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Will shows up for their appointment twenty minutes early. Traffic hadn’t been great and his mind had wandered most of the way. Fast, reckless driving hadn’t really been on the menu with the distractions bogging him down. He’s been out of sorts since he figured it out about Abigail killing Nicholas Boyle. He didn’t know what other way to be. Maybe Hannibal could help him with finding the ground once more. It had since been ripped out from under him.
He waits for ten of the twenty minutes when Hannibal opens the door to his office. Will looks up from the framed artwork he’d been studying on the wall.
“Please, come in,” he says, when Will just stares at him blankly.
“We’re early,” he mumbles in response as he steps inside.
Will gazes at the elk statuette a moment before proceeding further into the room. Hannibal lingers a ways behind him near the door. It’s been this way between them for a while, Will fumbling halfheartedly through their sessions and Hannibal patiently waiting him out as if his listlessness were a storm sure to pass eventually.
“I heard you moving around in the hall. My previous patient left our session rather early. I wish she had not, given the state she was in.”
Hannibal’s face is somber when Will turns to look at him.
“And as you are my final patient of the day, I see no reason for us not to optimize this time that we have together.”
“Optimize our time,” Will murmurs, foggy with a sense of agreement he can’t exactly place. He drops his eyes to the floor and scans the windows briefly, striped curtains motionless in the absence of a breeze. His mouth feels dry and his hands feel helplessly empty in his pockets. “Optimize.”
“You are drifting, Will.”
“What?” He looks back up at Hannibal, taking an involuntary step back and then another before he realizes what he’s doing. Defensively, he snaps, “I’m fine.”
Hannibal doesn’t react to his mood; why would he, Will muses hypercritically. He merely takes a step forward and then another. Will’s heels twitch in his shoes, feet shifting against the floor but not daring to retreat again. It had been haphazard before; it would be conscious now. It would make him a coward. He stands his ground, refusing to acknowledge the way his shoulders roll back when Hannibal insinuates himself right in front of him. Hannibal doesn’t react to that tic either, and Will staunchly refuses to acknowledge the frustration that blooms as a result.
“I never meant to include you in what transpired between Abigail and Nicholas Boyle.”
“Didn’t you,” Will mutters, turning his face away but staying where he is. “Didn’t you know I wouldn’t be able to…to give both of you up?”
Will brings his eyes to Hannibal, rage building in his chest and quashing the short-lived disappointment. That starts to fade, too, when Hannibal’s response is to tilt his head to one side and furrow his eyebrows. He doesn’t even speak straight away, and the anger fizzles out, replaced instantaneously by distress.
“I mean because you’re…we’re friends. I just—you know I don’t really have friends, and Abigail, we both feel responsible for her, so we share that burden, too.”
He snaps his mouth shut, having said entirely too much. If Hannibal lets him have his way he’ll confess to his wilting sanity and the impossible notion of having some kind of normal life after everything that’s happened to them and because of them. Will just shoves his hands in his pockets and looks around.
“I’m ruining this,” he sighs, dragging one hand out of his pocket to paw miserably at his face. “There’s no scenario where I don’t ruin this.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Will stares long and hard at the bookshelf on the other side of the room and then at Hannibal, at their proximity. He swallows, daring to score his eyes higher up Hannibal’s face and making it to the bottom ridges of his eye sockets before stopping.
“Precedence,” he answers.
“You would give me an unfair handicap, competing with your previous experiences.”
Will breathes for a moment, turning in place so his shoulder lines up with Hannibal’s chest. He doesn’t feel quite as solidly linked to Hannibal as he did when they were face to face, but the tethered sensation at the center of him remains strong enough that he doesn’t care to stray any farther. Hannibal turns, too, and for a moment Will is comfortable.
But then Hannibal moves away; takes long strides toward his desk and leaves Will behind. It only feels right to follow after. He does so in small increments so as not to seem obvious, though he can’t hope to successfully masquerade nonchalance. Will explains as Hannibal fusses with straightening a file on his desk, “It’s more of a handicap for myself than anything else.”
“One I would strip you of if given the proper opportunity,” Hannibal says offhandedly. He doesn’t move when Will comes to stand behind him. He merely adds, “You didn’t deny that you have been adrift since your unfortunate discovery.”
Will just watches him for a moment, stunned.
“My…”
Hannibal turns to look at him.
“That Abigail killed Nicholas Boyle is tragic in and of itself. She was already in a precarious situation with Jack Crawford’s hunt for a link to connect her to her father’s crimes. I have made myself a knowing accomplice, and by your discovery and subsequent willingness to forgive the ill that has been wrought, you are obstructing justice. It makes you complicit; it makes you guilty. It taints us all: you, myself, and Abigail.”
Will gapes. Of course none of it is a surprise, but he hadn’t expected a lecture.
“I knew what I was doing just as much as you did when it happened,” he seethes. “Do you think I didn’t consider the consequences?”
“I didn’t,” Hannibal supplies in a painfully small voice that feels, strangely, like a trap.
He turns at the waist and catches Will’s eyes before he can think to look away; a vise of metal teeth clamping hard around his ankle in a darkened, unknown territory.
“I knew Jack would imprison her if he could see what she had done, and I knew I could not let it happen.”
Will studies him, coerced into the action by Hannibal’s cold, unrelenting stare.
“You had to move quickly,” he observes, slipping away from himself and into a memory that isn’t his. “Dr. Bloom was there; you couldn’t let her see. You—how did you know what happened? If you hadn’t seen the body yet, how could you have known that she did it?”
“I saw her on the stair; Abigail’s hands were bloody. She looked as if she had just seen a ghost.”
“If she hadn’t been alone when he found her,” Will murmurs, looking away at last.
“Yes.”
Hannibal’s frown is strepitent; it twitches across Will’s mouth and plunges in his stomach like lead. He doesn’t even look up to see it; just recognizes somehow that it’s there, that it has to be for him to feel the way that he does.
“You couldn’t have known.”
“No, there was no way,” he says, sounding mournful. “We can never predict how our actions or those of others will impact a life or lives.”
Will stays where he is a moment longer until he finally grows agitated with all this standing and pacing. He rounds Hannibal’s desk and sits quietly in his chair, closing his eyes for just a moment. Hannibal hasn’t wandered from his place before the desk, now directly across from Will. He brings his eyes to Will’s when he notices him watching, both of them hold steady. They are aimless in their inaction; Will is, at least.
He wants to let go of this thing that plagues them both; this mutual gloom they can’t permanently escape. He wants to let it go and for the weight of it on his shoulders to feel just a smidgeon lighter than it has. He attempts to relay as much with his words, something that’s as near to a joke as he can manage under the circumstances.
“How do you strip someone of their personal handicaps?”
“Psychiatry offers many possibilities as a discipline. Fears may be expunged through immersion therapy; addictions through systematic abstinence; unseemly behavior through sublimation.”
Will hums and says, “So for someone like me.”
“Your guilt I would mend with distraction,” Hannibal muses, slipping his hands into his jacket pockets. It’s clear by the shift in his demeanor that he detected Will’s desire to lighten the mood of their—currently very dreary—session. “It can be a powerful coping mechanism.”
Will leans forward, one elbow on the desk and the other arm laid flat across Hannibal’s planner. He traces the corner of an address book with his fingers.
“So regular therapy,” Will teases through the declaration alone. He can’t quite bring himself to smile or use a playful tone of voice. Aiming slightly lower for blasé, he adds, “Optimization and all that.”
“Exactly,” Hannibal acquiesces. He tilts his head back and gives Will a spectacular view of all the ways that his bone structure catches the light and creates shadows beneath the protuberances. The way the angle gives his eyes a heavy-lidded look stirs something curious and incorrigible in Will’s belly. “A tool can be a weapon, in the proper context. An illness can be a great advantage in a battle of wills. A high pain threshold, for example, can be disastrous in the detection of other symptoms and a tremendous asset for the sufferer who might otherwise experience debilitating pain.”
“What does that mean,” Will asks, voice barely more than a grumble. He straightens out and squints at Hannibal, feeling himself wake up and come back into himself. “What, that this…way that I can see things, it’s a strength?”
“It certainly allows you to see things that others would never would.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing, like it isn’t hell every time that I do it.”
In a hellishly gentle voice, Hannibal asks, with genuine concern as far as Will can discern, “Why do you let Jack Crawford exploit you for your abilities if it displeases you to do so?”
“I—he doesn’t exploit me. I choose to go there because it helps people. I can save people doing it; we’ve had this conversation before.”
“And yet I still struggle to understand why you would submit yourself to the equivalent of torturous emotional trauma if you despise the things that you see to the extent that you do. Is it a means of punishing yourself?”
Will sits back in the chair, first for the distance and then for the support. He had sensed the ground beneath him, and then it had fettered out, remorselessly. He stares hard at Hannibal, unsure as to what he is supposed to admit to here while Hannibal is giving him that calm but assessing look that exudes fortitude and a mite of tenebrosity. This is Hannibal waiting him out; this is Will settling into his storm.
He squares his shoulders and asks, “What would I be punishing myself for, doctor?”
“There are a number of events for which you may have taken the full blame upon yourself, however wrongfully.” Hannibal turns and paces a ways away from the desk, a leisurely move. “Your insights have been a knife in your side as much as they have been a crutch for Jack Crawford. He sees only what he wants to see, and the same can be said of you as well.”
Will stands.
“You said you felt responsible for Abigail.” He walks back around the desk, an aggressive pace leading his steps. “Are you telling me you didn’t mean it? Because if you did mean it, if you were telling the truth about feeling the way that I did when all of that happened, then you know what it’s like.”
Will actively prevents himself from crossing into Hannibal’s personal space, difficult as it—
The impulse to grab Hannibal by the shoulders and shake him roughly until he understands and reciprocate Will’s agitation dwindles and shorts out. Hannibal is still giving him that closed off expression; still emitting an aura about him that’s equal parts cunning darkness and brilliant clarity.
It’s a bit like the pendulum, that precious, livid second before it swings through the black. It’s consciousness and it’s willful sleep, a lucid exploration of a dream seen through someone else’s eyes. Will steps back.
Under his breath his lips form the word, “What?”
Hannibal’s head tilts to one side again as it had before, but his expression is more guarded than it was in his moment of confusion. He says, “It was the truth.”
“What was?”
Will blinks. He can’t remember if Hannibal had spoken and he’d missed it or if he himself had spoken without realizing.
“Abigail’s safety is very important to me,” Hannibal provides, patience written into his features. The darkness has waned, leaving only stark coherence in its wake. “From the moment I saw what had been done, I felt obligated to do whatever was in my power to save her.”
Something at his center of gravity has gone out of kilter. His feet are still shuffling him backward. When Hannibal’s desk bars him from escaping elsewhere with his dignity intact, he resigns himself to placing his hands there on the edge. He’s careful not to lean back on the desk in case Hannibal finds it distasteful or in bad manners to do so. He clears his throat, reminding himself of the topic at hand when it occurs to him that it’s his turn to speak.
“Did you ever feel that way for one of your patients?”
The calm detachment fallen over Hannibal’s face like a filmy veil of mesh flickers, and Will feels his knees buckle under the pressure of that minute shift. It takes some measure of gravity right out of the room, giving him the simultaneous sensations of being lighter and much heavier at once. His head spins slightly, and he anticipates Hannibal’s answer before it comes but only by a few seconds. It’s as Hannibal’s lips form the words that the full implication of the answer strikes him; that answer being, “I have often felt that way about you.”
Hannibal takes one step nearer. Will’s leg twitches, knocking the heel of his shoe into Hannibal’s desk.
“You are like an oil spill,” Hannibal whispers. He takes another step, and Will feels the compulsion to run deep in his stomach this time. It comes in the form of a twitch; that twitch manifests only as heat. “A disaster in your own right and made incongruently powerful because of it.”
“Like a hurricane,” Will rasps, voice embarrassingly hoarse. “Like a storm.”
“There is no containing a storm,” Hannibal murmurs. He takes another step. “There is no ruling it.”
Will isn’t sure how they got here, but he’s positive they need to stop. Whatever it is that’s brewing here needs to be stopped. Whatever it is, it needs to be quelled here and now before it escalates, before it becomes. Fingers in tune with his train of thought, his hands feel mournfully empty again, something he could let the warmth cure for him if he just let the wave roll him over.
But he can’t. He can’t because it would be horrid and catastrophic, and it would stain Hannibal with the indecency.
Storms cannot be ruled, but people can. People living within certain lines of propriety can be ruled, and that is what they are. It’s the principle that keeps them from savagery, though a primordial part of Will’s lizard brain is screaming at him that oil spills and hurricanes are of a different caliber than mere humans. They need to stop. They need to.
His heart is hammering in his chest, and the atmosphere is thick molasses in contrast with his blood that couldn’t be moving any faster without putting him in cardiac arrest. Will’s hand is on Hannibal’s chest before he’s even registered Hannibal standing with the toes of his shoes overlapping the imaginary line between the toes of Will’s shoes. His hand is there over Hannibal’s heart, and just faintly he can feel the steady, unhurried beat pattering unassumingly into his palm.
He wishes heartbeats could be read in terms of Morse code; that he could learn something from that stoic anatomical heart. Hannibal wouldn’t give anything away; of course he wouldn’t. Storms are, in the likeness of Nature, unpredictable at their core, merciless at their roots, destructive in their course. They are as brilliant as lightning and as calmly, ferociously black as the sound of thunder; as dark as a winter night and as warm as a summer morning. Storms are duality; they are completion because Nature is completion—feast and famine, harvest and rot, rainstorms and forest fires.
Hannibal is a storm.
He closes in on Will again, moving less with his feet and more with his shoulders and his hips. The back of Will’s hand presses flat against Will’s chest, and he catalogues the harsh differences in their heartbeats.
The breath whooshes out of his lungs when Hannibal leans down and presses the side of his nose against Will’s.
Tornadoes hop, floodwaters collect in ravines, and rains can extinguish brush fires. Hannibal’s breath on his face, warm and soft, is a question—somehow even less than that; more of a suggestion than an outright proposal. He isn’t even touching Will except where Will holds his hand between them and where their noses are brushing, making Will woozy and weak in the knees.
“Distraction,” Hannibal breathes, “can be a powerful coping mechanism.”
It almost takes Will out of the heat they’ve accumulated just watching and waiting and lingering, almost. He might frown and start to pull away, but he can’t focus his energy on anything but Hannibal angling his head and letting his lips hold just over Will’s. The absence of pressure offers its own kind of weight. It stifles his airway and makes his stomach drop, and Will only feels all the more crazed for realizing that Hannibal is waiting for him to respond; waiting on Will as is his fashion; waiting on the storm to wither or surge as it will.
They can still stop. Will can still stop them.
He doesn’t want to.
He turns his head just a ways and tests the give of Hannibal’s lips beneath his own. They hold against his and press back, lightly. His stomach flips, bouncing almost violently beneath his skin. He makes a noise, an unabashedly grateful kind of half-moan, when their lips pull apart.
Hannibal eases forward, lips aligning with Will’s again and back arching so that his chest pushes out and into Will’s hand. Will takes the hint and roves under Hannibal’s jacket with that hand and behind Hannibal’s neck with the other. The multitude of pecking, open mouthed kisses that follow the initial explorative one are patient and curious. Will takes to flicking his tongue at the roof of Hannibal’s mouth and Hannibal takes to nipping at Will’s lips when he pulls away to breathe.
Tasting the soft sounds of enjoyment Hannibal makes on his tongue is a heady enough thrill that he doesn’t notice Hannibal’s hands slipping around his waist and hefting him on top of the desk. He doesn’t realize he’s being stripped until—
“Blue is a wonderful color on you,” Hannibal all but sighs.
The shirt, a deep blue button-up and one of Will’s favorites, parts down the middle to allow Hannibal’s hands to catalogue the warm flesh revealed to him. He bends down and licks from just beneath Will’s collar bone up until the point of his chin. He mouths at the skin there, tasting for just a moment before mouthing at Will’s bottom lip instead.
Inspired, Will works at the buttons of Hannibal’s vest, the pressed jacket already undone where the two halves meet. Hannibal leans back a ways and slides out of his outermost layer of clothing, folding it over one arm and flinging it artfully across the desk and over the back of his chair. Will glances back at the jacket, staying right where Hannibal commanded it to go and shivers. A second later Hannibal’s hands are on his belt and Will incongruously attributes his bodily reaction to the very precise way Hannibal loosens and removes his belt.
The stopping point is so far behind them by this point that Will has no qualms with making a display of himself once it’s feasible for him to do so. When Hannibal’s eased him out of everything but his shirt and his boxers Will writhes a bit more insistently against him, breathes that much heavier into Hannibal’s shoulder when he touches him.
It’s when he reaches into Hannibal’s pants that things get interesting. Almost as if he hadn’t expected Will to focus on him at all, he’s not at all braced for the experimental stroke Will gives him or the way Will groans into his throat when Hannibal bucks his hips into that touch. Hannibal, made glossy and slightly vacant along the surface at Will’s provisions, gets his hands around the tops of Will’s thighs and pulls until Will is lying flat on his back, both hands having relinquished their handholds on Hannibal’s body in favor of grasping at the edges of desk.
“Yes,” he grunts, raising his hips when Hannibal tugs at the waistband of his boxers. He tosses his head back solidly into the desk and moans, too ravenous in this new hunger to be ashamed, “Hannibal.”
A few things clatter noisily off the desk to his right. Hannibal straightens out and Will realizes, foggily, that he must have swept his arm across to clear the area. His head is still turned when he feels fingers pressing down against his bottom lip. The touch is urgent but questing still as if Hannibal would still stop if Will asked him to stop; as if there was even a way that he could stop anymore.
He takes the fingers into his mouth, wetting them with spit the way Hannibal needs him to do so he can—so they can—
His mouth is empty in the next instant, but Hannibal’s tongue swiftly replaces his fingers. Will wraps his arms around Hannibal as he places the pad of one finger against him and nudges. That finger pushes in and a hot rush of sharp sensation clenches and flutters around the pressure of that finger fully sheathed within him. Will combats the stinging underscore of pain beneath the weakly building pleasure by scratching his fingers against Hannibal’s scalp. He intends for his nails to trace rather than rake through Hannibal’s hair, but the second finger punches the air out of his lungs and renders him noisily appreciative and inadvisably bold.
Something about the cocktail of pain so tantalizingly interspersed with pleasure boils the blood in Will’s veins and arches his back even as the angle doesn’t feel quite right, or it doesn’t until Hannibal seeks slightly with his fingers and presses deliberately. Will’s body jumps at the unanticipated pleasure. His body jumps again, a low groan emerging straight from the back of his diaphragm and falling gracelessly from his lips. Hannibal appears to like it, if the smirk on his face is anything to go by.
Will wonders, through a dazed, pleasure-soaked haze, whether they’ll do this again or if it’s a one-time deal. If a second time is in the cards, he wants to be the one standing pressing the buttons next time.
What Will must look like, jolting and dancing beneath Hannibal’s fingers like a puppet on crisscrossed strings.
He imagines an oil spill reacting like the tide to the pull of the moon; he imagines the storm clouds behind the hurricane tugged away by a sheer act of God. He imagines Hannibal bending and mewling like this for him. He nearly comes at the picture, and then he nearly comes again when Hannibal slides a third finger in.
“Reach into that drawer,” Hannibal commands, sounding beautifully breathless and desirous.
Will lays his head back to look behind him at the same time that Hannibal hoists his body up farther onto the desk. The handle to the top desk drawer looms up beneath his hand when he comes to rest. Hannibal’s fingers are still working in and out of him, twisting and pulling and singeing where the stretch has become the most baffling brand of ruinous ecstasy. Will clumsily tugs the drawer open and instinctively goes for the lotion, unscented and baring the label of an expensive-looking brand. He flings it back onto the desk, gross motor skills made uncoordinatedly erratic with Hannibal’s fingers burning and driving into him.
When he removes his fingers Will feels a cold stab of wild displeasure. He lifts his hips a little, ready for the slow ache of Hannibal’s cock pressing into him, but that doesn’t come. Hannibal’s fingers return, thoroughly slicked with lotion and deliciously warm. The easy glide in and out coaxes Will into rolling his hips to match the pumping motion of Hannibal’s hand against him.
He’s so lost in that slowly building pressure beginning in the muscles contracting tightly around Hannibal’s fingers that he startles when Hannibal leans back down to kiss him softly on the mouth. Against his lips he whispers, “Would you finish this way, Will?”
It takes him much longer than he’s willing to admit to make sense of the words. He pings his eyes back and forth between Hannibal’s, noting the inky pupils chasing the thing rings of warm hazel-green-brown-amber.
He bites Hannibal’s lip and growls, “Not like this, not without you.”
And Hannibal’s smile is radiant, more saccharinely indulgent than Will’s ever seen him and the man’s had his fingers up Will’s ass for the past whoever-knows-how-long. His hand moves several times against Will purposefully, movements unbearably slow and wonderful.
Hannibal takes his fingers away and twists them a few times in his pocket square before setting it down beside Will’s bare thigh and digging through his pocket for his wallet. Will uses this time while Hannibal fumbles with the final preparations sliding his knee along Hannibal’s waist and wrapping the other leg around his hip. Distraction is a two-way street, after all, and as much as they talk natural disasters and manmade mistakes, they are, each of them, only human.
The muttered swear that trips off Hannibal’s tongue when Will arches his back for him stirs the warm pool of want and need in his belly. One half of the shirt still concealing Will’s arms only slides over his ribs in the display and tickles the skin the fabric scrapes across.
Hannibal twists his hands in the pocket square once more before folding it neatly and tossing it somewhere beyond Will’s shoulder. He loops his arms under Will’s knees and tugs him back down to the edge of the desk. When he presses in Will shivers and stiffens through the shoulders. Hannibal manages an inch, maybe two before Will’s body tightens and holds around him, not allowing for comfortable passage in either direction. His body as it begins just below the navel feels as though it could combust at the slightest push. He can’t decide if his body has gone tense because the idea of combustion excites him or because the idea has him scrambling for control in any way that he can get it.
This method, decidedly, will not work. Hannibal makes that perfectly clear when he lowers down onto the desk so his hands frame Will’s head and his clothed chest brushes Will’s naked, sweating skin. His hips continue pressing in, and gradually, through the slight stretch and through the intractability of Will’s body, they find themselves connected at the seams.
Will squirms beneath Hannibal, trying to get comfortable and not reaching favorable results. Without warning Hannibal starts to rock his hips back and forth, stuttering Will’s breath and causing spasms to shoot through his already unsteady hands.
He grunts into Will’s neck—and Will had sincerely forgotten they were beings capable of speech— “Have you wanted this, Will?”
Will’s eyes pinch closed and then relax as the friction of Hannibal’s cock inside him lessens and then magnifies into something glaringly hot and incredible. He moans, a higher sound than he intends but a much more appropriate answer than he could properly articulate. Hannibal’s hips shift slightly, and when he eases back into place, Will’s body dances the way Hannibal so likes to make it dance.
He crushes his arms around Hannibal and pulls him in, lips working hungrily at Hannibal’s mouth, though his dexterity is suffering for his mounting gratification. He feels as though he could levitate through the ceiling when Hannibal abruptly pulls out of him and flips him over onto his stomach so he’s lying prone on the desk. The angle changes drastically, and Will can’t even find the words to object. He just moans the absolute loss of his restraint into the desk and delights in the one clear thought he possesses before coming apart and coming on the front of Hannibal’s desk: that their positions have flipped and Will has found himself waiting out Hannibal’s storm.
Blearily, as he’s clutching at the edges of the desk and muffling his shouted orgasm against Hannibal’s opened mouth, he wonders if Hannibal feels this elated when his waiting has proven fruitful.
Granted he’s never been the direct cause of Hannibal’s ejaculating all over his desk in a completely philistine fashion.
As far as he knows, anyway, he’s never been even indirectly involved in that, though he would love to change that.
Hannibal is delicate with him once he’s finished. He doesn’t rut to completion like an animal but rather rocks gently and intentionally until he’s sated; he even turns Will back around and kisses him on the mouth before he finally takes his pleasure, much deserved if Will says so himself.
Will doesn’t know what to do afterward. His hands feel empty almost immediately but for a different reason. He watches Hannibal unrolling the condom and tying the used thing off before tossing it to Will’s left. It lands with a solid thump, in all likelihood, perfectly in the trash. Even the way he tucks himself back into his dark navy pleated slacks is gentlemanly and refined. It’s positively annoying.
Hannibal leaves him for just a moment to bring back tissues and an orderly little bin with a tidy bag tucked in around the edges. The whole twenty seconds that he’s flitting about Will manages to swallow the irascible loneliness swelling in his throat twice. He sits up while he’s left to his own devices and tries to shrug off the feeling that they’ve just done something hopelessly foolish and irreparably damaging to their relationship. It doesn’t work; the misery only sets in twofold if not three or four.
Hannibal cleans him up and gets him back into his clothes before Will can object to the aftercare. It’s not that he would really object that sort of thing from, say, a boyfriend or a lover, but Hannibal isn’t either. He’s Will’s doctor and a raging thunderstorm if Will ever saw one.
He can’t think about what it means that Hannibal is so clearly an abundantly powerful force of nature; he can’t think about what it means that Hannibal said he was like an oil spill.
It shouldn’t have happened. It so obviously and horribly should not have happened.
But Hannibal is holding his hand out to Will and Will is taking it without a second thought. And he’s edging off the desk, alerting straight away to all the specific ways in which his body will ache tomorrow morning if not during the course of the drive home—the hour long drive home. He’s just about to protest his inevitable soreness when Hannibal sits on the edge of the chaise lounge and their fingers are still intertwined.
Will doesn’t ask what the hell they’ve just done or what’s going to happen now. He has a pretty good idea of what they did and what will happen if they let it. He can guess enough at the consequences, just like Hannibal had guessed at the consequences when he looked and saw Abigail literally red-handed.
He doesn’t say anything at all. He just sits next to Hannibal on the chaise lounge and lies down when gently prompted to do so. Hannibal weaves one possessive arm around his middle and Will inches back, body starved already for more of that touch that made the soul sickness leave for just a little while.
Your guilt I would mend with distraction, Hannibal had said. It can be a powerful coping mechanism.
A disaster in your own right and made incongruently powerful because of it.
There is no ruling a storm.
Hannibal hadn’t needed to say any of it, not really. They were facts stockpiled in the vaults of his mind, in the many impregnable forts stacked high like the sandcastles he used to build around himself as a boy at Gulf Shore in Alabama. His forts had always kept people out, and so many had pried before, trying to get their hooks in him and trying to study him. The darkness would creep in, but people never could.
Hannibal, whose arms tighten around him just before they go slack, is some hybrid between the two, just like Will is a hybrid between the two; both shadow and sunlight, a supernova flashing in the black heart of an infinite galaxy.
The hand resting just under Will’s sternum creeps up into his hair, drying but dampened still and curlier for his troubles. His shirt is still unbuttoned, so Hannibal explores his navel with his other hand. Not wanting to crush Hannibal’s arm beneath his body, Will turns slowly in the embrace and winds his arm around Hannibal’s waist, comfortable in Hannibal’s initiating the gesture to mimic it for himself. He nestles in with his cheek pressed up against that heartbeat, as steady as it had been before if not just a tad bit slower in their rest.
“Not bad,” he mumbles when he feels solid enough that he doesn’t fear his words will betray him.
Hannibal’s chest rumbles with his low laugh. He says, “That isn’t what you were screaming into your arm at the end.”
Will blushes in spite of himself. He vaguely remembers maybe saying, gorgeous, brilliant, oh, just…fucking— Something to that effect, anyhow. Hannibal brushes his thumb against Will’s ribs beneath the loose flap of his shirt. He shed his vest at some point and is only in his one collared shirt and tie; the tie is fantastically, almost comically loosened. Will must have yanked it askew at some point while they were getting ready. He doesn’t remember.
He asks, baldly, “Why did we do this?”
Hannibal studies him, expression calm and eyes stunningly warm. He says, earnestly but with a trace of humor, “That exact shade of blue brings out the teal in your eyes.”
“I’m serious,” Will chides, though a smile is tugging at the corners of his lips.
“I wanted to; you wanted to.”
Hannibal looks down at Will’s mouth briefly before stealing a chaste kiss and then another. The second builds where the first one only fluttered. Will pressed his palm to the center of Hannibal’s chest again, giving himself the illusion of a barrier and effectively halting Hannibal’s affections, though only because Hannibal is too polite to assert his dominance in any aggressive kind of way.
“You know I want a better answer than that.”
“Don’t we both,” Hannibal says, voice carrying music in the vowels as a result of his accent and the withdrawn, meaningful tone curling and softening the edges of his words. Hannibal kisses Will’s jaw. “Didn’t we do this in search of a better answer than what we had?”
Will likes that response; he even believes it, though his heart is clenching in his chest begging him not to because that road leads to pain. It always leads to pain, always.
“You don’t think I’m…unstable?”
Of course Hannibal thinks he’s unstable. He compared him to an oil spill of all things.
“You wear your heart on your sleeve. Being with you wouldn’t hurt me, if that is your concern.”
“Even though I’m your patient,” Will caustically reminds him.
“Even though I am your doctor,” Hannibal corrects, rerouting the deposition of responsibility as easily as if he were directing a call.
Will licks his lips, nervous but far too comfortable with his arms around Hannibal and with Hannibal’s fingers tracing concentric circles into his abdomen to make a run for it. Distantly he submits that he doesn’t want to make a run for it. Why should he run when Hannibal is his paddle; when Hannibal makes him feel safe in the way that only disembodied lights drifting through vapor make him feel safe; when Hannibal does that thing with his fingers and Will’s body bows like a string poised in between silence and sonorous vibration; when Hannibal can do that to him without making Will feel weak for adoring the way it buzzes through him like meth rifling through his veins and making him fly.
Never mind that he might have the opportunity to make Hannibal feel that way, too; never mind that Hannibal might want him to; might have even wanted it, wanted Will, for a while now.
So Will pushes back the static clawing its way to the surface and listens to the rhythmic drumming of Hannibal’s heart against his cheek and gently shapes his lips over the skin through the shirt. Hannibal’s hand snakes around his waist and up the small of his back, fingers tracing the dip of his spinal cord bisecting the two sides of his back. He presses his fingers into Will’s ribs, counting and lavishing and taking a detailed inventory exactly how Will is taking inventory.
Hannibal’s fingers skip too lightly across one section of his ribs, nearer to the floating rib at the very bottom of the ribcage, and Will jerks, a soft puff of laughter bursting against Hannibal’s jawline. He doesn’t repeat the action, but he does laugh with Will, hiding that he does by muffling the sound in his hair.
It doesn’t keep him from feeling it vibrate soundly through Hannibal’s chest where his heart beats just that much faster before slowing down again.