Work Text:
tom lued moo
"A compromise," Hannibal says. Swirling the word, holding it up to the light.
"You had to know, when you let me live, that there would be compromises."
"I could say the same thing," Hannibal says, "about your choice to take us over the cliff."
Will lets his mouth quirk. It’s pretty funny. "That was my compromise."
"No, that was you absolving yourself of responsibility. Placing us in the hands of fate, or God." Hannibal’s face relaxes into decision. "Very well. Your arm, please."
"What, you want to do it now?"
"No time like the present."
Hannibal’s testing him. That’s nothing out of the ordinary; it’s part of what makes this interesting. Will rolls up his sleeve with fingers that are still stiff and healing, and probably will be stiff in the mornings for months yet. Hannibal’s eyes glide upstream along the revealed pattern of his blood vessels. Will waits for his flesh to crawl, for his tendons to tense, but there’s a kind of temporal war going on within himself. His mind’s still falling, falling, falling towards the waves. His body remembers pain and the scrape of sand in his wounds and against his exhausted skin; it remembers inhaling, free of the water. His heart is years ahead of the rest of him.
His arm is steady as a corpse as Hannibal wraps the tourniquet around it.
"Blood pudding?" Will says.
"I was thinking about a Vietnamese soup," Hannibal says. He has fetched his medical kit. His fingers are very gentle on the swelling topography of Will’s veins. "Pork offal and vegetables, with cubes of congealed blood. Very nourishing."
The needle slides in. Will says, "I hope the cubes are small. I've lost enough blood recently without your eyes getting bigger than your stomach."
Hannibal meets his gaze with an intensity that borders on adoring, stopping Will's breath. Then Hannibal is watching with parted lips the slow giddying of red down the transparent tube, and Will gives a mental shrug, surrendering himself. No doubt he will be tired after this, and even less inclined to run; soup will be exactly what he feels like. It will probably be delicious. In some ways, Hannibal expresses affection through nourishment just like millions of other people in the world, but this is...a unique variation on that theme.
Will expected nothing less.
blodplättar
From the outside, the scar on Will's face is starkly obvious; inside his mouth, there is barely anything to be found, now, when Will probes the area absently with his tongue. Mucus membranes, Hannibal said once. Their ability to heal is remarkable.
"The versatility of blood in cooking is related to how closely it mimics eggs," Hannibal says. He whips the whisk briskly through the batter, which is the colour of stained mahogany. "They have a very similar protein content, including--"
"Albumin," Will says.
Will turns the pan this way and that, watching as the butter subsides from its initial furious froth and begins to brown. The gauze pad taped in the crook of his elbow has caught a spatter of it.
Hannibal comes close with the bowl tucked under one arm. He closes his hand briefly over Will's, directing the circling of fat around the pan's edge, then releases him.
"Molecular gastronomy, Will?" he says.
"Molecular chemistry," Will says. "There's a lot of it, in forensics. Especially as it relates to blood."
The pancakes are that same deep, attractive red-brown when cooked, thin as crepes and crisp at the edges. Hannibal serves them with sour cream and jam; the tiny berry seeds get stuck between Will's teeth. He looks at the food on his plate and tries to reconcile it with the half-hour spent watching his blood leave his body while Hannibal played the piano in the other room and the warm, rosemary-scented air floated through the window. His throat gives a single, half-hearted spasm and then relaxes.
"I wouldn't pick it off a menu in future," he says.
Hannibal nods, acknowledging a difference in taste with no more emotion than if Will had asked that they have asparagus rather than green beans for dinner.
"Nonetheless, thank you for indulging me," Hannibal says.
Will looks at him, trying not to laugh. It wouldn't sound nice, if he let it out.
"I'm a little scared of how far I'll go to indulge you," he says honestly.
Hannibal takes a deliberate mouthful of pancake and chews, his eyes closing in appreciation. Slowly, as his wounds heal, he is regaining the mannerisms of the elegant psychiatrist that Will first encountered; the society host with a sincere appreciation for the beautiful. Will had come to see the red-clawed beast beneath the man so clearly, had forced himself to look the killer in the eye so that there could be no mistaking what he was giving himself to. He'd forgotten that this, too, is Hannibal Lecter. The clothes and the food and the music may be a mask, but they are still true.
raththam poriyal
"I'm a bit surprised you haven't tried to talk about transubstantiation yet," Will says.
Hannibal looks amused, but also pleased, as he always is when Will throws a topic onto the table. "The important idea there is the transformation from one thing to another, through belief."
"Not the blood itself?" Will says. "Consuming the body as an act of worship?"
Hannibal says something that Will can't hear over a sudden flare and sizzle as flames lick greedily around the wok's edges and Hannibal tosses its contents, then pokes at them with the wooden spoon, sending a new waft of spices into the air. It's a hot night; the smell lingers, heavy and tantalising. Will takes a long drink of his sweating beer and waits.
"You're fishing, Will," Hannibal says, reproving.
Will smiles. "Indulge me."
"In that context, it is about worship. Or at least remembrance."
Will has a sudden, forceful mental image of a steel refrigerator filled from top to bottom with neat plastic packets of blood, enough to save a disaster's worth of people, all neatly labelled with a time and date. Hannibal opening the fridge and removing one or two packets, bringing them to the bench and laying them with the rest of the ingredients. A table set for one. A taut, sorrowful emptiness to the air.
Hannibal goes on, "Of course, in some religions, the consumption of blood is taboo. And all over the world it has become much less common with the advent of industrialised slaughter."
The dark and crumbly contents of the wok, with their smell of watering eyes and watering mouths, make another swift arc through the air. Industrialised slaughter. Will finds himself touching his own temple, and turns it into a rake of fingers through his hair.
"But in the past, it was just another part of honouring the whole animal," Hannibal says.
The sentence hangs between them, uneasy, smelling of winter breezes and copper and a girl’s hair. Then it's gone, and the summer and the spices are back.
dinuguan
"What do you have planned for tonight?"
"A Filipino stew," Hannibal says. "The blood forms part of the sauce." He flicks a glance at Will. Today his eyes match the rainstorm gathering in the sky outside, with a glassy intelligence that makes Will's skin feel like the pressure in this one room is falling, falling, falling. All sorts of things could rush in, turbulent, to fill the space.
"Go on," Will says, slouching more in the chair. He feels even more light-headed than he usually does when this is happening. It could be the weather. "You want to ask me something, right?"
Hannibal puts his hand on top of Will's, solid and warm. When Will squeezes his fingers, the flow of blood speeds up, for a few seconds.
"Perhaps I am waiting for consequences to become apparent," Hannibal says.
"You didn't think I'd agree to this," Will realises. "You thought--Jesus, Hannibal, what else was on your list? What were the alternatives?"
"I am not sure," Hannibal says. "They would have been equally interesting."
"It bothers me less than I thought it would," Will says; truth for truth. "But I've seen a hell of a lot of blood in my life. This is--this is nothing. To either of us."
"It is not nothing," Hannibal says, warm like a gas flame.
When Will decides it's enough, and they pull the cannula from his vein, there is a growing bleb of freshly scarlet blood against his skin. Usually Hannibal would press down at once with the gauze, but today he dabs his forefinger in it, gently, and lifts it to his lips. He does it as though it's the most natural and caring gesture in the world, and he tastes it like he tastes wines that come from dusty bottles.
"Hannibal," Will says, "have you been adjusting my diet, so that I taste better?"
He was hoping to sound accusing, but only manages curiosity.
"There has been no noticeable difference," Hannibal says. "Yet."
Will makes a small beckoning motion with two fingers of his free hand. There is a disbelieving pause, in which Will exhales a shaky relief that he can still dictate some of the terms here, and then Hannibal lifts freshly blood-coated fingers to Will's mouth.
As a sacrifice, blood is slow, but infinite. You take and you take, and the sacrifice lives and walks: that is the compromise.
Will is eating plenty of dark greens and plenty of red meat. Deep in his bones, his body is a factory.
migliaccio
"I ate this first in Syracuse," Hannibal says, turning a slice of the sausage on his fork, "though it is not a specialty specific to the region. My recipe has the addition of pine nuts."
Will has been thinking, as he set out the plates and poured the glasses of sweet, sticky wine that Hannibal insisted was the proper accompaniment, about the idea of consumption and the idea of transfusion. The one is both proprietary and transformative, given that blood is broken down in the digestive tract and delivered to the consumer's body as no more than nutrients. The other is purer. More generous. Will's mind glides easily along these lines, as though following a current, or the blue and inexorable path back to the heart.
Will takes another bite of his own serving. The raisins are a pop of sweetness against the meaty salt, similar to some other dishes that Hannibal has made for him: kofta draped in yoghurt sauce, or the spiced and eggy richness of bobotie.
"Would you inject my blood directly, if you could?"
"Our blood types are not compatible."
"Of course you know my fucking blood type," Will says mildly.
"I had not considered it," Hannibal says. He blinks. Will doesn't think he's lying.
"Don’t tell me the intimacy of it doesn’t appeal to you, Hannibal," Will says. He lets darkness bloom in his voice like ink dropped in water, and it feels good. It feels like loosening a knot that has been too tight for too long.
"Would you change me from the inside out? Your blood in my veins; would I inherit your dreams, Will?"
"You already know my dreams," Will says. "And I've already changed you."
After the meal, as he leaves the table, Hannibal pauses and lays his hand on Will's shoulder. He bends briefly and his lips brush the scar that curls across Will's cheek, where the sensation will always be poor. Will feels Hannibal's mouth like the first snowflakes of a blizzard, or the sweep of a sleepy child's eyelashes. He is, abruptly, irate and starving for something more than this gentleness. He reaches out and grabs hold of Hannibal's wrist as the man is moving away.
"Is that the best you can do?" he demands.
Hannibal looks down at him. The shutters on his personality are thrown open. Will shudders as though the force of it will tear every one of his wounds wide open again, leave him with blood coating his cheek and his shoulder and his stomach and his neck. A feast.
"I am not the one who counselled patience," Hannibal says.
Will digs his thumbnail in, hard, just below the edge of Hannibal's cuff.
"I'm done waiting," he says.