Work Text:
Will adjusted his head on the pillow, trying to relieve the ache where the base of his neck met his shoulder. He had long since kicked off the sheets on his bed, and the room still felt like a sauna.
A bead of sweat trickled down his neck and soaked into the damp collar of his threadbare t-shirt. One of the dogs roamed restlessly, nails clicking on the floor.
He jerked in surprise when the ring of his phone pierced the quiet.
“Dammit,” he muttered, groping for his phone on his nightstand. It was nearly noon, but the curtains on his windows were tightly closed. As soon as he found the damn thing, he opened his eyes enough to peer at the screen, which read “Jack Crawford.”
Answering the phone, he bit out, “What?”
“Will,” Jack answered, curt. It was his warning tone, the kind that said Will was bordering on disrespectful and better watch it. Will sighed, shrugging his shoulder as he tried to let the frustration go. Jack was an alpha, and it was expected he would demand respect from a beta like Will. “I need you on this one.”
“I told you I’m home sick,” Will said. God, his head hurt. He rubbed at his forehead with one palm. “You’ve got Dr. Bloom and Dr. Lecter; they can handle it.”
“Apparently they can’t. We’ve got no leads on this one. These are the fourth and fifth victims; I don’t want any more. Do you?”
Will flopped onto his back and stared at the white ceiling. There was a water stain. He blinked, and the stain turned a deep red, almost black. It began to drip.
“Jack, I’m really not feeling well. I’ve got a fever, aches; I can barely think.”
Jack paused.
“You throwing up?”
“No.”
On the ceiling the blood welled up, and droplets clung together thicker and thicker until it resembled a flower bud clinging to the ceiling. And then the bud started to unfurl, four skinless human legs spreading like petals, bent in half with the knees serving as the tips.
“Can you stand on your feet?”
“Yeah,” Will said as he slowly shook his head in defeat. He already knew what Jack would say.
“Look, I’ll send a car so you don’t have to drive. Be ready in an hour.”
It bloomed. Two skinned women formed the flower; their back-to-back torsos pressed together served as the flower stem. Four legs stretched out.
Their upper arms were kept against their sides, while the lower half of the arms were outstretched and back-to-back with the other woman’s. Each pair of arms twisted together and became one. Strips of skin stretched between all of the limbs—the four legs and the two twisted-together pair of arms—to create six petal shapes.
It had been what they had found at the last Chesapeake Ripper scene. There had been lenten roses carefully arranged below the corpse flower, all with six blood-red petals.
“Despite its name, it’s an evergreen flower, not a rose,” Price had said as he used tweezers to grab and bag some of the flowers as forensic evidence.
“I feel sorry for that janitor who found this,” Beverly said. “Poor guy was just here to mop the floors and bag the trash and saw this instead.”
The flowers were beautiful. Will found himself reaching out as if to touch one.
“Careful,” Zeller warned. “Poisonous. I wouldn’t touch it if I were you.”
It was fitting, Will thought. What in Will’s life wasn’t slowly poisoning him?
“—Mr. Anders was killed in the upstairs office. Mrs. Anders was chased through the house before she was tied to a chair and gutted, just like the last couple,” Jack said. “The weapon used was likely a hunting knife.”
“This killer’s first victim was a gay man,” Price said. “The next victims were a lesbian couple, or so the killer would’ve assumed; one was actually a female alpha. We thought these were hate crimes, but now?”
“A female alpha, that’s rare,” Zeller said with a whistle. “Almost as rare as a male omega. We’re talking less than 1% of the population.”
“A gay man, a presumed lesbian couple, and a straight couple,” Beverly said. “As far as we can tell, the victims don’t have anything in common.”
Will stared at the blood trail that dribbled down the stairs and then snaked down the hallway. It stopped just mere feet from the door before veering to a bloodied chair in the dining room. She had nearly made it out before the killer had caught her.
“I found Clomiphene in the bathroom,” Zeller said. “Mrs. Anders may have been pregnant.”
Will closed his eyes, and the pendulum swung.
He was in the office. There, in the middle of the room, loomed the wendigo. It lashed out, slicing into Mr. Anders’s neck with one of its long claws.
Will backed away trembling. This wasn’t right. Whoever killed these people wasn’t the Chesapeake Ripper. Why was Will not empathizing as the killer? Sprinting in a panic from the room, he heard the pounding hooves of the wendigo pursuing him.
A claw nicked his shoulder, and he stumbled into the railing of the hallway above the stairs. Clutching his arm, he used the railing to help keep himself from falling as he fled down the stairs as fast as he could.
Before he could reach the front door, the wendigo was on him, strong arms wrapping around him and dragging him half-falling to the dining room. Will was panting too rapid and shallow to get a full breath. All around him he could feel the thick muscles of the creature that was going to tear him apart.
He struggled in its arms, but the powerful monster just held him closer, face pressed against the curve of his neck, audibly sniffing in his scent.
He felt strange. Teeth scraped against his neck, and instead of fighting, his body went limp. His stomach fluttered and ached, and he pressed himself back against the creature, half-mad with an instinct he didn’t even understand. His crotch and upper thighs were so slick with sweat the dampness soaked through his clothes; even his ass felt wet at this point. A whine escaped his throat.
The wendigo growled in response. He could feel the chest he was pressed against reverberate with the deep noise.
Will gasped. He nestled back against the strong heaving chest until he could feel a hard length pressing against the cheek of his ass.
The creature gripped one of his thighs in a huge hand—dangerous nails scraping against him—and spread his legs as another claw tore across the back of his pants and boxers, splitting the cloth apart from left to right where the bottom of his ass was. Will squeezed his eyes shut in embarrassment.
Both clawed hands gripped his hips, tilting them up and back, and Will should be terrified, and maybe he was because his heart was pounding and his stomach felt like it was twisting itself into a knot. But his cock was stiff and aching, and his upper body settled across the ground, like he was an omega presenting for his mate.
Something huge and hard nudged at the cleft of his ass, and he knew what it was. He inhaled sharply and didn’t breathe as he felt it breach him, pushing inside his trembling body with a steady insistence. After his hands scrabbled uselessly at the floor for a moment, he peered over his shoulder to see the wendigo sitting on spread knees, it’s powerful chest heaving with loud pants. The creature’s hips jerked forward as it impaled him further on its cock, and Will’s hips lifted to accept him more fully.
The creature reared back to thrust forward again, and Will cried out at the feeling of fullness that swept through him. It should have helped sate the hunger that was pooling between his legs, but it increased his appetite instead, and at the next thrust, Will pushed back into it and heard the slap of skin.
It only took a few thrusts until the both of them had a rhythm. The wendigo leaned over him—its arms planted squarely on either side of Will’s shoulders—as it mounted him more fully, pressing as deep as possible. Sharp teeth clamped down on his neck, pinpricks of blood welling up, as its body rocked Will with powerful jolts and smacks as it took him.
The cock inside him felt like part of it was getting bigger, pressing more firmly against his prostate. Will squirmed—the pleasure so intense it bordered on painful—as he tried to find a more comfortable position, but the wendigo was having none of it. One of its arms snaked back to clamp around his hips and pull Will back into the rhythm.
Will cried out, stretched taut around the growing knot inside him, as it swelled too large to leave his body. The wendigo stilled. A different feeling of fullness flooded Will’s body, spreading warmth through him.
Oh god, he’d just been bred.
A clawed hand wrapped around his throat, and in an instant there was too much pain to feel anything else. He stared at the blood pouring onto the ground from his throat before the floor rushed up to meet him.
Will jolted out of the hallucination. He stumbled back, trying to get out of the dining room as quickly as possible, but his legs were too uncoordinated.
“Will!” Beverly said, as he nearly toppled to the ground. He fled for the front door.
A heavy hand landed on his shoulder before he could reach it, spinning and pinning him in place.
“I’m going home,” Will said, tugging himself out of Jack’s grip.
“I need you to go back there and tell me what you see,” Jack said, trying to force eye contact with Will.
“No!” Will said, shaking in either fear or anger. He was ashamed to note his voice sounded wet, like he was holding back tears. “I can’t. I won’t be able to see anything to help. I wasn’t the killer, Jack, I was the victim. I… I felt him kill me. I felt him—” Will tried to take a steady breath, but he felt so weak. The light in the room was hurting his eyes.
“Felt him knot me,” Will whispered.
“He’s an alpha?” Jack said. “He’s sexually assaulting the victims? We haven’t found any semen—”
“He hasn’t yet. But he will,” Will said. He didn’t see an ounce of remorse or sympathy on Jack’s face for Will’s experience; Jack only cared about the ‘real’ victims. “I wasn’t any of these victims. I was a future one.”
“He’s escalating,” Jack said. Will nodded.
“She wasn’t pregnant; she had an IUD,” Beverly said, once the autopsies were complete at the local lab. Will shook his head in confusion. Why would she take fertility drugs when on birth control?
“Looks like he was the one that was trying to get pregnant,” Zeller said, pointing down at Mr. Anders. “He’s a male omega. We’ve got a pattern.”
“SGAPA permits citizens to legally withhold their secondary gender, even on official documents. It’s why we didn’t know about it,” Price said. “Mr. and Mrs. Anders couldn’t have kids on their own, so they got a sperm donor. The Clomiphene was for Mr. Anders.”
“So it’s only the first victim that breaks the pattern?”
“Actually, looks like the local precinct didn’t do a thorough biopsy on the first victim,” Beverly said. “Unlike female alphas—who have more obvious anatomical indicators—the only way to know a male is an omega is when he goes into heat or you find the uterus. Ends up the first victim was a male omega too. He likely didn’t know for years because he couldn’t have a heat. Take a look at this.”
She pointed at a small surgery scar at the base of the neck of the first victim, near the mating gland that alphas and omegas have.
“So he had his tonsils removed, why does that matter?” Will said.
Beverly huffed in disbelief.
“He didn’t have his tonsils removed,” Beverly said. “It’s a PGI scar.”
“No, it’s for a tonsillectomy,” Will said, his hands feeling the base of his own neck through his shirt collar. “I have that exact same scar.”
“What?” Beverly said.
Everyone in the room was staring at him.
“Leave. Now,” Jack ordered the local sheriff and cops that were in the room. The three lab techs exchanged uncomfortable glances.
“Tonsillectomy scars are, uh, inside the throat just behind the mouth,” Zeller said, pointing at his own neck. He was staring at the body on the autopsy table instead of looking at Will.
“Yeah, but sometimes they go in through the base of the neck—” Will said.
“Will, no. No, they don’t,” Beverly said. Her voice was very quiet. “There’s only one surgery that leaves this type of scar. It’s a Pophanes Gland Inhibitor scar. About 30 states have banned the surgery on minors, on grounds of discrimination. It’s typically performed on male omegas whose parents believe only females should be omegas.”
“It’s a cheaper alternative to a hysterectomy,” Price cut in. Will could tell from the look on his face that he thought it kinder to rip the band-aid off. “Heats and ruts are dangerous to alphas and omegas if it happened during unfavorable conditions. When there’s a drought, famine, war. The pophanes gland only releases the necessary hormones to go into heat or rut when the conditions are right. But when the gland is permanently damaged...” He shrugged. There was a helpless look on his face.
“The omega’s body no longer produces the hormones necessary to go into heat on its own, and without heat, the body doesn’t release an egg into the uterus,” Zeller said. He glanced up at Will with a pitying look.
“No,” Will said. “No. My father would never—”
Sure his father had been distant when growing up, but he wouldn’t have done this to him. He wouldn’t have.
“I kept getting fevers. The doctor said it was from infections in my tonsils. And it worked. I no longer got fevers—”
“Are you sure those fevers weren’t the pre-heat cycles omegas go through for a couple years before their first heat?” Beverly said. “Your doctor may have told your dad the truth but not you. You grew up in a small religious town, it’s very likely—”
“Will,” Jack said. “I suggest you make an appointment with a doctor who specializes in this sort of thing.”
Will drove the familiar route to Hannibal’s house in a daze.
When Hannibal welcomed him in, Will noted the air in the house was heavy with the scent of the alpha’s pheromones. The scent had an acrid note to it—the sign of an alpha who was attempting to court an omega. It was a warning note to others to be careful, because he would fight anyone who dared to try to mate the omega he had set his eyes on.
Will hadn’t even known Hannibal was interested in someone.
“I went to a doctor today. She said I’m an omega,” Will said. He’s sure Jack already filled Hannibal in on what had happened at the lab. Hannibal didn’t look surprised; he didn’t even sniff the air to try to confirm Will’s gender. “You already knew before today, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Hannibal said. He walked around Will to lead the way to whatever room they were going to have this discussion in. Probably the kitchen. His eyes stayed on Will the entire time as if he couldn’t look away.
“You didn’t tell me?” Will said. His voice sounded angrier than he meant it too.
It had been the worst doctor’s appointment of his life. It was not only confirmed he was an omega, but that he was in false heat, a state the body went into when there was almost but not quite enough hormones to go into heat.
Which shouldn’t be possible after a PGI surgery, not without prescribed synthetic hormones. Not unless his mating gland was getting regularly bitten by an alpha—which injected the alpha’s own phageno hormones—or maybe if he’d swallowed enough of an alpha’s semen or something, as an alpha stored concentrations of the hormone throughout its body, especially in semen and fat cells. Will hadn’t experienced any of those things; it made no sense.
“My nose may be sensitive enough to smell what others could not—that you are an omega—but the muted quality to the scent was the same as suppressants,” Hannibal said. It made sense. Suppressants prevented the production of those hormones, just like PGI surgery, so that the body couldn’t go into heat. There would have been no difference in the resulting scent. “I didn’t know about the surgery your father forced upon you, not until Jack told me.”
So Hannibal had thought Will was using suppressants to hide his secondary gender. Will thought back to the past few months; the way Hannibal has kept insisting on having Will over for dinner. Hannibal might be courting him.
“I could stay the night,” Wills said, voice low and quiet. His fingers reached out and brushed against Hannibal’s tie. He wondered if Hannibal would kiss him.
“Will, I am your psychiatrist, however unofficial,” Hannibal said. His voice sounded cold and professional. “This is not appropriate.”
Stung, Will reared back.
“Is it because I’m a male omega?” Will blurted out. He didn’t want to know the answer. He stormed out of the house before Hannibal could reply.
“That’s not right, I have health insurance!” Will said, when a receptionist from the doctor’s called saying his insurance claim had been rejected.
His week kept getting worse and worse. Freddie Lounds had published an article about his secondary gender, though god only knows how she found out. His dogs were uneasy due to his false heat, and so the pack was currently at Alana’s house. And now this.
“We run into this all the time at this clinic. You’re a male omega now,” the receptionist said. “You need to contact your insurance. They’ll assign you an agent who specializes in rare secondary genders, and then we’ll resubmit the claim for a specialist to approve. Fair warning, now that you’re a male omega, your insurance rates are going to go up.”
Will inhaled sharply as he remembered the last two Chesapeake Ripper victims were found in the lobby of a health insurance company. Male omegas and female alphas were rare enough each insurance company would only have a few agents specializing in rare secondary gender clients. Was the Ripper trying to point them in the direction of the killer?
He called Jack. Several hours later it was confirmed all the victims had the same health insurance, and yes, it was the company the victims had been found in. They also all had the same insurance agent assigned to them, an alpha who had a prior record for domestic violence.
The arrest was made at the alpha’s work office. Will watched as agents cuffed the fuming alpha, who was yelling indignantly that he was innocent. At least until the FBI searched his work computer and found he had accessed each victim’s account a week before each murder.
As Zeller and Price bagged up the items at the office, Beverly found a slip of paper in a desk drawer with last year’s date scrawled on it and the word ‘rortie’—an offensive term for a male omega.
“Bigot,” Beverly muttered angrily.
“The alpha we arrested has an alibi for both the first victim and the last couple,” Jack said over the phone. “Is he working with an accomplice?”
“No, whoever the killer is, he works alone,” Will said as he parked his car in his driveway. “We got the wrong man.”
Jack made a sound of irritation and hung up. Will barely heard him. This made no sense. Whoever had killed those people had accessed those files.
As Will tried to unlock his door with the key, he remembered the paper with ‘2018rortie’ scribbled on it.
“It was a password,” Will said. How could he have missed it? “He had written down his account password and someone found it.”
His key didn’t turn in the lock. Because the deadbolt was already unlocked.
Will stepped back in shock, the hair on the back of his neck prickling in alarm. He reached for his phone in his pocket, but the door flung open and Will froze.
It was janitor who had found the Ripper’s tableaux. The man’s eyes were wild and Will could smell the rut on him.
“It was you,” Will whispered. The alpha smiled and grabbed Will’s arm, yanking him inside. Thanks to the rut, he was impossibly strong and easily twisted the phone out of Will’s grip, throwing it out of reach.
“I read the article on you,” the man breathed. “You’d be perfect. A male omega with empathy—”
This alpha intended to mate him before killing him. Once he bit Will’s mating gland, the hormones in his saliva would enter the bloodstream and tip Will into a heat.
Will contemplated fighting or running, but he already knew there was only one way to save himself.
“We’d be perfect,” Will said, voice low and sultry.
The alpha breathed in Will’s scent and crowded close to Will. Will slowly leaned forward as if he planned to nuzzle where the alpha’s mating gland was.
Will bit savagely, not the gland but the column of neck right next to it. He snarled as he bit as deep as he could, and then tore the skin from the neck. The alpha howled in pain.
The man’s hands slapped over the wound trying to stem the flow of blood, and gasped in wheezing breaths. The blood spurted over his fingers and down his arm.
Unless he got medical help and soon, the alpha was good as dead, but that didn’t mean the man wouldn’t try to kill him first.
Will darted into the kitchen. All he needed was a knife.
When the alpha came at him, he had his weapon ready. The man lept on him, and Will embraced him, stabbing into his stomach. He felt the alpha jerk in his arms from the pain of the knife.
“You came to impale me today, but I impaled you instead,” Will whispered harshly in his ear.
When he looked up from the dying man in his arms, he was shocked to see Hannibal Lecter standing in the doorway of his kitchen, dressed in a clear plastic suit over his clothes. Will tried to comprehend what he was seeing.
“You’re. The. Chesapeake Ripper,” Will said. It all clicked into place, like gears tumbling in a lock.
Hannibal was staring at the bloodied man that Will was cradling.
“You already knew who the killer was,” Will said. Of course, it all made sense. “This man was one of your former patients. A man who killed and liked it, until he saw your work and suddenly his own wasn’t good enough. He wanted to be better; he wanted to be like you.”
Hannibal stalked into the kitchen, sniffing the air. He’d be able to smell that all Will needed to go into heat was a bite. And Will could use that to his advantage.
“I need you, Hannibal,” Will breathed. “I ache for you.”
Hannibal strode over to Will, yanking the body from Will’s arms to let the alpha crumble forgotten on the ground. Now that he was close, Will could smell that Hannibal’s rut had begun, likely triggered by the scent of a competing alpha in Will’s house.
A large hand fisted in Will’s hair, and then Hannibal was kissing him fiercely, licking at the blood smeared on his lips.
When the kiss ended, Will nuzzled the skin over Hannibal’s mating gland. One of Hannibal’s hands cupped the back of Will’s neck to press his mouth firm against the swollen gland.
Will lunged for his throat, but instead of immediately tearing into it, he clamped his teeth down. It would be difficult to dislodge him, but he wasn’t biting hard enough to break skin yet. He waited to see what the Ripper would do.
A hand in his hair gently pet through his curls.
“Clever to use an alpha’s own instincts against him,” Hannibal said. He sounded pleased. “Tell me, Will, what do your instincts tell you to do in this moment?”
Will had gotten this so wrong. Hannibal hadn’t turned Will down because he was a male omega. He had turned him down because he couldn’t stomach the thought of Will loving the fake Dr. Hannibal Lecter instead of the real Chesapeake Ripper.
Decision made, he sunk his teeth into Hannibal, tasting the fresh tang of blood. But it wasn’t the neck he bit. Taking a minute to worry at the bite, he punctured the mating gland deep enough to form the mating bond before he finally released him.
Hannibal lunged, teeth biting into Will’s own mating gland as a sharp cry lept from Will’s lips. After a moment of digging his teeth in, Hannibal let go to capture him in another kiss, the taste of their own blood mingling on their tongues between them.
Desire shot through Will’s body. His heat was beginning.
Powerful arms—their strength increased by rut—lifted Will into the air to drop him onto the bed in the living room. Scooting back, Will watched Hannibal kneel on the mattress and prowl forward.
His mate was on him then, devouring his mouth with kisses. Will shivered in pleasure as hands roamed across his body, tugging and removing his clothes as he fumbled at Hannibal’s clothes in return.
The ache inside Will grew, and he needed his mate inside him now.
“Please,” Will said. “Hannibal please.”
Hannibal took mercy on him, and shoved his hands up and under Will’s legs to keep him spread open. A hot wet mouth licked and kissed at him, brushing against his cock and then making his way down to where Will’s need was. A slick tongue pierced him, and Will cried out.
A rumble of approval shook Hannibal’s chest as he worshipped the body beneath him. Will shook and whimpered, encouraging his mate to continue.
When the mouth left him, Will could have strangled someone in frustration. A blunt hardness pressed between his legs as Hannibal whispered words of praise to him.
“Beautiful. You feel perfect, ah, Will—”
At the first breech, when the ache inside him finally had a taste of what it needed, he came with a choked-off cry as his muscles greedily clamped around Hannibal.
Moaning at the exquisite feeling of Will’s inner muscles clutching him, Hannibal continued to push in, fiercely determined to join their bodies together. His hands grasped Will’s—interlinking their fingers—as he began to thrust, rocking his mate’s body in a desperate rhythm. As Hannibal urgently made room for himself inside Will, he repeatedly pressed deep against a place that sparked pleasure. Will’s spent cock awakened again.
As Will cries of pleasure turned to helpless gasps, his alpha leaned over to kiss him silent, Hannibal’s stomach rubbing against his now aching cock. Blindly grasping and clawing at his back, Will could feel his fingernails scrape hard enough to leave marks.
The pressure inside him grew, until he was stretched wide on a growing knot. When it finally swelled too large to leave and the length inside him twitched in release, Will came with a breathless shout of “Hannibal!”
“Well, on the plus side, now we know each other’s worst secrets,” Will said, lying utterly exhausted on Hannibal’s bed. They had relocated to Hannibal’s house around the second day of their heat and rut. “Better than finding out after the bonding.”
Hannibal laid a tray of food next to him on the bed as Will hummed in pleasure.
“Where are you keeping the surgical trophies anyways?” Will said, taking a bite of barigoule that had some sort of diced meat in it. “In the basement? I’m gonna find those two women’s hearts there, aren’t I? Mmm, this is delicious. What is it?”
“Hearts sautéed with carrot, shallots, and garlic. Heart cooks quickly, and care must be made not to overcook it, or else it becomes tough and rubbery.”
“What? Wait a FUCKING MINUTE—”
He was cooking them. Which meant Will had gone into heat because Hannibal had included too many alphas in his recipes before biting Will’s mating gland, the bastard.
Eight Months Later
Will packed up his laptop and lecture notes, careful to not make eye contact with his students as they filed out of the room. Alana, as was her habit, stopped by as soon as the lecture ended.
“Only a few weeks left,” Alana said. Will grunted in annoyance, hand resting on his uncomfortably large stomach.
“Still can’t fucking believe he got me pregnant,” Will complained.
“It’s what heat is for,” Alana said with way too much cheer. “Besides, is it really so bad? Foot rubs, decadent meals, he's doing everything to spoil you.”
“It’s a fucking nightmare,” Will lied. Hannibal was insisting on a lavish wedding and a honeymoon in Florence. There were late night hunts, mind-blowing sex, and Hannibal cheerily listening to records of Bach while he cooked. Sometimes Will found himself whispering, “I love you,” into his mate’s ear while cuddling.
“Speaking of nightmares, there’s been another Ripper victim,” Alana said. “If you’re willing—”
“If you’re worried I wouldn’t want to be occupied by the Ripper this close to the due date, you needn’t worry, I’m already engaged.” Will grinned when he felt a tiny kick against his stomach. “And if Jack wants to know the Chesapeake Ripper’s design, I’ll be happy to deliver it.”
[Artwork by mferret9]
[Artwork by mferret9]