Chapter Text
He felt himself melt into the furniture, his naked back sinking further into the buttery leather of the table. His knees occasionally hit against his chest, folded over as he was. He let his muscles fall lax into the thick straps that held his legs up. A wry, sinewy older man thrust sharply into him, his arms flexing as he gripped the strap with slender fingers. Each jerking movement made his skin rub against the leather, building a quiet heat between his shoulder blades. His half-hard cock flopped from time to time against his stomach.
“Will?” A woman kneeling with his pasty, mottled forearm in her lap looked at him expectantly, as though she’d been trying to get his attention for some time.
Will’s eyes rolled closed as he tried to recollect what had been previously asked of him. He shook his head and tried to focus on the woman, though it didn’t help in regaining him any composure or memory.
“Wh-” he started, pausing to clear his dry throat. “What?”
“More?” She repeated, brows raised.
He let himself slip slightly back out of the moment: he didn’t need to think of the answer. “Of course.” He let his eyes fall shut once again.
She replaced her mouth over the wounds ripped into his flesh, the quiet, suckling pull beginning anew as she drew more of his blood into her mouth. The pain he felt registered, but even its ferocity faded into the background. Unimportant.
He started to feel the clawing hands of unconsciousness peel at the edges of his mind, his body thrumming with every slowed pump of his blood coursing through him. His head throbbed with it: a foggy, thick pain that manifested as a crushing pressure on every downbeat. He couldn’t remember why it was important he remained awake.
“They’ll stop if you lose consciousness.” A voice from the doorway spoke the reason Will had nearly managed to forget. They’d stop.
“Fuck off!” He half-yelled, half mumbled in the direction of the door. He didn’t bother opening his eyes.
The man using his hole stilled his shaking of the rigging and came, hot against the swollen walls of his ass. He pulled out and wiped the end of his cock against Will’s upper thigh before leaving to clean himself up.
Instead of side stepping away, the figure at the door glided into the room, taking a knee on the opposite side of where Will lay.
“Denying it will not, however, stop it from happening.” He reached up with his pianist-long fingers and brushed a wispy, sweaty string of hair from off Will’s forehead. Will grimaced, squeezing his eyes in disgust before jerking his head around in order to regard the man.
“You haven’t been invited in here.”
The thin skin around the man’s whiskey-dark eyes crinkled with a smile. He looked down at the padded floor of the room, where the come leaking out of Will’s hole dropped wetly with a splat.
“I’m afraid that’s not how this place works.” He winked at Will, then looked over to the woman on his arm. “I sometimes find it quite invigorating myself to dance around the idea of dying.”
The woman veiled her rolled eyes, then pulled herself off of Will’s wrist. Dark red blood hummed out of the wound and trickled down his pinky finger.
A new stranger loomed over Will, working his cock to hardness between his legs. He teased Will’s rim with the edge of the underside, rubbing the frenulum lightly against the curve of his hole. Will felt only an unpleasant coldness of the lube when the man slid in.
“Get the fuck out,” he tried instead, swatting the older man away like an annoying gnat. He didn’t need more people near him, already too many bodies and minds in the room that any self-control of his own identity wavered and shimmered dangerously with the vampire to his right and the burly man grinding his hips into the soft meat of his thighs.
The man let his smile reach his lips, his sharp teeth more prominent than Will had expected considering he wasn’t feeding. He changed his tune, holding out his other hand. “Unless you want to join in?”
The older man’s smile faded and he stood up slowly, careful to avoid touching Will’s outstretched arm. “I don’t share well with others.”
He turned and backed away, though he lingered for several moments longer in the corner of the darkened room. When Will couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, it was the man’s ashen blond hair and sharp cheekbones that slipped with him into unconsciousness.
---
It had been three days - or was it three weeks? - since Will had been to this particular part of town. His last experience here had nearly ended in him being drained to the point of death, and he’d been sent home to recover and to not darken the door of the club again.
Will wasn’t really one for rules.
He managed to charm his way through the front door, the vampire guard - a woman named Bev - had a soft spot for him that he could spot from a mile away.
“Be careful this time?” She suggested casually, as though she were telling him to watch where he was walking before crossing a street, rather than acknowledging that he’d nearly died from carelessness last time.
He gave her a half-hearted salute and made his way into the depths of the club. This one was more upscale than some of the dive bars he ended up at on the most desperate nights; nights when he would beg and plead and sob in relief if only he could feel something that wasn’t a shadow of someone else.
Pain was centering. It brought with it the promise of clarity, a calmness that came with expectation. This club would provide that.
He weaved through the growing crowd. A shot of something was forced encouragingly into his hands as he made his way to the back, breaking him from his thoughts. He didn’t even look at the contents before he tossed it back, the flavor exploding overly-saccharine and sticky on his tongue.
“Now this!” An overly-enthusiastic drink-girl offered him a thin metal spoon piled with a little bump of white powder on the end. He hesitated for only a moment, his proclivities falling less towards stimulants than literally anything else. But who was he to decline? He leaned forward, pressed his finger to his right nostril, and snorted the blow into his left, relishing in the bitter post-nasal drip that helped wash down the sugar-water sweetness of whatever liquor she’d first offered him.
She smiled, her teeth blunt and nicotine-stained under the blacklights: too human for his interest. It wasn’t that he could tell who were vampires in the club - not really - but he liked to think he had a sense for who definitely wasn’t. She definitely wasn’t. Her bubblegum pink hair was stuck to her purple lipgloss. He tripped on his empathy and slipped into her skin, just long enough for it to itch. Like an echo, he felt the remnant flashes of her own sorrow, tar-black as it bubbled like flesh boiling under a flame. He tried to shake it off with a grimace, his heart beating rabbit-fast because of the drug, though shimmers of the girl’s thoughts still sparkled at the corner of his mind.
He took the spoon from her, and the little bottle of coke swinging from a necklace around her too-thin neck, her collarbones thrown out in sharp contrast, pushing jagged against her flesh. Two more heavy bumps and he felt her spin up and burst out of his mind. He let the sensation spill down his spine and pull a smile from the corners of his lips. Her own smile wavered only a second before she was reclaiming her drugs and her spoon and moving on through the crowd to the next partygoer.
Will didn’t waste any more time. He slid through the crowd like a shadow, finally stopping when he reached the back, nothing but a heavy blackout curtain separating him from where the real party would be.
---
“Fuck-” Will groaned, the first sound that he’d made in what felt like hours, his throat nearly raw from the disuse, voice cracking over the word, deeper than it ever was.
He laughed at the sound of it, a sort of hollow sound that sizzled out in the quiet of the room. The vampire attached to his wrist pulled away long enough to give him a curious look before he returned to his meal. Will was balanced on his hand and knees this time, maintaining the position only through the strength of the vampire thrusting between his thighs: his own arms had long ago become jelly. A firm hand on his lower abdomen kept him arched precisely how he was wanted.
If he liked anything at all about the position, it was feeling the hard press of the man’s palm against his insides when he fucked deeply in. Like this, he could imagine the thin walls of organs and skin separating the man’s cock from his hand. Like this, he could imagine the man fucking into him harder, making him burst from the inside, his fingernails scrambling and digging in from the outside until he was no barrier at all.
When they fed, the pain had a tendency to start local, but with enough time it could spread. He could pretend that the sucking, throbbing pain that originated at his wrist had its source anywhere, once it began to hurt enough. He let the origin slide over his body, past his elbow, over his shoulder, to settle deep in his gut. The man fucking into him was long - sharp. He could imagine the way his insides might tear up and shred from sufficient misuse. He relished the thought.
He put his head down and closed his eyes, skull suddenly too heavy to hold up. The man’s hand shifted and he could imagine he could see the way the cock inside him banged against him from inside. In a moment of delirium, he let go with his other hand to touch the imaginary bulge; his head fell heavy onto the thinly padded table. The dull thud of pain against the bridge of his nose made him smile slightly, relieved that he might still be able to feel more than just the thumping thudding ache of being drained and used.
His hand moved to touch where he envisioned he’d explode, if the man behind him was worth his shit. It jostled and shook as he was fucked, but the blood and the gore from a disemboweling never came. Instead, the man behind him pulled out and shot his load in thick ropes onto his numb ass.
“More!” he shouted to no one at all, his words mumbled against the leather of the table. A woman sauntered in behind him, her strap-on at least twice the girth of the man that had come before.
It tugged at his insides, pulling at the flexible walls of his intestines to untwist a little more so that the woman might sink deeper into him. So that he might feel something more than a clouding hazy ache that told him he was beginning to slip under. Awkwardly, he pressed his arm up, pushing his wrist harder into the mouth of the vampire feeding.
“They’ll stop when you lose consciousness,” he heard the unique accent say again just inches from his ear.
It should have alarmed him, seeing the man again, but something about the familiarity felt oddly comfortable. Still, he scoffed.
“Then don’t fucking let them,” he murmured, before closing his heavy lids and losing time.
---
Will’s skin hurt. It felt stretched too tight over brittle bones, bird-light in their hollowness. He blinked into wakefulness almost angrily, lashes fluttering back frustrated tears that he was still fucking alive.
Through the salted-film of unshed tears, he noticed he wasn’t where he last remembered. Things were foggy, but he had been in the back of the club when he’d lost consciousness. And, it seemed, the vampires had stopped feeding, had stopped fucking, as soon as he’d slipped away.
Smack. Pain bloomed star-burst bright behind his eyes and his teeth ground together hard enough in his mouth to catch on his inner-cheek, blood flooding his tongue with a copper tang.
The sound had been even sharper than the actual slap, though his cheek surely prickled red from the impact. He tried to focus his vision on the blurry figure that stood in front of him, but he found he couldn’t lift his head enough to blink back the halo of light that cast the man in stark, backlit shadow.
“Welcome back, boy.” That accent. The vampire from his last several times at the club, the creepy voyeur who always watched but never partook.
Will spit red-tinged saliva onto the black tile beneath his feet. “Not your fucking boy.” He growled to a smattering of amused laughter from the crowd gathered around them.
The vampire ignored him, continuing. “I said I don’t share well with others, and that is true. However, I do rather enjoy public scenes. Which you - I have on good faith - do too.”
There was no inquiry in the vampire’s statements, no real out for Will. He felt his pulse thrum in his veins and center in his groin at the implication.
“You know so much about me and I don’t even know your name, Sir,” Will faked the deference he assumed the vampire wanted, though it took a lot for him not to spit the honorific at him in a thick wad of saliva.
“Hannibal Lecter. And you are Will Graham, a frequent patron in my establishment.” The man sounded incredibly pleased; Will felt like he’d missed something important in the molasses haze of coming back up.
He pushed his head up as much as he could manage, staring into the black backdrop of the stage. The voices he heard - they were behind him then, his ass bent over on display. Warm metal bit against his ankles and he let his head drop to find a spreader bar separating his feet.
He tried to move his hands but pain shot through the tendons of his arms and shoulders. He hung from his bent elbows, upper arms pulled taut behind him, his hands bound and hanging limply above his ass. He tested his bindings about his wrist, felt the rough edge of the jute against his raw wound. He didn’t feel the slippery slide of blood; he must have been out for a while if he’d already stopped bleeding.
“The fuck is this?” he grimaced, silently thankful for the uniquely uncomfortable way he woke up contorted upon the stage.
Hannibal stared at him. “Sir,” he added resentfully, seemingly at the pleasure of the other man. The crowd murmured their enjoyment as well.
“This - “ Hannibal began, moving around and kneeling down so that even with his head limp on his neck, they could make eye contact. “Is our opportunity to discuss your limits, before we go further.”
Further? Will thought, then was reminded of the sharp stinging pain across his rear. Hannibal had been hitting him while he was unconscious. The idea sparked a dull pull of arousal from between his spread thighs.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Hannibal’s lips thinned at the reply. He took Will’s chin in his slender fingers and tilted his head slightly from side to side, examining the boy’s delicate features. “You don’t mean that.” His assessment was said without question.
“You don’t fucking know what I do and don’t mean, Sir.” Will hissed out, trying to shake his head from out of Hannibal’s vice-like grip.
“You’re young. You’re not stupid.” Hannibal looked in and through Will like he was more prone to do with others, seeing more than just their external tics and projected personalities. It made him twitch uncomfortably.
“Stop that,” he said quietly, closing his eyes against the intrusive stare.
“See? We’ve found a limit already.” Hannibal showed his teeth in his smile and let go of his chin while he stood up and stretched his legs. Looking down at Will, he asked again, “What are your limits, Will Graham?”
Will snarled, suddenly less enthusiastic about finding himself bound before the club goers. He felt woozy, the world coming in and out of focus as he tried to steady his vision. Suddenly bone-tired, he sighed.
“I said, it doesn’t matter.”
Hannibal didn’t miss a beat. “We’ll find them together, then.”
Will should have anticipated the slap, but it still turned his head sharply to the right. There was more blood, this time from a split lip, and it rolled down his chin and stained his teeth. He closed his eyes, but he couldn’t shake a wisp of a smile that pulled at his lip. He’d let Hannibal have his fun. He closed his eyes, ready to sink into it, just like he always did.
A harsh hand in his hair had his eyes snapping open as his head was yanked back, exposing the long column of his throat. With his free hand, Hannibal pried Will’s mouth open, pinching his cheeks together enough that Will felt his teeth grind together and his jaw protest.
Once his mouth was open, Hannibal leaned close, close enough that Will thought for a wild, heart-battering moment that he was going to be kissed. He never allowed them to kiss him, never allowed bites to his neck. It belied an intimacy that he simply wasn’t there for.
But Hannibal didn’t kiss him. He pulled Will’s tongue from his mouth so that it lolled out across his blood-stained lip, and then he leaned even closer and spat into Will’s mouth, using his thumb to rub his saliva against Will’s tongue and teeth.
Will seethed internally but still didn’t speak. He wouldn’t give the man the satisfaction. Even with the debasement, Will’s cock still hung semi-hard between his thighs, the danger of the entire situation flying through his veins like speed.
Will was brought sharply back to the present by another slap, this one to the opposite side of his face, Hannibal’s thumb still hooked firmly in his cheek so that his mouth remained open wide. He used his hold on Will to force his face up, sustaining eye contact for long enough that Will nearly whimpered with it.
Hannibal didn’t speak, he simply let go of Will and stepped around him, an owner surveying his property. Will couldn’t see what was happening behind him, but he could hear the delicate shuffling of implements on a table to his far right.
Then there was silence. It extended on; not even the audience stirred. The only sound in Will’s ears was his own heavy panting as the position grew increasingly uncomfortable. Then, the heavy dragging of a chair before it was shoved underneath him, forcing him to kneel on the plush leather seat, his chest and torso folded over the back.
Thwack. Will heard the sound before he felt the fire ignite against the thin, fragile skin of his right foot. It felt like an explosion of sensation, all-encompassing and forcing him to focus solely on the place where the cane had fallen.
Before he could even catch a breath to recover, Hannibal was bringing the cane down across the same thin strip. His toes desperately tried to clench to protect his soles, the metal of the spreader digging into his inner ankle when he tried to close his legs.
The flexible bamboo hummed in the air of the near-silent club. Will could hear nothing but the zoom of the cane through the air before it cracked hot and bright against the sole of his right foot. He couldn’t help the way his whole body tightened and jerked in response.
A series of five quick successive taps to the same foot, each progressively more forceful than the last made Will cry out in surprise as the pain blossomed from the thin edge where the cane struck flesh to throb over the whole of his sole.
“The boy has no limits!” Hannibal shouted to the crowd. Some laughed in response; others tsk’d. Thwack the piece of wood snapped over his soles, then vibrated in the air behind him. Whip, whack, smack, the last hard hit made his muscles tense and contract. A shrill pain in his shoulders where his arms were pulled back behind him forced him to slacken. His feet sung with pain, his face suddenly red hot and sweaty from the exertion of holding back a cry every time the cane came down against his skin.
“Thank you, Sir.” He tested his voice. It came out rougher than he expected. The pronouncement seemed to bring about a pause in his onslaught; he used the time to pull his head up and crane his neck to regard Hannibal.
Hannibal caught his eye and winked. He brought the bamboo down, nearly touching the white hot stripes across his soles, but pulled back at the last second so the cane licked at his wounds almost mercifully.
“Count to ten.” He gave no further warning before bringing the cane down with force across one foot.
“One,” Will said, the moment he recovered from the unavoidable jerking twitch of his whole body contracting against the blow.
“Two. Three. Fuck” The crowd chuckled, a murmur of appreciation as the thin wood cracked against his foot.
Will panted heavily in the lull as Hannibal turned to retrieve a second cane. He tested it in the air, letting it zoom behind him before bringing it down with a quick flick.
“Four.”
By six, Will was unable to catch his breath. By eight, the first sobbing cry slipped from his throat and he missed counting the next two hits.
Hannibal sauntered in front of him and took his chin again in his solid grip.
“Have we hit a limit?” he asked silkily in a way that made Will’s hands curl into fists.
“Fucking ten, Sir” Will whispered, blinking against the sweat that beaded down his forehead and past his brow.
“Excellent. We’ll continue,” Hannibal switched canes again, this one catching the light in a way that suggested a material other than wood.
Will was better prepared, or so he thought, but the blow didn’t land on his feet this time, rather across his ass, managing to hit both cheeks at the same time.
He let out a hiss of pain, but otherwise remained quiet, steadfastly refusing to break for this fucking infuriating man.
Swish. The cane sounded and, again, spilled fire across his skin. He lost time after that, Hannibal choosing not to pace his blows, raining down a dozen or more too fast for Will to count even if he’d still been expected to.
He could feel the thick, warm drip of blood down his thighs, knew he’d be covered in marks and most likely unable to sit, or frankly walk, for days. Perhaps longer. His blood sang with endorphins, his muscles tensed and aching. He could feel himself shaking, tears burning his throat like acid and threatening to spill down his ruddy cheeks.
“Your skin breaks so beautifully, Will. You really are a vision,” Hannibal observed, stopping his swings long enough to bring a broad palm to cup Will’s ass, squeezing his inflamed, oversensitive flesh in a strong hand.
It was on the tip of Will’s tongue: the word please perched under his chin. He was in more pain than he’d ever experienced, no one else had ever dared to try testing his proclaimed lack of limits. Hannibal was clearly a true Sadist, through and through.
“Thank you, Sir,” he said instead, forcing the words out of swollen lips and past blood-stained teeth. He would endure whatever Hannibal had in mind for him. He would show this vampire that he was made of tougher stuff than was assumed.
Several more hits landed against his trembling upper thighs. Though he couldn’t control his muscles or bodily reactions at this point, he refused to beg for mercy.
He heard a low hum from behind him, and then Hannibal was in his field of vision, his hands working on a pulley system to lift Will back up so that he was able to look Hannibal in the eyes. Will’s body was extended painfully, his knees still on the seat of the chair, his ankles weighed down and heavy with the spreader bar that kept them separated as they hung over the chair’s edge. His stomach pressed uncomfortably against the back of the seat, the edges digging in between his ribs painfully enough to draw a gasp from him.
Hannibal didn’t speak, he simply pulled Will by his hair again, slipping two fingers between lax lips and massaging Will’s tongue for several long moments. Will was confused by the abrupt change, the seeming gentleness after such abrupt and brutal pain.
And then Hannibal slid his fingers back further, clogging Will’s throat with them and activating his gag reflex. His throat seized around the intrusion, his entire body spasming in an effort to expel the fingers from where they rested, firm and unyielding. He could feel Hannibal’s knuckles brush against his soft palate, could feel his thumb massaging his tongue.
Spit gathered in the corners of his mouth and spilled down his cheeks and chin, down his chest. And still Hannibal pressed, deeper, further, centering Will’s mind until he could think of nothing but trying to draw his next gasping breath. And then Hannibal’s hand slipped from his hair and the man was pinching two fingers around Will’s nose, blocking his airflow completely and pulling another gagging moan from Will’s chest as his lungs started to burn with the effort.
His body convulsed, his back trying to go concave but his bindings stopping him from closing in on himself. A tight burning singe shot through his shoulders and down his back. Without reprieve, he whipped his eyes up to meet Hannibal’s.
They stared at one another for the length of seconds, but Will slipped easily in behind his sparkling eyes. What he found there was only wet, slippery pleasure.
Hannibal watched him fervently, counting seconds and looking for any signs that Will might lose consciousness. He held his breath fitfully, the empty sucking pressure of his collapsing lungs making his mind spin into a frantic panic.
Seconds after Will was sure he couldn’t last a moment more, Hannibal let go of Will’s nose and wrapped his hand around the back of his skull. Will snorted in as much air as could pass before Hannibal cradled his head as he pushed his fingers further still.
Will gagged violently, sliding off his knees and hanging his full weight onto his burning shoulders. The sudden shift off the chair loosened Hannibal’s fingers in his throat and he coughed viciously before they returned in earnest.
With a merciless jackhammering, Hannibal stabbed his fingers hard and blunt into the delicate tissue of his throat. Tears ran down either side of his cheeks, cutting a cold track through the fiery heat of his face. He gagged, harder this time, bile and liquor dribbling from between Hannibal’s fingers.
At last, Hannibal slid them out, wiping them over Will’s cheek. He ruffled his sweat-damp hair and backed off to take a long sip of water. Will let out a series of hacking wet coughs, necessarily taking his eyes off the prowl of the man before him.
His voice dripped in the thick air next to his ear. “A limit, perhaps?”
Will spit saliva and bile, missing Hannibal by fractions of an inch. Hannibal’s smile wiped from his face. HIs quick, light footfall brought him just before Will so fast, he blinked rapidly in response. His body convulsed away from Hannibal’s hand when it came out to pry his mouth open again.
“Mercy!” Will shook his head loose from Hannibal’s grip and shouted. His throat was on fire with the words, the scratches in his throat like a hundred razors’ burning edges. The syllables pulled more hacking coughs that made his body shudder under their force.
“That, dear Will, appears to be a limit.” The vampire was smirking down at him, Will could just make out the impression of his fangs against his bottom lip through the tears that hung like a film over his eyes and spilled down his snotty, saliva covered cheeks.
He’d never hated before, but he felt like the rage simmering in his chest was close to that sensation. He spit more blood and saliva onto the floor again and was pleased to see it turned Hannibal’s lips down in a moue of distaste.
“Just feed and get it over with,” Will sighed, his entire body exhausted from the sustained abuse.
“Oh no, Will, I don’t feed on those who have not earned it.” The vampire’s smile was brittle, cracked around the edges like an old black and white photo.
Earned it. Like his fucking fangs were a gift to the world. Will didn’t stop the roll of his eyes before letting his head hang between his shoulders, no longer able to hold it up.
It could have been minutes or hours, but eventually, he was released from his binds, and moved back into the private backrooms of the club. A man he recognized from his time here - a human, he thought, not a vampire - carried him through the crowd and deposited him on a pile of blankets in a room with a concrete floor.
He wanted to sleep, was nearly desperate to rest, but the adrenaline and the remnants of the drug cocktail he’d taken earlier in the evening were pumping through him, turning his brain into nothing but electric sparks of energy with nowhere to go.
A syringe was tossed to the floor beside him, the man who’d brought him to this room hovered above him.
“I don’t need a fucking babysitter,” Will spat, but his hand still slid across the cold floor, fingers wrapping around the syringe. He didn’t even ask what it was, didn’t pretend like he wasn’t going to use it. It didn’t matter.
He popped the cap with his thumb, but his fingers were shaking nearly uncontrollably, his brain and body trying to sync back up after what he’d just endured. His ass and thighs hurt where they rested against the smooth, poured concrete. His feet felt like useless ribbons attached to his ankles.
The man didn’t speak, didn’t threaten him or boast. But Will could tell there was something predatory and dark lurking just beneath the surface of his eyes. He wanted something from Will, and Will was in no position to deny it from him.
When he’d finally lined the needle up with a thickly pumping vein in the crook of his arm, the man finally moved, kneeling to spread Will’s legs apart while also holding his arm still for him. It was only then that Will realized his entire body was trembling.
The needle sank in and fire and ice erupted in his veins, the drugs already soaring through him before the man had even flipped him to his stomach and settled heavily between his thighs.
---
It was long past dark once Will closed his laptop, the cramped office space he shared with three other grad students gone pitch black without the light from his screen. He fumbled through the dark, grabbing his bag and coat, and made his way outside, intent to head home and have a nightcap or five before calling it a night.
The wind whipped against his face as he left the building that housed the biology grad offices and labs. The occasional light still burned up on the third and fourth floors, some fools more dedicated than Will no doubt spending the evening sleeping on threadbare sofas between checking on their specimens.
He felt little satisfaction knowing he was nearing the end of the graduate program at least two years before most: he just needed to get out, and fast. He’d lost whatever spark that had pushed him to pursue forensics in the first place somewhere after the first year, and now his days were spent in a slog between school and work and the clubs. Nothing felt real anymore. He continued with the motions, understanding that meeting expectations was a path of least resistance, but he did it without a sense of pride or fulfillment.
The campus was quiet this late in the evening, but he recognized Bev’s self-assured saunter from a ways off. He grimaced, flipping up the collar of his jacket to the cold, put his head down and moved with more purpose in the direction of his apartment.
“You’re not going to say hello?” Bev called out from across the courtyard, picking up her pace to cut the distance between them faster than Will thought reasonable. Bev came up beside him, her breath coming out in slow, steady puffs that mimicked his in the cold air.
“Why do you do that?” His voice was gruff. He probably hadn’t said a word for two days, not since his last shift at work.
“Do what? Say hello?” She nudged him and smiled.
“Breathe.”
Bev tipped her head back in understanding. “Force of habit, I suppose.”
“You’d think you’d lose touch with human things after this much time.” Will didn’t know exactly how old Bev was, but from snippets of conversation, he reasoned she’d been a vampire at least twice as long as she’d been alive.
She shrugged. “I suppose it feels comfortable, the repetitive motion. Soothing.”
Will had nothing to add. He didn’t feel soothed by anything in his life at the moment, the idea of something as simple as breathing bringing him comfort was nearly laughable, if he cared enough to work up the energy to laugh. They walked in silence for some time, Bev peering over at him time and again, as though looking for something.
“Did he feed from you?” She asked finally, as they turned the corner onto his side street. The question made Will bristle, remembering the dismissive way Hannibal had walked away from him after nearly making him vomit in front of the crowd a week ago. He’d recovered physically, more or less, a couple of days later, but a lingering sense of embarrassment had kept him from going back.
His defenses went up. “Why do you care?”
“You look… frail. Are you sleeping?” She asked, pivoting around the subject of his well-being.
Will stopped and turned to look pointedly at Bev. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
Bev’s eyes narrowed. Before Will could realize what was happening, she had her hand on his collar, pulling it away to expose the unblemished white of his neck. Will stepped back, throwing her hand off of him. He looked at her for some explanation.
“Good.”
“Are you done?” he queried, annoyed.
Bev’s expression switched and she flashed him a crooked smile. “Get some rest, kid. Focus on your schoolwork. It’s good not seeing you around as much.” She gave him a curt nod, turned on her heel, and left.
---
Will wiped gasoline off his palms and onto his jeans. He’d been distracted again while filling up his car; the gas had spilled over onto his hands and puddled in a pearlescent, technicolor puddle at his feet.
He had the thought - rabbit fast as it flashed through his brain - of setting a match to it and letting the flames consume him. For a moment, the heat rippled over his face.
Then: nothing. He shook himself free of the cobwebs that slithered gossamer soft and fine as spider-silk through his mind, focusing himself in the present moment.
It had been four days since he’d been to the club; since he’d been fed on. He could feel the restless energy building in his bones, compelling him to do something to exorcise himself of it. His skin was itching with an anticipation he’d come to recognize as a withdrawal symptom. Of which drug, he couldn’t even be sure.
There was a fine tremor in his fingertips as he stuffed himself back into his old, beat-up Volvo and turned the key in the ignition. He steadfastly ignored it.
He’d just go out tonight. He didn’t have classes tomorrow and he could get his shift at work covered easily enough if he hadn’t recovered by the following evening.
---
Even without his empathy, he knew most of the vampires that frequented Hannibal’s club, he’d been fucked by more than half of them in the bathroom stalls, had their cocks in his mouth and their fangs in his skin. But none of them would so much as glance at him as he made his way through the crowd and took up a spot at the bar.
The bartender, a human he’d never caught the name of, slid his preferred drink across the bar to him, but didn’t speak. Will knocked back the whiskey, ready to feel it slide into his veins and begin to fill his brain with fluff. He tapped on the bartop and the man poured him another before walking away.
“Who’s holding?” he asked the woman beside him, a slender waif of a blonde, teetering on the edge of the barstool.
She looked over to him with half-lidded eyes, a dazed smile on the edges of her lips. She didn’t answer except for the briefest of glances in the direction of the back corner of the bar, just before the hallway leading to the private rooms. He scanned the crowd, checking off who he’d bought from before. After a third glass of whiskey that left a smooth burn down his throat, he got up and made his way to the back.
The same imposing man from the last time he’d been in the club stood watch by the door of the hallway, the sliver-fine scar of a hare-lip the only visible imperfection on the otherwise chiseled body before him. This was a man he had never been sure about the identity of - something altogether inhuman about him but nevertheless not quite vampire, either. When his mental guards failed around him, Will found himself sinking into a burning madness that made him dizzy upon reentry into himself.
The man’s eyes flitted away from the crowd towards Will as he approached. Will pulled a pile of bills from the tight pocket of his jeans, holding them carelessly between two fingers. It made the other man seethe, though he grabbed the money all the same. He turned with barely a motion for Will to follow, leading him to one of the private rooms near the back of the building.
The room wasn’t empty, but the buzz of the crowd quieted the further back they got from the main hall. Will watched dispassionately as a young woman was probed forcefully by a large dildo held by one of the women he recognized as vampire.
Will slipped his eyes back to the taller man, and offered his wrist to him. The motion made him growl in annoyance. Instead, he ignored WIll, turning half around to rummage through a side satchel he carried. He pulled out an identical pair of syringes, each matching what he’d been given previously before he’d fucked him.
He understood, stepping forward and moving to undo the man’s belt.
“No!” The man hissed, lurching away from Will’s touch. “Just the drugs.”
Will stood motionless for a time, processing. He wasn’t in the habit of being turned down, especially in so obvious a fashion, and nothing in life was given freely. He looked at the man for a time before he snatched the needles regardless, shoving them into his front pocket.
“Fuck you, too.” Will cursed, then left to find a corner where he might settle the increasingly apparent tremor of his fingers.
The bathroom of the club was sticky, dark, with a single stall at the far wall by the sinks. He stood there, watching the patrons slink in and out, waiting for the two men loudly occupying the stall to finish up. With the wide gaps in the door, it provided only the illusion of privacy, and Will didn’t flinch away from watching the one man - slim but tense with muscle - bury his face over and over again into the globes of the other man’s ass.
The man leaning over the toilet looked back and caught sight of Will staring. He winked and pushed his ass out further, as if to titillate. Will’s own ass flexed against a phantom sensation of the younger boy’s tongue. Despite the chill of the bathroom, Will felt a warmth spread up from his ass and into his chest as he watched, transfixed as the boy sucked greedily on the pucker of his hole. A frizzle of arousal ran through him, but it felt cocksure and foreign, and he recognized it as the taller man’s mirrored emotion rather than his own.
He looked away suddenly, disgusted that he’d fallen so simply into the headspace of another. It was happening more now, especially since he’d been sober for a few days. It simply wouldn’t do.
Walking forward, he bashed his hand impatiently against the stall door. “This is a fucking sex club, go pay for a fucking room!”
The men behind the door laughed, and seemed to take longer for his interjection. Will waited, his leg shaking irritably, as he caught himself smashing into the mind’s of other patrons as they came too close to him. When the lock of the stall slid open, Will was shaking in earnest, and pushed past the satisfied men, slamming the door closed behind him.
Clenching and unclenching his fist, he poked the edge of the needle into a prominent vein running down the inside of his arm. He watched, enraptured, as a drop of blood danced into the brown-tinged liquid, before he pushed the plunger down.
His heart galloped into his throat as the drug wound its way through his veins; he imagined he could feel it coating the vessels, filling him up with warmth from the inside out. He rested his back against the wall and let himself slide down its cool surface, his head suddenly too heavy to hold up on his own. His bones felt filled with gold, his mouth sticky-thick with honey.
He breathed out and it was fire, his body immolating just like he’d imagined it would earlier at the gas pump. The world swam and spun around him like props on a merry-go-round and he laughed and laughed and laughed, hysteria and a blazing, all-consuming euphoria slipping through him like rain through cracks in the pavement.
As his veins carried the liquid throughout his body he glowed, his breathing increasing along with the pleasant ache of his too heavy limbs until it evened out, a slow, even cadence of sound as he pushed the air from his lungs, passed the bone-cage of his ribs and out of his raw, burning throat. He was flying and couldn’t manage to pull enough air through his clenched-tight teeth, his chest heaving with it.
It was hours, or maybe only minutes later when a heavy crash split open the heavy, muffled silence that had settled over him like a blanket. He tried to lift his head in the direction of the sound and saw the stall lock cracked open on the ground at his feet just before the door was swung open and he was being lifted over someone’s shoulder, the ground rising up quickly enough to disorient him as he hung limply from the man’s back.
He watched in a fevered-daze as the second syringe fell from his pocket and shattered beneath the man’s feet as he walked, the fluid spilling out and filling the grout lines in the tile like tiny rivers. He clawed down the man’s back in his effort to reach it, filled with the overwhelming desire to bathe in the murky liquid, to drown himself in it.
The light from the hallway was too bright, like staring into the sun and he tried to blink away the afterimage left on his eyelids. When he opened them again, he was back in the room with the concrete floor.
The man’s muscles flexed against Will’s abdomen, rubbing against his flaccid cock as he deposited him ungently on the ground beside a twitchy man with a white-crusted razorblade and a gilded plate spread across his lap.
Will propped against the wall, this one more textured than the smooth tile of the bathroom had been, his skin exploding with sensation. The man left the door open when he exited the room, but Will couldn’t be bothered to care.
Time moved sluggishly, syncing to the push and pull of blood in his veins as he looked up into the circle lights set into the high ceiling, his mind a million worlds away. Suddenly, he heard a shuffling and then his lap was full of too-slim legs and slender hips: the boy who’d been sitting in the corner had set his tray aside to climb into Will’s lap.
Will could feel that the boy was hard against him, his cock rutting against Will’s stomach just before he leaned in to try and kiss him. His aim was sloppy, lips sliding from Will’s flushed cheek and down to his chin before finally managing to make it to his mouth. Will didn’t move, didn’t encourage or discourage the boy from his mindless rutting even as he licked into Will’s mouth and ran his tongue along his gums, leaving behind a numbing bitterness from his own drug of choice.
Will’s pants were unbuttoned and his soft cock freed from them. The boy quickly disrobed and returned to spread his legs across Will’s thighs. He huffed in frustration when he realized Will wasn’t getting hard, tried to wrap his ice-cold fingers around Will’s cock to pull half-heartedly at him before giving up, turning Will forcefully around so that he was pressed on his belly to the hard floor. The concrete scraped against the exposed skin of his abdomen and his cock in a way that sent electric sparks up his spine.
The press of a body against him felt like a blanket - impersonal but warm. It pushed him into the quicksand of the concrete, his chest melting into the cold as he sunk several inches below the ground. The boy’s hands felt slick and sticky with sweat; they pulled at his clothes until he was nearly naked, his pants around his ankles, his shirt around his neck. The boy used it as a leash, twisting the thin fabric around until he could pull up Will’s body. It came sucking up from its home in the ground, sloppily maneuvered until he was forced to move his arms up to protect his face against the rough floor.
Fingers probed at his uncomfortably dry hole before he heard a wet squirt and slop and then all he felt was cold and slippery. Will’s body nudged forward with the first thrust of the boy behind him. His skin accrued a hundred small scrapes along his forearms and belly as he rocked back and forth with the force. It was a full body buzzing that complemented the high; he didn’t have the wherewithal or strength to get up.
The boy passed the time silently, and Will drifted, feeling little more than a thousand sparks that lit and then fizzled out. He closed his eyes at some point, the fireworks in his head clouding his vision. For a while, perhaps, he lost time.
Eventually, he felt a sharp sting on his now-splayed hand. Blinking groggily, he tried to lift his head. The room swayed, but his body was still: the boy behind him had finished and left without saying goodbye. His eyes crinkled at that, he thought perhaps he verbalized a belated farewell. He tried to pull his hand back with no success and squinted to focus on the edge of a black heel, pressing hard into his palm.
“It’s about time you went home, little one.” The waif-thin blonde balanced her meager weight on the heel of the shoe.
Will grimaced, pulling at his hand again, this time ripping its veiny surface before she let up her force. The scrape was shallow, but it bubbled up red all the same. He pushed himself up to sitting, then brought the blood up to taste against his chapped lips.
The woman bit the inside of her lip, watching him. Suddenly, he felt ravenous, saw himself as a feast more than a heavy weight, anchored to the floor. It was a sudden shift, made him spin, but he smiled through the dizziness.
“Come here. You hungry?” He half-asked, half-taunted, knowing the answer. He held up his hand, rotating his wrist so she could see the mash of old scars that littered his otherwise smooth skin.
The woman looked at him with pity and shook her head curtly. “Not from you, I’m afraid. Your night is over.” She lowered herself with an eerie smoothness until they were face to dirt-scraped face. She gently untwisted his shirt and began to help him back into his clothes.
When she lifted him up, his weight spilled over her like molasses, though she seemed not to feel it at all. Together, they walked through the room’s entrance and towards the back exit. Will noticed vaguely that the club was nearly vacant, the buzz of the sub gone and only practical noises - glasses clinking, brooms sweeping, chairs shuffling - could be heard in the space.
He slinked through the back hallway, more willowy vampire than hazy human. “You haven’t fed in days,” he said, sure of himself because he didn’t feel quite himself at all. More than anything, this is how he knew the drugs were fading: it was too easy to slip when he was sobered up.
“Sweet of you to notice,” the woman said, propping the door open with a pointed toe and pushing him into the dawning light of morning.
A taxi was waiting at the rear exit, its fumes billowing around the body of the vehicle. Will folded into the backseat, half-heartedly trying to prop himself up to sitting. He got himself to a slouch and gave up. The car started to move; the next thing he recalled was waking up on the cold tile of his bathroom floor, still fully clothed.
---
It was pouring rain as Will stood in an actual line to get into the club. He had his jacket pulled up to his neck, shoulders hunched against the wind, but his hair was dripping and matted to his face and neck, aiding him in the hopefully standoffish appearance he was trying to maintain.
“Kid, don’t you have classes or something? Why are you darkening my doorstep every couple of days?” Bev wasn’t working the door tonight, but she appeared suddenly on the opposite side of the pretentious velvet rope that stood alongside the line of people, separating them from the street and herding them towards the wall like cattle.
“Not really your doorstep, is it?” He tipped his chin up, blinking away rainwater.
She hummed noncommittally, giving him an obvious once-over. “Have you even slept since the last time I saw you? You look like shit, Will.”
The intimate use of his name felt like rain water trickling down his spine, pulling him to stand up straighter. “And I’m sure you look great for your age. What’s your point?” He knew he was being snappish and unfair, but he couldn’t be bothered to care. He hadn’t asked for her concern.
She blinked, ignoring the barb as she unlinked a section of the rope and grabbed his elbow, guiding him out of the line and dragging him bodily down the sidewalk. “What the fuck are you doing? I’ve been in line for half an hour already!” Will grumbled loudly, trying to jerk his elbow free but it was like trying to shake loose from a vice.
“Food, dumbass. You know, nutrients? When was the last time you fed yourself?” She shot back over her shoulder, not hesitating in her brisk pace.
“Is that what this is about? Do you want to eat? Fucking do it, you don’t have to drag me off somewhere, you could have done it in the club.” He kicked vindictively at a puddle of water she’d sidestepped, a tiny seed of pleasure settling in his belly when it drenched the bottom of her pants.
“Oh no, uh-huh. You are off the menu. But you need food. I thought you were supposed to be smart? Human bodies require food to function. If you won’t sleep, at least you can eat.” She sounded so much like a righteously angry sibling or parent that it stalled Will’s tongue, an angry reply just on the tip.
He didn’t speak again even as she shoved him into the greasy-looking front door of a sidestreet diner, the bell jingling overhead as the door closed behind them. Then he was being stuffed into a thread-bare vinyl-covered booth seat, his elbow knocking painfully against the corner as she forced him to sit.
She ordered two of the daily specials, not even glancing at a menu or asking Will what he wanted. The waitress brought them each a water, a few meager, half-melted cubes of ice floating near the surface. Will moved the glass closer to himself just for something to do with his hands. His fingers were starting to tremble again and he pulled his hands into his sleeves to try and hide it.
The silence stretched out until their food arrived, though there was nothing necessarily uncomfortable about it. Things were easy with Bev. She wore herself openly and brazenly on her sleeve. Nothing hidden in her actions, no deception or layers of subtext to work through like so many people. He didn’t need to slip into her to understand her.
When the food came, Will poked at his burger with a wilted, soggy fry, not really eating so much as moving things around on his plate. He’d learned a lot about deception over the years. Perhaps someone should teach Bev.
“Why are you here, Will?” Her voice interrupted his thoughts, pausing his hand where he’d just been about to dip the fry into some ketchup to up the imagery.
“You brought me here against my will?” He accused, tossing the fry back onto the worn, beige plastic of the plate. The lights were blindingly bright, fluorescent and flickering as they fought to hold onto the last remnants of energy. It threw everything into a sharp, yellow-grey contrast, sallow and sickly.
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“You know the answer to that question, too.”
Bev’s brows knit. “You’re going to be disappointed if you go in.”
Will perked up. “You’re saying that I’m allowed in?”
Frustrated that she wasn’t getting through to Will, Bev slumped on the booth’s bench. “You’re a damn adult, I’m not your babysitter.” She picked up her burger and took a massive bite. “But I’m still right - you’re going to be disappointed if you go in.”
Will didn’t roll his eyes but it was a near thing. “What are you wanting to tell me?”
She chewed slowly, savoring the greasy texture of the burger. From behind the table, she studied Will for a long time, deciding something internally. “Hannibal has you marked.”
Will dropped his fry and leaned onto the table. “What do you mean, marked?”
“You’re not going to get what you’re looking for, is what I mean. Not if you try just anyone.”
“Who do I have to try?” Will’s eyes narrowed. It clicked and his brows shot up. “Him? He wouldn’t do it before, why would he be interested now?”
“Because he knows no one else will have you now.”
Will snorted and shook his head. He took a precautionary nibble off the corner of the burger. The taste of it felt buttery smooth and slippery in his mouth. He went for a long sip of water. The conversation lulled naturally, neither of them needing to break the silence that had fallen between them.
Finally, Will shrugged. “Okay.” He stood up, “Are we going then?”
Bev looked up at him, her nostrils flaring in a teasing anger. Finally, she threw her hands up and shuffled out of the bench. She grabbed her coat and began putting it on as they walked out of the diner. “You’ll remember I warned you?” She spoke over her shoulder, back at Will.
Will huffed and agreed.
---
Even in the rich aesthetic of the front rooms, it didn’t take Will long to pick out Hannibal’s unique profile. He walked the short width of the club, losing Bev in the process, and slid into the empty seat beside him. Hannibal turned to regard him, as though he was expecting his appearance.
“You did this, then?” He gestured vaguely around the room and Hannibal looked expectantly at him so he might continue. “And what? You want me to ask you?”
“It would be the polite thing to do, in such circumstances.” Hannibal mused. He spoke quietly to the other men across the table. Will couldn’t recognize the language. The men excused themselves and were lost in the crowd.
Will scoffed, “In such circumstances.” He looked at Hannibal, his lips tightening against his teeth. “You’re so full of shit.”
Hannibal smiled genuinely, pivoting to attend more directly to Will. “That didn’t sound like a request.”
Will’s eyes flitted over Hannibal’s features, returning again and again to the crooked teeth that set out from the rest. The pupils of his eyes expanded minutely as he considered. A growing warmth overtook him at the suggestion.
“Should we go back to a room then?” Will relinquished, his words coming out a bit fast, a bit unsteady. He sat on his hand to hide the tremor.
Hannibal’s eyes glided over the sinew of Will’s neck. Will fidgeted in his seat without realizing it, his finger rubbing circles across the pad of his thumb. He didn’t like to be the focus of someone’s attention. It too easily made him switch perspectives to understand what it was about him they were so interested in.
In the thick of Hannibal’s mind, Will felt a growing excitement, an easy sort of predation that waited greedily in the background. “Here?” He asked, his mind supplying Hannibal’s answer. He couldn’t remember ever seeing someone else feed in the thrumming open lobby of the club.
“Would it suit you?” Hannibal’s fingers moved with grace through the small space between them and plucked a stray hair from off his white shirt.
“You don’t care about my comfort, Hannibal,” Will accused, shifting away from Hannibal’s hand and further back into his seat. He’d rather have the man’s cane again than this crippling, fragile gentleness. It was nearly as choking as the phantom fingers he could feel dancing along the back of his throat.
He threw himself out of his chair suddenly, unable to mask the chaotic, overwhelming energy that pulsed through him. He stuffed his trembling hands in his still-damp jacket pockets and started to pace.
“I’d like for you to ask outright for what it is you seek, Will. And, as you said, right here.” Hannibal’s voice filtered in through the clutter of Will’s thoughts, pulling his eyes to the vampire. He had the insane urge to ruffle him, to see the man left gasping and as desperate as he had made him.
“You have no right to claim me, to deny me. I am not yours, Hannibal. This is absurd.” Will ranted, his fury returning tenfold as he walked along the edge of the dais. He knew people were looking, that he was already drawing attention, but he simply didn’t care. Hannibal did not control his life. He wasn’t allowed to fuck up Will’s system.
“It would appear that I very much do have not only the right, but your own self-admitted consent to do so.” His voice remained calm, placid on the surface like an ocean teeming with sharks.
“Fuck you,” Will spat, circling closer to the man’s chair, regardless, helpless but to go to him like a moth to a flame. The patchwork of scars layered over his wrists seemed to throb with the proximity to an apex predator such as Hannibal. Will’s pulse beat rabbit-fast just beneath the surface of his skin.
He ripped a piece of skin from the thumbnail he’d stuck between his teeth, a thoughtless, nervous habit. He didn’t realize he had torn the skin enough to bleed until he had a firm hand wrapped around his wrist and was being pulled down into Hannibal’s lap, spilling him across strong, muscled thighs covered by expensive dress slacks.
Hannibal’s chair was wide enough that Will’s knees sank into the plush leather on either side of Hannibal’s hips, his hands reaching out to catch himself against the back of the chair behind the man’s head, bringing them far closer together than Will would have liked.
“We couldn’t do this on the sofa?” Will growled, but went immediately silent when Hannibal pulled his bleeding thumb past pillow-soft lips, a pink, wet tongue wrapping around the tip as he sucked.
Hannibal’s eyes were dark as he locked his gaze on Will’s face while he licked his finger clean. He couldn’t suppress the shiver that nearly shook apart his bones at the visual, heart hammering in his throat. Hannibal was far more dangerous than any other vampire Will had ever met, could kill him as easy as breathing. His heart raced just a little faster at that.
“What, exactly, do you want, Will?” Hannibal taunted, and Will wanted to scream, could feel it perched just beneath his tongue. Hannibal was a Sadistic asshole, he expected Will to ask out loud so that he could debase him, humiliate him just that little bit more.
He could feel his cheeks grow warm and red, shifting his eyes to look over Hannibal’s shoulder rather than directly at him. “I’d like you to feed on me,” he ground out between clenched teeth.
“Yes, that is what you like. But what do you want? And how do you plan to obtain it?” Hannibal inquired, head tilted just ever so slightly to the side like a curious bird. Not for the first time, Will wondered at how old Hannibal was. When he looked at him he didn’t see any remnants of humanity left, just a finely crafted person suit that was lovely, but no less ill-fitting for all its loveliness. Hannibal didn’t even breathe like Bev and some of the others did, preternaturally still and silent as the grave.
“I want you to not be a fucking dick, but I suppose that’s asking too much,” he seethed before taking several deep, calming breaths. He wanted something from Hannibal, and if he needed to play nice to get it, he would. “I want your fangs in my wrist and my blood in your mouth,” he tried again. He could be polite, though he would never be one of the sweet, demure little things he often saw hanging around the club.
Hannibal’s lips seemed quirked in a perpetual smirk, his eyes full of mirth as he watched Will wind himself up. He could probably feel Will’s pulse where his hand was still wrapped around his wrist, most likely knew the effect he was having.
“What do people typically say when they are asking for something they want from another?” Hannibal prompted, his smile turning predatory as he watched Will fidget in his lap, trying to stand but unable to pull his wrist free or balance himself properly on the overstuffed leather. With his other hand, he pushed on Will’s thigh, effectively seating him fully onto his lap.
Will’s nostrils flared but he managed to remain calm, unwilling to give Hannibal the satisfaction of knowing exactly what he was doing to him. “Please, will you bite me?” he asked quietly, and when Hannibal’s eyebrow crawled up his forehead, he tacked on a nearly silent Sir to the end of his request.
Hannibal chuckled, a low, lovely sound that Will absolutely ignored, trying again to yank his wrist free when Hannibal remained silent for several long moments, giving no answer or indication he’d even heard Will, though Will knew he had.
Will’s breath fell onto Hannibal’s cool cheeks, close as he was, giving them a pinch of pale pink on an otherwise ghostly palate. Hannibal hadn’t fed for some time, he reasoned, the color seeped out of his skin as his nourishment wore thin. He’d been waiting, then.
The hand on his thigh splayed, feeling the thick burgeoning muscle of youth that ran from hip to knee. Pressing his palm against his jeans, Hannibal pushed his hand up, bunching and catching it in the loose fabric of his shirt. Will’s skin prickled with electricity at the sure touch, goosebumps erupting down his back. He blinked against the sensation, unfamiliar as he was to feeling anything at all when someone touched him.
Hannibal’s hand trailed over the hard pebble of his nipple, and along the jut of collarbone too prominent for his age. It stayed then, resting as a loose binding around his throat, a necklace of slender fingers.
Will tried to shake him off, his brows furrowing at their closeness. “Not the neck.” He pulled up his wrist to show the layers of scars that littered the flesh above hollow bones. “Here.”
A thin finger uncurled from around his neck to pet his throbbing pulse. “Here,” Hannibal demanded instead. His grip shifted, grasping Will’s prominent jaw firmly in his fingers, then twisted his neck so that it lay exposed before him.
Will struggled to slip from his grip but with no success. A dabble of adrenaline trickled into his veins, making his chest expand and his lungs tickle. He gasped, realizing Hannibal’s strength made it so that he wouldn’t move unless it was what Hannibal wanted. Feebly, his cock twitched, then lay soft in his jeans. These were all foreign feelings for him, and he squirmed uncomfortably against the man below him.
His lips were unpleasantly cool, but his teeth were sharp and they pierced through the thin skin along his neck as though it were the peel of an apple. Immediately, juices ran bright and hot. Will hissed out at the pain, his face twisted in anger for having his preferences ignored. This would be difficult to hide, he thought heatedly. He slammed his fist uselessly against Hannibal’s chest, knowing any fight would be in vain. Still, he felt he couldn’t sit idly by.
He tore at Hannibal’s shirt, ripping from it a button that skittered over the dais and onto the floor. His fingers clawed at the flesh of his upper chest, fighting instinctively to regain some control that had so simply been stolen from him. Other times, when they fed on him, he had wished for this sort of evaporation of any power, but now that it was gone from him, he felt its absence like a gaping wound.
It was a heady experience, feeling the thunderous pulse from his heart pushing his blood out and into the greedy mouth of the man below him. There was no sidestepping about the point - Hannibal had pierced into aortic flow and it spurted in rushing passes that he sucked back expertly. It was never like this, with the others. With them, he didn’t feel like his life was running out.
His cock began to fill at the thought, and he writhed, unsatisfied and suddenly craving so much more. His hands, previously digging into Hannibal’s flesh, smoothed out and ran across the sturdy chest. The noise that slipped from his lips sounded wanton, foreign and altogether too much.
A few guests nearby looked up at the sound, their faces impassive and impossible to read. Will didn’t care.
“More,” he breathed and ground his flaccid cock into Hannibal’s solid form.
Contrarily, Hannibal pulled himself off, his thumb coming over to press on the small holes that let spurt a final pulse of red before the pressure staved the flow.
“You want to die?” His voice was smooth, but affected. His cheeks had turned a ruddy pink, his pupils blown wide to devour the iris.
Will shrugged. “I don’t care.”
Hannibal’s teeth flashed in the low lighting of the club and he put his mouth back against the wet pricked holes in Will’s neck. He lathed his tongue against the wounds, and Will let out a small anticipatory noise, waiting to feel the way his blood throbbed up and out of his body. The sensation never came though. Soon, Hannibal pulled away and leaned back to take him in. Will’s hand whipped to his throat. He felt no bumps or punctures. When he pulled it away, it came back bloody, but not nearly as much as it should have. Will felt a fuming rage grow.
He lashed out at Hannibal’s chest, his face, only to have his wrists grasped tight in one broad, elegantly fingered hand, tight enough to make the bones grind together painfully. He let out a hiss of pain loud enough to draw even more attention to them and realized with a flush that he was practically writhing in Hannibal’s lap, their bodies pressed desperately close together and his arousal evident in his jeans.
“What do you think they see when they look at you? A wanton, desperate whore beautifully anguished and still begging for more?” Hannibal’s words were purred directly into Will’s ear, wrapping around his brain and squeezing like a python, pushing all other thoughts from his mind except for those centered in his pulse points, in his cock. His rage left him on a gasping breath, seeping out of his pores and sinking into the floor.
“Please,” Will began, but Hannibal silenced him with two deft fingers slipping past his lips and splitting along either side of his tongue, running across the blunted edges of his teeth. Will suckled on them temptingly, watching the vampire’s pupils contract at the action.
“What would you do, sweet boy, for me?” Hannibal’s tongue rubbed against the sharp tip of one of his fangs, a single pinprick of blood bubbling to the surface as Will watched. He saw Hannibal’s gaze drift over his shoulder, most likely to the public scene stage; the place they’d first met. It was painfully obvious then what Hannibal wanted. He wanted to see Will reduced to mindless rapture, a creature of nothing but need.
Distantly, alarm bells sounded, behind a thick wall of cotton. But he didn’t care. Like that, the phantom noise dissolved into the din. If it convinced Hannibal to end this madness and to feed on him again in the process, Will would do practically anything.
His first attempt to get off the man was held back by his quiet strength; even Hannibal hadn’t expected it to be so simple. It clicked that Will was trying to stand and he let go.
“Would you like a safe word, this time?” Hannibal mewed.
Adrenaline shot through him in the form of a curdling rage. He stared fixedly at Hannibal, thoughts chewing away over his motivations. He tested a theory. “Would you like me to have a safe word?”
The faintest twist of emotion writhed to the surface of Hannibal’s placid face. He spoke his answer honestly: “No.”
So it was simple then, what Hannibal wanted from him. Will should have been relieved at that - the knowledge that this could be a straightforward transactional relationship. He nodded curtly, glancing around their shared space. He found the fullest drink, reached for it and knocked it back.
“Let’s go then.”
---
Whenever someone took the stage, the crowd shifted and centered around it, a buzzing anticipation that incubated in the first few to notice and spiraled out to the rest of the group. Tonight was no different.
“No restraints?” Will asked, eyeing the simple bar stool that Hannibal offered him at the front of the stage.
“I anticipate your cooperation.”
Will huffed. “Does that take away from it, for you?” His own form of sadism was too inwardly directed, too wrapped up in a masochistic self-destruction, to understand what spurred someone like Hannibal on. The realization that he didn’t get it sat like a heavy bit of grease in the pit of his stomach. It felt a bit like failure.
Hannibal didn’t answer. Will took a seat.
The crowd quieted at that, watching the tender way Hannibal helped him out of his white t-shirt. His fingers didn’t trail against his skin like with other partners, where they revelled in knowing what was before them was about to be theirs. Hannibal already knew he had Will, the moment he’d pressed his lips against the dome of blood that had swelled upon his finger.
Hannibal disappeared from his view momentarily, leaving him to stare into the crowd. He recognized several vampires in the throng, but many of the patrons wore their emotions on their sleeve, too human to hide. They shared a morbid curiosity: despite Hannibal being known as the owner of the club, none of them had known him to take the stage before their previous encounter. Now they were back, an encore for a scene that guests had spoken reverently about for a week following.
He came around holding a single scalpel; Will’s brain hummed quietly. He felt his skin pull tight towards the edge of the blade, as if by a sort of magnetism. His chest was already littered with small scrapes and bites; his body remembered and sang for the sharp lick of the blade.
Hannibal smoothed the mess of curls away from his forehead and held his head firmly in the crook of his arm. Alarm tried to flash through Will, bright like lightning, but it died off just as quick. Outwardly, he let himself go limp and fall into the cradle of strong muscle. He puffed his slim chest out, anticipating where Hannibal would mark him. Quickly, he realized his mistake, but Hannibal’s grip was too strong on his skull, so that he didn’t even flinch when Will dug his nails menacingly through the flesh of his forearm trying to pry him off.
Hannibal made no ceremony about it, moving with a confident grace as he sliced Will’s forehead from edge to edge. The bite of the scalpel was barely noticeable at first, its blade so sharp his body lagged in its reaction to being split open. The first sticky pangs of sensation came when a wisp of air blew across his face, his nerves reacting to the change in temperature more than the pain. Then the blood came.
It sagged over his brows and dripped over the ridge and onto his cheek. A drop caught in Will’s lashes and he squinted it into a mess smeared around his eye. Hannibal let him go before the first lines of red reached his chin.
The silence grew sticky between them, honey-thick, knife-sharp and deadly. With so little movement, so little effort, Hannibal had ignited the beginning spark of something more thrilling than pure adrenaline. Something far more dangerous than any high he’d ever managed.
He suddenly craved the hollow-euphoria of a chemical high to help dampen the rushing, pounding feelings that whipped through him lightning-quick at the proximity of Hannibal’s hands, one of them still holding the scalpel, its gleaming brightness dulled slightly along the red-soaked edge.
Hannibal was on him then, a harsh hand in Will’s hair as he yanked his head back enough to expose the too-thin column of his throat. A thought blinked through his mind then, like an afterimage, and he knew he was seeing through Hannibal’s eyes: a clean, wide gash like a scarf of scarlet from one side of his pale throat to the other, deep enough that Will imagined he could see into his esophagus and down, down, down into the very bowels of Hell. Past blood and viscera and bone. He felt beautiful and he hated it.
He struggled, knowing it was useless, watching helplessly as Hannibal leaned forward and licked a warm stripe along his blood-stained cheek. He must look ghastly, covered in red with a wound that promised to scar if not seen to soon.
Will blinked heavily as Hannibal moved his head even further back, bending him so that he nearly fell from his seat, the blood that had tracked down his face now rolling back up in rivulets that traveled around his eyes, pooling in the socket below his lower lashes, trickled into his nose and nearly activated his gag reflex as it made its way down the back of his throat.
He felt covered, painted over like a canvas as Hannibal leaned in again and began at the far left of the line across his forehead, dragging his tongue through blood already starting to grow tacky and thick against Will’s skin, ending at the other end of the line before he pulled away, Will blinking away more blood to see Hannibal’s lips coated in him.
He’d never desired another person, had never felt the urge to press his lips to another’s and feel them yield beneath his teeth and tongue, but he had the clawing, aching need to taste himself directly from Hannibal’s mouth. Almost as though the man could read his thoughts, perhaps he could, Hannibal dragged his pointer finger through the blood beneath Will’s right eye and then wiped it along his mouth until Will’s lips parted, marking up his teeth and tongue with copper-red.
Then he let go.
His firm hold suddenly gone, Will flailed upon the barstool to keep his balance. His head whipped over to maintain eye contact. It felt vital, felt viscerally important to watch him prowl around the stage. His blood caught in his eyes and he wiped at it furiously to keep his attention where it needed to be. His hand slid in the wet, knocking against the wound which he could feel tingling, already trying to close.
Hannibal walked around him, regarding the mess of a boy. Considering, he flipped the blade of the scalpel and offered it to him, handle-first. Will looked at him, skeptical, but took it. He held it, his hand shaking from the rush he was unaccustomed to feeling.
“Your chest.” Hannibal spoke clearly, more to the audience than to Will himself. “Three lines. No less than two inches each.”
This wasn’t Will’s brand of masochism, and his gaze flicked from Hannibal to the blade and back again, considering how much he wanted what Hannibal withheld. He felt himself press his legs together to dull the throb when he considered how much he had felt, before, when Hannibal had fed on him. The memory steadied his grasp on the scalpel. He turned it to his chest and let the blade sink into his flesh like a hot knife to butter, then dragged it along the curve of a rib, just above his stomach. Immediately, the wound gaped slightly in the middle, revealing a thin layer of yellow fat before the blood blossomed and spilled forth from its maw.
“Not so deep.” Hannibal warned. “Again.”
Will did it again, choosing this time to press the blade lightly into the delicate muscle of his pectoral. It skidded off his bare skin, creating an uneven pebbling of red in its wake.
“Better. Again.” Hannibal said, a hint of greed underlying the curve of his lips about his words.
Underneath, in the slick of the trickle of blood from the second cut, Will slid the blade along again. Further this time, it ran from nipple over sternum. He kept the pressure light but steady, his breathing catching in his throat as he watched the even spill of blood from behind the scalpel. Where the first had been too deep, the second too unsteady, this time Will felt a stab of pride and looked up for Hannibal, a sudden irrational urge to share the feeling with him.
Hannibal licked his lips and gave a small nod, holding his hand out to take the blade back and placing it on a table to the side of the stage. He kept his lips straight, but Will thought he felt a reflection of his own satisfaction flash back at him. When he turned back to Will, the blood had seeped down his chest and begun to sink into the fabric of his jeans, leaving small, dark wet marks along his waistband.
“Undress.” Hannibal commanded, holding his hand up to pull Will off the stool and present him to the crowd. Will’s fingers felt numb; he fumbled with the close of his belt and the button of his pants. He grew increasingly aware of the eyes that were trained on him, not only from the crowd, but from his side as well.
It had been a long time - too long to remember precisely - since Will had gotten off from what he let other people do to him. Despite the slow, throbbing ache that spread from his cock and down his thighs, it surprised him to strip out of his boxers and see his cock semi-erect, hanging heavy and jutting slightly out between his legs. Somewhere, distantly, the thrill of having others see him this way made it jump slightly in the cool air.
He wanted to feel the man sink into him between his thighs as his fangs pierced skin, was nearly delirious with the thought for several seconds as he messily folded his pants as best he could and sat them to the side of the stage.
Hannibal gestured back to the stool and Will assumed he was meant to sit back down. He edged himself back onto the seat, thighs aching with tension. The vampire disappeared into the crowd for a time, everything felt like it was moving both far too quickly and molasses-slow at the same time, so Will lost track of how much time had passed, his brain only flickering back online when Hannibal returned, now with what appeared to be a medical kit in hand.
Will’s eyebrows climbed up his head and drew his spine straight with them, his entire body alight with anticipation and a simmering anxiety. Hannibal gestured to someone off to the side of the stage and, seconds later, a small table had been procured and sat in front of Will.
“I do not believe we will require stirrups for this,” he replied to a whispered question from the man who had brought the table, loudly enough for everyone gathered to hear. Will had already given his consent, he wouldn’t admit to his curiosity by giving it again. He looked on in silence as Hannibal spread the medical kit open, exposing the guts of the thing to the room. It was lined in little loops of leather that housed several long, vintage needles that, regardless of their obvious anachronistic appearance, seemed to be in perfect form.
His legs tried to close at the sight of them, an animal instinct to protect his most vulnerable parts from the sharp, gleaming metal.
Another image flashed then, this one just as fully formed as the first, another impression from the stoic vampire that stood before him. It was him as Saint Sebastian, pierced and somehow made all the lovelier for it, blood beading at each individual point where he was impaled. His body sagged beneath the weight of the pain even as he looked rapturously heavenward, eyes closed and spider-leg eyelashes stretching along bloodied cheeks.
He looked to Hannibal, truly looked. In response, he spread his legs further apart, hooking his ankles around the legs of the stool.
“Good, boy,” Hannibal praised him with a grin spreading his lips wide, exposing a flash of teeth. He picked up the first needle and approached. Will placed his hands behind his knees to help keep himself spread open. His thighs ached with the pressure, his hip groaning from the position.
Hannibal was precise in his movements, there was no hesitation as he took Will’s semi-hard cock in one hand and appraised it, as though he were envisioning his desired outcome and finding the perfect place to start. He began low along Will’s shaft, uncomfortably close to the delicate, exposed skin of his balls, sinking the needle into the left side and pushing it through to the right.
The needles were thicker and longer than what Will had been pierced with before. A flinch ran through him, pressing his thighs closed. Hannibal caught his leg with one hand just before Will jerked the end of the needle into his inner thigh. Oh.
Will’s hands stayed gripped behind the stool, his ass barely on the padded top of it as he pulled his thighs wider. Hannibal pinched the delicate skin: a second needle slid in, a fraction of an inch higher. He did it again and again and by the fifth needle, Will couldn’t control the shake that had seized his inner thighs. He tells himself it’s the uncomfortable splay he’s forced in, but he knew that Hannibal was also partly to blame.
By the end, Will wore twelve long piercings, from scrotum to just below his frenulum. The pain was sharp, and as he grew harder, his skin pulled tight. He could feel the smallest slide of the metal inside his skin; tried to stay as perfectly still as breathing and his uncomfortable arousal allowed him.
For the first time, he looked down at himself, saw himself impaled over and over again. A swell of pride peaked from over the horizon and he looked up to Hannibal, as if by surprise.
“You’re doing well,” he praised, and that felt good too. Will grit his teeth and swallowed down any flickering emotion. He didn’t know what to do with that, now.
Hannibal took a moment to show Will off to the crowd, and for the first time in minutes, Will was once again aware that he sat before a throng of onlookers. The piercing had been too intimate, the pain too focused, he’d lost track that all eyes were and continued to be on him. Knowing it now, he felt no shame, but a small urging to be somewhere else kindled in his mind. Somewhere with Hannibal.
Hannibal leaned forward, mouth slightly agape; Will closed his eyes, anticipating a bite that did not come. He felt the wet lathing of his tongue against his bloody cheek instead; it made his flush hot.
Then Hannibal lowered himself neatly to the ground, pulling up the legs of his finely tailored suit to kneel before Will and gaze upon his handiwork. Not every puncture bled, but with the size of the needle enough had pebbled up red. In a few places, the drop had grown too heavy under its own weight and started to trickle down the underside of his shaft onto his balls.
Hannibal started there, where the first needle had been inserted into the relatively looser skin of his scrotum. He gasped at the wet, cold touch of Hannibal’s tongue as he licked the bead of blood gently off the exit point of one needle. Will watched with the crowd, enraptured, as Hannibal bathed each wound in a wet kiss, alternating between soft sucks and indelicate licks that shifted the needles harshly against his hard cock.
When he got closer to the head of Will’s penis, he paused, looking once again with a sort of rapture at his work. His hand came up to massage the inside of Will’s thigh. Will let out a quiet moan from under his breath. Hannibal looked at him then, intent clear in his eyes. He lowered his mouth, and tongue first, licked the ladder of needles from base to tip, making each individual metal rung slip slightly under the tightness of his skin. Will groaned in earnest then, and fought the urge to writhe on the bar stool.
His thighs shook from the effort of keeping them open, every instinct in his body alight with distress and screaming at him to close them, to protect himself, to run. It was an uncomfortable contradiction to the detached indifference that took up the majority of space in his brain, coating everything like sticky tar, making it impossible to feel the enthusiasm he sometimes mimicked for the sake of others. But with Hannibal, his hindbrain had been engaged, a legitimate fight or flight response that no other vampire or near-death situation had ever managed to trigger.
“You taste exquisite,” Hannibal stood abruptly, leaning close and practically breathing the words against Will’s ear. His skin involuntarily pebbled with goose flesh at the chill that spilled over his ear and seemed to seep into his bones, down his spine. It rooted him to the spot.
He made another gesture off to the side and someone else approached, offering a thin strap of leather, the same chicory-root brown as the bitter coffee from his childhood in the Gulf, split at the tip into two vicious pointed tongues lined with three holes each. The handle was wrapped in an elaborate knotted weave of the same color, and Hannibal took it into his hand and tested the weight as Will watched on.
“A tawse. It has a rich history as a primary form of correction throughout the years. I value balance, so I believe twelve strikes, one for each needle, sounds fair, no?” Hannibal taunted, taking a step closer, far too intimate as they shared air between them for several long seconds before the man moved further back, still within striking distance, but with enough space to allow him room to work.
The first hit of the leather felt like nothing at all. And then, after the brief delay of pain, Will’s body immediately curled inwards, ice-water pushing through his veins and his entire body nearly seizing with the bright, sharp pain of the leather against his puckered skin, the needles shifting with the blow.
The second hit came immediately after, before he’d had time to collect himself, and he couldn’t stop the clench of his legs, desperate to close. His gasp of pain seemed to ring out in the silence of the room as the long needles managed to pierce his thighs. Pulling them apart again was just as painful, the needles sliding out of the skin and then immediately back in again as Hannibal brought the tawse down a third time.
“How many?” Hannibal demanded, allowing Will a slight reprieve.
“Three,” he breathed out.
“How many more?”
Will closed his eyes before answering, unwilling to watch the swift flick of the leather through the air. “Nine.”
Swat.
“Eight,” he shuddered. The tawse glanced off the heads of the needles, dislodging one of the metal spikes and sending it clattering to the stage floor. A sharp hiss came from somewhere in the crowd.
He moved to his thighs soon after, slapping the tongue of the leather where the needleheads had pricked his skin, drawing up beads of red. The leather smeared the blood over his inner thigh, though Will didn’t notice; he kept his eyes closed tight, trembling with the effort to keep his legs open.
“Four more.” Hannibal announced it to the crowd, who silently counted along with Will.
Will waited, his face and thighs tense, but the blow never came. Cautiously, he peeked one eye open, searching for Hannibal on the stage. Immediately, he felt the whoosh of air that the leather pushed over him, then the sharp smack of the whip vibrated out from between his legs, straight up his cock and coursed through the rest of his body. Hannibal had been standing directly in front of him; the slap had come down fiercely over his erect cock, the sharp pain digging each of the remaining eleven needles into the underside of his prick and balls.
A weak, startled sob escaped from between his tense jaw. He gritted his teeth against the shooting pain that sparked in his groin, and gripped tight to the lip of the stool.
Hannibal rested the warm leather over the ladder of needles, stroking down his cock slowly, gently, before - with the slightest flick of his wrist - the tawse whipped through the air and back down where he was most sensitive. In a spiral motion, Hannibal let the leather come down a second, and then a final time, giving no warning between. The needles pierced into the meat of his inner thigh at several points and Will let out a surprised yelp. He pulled his legs back, but two of the long shafts had dug so far into his thigh, they refused to slide out. They tugged at his cock mercilessly, making Will whimper.
Hannibal immediately was down on his knees again, hands on either of Will’s thighs. He watched with deep concentration as he pulled both thighs back slowly, letting the needle finally slip out of the nearly hairless skin. Will gasped with mixed relief and pain.
His fingers trailed down the line of needle heads, every time knocking it just enough that Will flinched at every rung. When his finger fell upon the final head, he grasped it delicately and slid the needle out. Will hissed as his balls contracted, unused to the unpleasant slide of metal inside skin. Tipping his head back to stare at the darkness of the exposed ceiling, Will tried to steady his breathing as Hannibal tugged each needle out, one by one.
---
Will awoke in an unfamiliar place. He didn’t open his eyes at first, but there were silk sheets beneath his fingertips and his head was cradled on the softest pillow he’d ever encountered.
Not at home, then.
“I see you have returned to the realm of the waking,” Will forced his eyes to open, the lids heavy and tender, like a fresh bruise.
Hannibal was standing closer than Will had expected, his crisp white dress shirt still spotted with blood, the sleeves rolled perfectly angled up his forearms. Will hadn’t noticed the musculature that lay just beneath the vampire’s skin, the veins that crisscrossed darkly beneath, full of his own blood.
He squirmed a little against the sheets at that thought, hissing in pain when the motion squeezed his sore thighs together, the wounds faded but still aching. Blood remained smeared all over Will’s body, but his marks were gone, not even the pale silver scarring he’d come to associate with vampire bites left behind. His brow furrowed, comparing this detail against his mental library of unconfirmed vampire lore.
“Come here,” Will heard himself say before he’d even realized his lips were forming sounds, the words pushed out and unable to be clawed back in. He wasn’t even sure he meant them. Wasn’t sure if he wanted the vampire’s fangs back in his throat or if he wanted to be as far away as fucking possible. He was just so tired. A bone-deep exhaustion that weighed his body down like it was gold-encrusted. He felt himself sink deeper into the mattress and he didn’t fight it, like most things in his life, he simply let it happen.
He noted vaguely that Hannibal smirked, his fangs flashing as his lips parted, too wide and animalistic to be human. He was surprised when the man did move closer, sitting at the edge of the bed and wrapping one cold, wide palm against the base of Will’s neck, applying enough pressure to be uncomfortable, to cause Will’s lungs to ache and his body to shake with a shudder that rattled down his spine.
It was too much too fast, his brain still lost in a hazy fog of blood loss and their previous scene. Hannibal’s other hand slid beneath the cold silk of the blanket that draped across Will’s lower half, pulling it down enough to expose the slender, delicate bones of his hips. His hand curled around Will’s cock and his entire body arched off the bed at the slow strokes, Hannibal taking his distraction as an opportunity to lean close and sink his fangs into the thin, fragile skin of his shoulder.
Hannibal’s strokes felt raw and unsympathetic, too much and not enough, his body spiraling closer to a release he wasn’t even sure he wanted. It took several minutes of suspended silence and pain for Will to realize Hannibal’s motions were matching the slow, steady pulls of Will’s blood into his mouth and he released a shattered moan onto the air.
It didn’t take long after that for Hannibal to mount him, sprawling his body across Will’s at several points as though Will would ever try to fight him, would ever deny his bite. The vampire switched back to his neck then, piercing directly into the throbbing vein that ran along the exposed column of Will’s throat and sucked greedily, pulling long gulping mouthfuls of blood from his exhausted body while never spilling a drop.
He wasn’t sure how much Hannibal had drank before. The room doubled; Will squinted his eyes trying without success to bring the room back into focus. In the dim light, he could barely see past the heavy walnut of the four poster bed anyway, and the way the world darkened around the edges with every pull at his neck made it impossible for him to take in his surroundings. The room looked more ornate than anywhere he’d stayed before, but the small blink of curiosity about where he’d been taken went out as his attention was pulled back to Hannibal’s dry palm rubbing over his cock.
Soon Will was panting underneath Hannibal, his hips making small thrusting movements in time with the movement of his hand. A whimpering noise escaped from his lips, his thighs flexing hard and beginning to quake. His lower belly sunk into a hollow between his hips, as he approached the precipice of orgasm.
Hannibal’s hand abruptly stopped, whipping off of Will’s cock and grabbing at his matted curls to pull his head back further still. Will’s eyes shot open in surprise, his hips still thrusting into the air hopelessly.
Sharp teeth slid out from his neck, pulling from him a soft cry. The blood bubbled and then oozed from the punctures; Will felt an instinctive need to draw his hand up to the wound and hold what was left inside. Hannibal shifted off of him, letting his body float uncomfortably with no one to ground him. He let out a dissatisfied growl.
“Sadist,” he said, half-jokingly before bringing his own hand to his cock, intent on finishing off now that he’d come so close. Hannibal slapped his hand away; he looked up, shocked. “Really?”
“You belong to me.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Try it.”
Will brought his hand down again. This time Hannibal lunged at him, smashing his teeth into the blood-slicked curve of his neck. The pain of the attack felt intrusive. Will let out a surprised howl, expecting the distinct pull of him feeding. Hannibal let his jaw relax though, pulling off of Will, his lips painted red.
“Why’d you stop?”
“You’ve had enough.”
“Don’t you mean you’ve had enough?”
“No.”
Will huffed and shimmied awkwardly up onto his elbows. The world spun; he shut his eyes hard against the nausea that licked in the back of his throat.
“Who’re you to say when it’s enough?” He spoke his words quietly into his hand that drew up and rubbed against the subtle stubble along his jaw.
“One of us should.” Hannibal stood up then, pulling the sleeves of his dress shirt down his arms and rebuttoning it at the wrists. He took a towel from the bedside table, wiping the wetness from off of his shining lips.
Satiated, Hannibal’s skin took on an olive glow. He seemed to loom over Will in a way that he didn’t before, too much power compacted into his lean body. Will wanted to get up, to tell him off, to get himself off or just go home, but the room spun dangerously when he made a move to sit up. He found himself flat on his back again, staring up at the delicate swirls of plaster that made a canvas from the ceiling. He heard Hannibal’s soft padded footsteps exit to the right; he didn’t bother to turn his head and inquire where he was going.
He should get up, he told himself. He should leave, wherever he was. He shouldn’t be here. But when Hannibal returned, what could have been a quarter of an hour later, Will was in the same position he’d left him, asleep and breathing light, blood from his shoulder and neck staining the silk.
---
He was alone when he awoke a second time. His vision swam into focus, the room at first a swirl of dark wood and bruising heavy color, before he blinked the sleep from his eyes and looked around properly for the first time since arriving.
The space was not small, but the size of the furniture made it feel compact. The bed stretched out forever, the furniture deliberately elaborate; made to show off its wealth. Thick velvet curtains blocked out all but a strip of light from outside, which streamed in and cut through the plush carpet.
His hand moved groggily up to his shoulder, his body remembering before his thoughts fell into place. Blood flaked off under his touch; he peeled himself off the ruined sheets and tried to move delicately to sit up in the middle of the massive mattress before the throbbing in his head had him back lying supine. Defeated, he stared up at the same ceiling he’d drifted into unconsciousness beneath the night before, noting, now, the areas where the plaster was peeling, where the corners of the room seemed grey with disuse. Not a place Hannibal used commonly, then. And not a room that others in the club would be allowed entry to.
Will didn’t have to wait long before he heard the soft sound of the door opening, though he didn’t hear it close again. He snapped his eyes closed petulantly at the sound, and kept them closed even as he listened to Hannibal as he moved around the room, his steps clearly familiar in the space.
His eyes remained closed even as a cold hand wrapped around his ankle and squeezed until he felt the delicate bones underneath shift and he groaned in discomfort, his eyes forced open by the pain.
“I will take you home, Will. I brought you breakfast, as you will need to replenish yourself after the amount of blood I took last night. Once you are finished, we will leave.” Hannibal’s words left no room for argument and they rankled something deeply seated inside of Will, shaking loose some old, nearly forgotten reactions.
“You don’t know where I live. I can manage just fine on my own.” He looked across the room at the large, ornate dresser and saw a gilded tray sat on top of the dark wood, orange juice and toast and all sorts of other breakfast foods elegantly placed atop it.
“I believe, you’ll find, that I do know where you live. And that I do not have an inexhaustible patience. Eat. I have also taken the liberty of washing your clothes for you and I replaced those that could not be salvaged.” Hannibal gestured to a chair a few feet from the bed where a pile of clothes sat neatly, several of the articles not things that Will recognized. He hadn’t even noticed his clothes were missing, but something about the new clothes, things that didn’t belong to him, filled him with what he could only describe as rage. Or, at least, the beginning stirrings of it.
The level of invasiveness felt obscene, the knowledge that Hannibal knew where he lived, the idea that he would be beholden to this man in some way because of his charity sat like a heavy stone in Will’s chest, pushing him to his feet.
“Have you been fucking following me, Hannibal? Do you realize how creepy and fucked up that is? You don’t own me. I’m not your kept boy and I don’t want your handouts. You can keep the clothes, and the food, I’ll make due.”
He didn’t even make it halfway off the bed before he was jerked up by his elbow and thrown back onto the mattress. The vampire hovered over him as though the movement had taken no effort at all. It sent a thrill of something down Will’s spine that he pushed away, unwilling to allow this man any additional entry to his life. He already felt the violation like a thick lump clogging his throat.
“You will eat. And we will go to your home. I have other things to attend to besides your fragile ego and your whims, Will.” Will wondered, with a martyrous level of curiosity, whether he could push the vampire far enough to kill him. Considered how hard, exactly, he could press until Hannibal broke and drained him dry. He felt something like desire at that, a flash of images careening across his eyelids as he pressed them closed again, imagining the scarlet stain of his blood against the already ruined sheets, his limbs grown cold and stiff with rigor mortis, belly distended, skin mottled and pale, devoid of life, of color. Like alabaster yet to be crafted into something other. Something more.
He shook himself free of the cobwebs in his mind as Hannibal’s hand wrapped around his throat as though it belonged there, setting Will’s teeth on edge at the show of ownership.
Eventually, Will ate, but only because he was hungry, he told himself. He ignored Hannibal as he dressed in clothes that weren’t his, pulling them on over his bloodied, bruised skin. Just as he was being guided from the room, Hannibal looming at his back, Will caught a glimpse of himself in the oblong, freestanding mirror that sat in the far corner of the room, the puncture marks clear and vivid against the skin of his neck.
“Why didn’t you heal those?”
Hannibal’s fingers came up to trace the angry bumps. “Because you would have wanted it this way.”
“You don’t get to decide what the fuck I want!” Will spat, spinning around. “I can’t hide these! What am I supposed to do at school? At work?”
Hannibal regarded him coolly. His hand dropped and he began maneuvering the two of them out of the room. They were on the third floor of the club, Will realized, somewhere he had never explored before. The halls were just as dark, but the doors spaced further apart, the promise of equally spacious rooms behind them.
“Can you do it now?” Will asked, allowing himself to be pushed along the hall despite his mild curiosity about what lay behind each door they passed. “If you do it - lick them, or whatever - will it heal?”
“You’re ashamed of what you crave so openly in my company?”
Will huffed. “I’m put off by the possibility of having to explain myself to others. You’re not real.” He waved his hands vaguely, brushing the idea away.
“Then you’ll find a creative story to share with them.” Hannibal seemed unbothered by the cold glare Will shot him.
They left the club in silence. Before stepping out, Hannibal donned a pair of sunglasses and a ridiculous trapper hat before slipping on a fine wool coat. Will tugged on his bomber jacket to brace himself from the wind.
The sky was clear, the cold having a bright, biting quality that cut through the thin fabric of his jacket immediately. But he noticed no discomfort; he was too caught up watching Hannibal move out of the shadow and into the brightly lit morning.
“I’m parked around the corner,” Hannibal said, intentionally misinterpreting Will’s unwillingness to move.
“So it’s just a myth then - oh.” He stopped himself, catching the way Hannibal’s skin had tanned several shades darker in a matter of moments.
“Around the corner,” Hannibal repeated, flipping the collar of his coat up to cover his wrinkling neck.
The two men walked at a quick pace to a black Bently, its windows tinted illegally dark. So enamoured with watching the way Hannibal seemed to age before him, Will missed the curb and stumbled into the car, setting off its alarms. Hannibal silenced them and made a disgruntled tsking noise at Will before getting in the driver’s seat. Will, unwilling to lose sight of Hannibal, scrambled in beside him.
They’d been outside for no more than two minutes, but Hannibal looked like he’d sunned in Ibiza for the better half of the year - his skin had taken on a dark, worn leathery appearance, and it sagged along his jowls.
Hannibal, unbothered by the dramatic aging, pressed the ignition and shifted the car into gear. The car slid out into the light morning traffic without so much as a hint of movement inside the cabin.
Will stared, fascinated. It happened slowly, slow enough that he might have missed the transition as they drove, if he weren’t focusing entirely on the man beside him, his entire body shifted towards his own. Aging backwards, his skin losing the thick leathery quality, turned from burnt ochre to a smooth olive once more. The age marks that sprayed over his cheeks faded and disappeared. The skin regained its tautness, until it pulled over the severe lines of his face.
When Hannibal pulled up to Will’s building, he looked exactly as he had when they’d left the club.
It had never unsettled him before now, the knowledge that vampires, while they shared nearly all of the same characteristics as humans, were not entirely human. They were something so totally other that it caused Will to pause with his hand on the handle, realizing that some deeply rooted, animal instinct within him had compelled him to reach for it even before he’d been conscious of the action.
It sat uncomfortably inside of him, the thought that his body was hardwired to respond so viscerally. It only made him want to throw himself onto the sword of Hannibal’s good favor even more readily, made him want to revisit some of his past experiences and see if he could recreate them, see how far he could push some of the vampires he’d come to know before they broke, before they broke him.
“It’s considered polite to thank someone for seeing so thoroughly to one's needs, Will.” Hannibal spoke, voice crackling like static through the silence.
“Good fucking luck,” Will seethed, again reminded of the ghost of anger that still threatened to boil over in his chest, his body propelled forward and out of the door before Hannibal ever had a chance to reply.