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As promised, Will feels everything.
Always does, always has, always tangled with people who enjoy making him hurt. Or, at least, value the outcome, he thinks, thinking of Jack Crawford, FBI. Jack Crawford, immobilized by something sluggish in his veins, but not enough to not allow him to chew, scream, beg.
Cold stings the point of his nose numb and it runs without him. The broad band of his stitches smart, the icy wind prickling into the meat between them. There’s too much of it—Cordell’s wide mattress straps, made to be unpicked and cleaned up after the transfer. Only enough to keep Will from ripping, flapping, ruining Mason’s new face.
He’s bleeding. Hot beads of it pit-patter against the curls matted to his face with sweat, the tense muscles there curled and pharmacologically lock-jawed. It cools, congeals, goes cold-hot-cold to his blinding nerves still awake and kicking. The careful scalpel curve just at his hairline just feels tacky and wet and sluggish.
He’s not bleeding. Someone else is. Someone warm and breathing harsh and steady.
Cordell wanted Will to watch, inside, outside, as he was peeled, fascia and frozen muscle. He never got the chance. The last person Will saw was Hannibal Lecter, face a pale night sky splatter-painted red and black where day-old hurts had done their job clotting, before a gentle touch softly pressed his lids closed. No fanfare, no goodbye, just a rough sigh, and Will kicked at the prison of his struggling ribs from the inside and thinking, asking, dreaming: well, are you going to finish the job?
He did nothing but bleed thickly into his own ear, full up. Well, well well? went the pooling blood, muting, cotton-thick. And then hands unstrapping, pushing over the ridges of his face and prying at his newest wound with considering thumbs. Not Cordell, then, whose pleasure was in the gleam of the blade. He didn’t care what was inside the cuts he made or what he was excising, only that he was.
Well? It rang through his stilled tongue, then, in the press of his molars against each other. Well?
He’s so heavy. Hannibal, harsh and steady, can’t keep going.
He does. Will wants to sleep. If he does it now, he doesn’t know if he’ll wake up.
His body jostles, neck lolling and wrenching under the weight of his skull, and then his ear, presses to the damp expanse of a sweater. The metal-sink stink of blood fills his nostrils and the dull thump of a straining heart sounds dully from his crushed ear through his jaw. A cheek brushes against his hair, breath jostling his curls once, twice, then leaves his crown cold.
Hannibal, jealous-handed, holds Will as he hurts. Always has. Gloves petting down the sweaty lines of Will’s seizing neck and slack face, arms tugging Will’s limp shuddering front to his own as blood pooled between their trembling bellies, thumbs soothing the back of Will’s neck as he trussed him in his coat to pry the bullet from the mess of his shoulder.
At the insistence of Hannibal’s cheek, the closeness of his breath, Will waits, eyes fanned closed. The scar on his belly could be reopened, muscles still not back to their full strength. He’d steam, all spilled out in the snow. Maybe Hannibal would eat him raw, on his knees, rinse the red off after with snow cupped in his hands. It’s a time-honored tradition, way up in the far places where the ice never melts.
Will waits until he can’t remember what he’s waiting for. Pain and exhaustion wring him, shake him, gnaw deep into him like the dogs worrying.
He sinks back into himself in the warmth, in somewhere that smells familiar and digs into his back in ways he knows by feel even in the middle of the night. His bed, his own bed, slouching a bit one way how it always does when someone sits on the far side. Almost no one ever does, but Will knows the difference blind. Someone bends over him, close enough to feel the blunt pass of damp hair and scratching jaw, to unfasten the tedious line of his buttons with tired hands.
Hannibal. Has to be. Smelling like Will’s soap and shampoo and raw skin. Raw, ruined, charcoal and lymph, sulfur-acrid and bacon-sweet that even water and the harshest laurel sulfates can’t hide. The rough breath means that whatever it is hurts and it hurts and Will can’t ever remember hearing Hannibal Lecter sound like that.
Shirt off, scratching at his nipples as it goes. Diligent fingers cup the back of his neck to tug it all out from under his back. Shoes, already gone. Socks stripped, pants, underwear—he loses track. His head aches. Chills skitter across the planes of his chest, stomach, legs, but he lies still, rigid, as knees press alongside either side of his hips.
There it is, Will thinks dully as each of the tack stitches gets plucked and snipped out. Opportunistic about the fishing supplies and the paralytic and the ease of Hannibal’s weight levering him down into the mattress. It’s practical, the tight clip of new thread tugging the saw gash neatly closed—fifty pound line, never leave home without it.
You break it, you buy it.
Hannibal said the second time they’d ever met that he’d apologize sparingly. Will, groggy and snarled in each tugging hurt, thinks he doesn’t have any frame of reference for what that would look like from him. Maybe this is it. Maybe, maybe—
The sweep of a warm washcloth startles him, mopping the edges of the new puckered stitches and his damp nape and carefully rubbing out the bloody rime in the cup of his ear. It keeps going, on and on, clinical and tracing downward, lifting arms and scrubbing up underneath white bits of himself that don’t see the sun and—
A careful scrub through his pubic hair, much more gentle. Hannibal’s touch, feeling out his cock.
Not hesitant, but not proprietary either. Exploratory. Fond, when a thumb comes to brush the head, warm from the fingers gently cupping the rest. Will doesn’t know how his breath comes—harsh, sharp, a rumble in his chest that’s trying to keep him alive through the constriction of muscle and paralytic.
Less? More?
Stop.
He should close his eyes against it. They’re already closed.
Stop.
The thumb working soft against the head of his cock slips away, gone.
Some fantasy , he thinks, dreams, floats, wants to twitch away from the warmth of the diligent washcloth against him, all the way up and back, down over the corded muscles of his legs and limp splays of his feet. But still, there’s a hand in his hair, at the side of his head the whole time and it would be easier to get leverage, to use it to help. It stays, close, curved against his skull.
A banal fantasy, to touch when he can get away with it, when Will can’t say anything at all or move. When he could pick up the bottle to see exactly what Cordell gave him, dosage and concentration and the clear-beaded tip of the discarded sharp. So, Hannibal knows. So, a fantasy.
Will expects—something. Unzipping. Pick-up breaths. Skin working over slick, tight skin.
It doesn’t come. Neither of them do. The warmth of the washcloth vanishes and Will would shiver, but his body can’t remember how. It remembers how to well up, to leak, or maybe the drugs are slowly loosening their grip, but heat builds under his lashes, behind his lids until it all spills over. Will wonders if Hannibal’s eyes are misty, too, as the last forty-eight hours catches up on them both. He needs to sleep. He doesn’t know if he can, with Hannibal so close that the weave of his borrowed trousers catches on Will’s bare skin.
The tears get mopped up as they fall, the rounded edge of the washcloth folded into a tight triangle to swipe gently against the fragile skin under his tired eyes.
Will floats through dry clothes, familiar and smelling like his own drawers and buttoned without fanfare or further exploration, and sheets tucked up to his shoulders. The bed creaks beside him, full weight, and a slow, catching breath comes very close. He feels Hannibal, shoulder to hip to where their feet don’t touch, Will’s under the bedclothes and his on top. A private thing, bare feet, common. Banal, the way he wants to lay down with Will, beside Will.
So, he lays down. So, he lets their shoulders touch. Hannibal’s never been shy of touching.
His hand curls against Will’s, back to back, knuckles bloodied and bashed all to hell. Will thinks they must sting, all the crusting blood enough to scratch against his. Still rough, where the rest of him smells like Will’s shower and treats them both kindly. Will wants to brush a finger, push soft against his hand. He wonders if Hannibal’s eyes are closed to the ceiling, or would he watch for things he’s never seen, shooting stars and Will smooth-faced from something he’d didn’t personally administer or let fester.
Banal. A fantasy. An exhaustion. An admission. Will has nothing left to give.
Is this what you wanted?
They breathe, out of time, waiting out the dark until, finally, warm and watched, Will sleeps.