Chapter Text
When the truth of Nicholas Boyle is revealed to him in full, Will's mind goes to the wrong thing.
He thinks so, anyway.
(You struggle to admit it to yourself, even privately - your inconstant desire to have a child, and here one is that needs you.)
"We are her fathers now," Hannibal Lecter says, unaware, sternly protective of Abigail Hobbs, wholesome for that. "We have to serve her better than Garret Jacob Hobbs."
(Chasing that - the insistence that you don't know if you should. Be a parent - you're built for it, so why wouldn't you want to? But really, the fact that you aren't calling anyone right now, or condemning this, is exactly why you shouldn’t.)
These thoughts are not the kind Hannibal Lecter would likely suppose of Will. It's a rather innocent compared to the usual ones they talk about. Inappropriate in the moment. Maybe equally uncomfortable - tangentially related by the way they make Will's teeth grit. Pacing the length of his office, talking of parenthood and hiding the truth, crowding Will’s space like he means to herd him into a corner, maybe Hannibal Lecter is having a similar crisis of instinct.
Will considers calling Hannibal on it, but Will doesn't have the nerve to confess to his own instinctual wrongdoings. He shouldn't be thinking of instincts at all while he's hearing about evidence tampering, and conspiracy. He should be thinking of Jack Crawford now, or Nick Boyle's family who have lost two children of their own. There are laws and ethics, and he has allegedly sworn to them at multiple points in his career.
Instead, he lets it slide - no need for persuasion or crowding or lawyers. He was never going to choose himself over Abigail's life.
Will brings his hands up to his burning eyes and presses into them when Hannibal puts a hand to his shoulder and tells him this is the right thing to do. He bites the inside of a cheek until he imagines it severing - a great gash that he can tongue at, wet and bloody and disguising his want. He chews at it. It tastes of his insides, and the bright bloom of fresh pain, very unlike the dull, thrumming of a growing headache.
"In time," Hannibal says, feeling nothing of Will's jaw working from the bony round of clavicle and acromion, or unbothered by it if he does, "this will be the only story any of us cares to tell."
---
It goes about the way Will expects it to go.
The "it" that goes has three sheets of patient history forms that Will has partially avoided filling out year over year - in for a flu shot, out before anyone can dig into a problem that needs more ignoring than it needs medicine. It follows him home from the first days of college to the laminated shine of his special agent’s badge swinging on his pocket, imbued and heavy with purpose, and him still painfully afraid. It grows roots in Minnesota and clinging branches in Delaware, Virginia, and Maryland and will not be shaken off. It is the secret certainty of something being wrong inside of him, and all the smart people around him not being able to see it, so Will must handle disinterring the feeling alone.
There’s nothing to suggest it would go differently - all thirty some-odd years of it.
They ask the wrong thing every time.
“Everything working like it’s supposed to? Any recent changes in your cycle? New people in your life?” asks the physician, as though having a heat is the lynchpin of all good health, staring into the wall mounted computer.
Will wonders if that makes it easier to ask things like that - to look into the fine pixels of a screen, irritably tap at the top of the mouse with no pressure, ready to check off boxes and only held up by the necessity of the patient needing to answer. He figures he will be one of twenty or so people that will be seen today, in a progression of five days, in a progression of four weeks in a month. Four hundred people with little boxes, and anecdotes that aren’t relevant to the questions, who call the physician their doctor, like they’re not shared with four hundred others, and some formula of many more divided up amongst the remaining eleven months in the year.
Will can hardly manage to deliberately sink into four people in a month. He doesn’t fault the physician for neglecting to even try. It doesn’t stop him from wanting to ask if they mean if Will has recently been struck with seizures, or if they want details that feed into the weird voyeurism surrounding his dynamic, as if someone is just mauling his body to the point of causing them and this is all to be expected. Normal symptoms of socially expected fucking that he’s supposed to want, shown as charming inconveniences in television commercials, and punch lines to jokes in shows. Omegas , someone inevitably sighs with a wink to the camera.
“Just the headaches,” Will says, like his appointment notes should say. “And the nightmares. Not the usual kind, or I wouldn’t be here. Nothing different amongst the usual bullshit.”
He leaves out the fugue states and the sweating for expediency.
(If you want someone to tell you you’re crazy, you’ll go back to Hannibal Lecter, who you desperately want to think otherwise because you have started to hold him above all the rest, and you need to keep yourself together so he will do the same in some imagined future. You’ll go back to Donald Sutcliffe, dead as he may be, and Frederick Chilton, regrettably alive, and Alana Bloom who has the good grace to never imply as much, but says it straightforward and respectably, where all the others try to lead you into saying it yourself. Woman to woman, you want to sneer, even though she’s never treated your secondary gender like anything other than a letter on top of a form.)
He leaves out irritability as well, a favorite subject of those normal symptoms.
The physician shakes their head. “The...usual bullshit, as you say, is responsible for a lot of these kinds of things,” they say delicately, like it should be obvious, but good doctors don’t raise their voices to people like Will.
“I haven’t met someone,” he says so that there’s no misunderstanding.
There will be if he says anything about stress at work. Or joining the Behavioral Sciences Unit. More so with Garret Jacob Hobbs, Abigail, poorly killing someone, saving someone’s life, but only by merit of a doctor being readily available at the exact moment that it happens because Will would have done that poorly too, and the doctor fits the bill that people like physicians with spreadsheets to fill and succinct answers like to be able to write down to explain everything. Nineteen more people to get through today, and seventy-nive by the end of the week, and Occam’s razor wants something that fits the square needing to be filled in.
But it’s not that. It sounds like it ought to be but it’s not, it’s not, he knows it’s not.
(Maybe in other circumstances, if you allowed it. You can imagine that sometimes, the way you can imagine carrying a child in your body.)
The physician stares over their glasses once, shrugs, and sighs, tapping their way through the screen selection.
“Sounds like stress, or anxiety," they say, "very common for your age. The best thing you can do is find ways to reduce it, but I’d recommend a visit to a dynamic specialist, even so. Better to rule that out than a bunch of unnecessary tests looking for something that’s likely just symptoms of being anxious.”
“Sounds like another unnecessary test to me,” Will replies, fingers curled around the lip of the examination table he sits at the edge of, feeling like a child despite being in his thirties. The paper crinkles against the pressure of his nails. “I’ve always been anxious, so that’s hardly a developing feature.”
“I don’t know how something worse is preferable, but we’ll do what you want, Mr. Graham,” the physician says in that patient tone again. Will feels smaller hearing it, and grinds his nails down, pictures them whiten like he bleached them. “Have you considered therapy to help?” they ask, turning in their chair, stethoscope swinging from around their neck, the chestpiece a pendulum. “I can make a referral if you’d like to talk to someone in the network.”
Will laughs.
It’s the only thing anyone ever wants to suggest to him these days. Technically, in a small way, he already took the advice, and he’s not better. That’s why he’s here, burning time off that no one is excited for him to take. He’s worse than ever, and Will thinks that must be part of the something wrong with him, not something wrong with who serves it to him.
He accepts a prescription for a higher strength ibuprofen. (“I’m seeing a therapist, but not someone new,” you say like it pains you, but the physician perks up at that. Click goes their mouse.) It feels like a concession instead of medical care, but the chalky white pressed tablets have utility where every other suggestion does not. It’s good to have an alternative to the aspirin he supposes. Maybe between the two it will thin his blood enough that his body can never muster enough force to do much of anything other than quickly bleed out, and he won’t have to ever have this conversation again.
The receptionist offers to call whoever he sees normally for his sexual health to schedule a follow-up. Her tone is saccharine. She smells of powder and florals, as imagined by an incomprehensible list of terpenes and salicylates a chemist has dreamed up for perfume, not a trace of herself on her. An inexpensive perfume that she likes, and speaks to nothing other than preference. An orchid, the bottle would say, like it smells anything like that.
Maybe a type of scented dynamic blocker, given the strength.
Statistically speaking, more likely a Beta with a weak nose and bad taste.
Will, smelling of calone and eugenol, an inexpensive cologne that speaks to convenience instead of preference in that it masks the acids and ammonia of sweat that can punch through suppressants given the opportunity of distress, figures she doesn’t understand that her well meaning offer isn’t very kind at all.
---
Will has always had nightmares. His father does too on the occasion that he is at home at night, and sober enough to dream at all, so Will never thinks differently of them the same way he doesn’t think differently of a visit to a primary physician. Unavoidable. Tradition, maybe, the way the trip to the doctor's office is. They follow him around like something with motive, and agenda.
The content remains the same. He is in dark places. He is not himself. He is stuck between holding his breath and struggling to find more. He is surrounded by people he looks at during the day he relentlessly can’t stop understanding, and is robbed of the luxury of escaping them even in dreams. He is surrounded by monsters he must love. He is a monster himself.
Will comes to expect all of these things when he shuts his eyes, and wordlessly shrugs off suggestions of meditating, deep breathing, finding a date.
(The latter of these isn’t the first, but often the most cited after you reach your majority. “You’d be more settled with a mate,” the head officer for the homicide department tells you between shuffling papers. “You do good work, Graham, but sometimes I reckon this work is ruinin’ you for havin’ a family,” and you just wordlessly blink and ask him if he needs anything else. You’re more afraid of what having a family looks like than wallowing in the trauma of the poor and the desperate. At least you choose to go out and do that, instead of letting it happen to you.)
Garret Jacob Hobbs takes a seat in the living room, at home in Will's armchair. He turns papers on the side table over and over like he’s interested in them - Jack Crawford’s musings on Abigail Hobbs as an accessory to murder. The hole in the drywall and brick behind him is a mouth, breathing in cold air.
(Watching Hobbs try to crease pages with necrotic fingers, you suppose there are plenty of people who go out and do the same with families, whether they should or not. They choose that too.)
Will blinks from his work table, flexing fingers, turning to the chair and back to the trappings of his flies. The nightmares are old, but this part is new to him - the persistence while he’s awake.
“You won’t like that,” Will says, a respectable ten feet away and delicately cutting the rachis of a feather. The shadow of Hobbs warps in the sheen of his magnifying glass. Will glares at the grain of the table top, and he does not turn his head.
For several weeks now, Hobbs stares out from the corner of the kitchen cabinets, and the back seat of cars, and behind the stand of beech trees that the whitetail deer like to visit in the evenings when the edges of them grow dark. He sits at the edge of Will’s bed. He fogs the glass of the mirrors, running blue fingers around his mouth, the way someone thinking does, like he should shave his face, or that a bill is paid late and ends aren’t meeting.
Will never talks for more than a few scant seconds to him in life, but the impression of him in death is complete, constant, and fallibly human. It presses on the sides of his head until it hurts. It pushes at his ribs until his pulse is weak and rapid, and he wants to cling to something to stay upright. It too has motive.
The papers rustle again, sounding like leaves. Will still keeps his eyes studiously downward.
Maybe Hobbs will like Abigail’s forensic profile. Perhaps he’ll be proud of the accomplishments of his daughter, the serious bent of a murderer overtaking her perceived vulnerability. An underaged victim, an omega child under the unnatural need of a father to keep her as something that belongs to him at the very moment she can escape to something new. They love to talk about it, the high school teachers, career guides, college admissions. They love to talk about soft disciplines suited to your dynamic and once-in-a-lifetime experiences you don’t get anymore once you leave, and how you’ll meet new people, and above all else being careful with those same new people because it’s your own fault if you ignore instinct and expectation.
Hobbs rubs the sides of his mouth. A cut on Will’s hand stings when he pinches the shortened flicker quill to wrap with fine horsehair, black and tawny white, drawing his own mouth tight. He keeps his eyes down so that he misses the reflection of the magnifying glass, sucking at the split skin with a gnawing mouth. No one recognizes Hobbs as a threat anymore, and so like many things, Will guesses he must simply accept him in his house like the hole in the chimney, a ghost that is hungry but satisfied by nothing.
---
Will sees two doctors in a week, one day after each other. They are both confident he is projecting rather than seriously physically ill, though only one thinks it is because he is an omega.
Or at least the other has the good manners to not say it out loud.
To his understanding, Jack Crawford very nearly refuses to assign Will’s evaluation after their meeting to Hannibal Lecter for related reasons. It is small comfort that his refusal is staunch not because he thinks Will shouldn’t spend time with an alpha in a position of power over his work outcomes ( as though you are so cheap that you trade your body the way you trade your mind - a problem, but separate ). It is because Jack isn’t confident that this new-to-him Doctor Lecter will be able to see past Will’s dynamic and approve him to work as a consultant in the field, especially after as traumatic an event as the Hobbs house.
Neither reason is flattering, and neither reason fills Will with much confidence. He doesn’t resent alphas for instinct, but he does resent them for not seeing past it, and the possibility that Doctor Lecter might not allow him this thing he is so good at is infuriating. This isn’t exclusive to him and his kin - he resents any person forming wrong or stereotypical opinions of him just as much, and he’s never had the right words to explain, or been the right dynamic to justify it if they turned out they were right.
Will's a candidate for losing his rights, if his cards are bad in a draw. Doctor Lecter holds all the best ones without even trying.
Alana does his best to assuage this fear.
“He was my mentor,” she says at first, like that should be sufficient. My inherent goodness and intentional obliviousness to the negatives of dynamics in careers guarantees my professional connections for a minimum of five years, Will thinks unkindly, and taps his feet on the floor.
Alana continues, now likely intentionally ignoring Will who knows his face is doing something ungracious. “He’s pretty untraditional,” she says, throwing a spill of dark hair over her shoulder, carefully smooth. “I can’t picture him suggesting it being inappropriate for a specific dynamic to be working as a profiler,” she tries to assure both Jack and Will.
“He thinks that the typical emotional sensitivity of omegas offers deeper perspectives in most instances. Wrote a few papers about it...thought they’re the superior support staff - more right answers than wrong. You've met him,” she adds. "You've seen how he observes."
“Good to hear that Doctor Lecter thinks I’m sensitive, besides a bad shot,” Will says acerbically, turning a pen on his desktop, and tries to push away the impression of being talked over.
“Aren’t you?” Alana replies, and Will has no good answer to that, so he hides his hands instead.
It seems stupid to argue otherwise, given the circumstances.
Alana is right, of course, in regards to Hannibal. Doctor Lecter, as Will insists on calling him aloud, and is embarrassed to think of him otherwise in his head.
(She's right about this too - that you are unstable. Betas have weak instincts save for survival, and Alana Bloom intends to survive.)
Doctor Hannibal Lecter is nothing if not courteous and reasonable, from first introduction to the Hobbs residence to when Will finally makes it to the office, if a bit like an early naturalist in his aloofness, observing Will from a distance - wide enough to be read as unusual instead of respectable. The good doctor would be at home with field sketches between his palazzos and duomos, feral looking men and women that drift into the office peering out from between the pages in his light fingered graphite drawings. However, his posture is open and casual, happy at his desk and unbothered by another animal in his territory, even less so by Will’s dynamic. If he has any thoughts on that, before or after Hobbs' death, he doesn’t care to share them over the course of several opportunities in the weeks that follow.
(But you suspect, twice, maybe thrice. You suspect when the amber in his eyes is claret rather than the warm brown you’ve become familiar with, and there’s no cologne that hides that, inexpensive or otherwise. Once, you spot it in the back of the ambulance, that particular brand of pride that comes from competency, and the satisfaction of doing it better than the person just before. One hand on a hemostat, the other working a needle with practiced experience. Devon Sylvestri should have watched. He could have used the practical lab experience, or so Hannibal says when you both leave with a vigor reserved for athletes at the finish line, and manic highs. Twice, when he smells you with a lurid long inhale that you can feel as though it unsettled the fibers of your shirt and your hair, and you very nearly name him intrusive and obvious, which would be a disappointment to both of you.)
(Thrice, well, you don’t know if you saw that one. Your glasses were a haze of red spots already, and what is it other than the symmetry of nature for them to align like coins for the ferryman over Hannibal’s face, staring up at him with both hands clasped around Abigail Hobbs' neck like he’s halfway undecided between saving and choking her. You almost yell at him to stop, as though he’s come to crush a clutch of eggs to make room for another, but even you can assign blame to your biology for that one.)
Will has always had a good intuition - he leans into it, and reasons that there’s nothing to worry about on this front after a few repeat visits. Hannibal keeps a wide berth between them, and hides his occasional flared nose, scenting out of habit but never with comment. Hannibal Lecter trusts his opinions, and lets go of conversations Will would rather not have. Hannibal pushes instead on spots Will hasn’t thought to push himself, the true benefit of someone who thinks analytically like Will, but isn’t Will.
Will need only worry about himself.
It’s more than enough to worry about for anyone.
---
The waiting room is quiet, and just as the check-ups go, this night is no different from any other either. The wreckage of old frigates and their crew lie foaming in waves of paint over the chairs, and Will is pulled from underneath them and the weight of his thoughts by the click of the knob turning.
“Good evening, Will,” Hannibal says, opening the office door with the same speed and oblique lean into the frame as always.
He is necessary to the door, like Will would find it locked or missing if he tried the handle without Hannibal on the other side. He is a part of it, and when unfurled, another door himself. Hannibal explains it as a ritual of his the one time Will remarks on it in the earlier days of their acquaintance, a mental preparation for him to allow people in as much as a routine for patients.
Will thinks of keys, and Hannibal’s hands gripping at the stop moulding. “You open the door, but shut another just behind it,” he says.
Hannibal smiles when he says it, like Will’s’ done something charming.
Tonight, Will steps into the cool semi-dark of the room without comment, the mezzanine casting shadows. There is no good way to small talk his way through the commute today, no murders in need of his imminent gaze. It is a long drive from Quantico, and while it is lonely, he is not alone with the moldering corpse of Hobbs with him.
Mentioning that does nothing for the argument that he isn't crazy, or projecting, and so he doesn't.
“How many patients do you see?” Will asks, eyes landing on the desk, and the massive dossier atop it. It is featureless, save a spine full of colored dots, and neatly written words in Hannibal’s spidery script. Will doesn't think he actually wants to know what they say, but Will wants to know most things, and he cuts his eyes away from it so as not to be understood so nakedly.
Hannibal takes his directness in stride, walking to the paired conversation chairs. Will thinks he catches him take a long, measured breath with his lip snarled to smell, but it goes quickly and is hidden by the time he turns again.
“Twenty-nine, thirty if we were to count you, but as we both well know, we are simply having conversations,” he says, hand tucked to his front to keep his suit from wrinkling as he sits. Next to the orderly march of fabric stripes, it looks like a bronze of veins and broad fingers, and that it would be heavy. “No less than once every other week, most weekly, and with a generous window left open for rescheduling between consults and cancellations.”
“I have a hard time imagining anyone cancelling on you,” Will says and sits opposite of him out of habit. It’s the patient’s chair after all - rude to take the other, no matter that he hates his back to the door, and rude to ask for it. Hannibal is an old school gentleman at heart, and would likely offer it with no comment at all if Will were to speak plainly and lean into traditional roles, but that’s the game, isn’t it? The not acknowledging roles save for professional titles, all else left for dead at the door as it slides open for him to enter and locks closed behind. As long as it's not useful to Will, it's not useful to Hannibal.
He stands again to wander instead. Like the door, and the question, Hannibal takes this in stride as well with a very small quirk of his mouth but says nothing.
“Indeed, I find them sleeping on their feet as a no show instead,” Hannibal recalls.
Will winces.
(“Everything working like it’s supposed to? Any recent changes in your cycle? New people in your life?”)
Normalcy. Project normalcy, he thinks.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” Will says, suddenly interested in a diagram of eyes, the artwork set gallery centered to the panelled wall between shelves. “I'm a bit of an absent minded professor on most days, more so with the case load.”
“On the contrary," Hannibal says warmly, "I’ve always found you to be exceedingly sharp when you are present, more knife than fork in how you consume information, but you were not yourself that night...and so there is nothing to forgive,” he nods, hands clasped and then spread like an offering.
That sits between them for a moment before Hannibal adds, “You would no longer need a date in my appointment book if I felt otherwise.”
“A rebuke,” Will says, and walks on between shelves.
“A rejoinder,” Hannibal corrects. "Tit-for-tat, reclaiming my time rather than wasting it further."
Hannibal's smile is in his voice after a moment's consideration, letting Will wander away.
"I don't think you'd enjoy my idea of a rebuke," he adds from the growing distance between them.
Will doesn't reply, choosing to focus on his exploration of the room. There’s the quality of a library to the office, characteristic of the dry slow decay of paper and wood, or that a hidden corner between rows is waiting - a comfort perhaps, to a man well accustomed to the old universities and churches of Europe. The odor of wood oil and citrus hangs near to the pointed arches, where instead everything is dustless and tidy and scrub room sterile near to the desk, save for Hannibal’s own particular display of public masking - an unnamed oil worn close to the ears that Will never quite catches the name of, and Will too shy of closeness to anyone to be near enough to smell better.
It’s not like the movies suggest in real life. He can’t scent a person from across the room, and few can. And how horrible if he could - every mindless alpha moron who has passed him thinking they smell of wood ash and ozone and things synonymous to masculinity when all they smell of are the same things as everyone else with a pheromone twist. Ammonia perhaps. Methyl compounds. Bacteria. Nobody actually smells like roses. Entropy hides under the skin, and stinks. It is a mercy that Hannibal's cologne is so mild next to its pervasiveness.
It smells...well, not nice. Essential, maybe. Primordial.
“You are quiet tonight, Will,” says Hannibal, from somewhere far away.
“Spent a lot of time talking yesterday without being heard,” Will replies, staring into the spine of a book. Lessons from the History of Medical Delusions. He pulls it with the top of a finger, a bright green cover peering out from between its neighbors. “Did it again today to a class of people who listened by merit of the pass-fail system saying they need to.”
Did it again on the drive, a piecemeal trade of words between his ghost and himself. Like Hannibal, Hobbs is a good listener.
“Do you often resent your dynamic, Will?” asks Hannibal, as though asking about the weather.
Will is too good to show it in his face, the anger of his little paper bag with a prescription for eight-hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, a clinic summary with a referral, and having nothing else to show for it.
“I resent other people’s perception of it at times,” he says. “Can’t get a word in edgewise if they’re a traditionalist. Sometimes can’t if they’re not. Do you really want to go down that road though? It’s almost as disappointing a question as asking about my mother.”
Hannibal rolls his shoulders to shake out his amusement - that’s how Will sees it anyway. Doctor Lecter doesn’t let patients get under his skin. Hannibal who speaks in confidence with Will doesn’t either, but gives inscrutable looks of unknown significance instead. He lets these kinds of jabs run off as water does from oily things, like he’s feathered or scaled.
(Evolutionarily, he could be either - you haven’t pulled his skin back to see which, and the longer you go, the more certain you are that you won’t be able to without permission. Like the door.)
“It shapes your reality as much as the empathy, albeit in a fairly obvious way,” Hannibal says. When Will frowns at this, Hannibal just stares, like he’s looking for a crack in the wall that he can crawl into and observe from. Will very nearly offers to make one for him - he’s accomplished his own quite handily in the brickwork of his house. What’s another century old building between friends and their hammers? This he also keeps from his face.
“But no, we don’t need to tonight,” Hannibal concedes. “Much like you, I can interpret the evidence without exhuming the shallow burial of it.”
(Like the chair.)
Will nods, swallowing down sharp pain behind his eyes, and the urge to argue about that, how deep he’d bury it if he really wanted to. His contrarianism for the day has surely used up Hannibal’s good will by now, and Will has so few friends with any of that.
“Any more lost time? Headaches?”
(Like inspecting the dynamics you are both delicately ignoring, because the pretense of your genderless comraderie doesn’t survive scrutiny or honesty, and that’s your fault for thinking too much about it.)
“No,” Will says with another wince, and wonders how many more doses of the ibuprofen he has left to take today, and when the aspirin should replace it. "Anyone else needing to be exhumed?" he deflects.
Hannibal smiles.
---
Shallow burials are the meat and potatoes of Will’s career. People with the sense to properly hide their bodies, truly hide them, will likely never cross Will’s desk as cold case or active investigation. They will quietly transform to soil, maybe at worse trouble some distant construction project and be misinterpreted as historically significant.
Most killing isn’t. Will describes it as the ugliest thing in the world to a doe eyed Abigail Hobbs, but like other ugly things, it is also common as shit. There are billions of people on the globe, millions of those in conflict that could end in ignominious violence, and not all of those for reasons beyond the mundane: spouses stepping out on each other, wealth, how that wealth gets distributed, drug habits, life insurance, property lines, food and shelter, water.
Water. He thinks about that a lot, that he doesn't see that come across his desk, and how fortunate that is because he doesn’t think he could pronounce guilt for something so fundamental, and yet there it is, something thousands agonize daily about from outside the scope of his experience.
(Children, you add, when you realize you have left that out too. It lies outside of your scope too, and this, more than an actual desire to bear them, is what drives you to consider them.)
When Will is called to a small farmhouse in York County, Pennsylvania, Will thinks he’s seen this before too, but can’t reason out why they’d want him to look at it at all.
“Mated and married couple, alpha in his early forties, omega in her early twenties," says Jack. "Alpha is in parts between about nine contractor bags and multiple chunks of sheetrock - it’ll take Price and Zeller the better part of the week to process all of it,” Jack adds between street lights, eyes cutting across intersections and taking in the shops of the small town. “Got called in by the county sheriff as it technically falls in our jurisdiction. The male is a judge in the federal middle district, and I think they’re spooked by the whole thing.”
“But it’s definitely the omega female,” Will says like it’s obvious, leaning on the passenger door, head pressed to the cool glass.
“Oh, no doubt,” says Jack with a snort. “She called a local dumping company to pick up the bags - said the trash company wouldn’t take construction waste, and had no truck to take it herself. All very matter of fact, and not at all bothered, just that they couldn’t come inside the house. You should hear the phone call, it’s absolutely surreal.”
Will rolls his head enough to feel the change in pressure. A vein throbs in his temple. “Sounds like you don’t need me. Doesn’t even sound like there’s any political motivation that justifies FBI resources beyond a courtesy review, much less mine.”
“Well that’s just the thing,” says Jack, frowning into a snowbank, “we do need you.”
Nathan and Sally Specht’s house is a classic foursquare, looking like a headstone in a wide field of winter wheat that’s gone yellow and clipped short between furrows of ice. The paint is tidy, as are the corbels beneath the eaves, white and lace delicate with sun rays and vines carved into them. It would look at home on a postcard, if an old one, best suited to tired farm workers and slant mouthed women and omegas with swollen hands instead of the urbane promise of a federal judge and his young wife. The gathering of police cars at the end of the drive and a commercial hauling truck look pasted on, black and blue uniforms milling about the early winter-cold garden, a solid twenty feet between them and the porch.
“A hostage situation?” Will asks when they pull close, and no sign of Sally Specht appears.
“If you consider a heat a hostage situation,” Jack says bluntly. “More like a barricade, though, to be fair.”
Will does, in a way, but keeps that to himself as the indignation of being called begins to become clear. He stares at the house, and its shuttered windows.
(You can’t seem to avoid this anywhere - that little ugly greek letter, the assumption you want to save someone’s middle children, or protect lost little girls who don’t understand faces anymore. Here’s another one for you, in a capacity so far outside your range beyond the idea that your dynamic can carry you through this.)
(The worst part is sometimes you do want those things.)
Will sighs, deflating in his seat until he can feel the upholstery through his coat. He rallies against the thought. He opens the car door. “So you need someone unaffected to...talk her into leaving the house? I know you’re a beta, Jack, but I think you’re kind of missing the essentials of nesting and dens if you think that's going to work,” he says dryly, slamming the door when he’s sure on his feet.
Jack shakes his head, following after. “She shot at one of the haulers - strolled right up to knock on the door and tell her the bags were too heavy. It’s what tipped them off something might not be right inside them.”
“Gun fire does tend to do that,” Will says, and has to shake away the image of Hobbs’ wife, thrown on the steps to bleed out.
The sheriff is only too happy to add details, and wipe his hands of it like it displeases him to have dipped them into any of the tar-sticky story.
“Not like her at all, not like either of them,” he says. “Good Christian people, and an accomplished man to boot. Mated and married two years ago - I was at their wedding.”
“Isn’t that how most domestic homicides look to people outside of them?” Will asks, stepping around the brittle stalks of a rose bush, recently trimmed and clinging to black spotted leaves. He notes that, how the stems are still green, that it must have been done recently. The whole of the yard is fresh no matter the ice and snow. "Did he beat her? Does she burn the roast? You wouldn't know."
The sheriff doesn’t find that to be particularly insightful. He looks Will over with the kind of gaze reserved for greenhorns, or livestock, searching for flaws and weakness. Another alpha, Will presumes, but cannot smell for the biting cold and the exhaust of the cars running as they idle. He sees a band of menthol under the sheriff’s nose, disrupted by stubble and a sneer at the medicinal scent, and thinks of the body before he remembers the purpose is twofold. The officer can’t smell him either to avoid smelling the woman inside the house.
Will looks around - all of them the same, wiping running nostrils and squinting at burning eyes. Some betas on the sides of cars undisturbed, but no one asks them to do Will’s job. He wonders why that is, but brings his gaze back to the sheriff, and the deputies, and the bulk of day laborers making statements, washing their hands of the progression of black bags held to the side and photographed by a CSI determined to do something of use.
What a terrible time to be vulnerable, Will thinks. A jar of balm and whatever violence that dismembers a husband is all that keeps the omega woman from her arrest.
(Or a rape, you think. Just a mint plant between order and savagery, and you stuck on the outside with the savages, without the same security of the old white house, forbidding from the field with its closed windows and doors. Statistics say someone will get the better of you the longer you work in the field - what’s to say not today?)
Will blinks the dry chill away. It’s a conscious effort to not ask to leave.
Jack sidesteps the moment without them, never inclined to awkwardness on Will’s behalf any more than his own.
“With all respect to your familiarity with them, Sheriff," he says, apologetic and square shouldered, "we won’t know what happened without taking Ms. Specht into custody. I’ve brought my guy, as I said...can we give him an opportunity to try?”
The sheriff nods. It’s too reasonable not to, and what is that if not asking permission? Federal agents, waiting for the go ahead, and only the sheriff between them.
“You go on and try,” the sheriff says, chewing the dryness of his mouth with pronounced teeth and a dripping nose. “We’ll red things up on the truck and ‘round the house,” and he looks at Will again like he’s never seen him before. “And I suppose you’ll do the same inside.”
---
Will would like to say he approaches the door in perfect dramatic confidence, but the urgency he feels in each stride brings to mind other times.
(“Garret Jacob Hobbs? FBI!” but no one is tossed out the old walnut door this time, poised to open at any time and prove him right.)
His pulse ticks in his neck against the buttons of his shirt, and in his palms and ankles, and when he strides up the three stairs to the porch expecting demands, he gets Hobbs on the bench swing instead, pushing with two feet worth of toes and smiling with each sway of the seat.
(There’s no daughters needing saving here, you remind yourself.)
The white, blown corneas wait. Will’s own watch for what Hobbs is waiting for.
Because of this, Will doesn’t notice the door open, or the small hand that pulls him in, or her death’s head mask and hunting rifle when he’s pulled in the door. It’s latched closed before he gets a word in edgewise, still reeling from his watcher under the eaves of the house, and the flashing red and blue of the patrol car lights on the door’s portal.
"See?" says Hobbs, opening the door with Hannibal's measured calm to follow them, like it's funny.
---
Sally Specht greets him with feverish eyes.
There's no light save for the transom window above the door that pools blue and water-calm around them, but Will can see the shiny listlessness of them. He tries to construct an impression of her in the dark of the entryway with this in mind.
Sally wears her nightgown and a comfortable sweater, and looks half her age beneath them. These are darkened in places - water maybe, but the longer he stands there, the pungent musk of what is unmistakably a heat tells him otherwise. She seems unbothered by this, like it’s nothing, just a few splotches from washing dishes, or she’s fresh from the shower and couldn't be bothered to dry off. "Can't make guests wait," she'd say like it explains everything, and the confluence of glycoproteins and leukocytes is her gardening gloves left on, or a call on hold being held aloft by a freckle-backed hand.
Hands. Will looks at them, covered with rubber gloves like she’s been working a sink - maybe it’s true, and the officers outside have made an assumption, but the burning in the back of the throat says otherwise. It’s good that they sent him - she needs somewhere to curl up and rest without rough hands pulling at every part of her.
She wears a half-mask respirator, the pink stripe of the cartridges like plumage or warning on a wild animal. The rattling of the valves purr more keenly than the natural rasp of an omega, more honest in their intention if for the same things. (Safety and comfort, the firm grasp of something at the base of the neck, and you shudder to imagine it, even the elasticated straps instead of the broad palm of a person. What comfortable suffocation that would be.)
“Sally?” he asks stupidly, almost bowled over by a rush of pain in his sinuses. The smell, god, the smell-
She nods, and whispers something.
Will's heart quickens, despite his body feeling dull and slow. He wipes his forehead. He presses a thumb and index finger to the bridge of his nose, frowning at the growing discomfort.
Will thinks it’s because of this that he doesn’t hear what she says at first - what she's wearing, what he's thinking, but she has a small voice, and Hobbs’ shadow stands at the base of the stairs, loud without saying anything at all.
She repeats herself, a little louder now.
“Is it gone?” she asks, stress in her voice. “Did they take it?”
(No, you almost say - he's just at the bullnose of the first stair behind you.)
The bags, Will thinks. She wants to know if they took the bags. He shakes his head, wincing against the sensation of pain sliding from one side of his face to the other.
“They’re on the truck,” he says slowly, and remembers that he has questions of his own. He's here to work after all.
Does she realize what’s in them? Is she of sound mind between waves of awareness and the hysterical burn of severing a bond and heat? Is she going to shoot him? The stock of a gun lies heavy in one hand, barrel dragged on the ground like she’s forgotten it’s there at all, but Will hasn’t.
He thinks he's heard of this - prodromal heat psychosis, though never so strong that a woman of barely over five feet tall could joint her husband like oxtail for stew and forget she’s done it. Brain all addled and sideways in anticipation of relying on someone else to do the critical thinking, but too sideways to actually stop trying to do things.
He’s had to read about it. He's half wondered if that’s what’s wrong with him now, only to shake it off because it never seems to stop. It’s not the kind of problem he can diagnose. His talent is saved for petty human emotion, and when called for, the imperative of genderless violence that follows, and that he thinks about constantly.
Imperative.
“Vitally necessary,” says Hobbs as he glides hands along the bottom of the barrister, and walks through the long hall of the downstairs and into the dark of a door.
Will lets him. It feels dangerous to follow and see. One threat at a time.
(He’ll be in the kitchen, you reason. That’s where he always ends up. You don’t need to watch to know that.)
“Sally, do you know what happened to your husband?” Will asks, eyes never turning from the empty doorway until he is certain there’s nothing there. Funny how the young woman with the gun and the gumption to use it scares him less.
Sally nods, frantic.
“Gone with the rest of it,” she says rapidly, muffled by the respirator. The valves click again, and she blinks as though staring into the sun, shuddering and grasping at her middle, and Will turns to hold her up by her bony shoulders. “I found where it’s coming from," she whispers like it's secret. "It burns my nose, it-doesn’t-come-out. Can’t warsh it, can’t breath it. Have-to-throw-it-all-away. ”
Nine bags, neatly tied at the top, tar black and doubled around their load. Six mils plastic coated in the gentle dust of the floor in the house, and the droplets of melted ice from the porch, rock scratching at their surface on the long drive, and somewhere underneath all that something rotting.
Sally turns to stare at the front door, fingers trembling on the gunstock, and the other in contemplation of the blinds.
Will nods with understanding, half-sick with her fervor, eyes burning. He wants a mask too, whatever she's smelled coming to live inside of him too. He opens his mouth to ask for one, and forgets how to. She needs help. He needs to know if the bags are gone, and steps to open the blinds at a window door her, but can’t recall how they are pried open.
Sally's hand comes back up, clenched in a fist with bruised nail beds.
“Nothing left to do but toss it,” Sally says into her gloves, and Will envies that her hidden mouth makes noise, and she can breathe and her fingers tremble at the straps of the mask, making sure they are there, and tight, and nothing will pull them away. "I've tried everything else. I don't know what to do if I don't."
Will knows what that's like, and he thinks is why he steps forward to comfort her.
She allows it. His mass is surface tension. Hers is liquid trying to survive inside it, caught between rough fingers. He holds her like this for uncountable minutes in the watery blue of her foyer, and never does find words for questions.
He holds her when the police break down the door, masked now too, telling her to drop her weapon like she ever thought that was an actual solution to her problem.
---
“I hear you had a stressful day,” Hannibal warbles into the phone from Baltimore, or what Will presumes is Baltimore. There is road noise, and the delicate airy pressure of a pipe organ behind it. It's hard to say over the hum of Will's kitchen stove vent, and clacking of dog nails on the floor.
It is not Wednesday, and they do not have an appointment, but as Hannibal insists as always, they are having conversations, and friends converse, don’t they? Will suspects that Jack has put him up to it, after what he is told is three hours of holding a young woman in the hallway of her home until he is as eaten up with the stink of her oestrus as she is, and he is sorry for her, wants to protect her from it.
(“It’s not about biology,” you try to explain but can’t when it's suggested maybe you were the wrong guy to send after all, offended at the image of Jack Crawford and twenty some-odd men bending the grass of a well-loved lawn, thinking you’d do something as crude as touch her sexually, or that your own sympathetic response to heat would stop you from your work. You aren’t able to translate the fragile geometry of her shoulders and collar bone as they shake with the tectonics of what separates them from the other dynamics, or that it is essential that you keep her together. Your body fights the intrusion of her heat with mucus, and saliva, and you would drool like a dog to rid yourself of another creature’s need in your nose and mouth if you could have remembered how to open your mouth at all and not hold your breath, but you had no mask, you can’t breathe what’s in the walls-)
Will looks out the window. Late autumn sits dark in the eaves of the house.
(Come back to that later, her way of thinking - there's something to it. The part you need to reexamine right now is your way of thinking, and why you so deeply want to burrow and hold her safe inside of you.)
Will rolls his neck and changes ears, cell phone sitting sticky between shirt collar and neck. Bach ponders heaven somewhere on the other side of the air waves. Hannibal breathes silently into the receiver, unheard but known.
“It's been a stressful week,” Will says, turning a stalk of dill in hand, twirling it until it dances. Make dinner, something tells him. Mimic normalcy. Open up the fish, pull the guts and bones from it, the parts that stink, toss them. Fill it with something that smells wonderful. "I just let someone talk who had a lot to say," he shrugs.
“Jack said you were disturbed by it,” Hannibal says probingly. "Did you lose time again, Will?"
“She butchered her husband and left him with the bulky trash," Will replies, avoidant. "Bagged twice so whatever was in them didn’t bother her anymore. Should I not be disturbed?”
A hum.
“And what was bothering her?”
The fish burns in a skillet he didn’t think he had already heated. The oil never smoldered.
He doesn’t remember what he says after that, too caught up in the cloud of black smoke and soot, and waking up in the middle of the night to the white of his nightclothes, dampened with sweat, clutching his own arms, and frowning against piercing pain between nostril and eye. Hannibal is gone. He does not have the nerve to probe if Hannibal was ever on the phone at all, listening to a fugue.
Will is alone tonight, with no Hobbs to crawl out of the shadows, and the corners of the room brilliantly white with moonlight. But...the windows are open, and it smells of winter air blowing off the trees, and char. It flows over bookshelves and into blankets. Some of it whistles through the flue. He is chattering with the cold pouring out of them, his pack of dogs curled tight around each other, and he forces himself to close the panes.
(When did you open the windows? Why would you?)
Will goes back to sleep.
---
The reconstruction of Nathan Specht is so great an undertaking that the morgue is temporarily cleared to sort between pieces of housing insulation and sheetrock, and which of these things hide bones and muscle and the organs that unfurl from the fiberglass and gypsum dust. Sally’s work is thorough. She leaves nothing so comically obvious as full limbs, and nothing so bulky as to cause questions as the things are carried away.
Will thinks she might have gotten away with it if she hadn’t tried to fit it in nine bags. Ten or eleven would have been just light enough to not merit complaint.
Like Sally Specht, the analysis team wears half mask respirators of their own, and unlike her they wear eye shields and Tyvek over their clothes, and plastic drapes hung around their mounds of material. Much of it destined for black bags once more by environmental necessity.
(Madness pouring from them, you imagine.)
It's just not only Sally's husband that is toxic amongst the rubble, to the detriment of the medical examination, and brings a dour looking man that Will is unfamiliar with in similar protections to oversee the work that he will later dispose of.
(“Can’t warsh it, can’t breathe it,” she says for you, and you shake your head in pain, understanding, and comb at her damp hair.)
“Funny thing about old houses,” Zeller huffs from behind with his brow sweating and eyeshield beaded with condensation. He touches a white-dusted hock of upper leg cut six inches in length with ginger fingers, three gloves stacked over each other. Will wonders how he grasps anything at all with so much between skin and object. “You never really know what they’re made of.”
But on this occasion they do.
“This one is at least one percent chrysotile plaster from the upstairs bedroom,” Beverly grouses. “Or did you not read your dangerous materials packet before verbally agreeing to the autopsy and suiting up?”
“Just low enough density amongst the rubble to merit autopsy,” Will hums from behind the harsh press of the facemask. All of this is a favor for a director who knew the deceased, manipulated by procedure - Jack is savvy enough to oblige.
“A nice silicate surprise for anyone brave enough to peek,” says Zeller. “I grew up in a house built in the 50s, you know,” he adds. “Ate the popcorn ceiling, picked at the paint on the windowsills. Half a sheet of barely asbestos-laden drywall isn’t what’s going to take me out, but I commend her for absolute batshit boobytrapping and ruining my week.”
Will cannot commend it. Instead, he is puzzled by it. In any serial killer, he’d presume intentionality, maybe even a joke. "Every hour wounds, but the last kills!" an imaginary version of her says with a laugh that doesn't suit her background as a housewife.
It would be a great laugh, delivering slow cancers and scar tissue instead of fast knives and game rifles. History books name poisons the weapon of the vulnerable, but brief statements made by neighbors and coworkers of Nathan Specht suggest Sally is a great fan of her old house, and goes into marriage and her marriage den with an enthusiasm that is seen with elderly amusement and approval. Painting rooms for children, they figured. Maybe doing a bit of light furniture refinishing.
The CSI team and the photos they send to Jack’s office tell more of the story, but no one quite follows.
Hundreds of polaroids speak to hallways left skeletal, snaking coils of black rubber wires running from ceramic knobs to disappear into the rafters. Studs with nothing on them but holes. Fieldstone foundation left damp and stained with humidity. Empty bedrooms left open to each other through naked walls, save the one they sleep in and she clusters her own clothes on in a great mound, stinking of slick in the hours before the police arrive.
The living room is pristine - just enough order for the illusion of normalcy. “You’ll have a hundred projects, and none ever finished,” he was told when he bought his own old house, and can imagine her being told the same. “Leave one space for yourself to relax. Think about how you’re going to cover up projects you can’t complete.”
It’s not possible for her to have done it all in the time between eviscerating her mate and putting him out to the curb for pickup. Pulverization aside, it would have taken her hours to complete what she did to Nathan Specht. There is no time for the demolition. It speaks to caprice over several months, not reason.
("Not like me," says Hobbs next to the ruined front face of your chimney.)
“It’ll be a closed and empty casket, unfortunately - cat’s out of the bag once you test for it, and it’s a bad stroke of luck that it’s absolutely fireproof,” Jimmy announces from behind the bright scope of his magnifying goggles, interrupting with the glare of the light. “Unless they want to meet in a hazardous waste vault in the transfer station. I’ve never seen a funeral outside of one, but I guess throwing handfuls of dirt would be appropriate for the occasion and venue alike.”
Zeller snorts. Will thinks Sally Specht would find that sad and also a profound relief, and inhales shallowly with awareness of his breathing from inside the mask.
Beverly works to realign the bones of the right hand. They are harder to piece together than the left, which remained uncrushed, each washed twice. The number of tools used in the dismembering is not known, but at least five are confirmed.
“Sawzall, chasing hammer, oscillating tool, needle nose pliers, and a steel tube bender to snap the femur,” she explains to Will between shuffling papers. “And that’s just the mark making that I can recognize where the blood hasn’t pooled under the skin and the bones are intact. Couldn’t tell you what the cause of death was if I tried, only that he most certainly was dead by the time the waste removal truck was called. No bullet casings, no obvious entry or exit wounds.”
“She certainly hated him enough to shoot him," says Brian, turning a cross section of tibia and fibula that glistens with machine oil.
(To ease the blade's passage through bone, you think. Best not to burn out the teeth. Amazing what tools will pass through with the right parts these days.)
"Fear is a powerful motivator," says Will, and doesn't bother to correct Brian's impression. There is no hate here - just desperation.
---
Will stares into the exposed void of bricks beneath the drywall.
There are no animal sounds today, save the distant hum of an airplane passing the property. There is no cold air whistling through it. What is left behind, however, merits consideration after the photos of the Specht homestead. There are things about it that resemble his own.
Ash, cement dust, clay, lime, the residuals of nearly a hundred years of burning logs before he saw fit to ruin the fireplace's utility. Maybe a little asbestos of his own, insulating the concrete, deathless in the face of flames.
He tapes plastic over it, blue painter's tape a cheerful square highlighting the mistake.
---
It is warm in the kitchen of Hannibal’s townhouse, and unlike Will’s own house, very nearly stifling with the windows closed up against the wind and the spitting rain. Will closes his eyes to think about that, listening to the shh-shh-shh of a whisk, and forgets what he was thinking about.
Hannibal’s good at that; helping Will forget, and get instead to the meat of a problem. A hunter-gatherer with an inclination for sharing, and always excited for an entree.
"She would have been the right age for a first time psychiatric event," Hannibal says over the wide bowl of a stock pot, face held close to consider the spread of aromatics across a broth’s surface. He’ll have to wait a while longer for his meal, but the interim doesn’t seem to bother him. There is the simple pleasure of it in his face, taking passes to smell it in stages - a relief for a man whose hyperosmia must be a burden from day to day.
Twenty-nine people other than himself and Will who hangs at the edges of the room to account for, and the volatile nature of the dynamics to contend with between them all. Sour acridness for discomfort. Salts for sorrow. Stinging bitterness for anger and aggression, the unctuousness of attraction for those who dare.
Will wonders what Hannibal smells on him.
Hannibal is content with his preparations, ignorant of Will’s ponderings, and stirs on. He says instead, not one to be interrupted, "Left untreated or exacerbated, she would have grown more convinced of her delusion's seriousness," and casts bay leaves to sink between spots of oil.
"Is," Will corrects, watching the curve of his face in the metal of the pot, mouth pulled comically large in the reflection. "Taken into custody and held in a detention center until the court determines if she's been bad or if she's mad as a hatter."
Hannibal smiles warmly. "You bring more and more of them home alive these days. One wonders if you have a subconscious desire to protect other omegas, no matter your avoidance of anything related to that."
Will shrugs, and privately disagrees with both statements. It remains to be seen if Sally Specht comes out alive instead of a shell of a person. He doesn't know if Georgia Madchen counts. Abigail certainly doesn't - Hannibal can take the credit for that.
(Or Abigail herself, over Nicholas Boyle. Pity that she didn't have the sense to leave him buried, or double bagged.)
As for their being omegas, that is inconsequential. It is that they need someone.
Will takes a sip of wine. It’s comfortable between them, especially when Will doesn’t contrarily disagree aloud out of habit - Hannibal often understands what Will means anyway without words.
Something in Will wants to hear it out loud, sometimes. To prove Hannibal knows what Will thinks, to not misconstrue a quiet moment and misunderstand him. Will thinks this is another part of himself that is reacting to Hannibal's dynamic and can't be honest about it. An unfortunate instinct - looking for signs of unsuitability, and constantly running up against the other man's inexhaustible perfectionism.
Listening to the gentle simmer of the broth, both bask quietly in its fragrant steam. The ladle comes to a clicking rest on a spoon rest for Hannibal to take a sip of his own drink, and taken back up like a king in his court. Will smirks at the idea of him in purple and red, the loudest person in any room with such a quiet chthonic voice.
Will catches nothing of Hannibal's oily cologne tonight, even standing this close. The glass of Bordeaux and the bone-deep warmth of the kitchen from cooking warm his cheeks and loosen his limbs, but he's not brave enough to ask what it is or if he's just nose-blind to it from standing next to the stove. Still, he finds he misses it.
"Funny thing, those mad hatters," Hannibal hums, returning to Sally Specht, likely never having left it behind. He considers the running spill of pot-au-feu from the ladle back to the pot. Something to make Will feel at home, he had said, and cubed potatoes and carrots in perfect little squares that belie the humble base. "Mercury poisoning looks a great deal like your homesteader's breakdown. Unlikely, even in as old a house as theirs, and her ability to continue a heat cycle strong enough to garner the attention of law enforcement that day, but curious. There are many poisons in the bedrooms of our homes, fast and slow."
“Speaking of poison,” Will shakes his head amused. "The plaster gave the autopsy some trouble. It’s probably the first time Jack’s ever had to seriously bend to another department. That it was environmental services of all things instead of HR probably burns him up inside. Don't think they knew about the contamination until it was already in the lab."
"Most things you don't," Hannibal nods, eyes flashing to a skillet alive with butter and shallots. "Minerals, gases, things necessary in small doses but responsible for many a so-called lunatic and murderer under their elemental spells. Benignly hiding in the garden beds, around the pipes, in the basement. Nature is desperate to kill, outside and in, albeit at as leisurely a pace as it can."
A plume of steam rises in fragrant curls. Hannibal closes his eyes to it, nose flared.
"Hiding in the human body too," Will says, leaning to face the doorway to the dining room. He cannot see it, nor smell it from here over Hannibal's work, but the promise of mint and basil and thyme is something to shut his eyes to and rest. He continues, avoiding the light with his eyes. "Breathing is just slow, wet combustion. Muscular function is low level electrocution. Heat and rut cycles biologically driven fevers, pregnancy and child rearing evolutionary parasitism. Compared to all that, what's different about inviting a few letters on the periodic table into your home?"
"What indeed," Hannibal says, and sears delicate pieces of kidney, still vibrant with freshness and the metal sting of iron on Will's tongue and nose from across the room as though heating steel.