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Frederick Chilton still remembers the guy who cheated off him in medical school.
It’s been decades, but he’s good at nursing old resentments like welts in the tender meat of his cheek; both satisfying, both self-inflicted. The first year had been full-throttle weeks of blues and blurs, and not even the fresh-faced graduates with silver spoons wrenched out of their mouths knew it before anyone else. He was a bit wet-behind-the-ears himself, with a chip on his shoulder instead of any silver to suckle on, suddenly a big fish from a small pond drop-kicked into a school of big fish crammed into a pressure cooker.
Do or die, sink or swim, and Frederick was better suited to a survival float than a backstroke.
He’d always thought the cheater had been the same way—just keeping his head above water, pressing just close enough to Frederick at the exam tables with the cadavers skinned and carefully reflected and pincushioned all to hell, enough to sneak glances at his paper every so often. Frederick had always been nauseous and bitter with the realization that he should’ve had that bright idea first. Cheating in the first year barely mattered—they just had to pass; anything they’d actually need to know would come later. No squishy-headed embryo diagrams, no squinting at wet-mounts flush with Eosin pink, no irrelevant signaling pathways to memorize. Soon just the antiseptic chill of the OR and watching everyone watch the attending the way they’d all watch him someday.
Every so often, Frederick would throw his lurker a misdirect, a metaphorical leg stuck out to see him trip. He always hoped he would. This time—far from exam rooms and label the nerve roots of these terminal branches of the brachial plexus and anatomy being a team sport that he was always picked last for—Frederick had tripped over his own packed backs and crashed on the sweating marble of his entryway floor instead.
God, his marble floor, his protection detail, his house. He’d lost a kidney, a foot of intestine, a bit of liver, and the entire limp grape of his gallbladder. Losing the bloody front steps and the privacy frosted front door to the rearview of his roadster feels far, far worse.
Do or die, sink or swim, and Frederick grinds the sticky heels of his hands on the warm leather of the wheel until they hurt. He gasps, swears, loosens up with a miserable wrenching breath, swallowing the warm smell of the blood quietly congealing through the button-front of his shirt. The road rattles in his teeth and he has to fight to keep his eyes peeled for cops, for pedestrians lollygagging all over the place, for anyone that looks too close at his tinted windows.
Anything to drive Hannibal Lecter’s smug, bastard face from behind his lids.
It’s not like he hasn’t been on the receiving end of it before—talking about teasing tongues and psychic driving over grapes with insides as thickly dark as their outsides. A kind of bland self-assurance and satisfied curl of a mouth that Frederick had always chalked up to being crookedly handsome and ambiguously European, which he mostly resents and often quietly envies. Like the cheating, like the drive and efficiency to get a step ahead of the pack and actually manage to stay there.
Now he knows, releasing bloodless knuckles from the wheel in intervals, Hannibal Lecter had just probably been gently fileting grapes and eyeing up the soft pinkess of his tongue for just how long it would take to scrape smooth and poach until it curled.
Frederick tucks it back behind his teeth now, sucking, grateful, protective. It’s his still, even if nothing else is. So is the cash tucked into his jacket, the passport, the luggage Hannibal had the decency to at least pack ahead for him, the unsteady heart still squeezing away in his chest. Not dead. Not fucking dead yet.
Why didn’t Hannibal just kill you?
It trips over itself in his mind, as frantic as the drum of his left foot against the car mats. A question he’d lobbed over the proverbial fence at a newly-freed Will Graham, hair curling too-long at his ears and blue gaze resentful and behind the safety of newly-restored glasses. The state wouldn’t approve them for anything but Graham’s court dates—maybe afraid that he’d file the cheap acetate enough to kill someone himself or swallow the tiny articulating screws with his dozen morning pills. Hardly a choking hazard for a grown man, even an unstable one.
Because he wants to be my friend, Graham had said, a hint of a smile in his voice. What kind, Frederick could never tell, but it broke up the ice floes of the placid rage and dour insistence that had marked his time behind bars and his suggestion to convince Jack Crawford of Dr. Lecter’s guilt by any means necessary.
Maybe it had just been obvious. So much is dreadfully obvious to Will Graham.
Obvious, and he’s often right, but not always where the details matter. Frederick takes a small, twisted comfort that: the months of jumpsuits and suicide-prevention Velcro, sullenness and impenetrable remoteness in a basement cell speak for themselves. He couldn’t unwave any of the red flags he’d brandished in Hannibal Lecter’s face over the past year. Years , if he’s being perfectly honest; no one should be able to roll right from a lauded surgical career into a lauded psychiatric one, not when Frederick had been chased out of his own, owing his position now to earnestly clawing up the ladder and stomping on everyone trying to climb up after him. He did throw a foot into Hannibal’s oncoming path, hoping to see him trip like Frederick’s medical school paper-peeping Tom, but nailing his career to Jack Crawford or the licensing board’s cross was always an unacceptable option.
He’d gone to the ill-fated dinner party, fawned, kept a watchful eye, tried to grip his cane less tight at the sight of crook-clawed chicken feet passing him by, and swallowed down anything he could reasonably digest. And he’s here, anyway, alive and stinking of heme and head pounding, with luggage in the back painstakingly packed by the Chesapeake Ripper, who knew he’d run. Planned for it, so confident in it and the evidence sprayed over every surface in Frederick’s house that Frederick’s proverbial dirty hands would look bloodstained right down to the dermis. Will Graham is often right, but sometimes he’s wrong and that’s turned out to be so much worse.
Understanding dangles lower and lower in Frederick’s patchwork gut, a familiar feeling chandeliered in the empty space across from his remaining kidney as he lurches the roadster towards the exit for Reston and Dulles.
It never mattered how many fake answers Frederick had circled and hastily re-scribbled to throw his first-year cheater off the scent. Not because of the impressive failures of his first couple exams or the bafflingly mediocre ones he’d scraped out the rest of the year, but because he’d learned sometime late in his second year that his classmate wasn’t cheating off him at all. He just needed to know where Frederick would score in the ranks.
After all, Frederick thinks and tries to keep his heart from snagging his teeth and his medically-mandated vegetarian lunch from coming all the way back up, that way he always knew just how much better he had to be.
Will Graham lets him in. That’s the first surprise.
He takes in the bloody loafers, the long splatter trail up Frederick’s straining neck, then props the screen front door open with a blunt cage of fingers. Frederick jerks a breathless nod towards him and smooths a hand down his front as he bats his way through the curious snouts of Graham’s rangy pack all trying earnestly to lick him clean. Will watches him do this too, oblique in his study, then fits his tongue in his teeth with a sharp tss. The dogs fall back around him, long tongues swiping out to clean FBI blood from their fur.
He looks down at them milling and anxious with each other, instead of at Frederick, who tries to keep his balance and bluster in the cut of the wind, and says, “He let you go.”
“Not exactly.” Frederick swallows, and heaves a sharp breath. “Apparently, I’m a better candidate for the kitchen than the table.”
Graham’s mouth wrinkles into a familiar broken-back line, preoccupied and sour, and he leans into the door with a nod. Frederick ducks all the way into a house that looks smaller and more pleasantly cluttered in person than the crime scene photos made it seem—the place of a man who lives quietly and would have continued doing just that if he hadn’t been flung onto the proverbial tracks. Will Graham keeps his own, even if his own is humble in the way people always say when they really mean uninspired and less covered in dog hair than originally expected. Familiar, the way a childhood shame is. Frederick had grown up in a string of houses like this and never goes home if he can help it, far from the lysol-gleam of his countertops and a basement of interesting wines hand-picked by his consultant sommelier. He never hosts for his own circles—with nothing that could even spit near the faerieland of Hannibal Lecter’s darkly bizarre great room and glittering, handcrafted feasts—but dazzling relatives is as easy as hiring a chef for the night to look at home in his kitchen.
Just as the old cherry piano on Graham’s back wall is hardly a substitute for his oakwood grand shining gold in the afternoon milky sun, Frederick figures shower will make just as much of a rousing impression so long as it’s not the dirty, blush pink of the old Chilton family bathroom. A perennial 80s staple that long outstayed its welcome.
Will Graham comes upstairs with him. He’s not expecting that either.
The shower runs hot and is blessedly tiled plain-Jane subway white. The spray patters hard against the chipped old porcelain tub, loud enough to scramble Frederick’s thoughts and nearly drown out whatever Graham is rustling in the sink cabinets for. New bar of soap? Extra toothbrush like he’s staying the night not trying to spit away evidence down the drain? Something to scrape the thick rime of blood out from under his nails?
“No wit? No I told you so s? Or has Cassandra finally run out of things to say?” Frederick asks, biting and bitten secretly into the edge of his mouth to hide the tremble. The salt-iron flavor of it makes his mouth water and his remaining kidney flinch. He adds, on a soft, poisonous laugh, “Vindicated at last?”
The rustling goes still. He turns, perched on the edge of the tub to see the still line of Graham’s shoulders and the gentle curve of his cheek in profile staring into the open cabinet. The caged bird sings the same as its wild counterparts, but maybe Will Graham feels the weight of his proverbial tag. Frederick entertains that idea—tugging away the tight curls cupped behind his ear to press plastic through the soft round of his lobe. He understands Hannibal Lecter’s giddy little crush on the mind that lurks under all that hair and bone, but sitting on the groaning lip of the old tub, he considers if that’s all. Just professional jealousy, graciously and quickly tucked under with a maddeningly polite smile when Frederick informed him that Graham had refused to see him.
He blinks at the length of black plastic that Graham shakes out of the cabinet. Trash bag, smelling like cheap plastic breaking down—stale smoke and clothes from the Goodwill. Frederick looks from his face, lashes canted thick over his eyes, to the efficient twists of hands creasing the edges of the bag into a thick rind.
“No one came weeping to Cassandra when Troy burned. They just died. No one to tell I told you so except the Greeks who raped her,” says Graham, bag crunching under his attentions. He makes a come hither gesture with it from Frederick’s face to the wingtips of his shoes shining bloody under the buttery bathroom light. “Evidence.”
Frederick lets his shoulders slump and drags his face into his hand. He gestures vaguely with the other. “I’ll leave it outside the door.”
But Graham doesn’t move, forehead wrinkling. It did that inside the hospital too, like he had to suck on whatever he was going to say, roll the flavor around on his tongue to really get a sense of it. It’s strange to see it on this side of the bars, no safety line here to keep from the worst of the spit or the piss or the blood beading off well-oiled leather.
“There’s already blood in enough places as it is.”
The water drums, insistent. Frederick watches him, the flat impasse of that face he’d tried to summit from behind bars, behind the glossy eye of a camera lens, pressed up close to peel those shocking blue eyes open under the grip of a few clever psychotropics. He scoffs; no reaction from the man holding the bag except a hike of thick brows. The amusement and surprise and blood, what little of it there is left, trickles slow out of Frederick’s face.
Retribution. That’s the only word for it. First, from Hannibal Lecter and the disgustingly thorough workup on his home, Abel Gideon, the unsuspecting agents come to bring him somewhere safe from all this. Now, from Will Graham, who the gurney from medically-induced coma to plasmapheresis to straight to the bowels of the BSHCI had spared the strip, spread, and cough. Frederick wonders if he would’ve taken that with his characteristic display of teeth-biting wit and dry unhappy laugh or the unflinching look he’s got going on now.
The latter, he thinks, and rips at his own tie with unsteady fingers. He’s seen those evidence photos, too—the faraway disbelief of Graham’s numb face, vulnerable legs bared by old underwear and caked up each corded calf with mud and slender scratches. Hands, feet, shoulders, knees, and toes. The red curves of his hard palette, the gentle slopes of his soft, both pink and streaked with blood leftover from the remains of the Hobbs girl’s ear. He’s seen inside Will Graham, not quite in the ways he knows other orderlies have seen other patients, but enough that the back of his neck warms with the knowledge and the shower steam.
Graham looks him over as each piece comes off. Frederick’s shoes crunch and thud at the bottom of the bag, his trousers and socks balled together with only a brief burble of protest that Graham seems immune to, like the thick red spreading thick in every crease of tailored cotton. Frederick looks mournfully at all of it shoved into stinking plastic, gooseflesh prickling up along the white bits of himself bared and chilled. Graham stares pointedly but dispassionately at the silky cling of his briefs until Frederick strips them off, resentful. He tosses them dispassionately into the trash bag and works the top into a tidy twist.
“I’d like to shower now,” says Frederick, covering himself. Graham isn’t even remotely looking, but with the warmth of the room and the adrenaline still lurching through him and the brush of his own fingers, his cock’s started to take notice. “I’m showering now.”
At this point, he’s given up expecting or not expecting anything of Will Graham, who drops the tied bag of clothes by the door, then sits heavily on the closed toilet seat.
Graham looks at him, then the shower curtain. “You’re letting the hot water run.”
“I’d prefer to be spared my dignity, if it’s all the same to you.” Frederick tilts his face up enough to look down nose and chin at him, with a nod and a curt sniff. So strip, spread, cough is how it’s going to be, then. “What little of it there is left.”
A funny little look flits around Will Graham’s mouth. A nice mouth, a better place for Frederick’s curious eyes than the impenetrable bear-trap depths of that skull that sodium amytal hadn’t screwed completely open.
“I was in your hospital, Dr. Chilton, I know how often you spare everyone else’s dignities,” he says, then, thoughtful and pressing his thumbs together, “It’s not all the same to Hannibal Lecter.”
He doesn’t tell Graham that any real dignity fled him the bleary moment he woke up, chilled but wrapped tight in a hospital blanket after the surgery to fix the first surgery Gideon had inflicted on him. He’d shaken and sobbed in relief, then blinked in blank, drugged mortification at the surgeon’s estimate for how long he’d be shitting through a hole in his stomach. Once upon a time, he’d been the one giving these follow-ups, rounds at dawn, and patting an anxious hand across the blanket with the best bedside manner he could muster.
Frederick had forged every scrap of dignity since that bed and he wasn’t about to let any of it wriggle away from him.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask him on my way out. Him and his little plastic murder suit, in case you’re wondering exactly how the Chesapeake Ripper leaves no evidence behind,” he insists and wrangles in his voice so it doesn’t creep up on him. “I asked you .”
Graham laces his hands together, maybe considering the implications of full body plastic and the fortitude to wear it or the only kind of shop that makes those sorts of things without asking too many questions, and braces his elbows on his knees. Maybe just considering. He does that, looking far away from everyone else while he does it, and like a gentle hand would work to eventually coax him back around. Frederick’s still not certain anyone’s actually tried that yet—anyone other than Hannibal Lecter of course, and they all know how that turned out.
“I already told you weeks ago. Months ago,” he says finally. He flicks a look up to the ceiling, like prayer, like thought, hands clasped and working. “I guess confessing to the FBI now would be more problematic.”
Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve, and it feels so much better to have that chucked out in the open between them now, instead of the veiled vagaries that both Graham and Lecter are so terribly fond of. Frederick’s always marked that from the sidelines—they way they circle each other. Courtship, threat displays, teeth sharp and tender bits bared. There’s a shine in both their eyes that he doesn’t particularly trust or like, terrible to see glinting over a glass of something dark and full-bodied, but that he covets sometimes.
It’s nerve, probably. That gleam. And the worst part is Will Graham doesn’t have to look at Frederick fully to see the dulled self-preservation of his gaze, to know that he’s never done something he knows he hasn’t been able to get away with. Gideon, categorically insane, no one to believe him anyway. Graham, less demonstrably so but playing all sides enough to submit to the needle and the consent form and the leather buckles. And the others that he’s managed in over the years, the dabbling in the unorthodox, the papers written part and parcel by graduate hopefuls, the surfing off coattails as an MS2 when all that mattered was first crack at the boards.
Don’t do anything you don’t know you can get away with—clearly Hannibal Lecter knows that, too.
“You told me to kill my career ,” Frederick snaps, voice breaking under its own weight. And so what, he deserves to panic. He deserves a little nervous breakdown after waking up with three butchered men eviscerated all over the countertops where his family nods every other Christmastime, shiny-eyed and open-mouthed at his career, his papers, his life , and kept carefully ignorant of all the rest. “Forgive me for not thinking that was an acceptable option.”
Graham’s forehead creases, then unfolds as his brows pinch tight together. The funny twist to his mouth resolves into a flash of teeth. “I didn’t expect you’d tell Jack anything.”
Frederick can almost convince himself that particular peek of white is kind. His body doesn’t need any convincing to arrive at the wrong conclusion, still shoving blood around in a panic to help him flee, fight, fuck. All the worst F’s for the humid close-quarters bathroom of a man who hates him because Frederick can’t imagine not picking him apart to see how he ticks, but who nonetheless has melt runoff in his glacial stare.
Graham looks at his fig-leaf hand with a heavy-sigh kind of acceptance. Frederick wants to sneer at him to lighten up—at least no one thinks he pushed Abel Gideon down the stairs and ate the deadlocked parts of him. At least Graham could look like he’s enjoying this gift-wrapped schadenfreude; Dr. Lecter certainly is, fucking Frederick’s life six ways from Sunday and enjoying it the same way he’s has watched him take in the nose of a particularly crisp white.
His mouth twitches. “Then why waste your breath when you’d already made up your mind?”
“I can still be surprised. I can still be wrong,” Graham says. He pulls and pushes at the meat of his hands, works the heels together in a way that seems like it hurts him and says, gentler than Frederick has ever heard him, “Take your shower, Frederick.”
It’s nothing like the gentle overhead waterfall of his own, but it’s hot and the pressure prickles up his skin in sharp little pebbles. Frederick cups water into his face, scrapes and scrubs until it stings and he spits spray onto the tile. He cuts fingernail marks into the plain soap in the dish and rinses the teethmark furrows until they run sudsy and the ruddy stains drain all the way off. He swipes the soaking flop of hair from his face and doesn’t bother to hide his shaking. No one’s watching. No one would be watching in his hospital either—no cameras peering inside showers or cells directly. He couldn’t tell if Will Graham had ever sneezed or seized or so much as touched himself under his blankets. He has orderlies for those sorts of things, when it’s necessary. Frederick doesn’t need to peek out from behind the plasticky curtain to know that Graham hasn’t moved, except to stretch out his legs and shuffle himself with a low grunt.
“I don’t need minding to remember to scrub the blood from behind my ears,” he says over the blur of the water. Dear god, the blood . “You know, I only had your showers babysat when you couldn’t stand up by yourself.”
He hears nothing, nothing, shower staccato. Then, amused, “Generous of you.”
The dry, cutting little remarks—it’s a tiring, but earnest refrain Graham’s kept up from the moment he’d woken up choking around a breathing tube under armed guard. That is, when he deigned to talk at all. Exclusive care , Frederick can still see the shape of Graham’s mouth work around those words. And he still hasn’t managed to get a paper out of it.
He will. He will. He needs to get clean; he needs to get out of this house.
“Yes, it was.” Frederick runs a hand through his sopping hair and digs past the curtain, “I fought for you to be under my hospital’s roof during your treatment. Transfers to and from federal prison to Hopkins would’ve killed you.”
And put him under the unfettered scrutiny of Dr. Lecter, friendly with the staff of his alma mater and with enough residents partial to him to get him at least as far as peering past the federal guard on standby for a coma patient. Frederick got that view from the visitor’s side of safety glass on the BSHCI fifth floor low security ward. Unobstructed, hungrily watching the blips of Graham’s EKG for something to study that didn’t need consent or review board approval.
A soft snort, disbelieving warbles through the stiff plastic of the curtain. “You don’t know how to parse generosity from self interest.”
“Isn’t that the whole idea behind a little quid pro quo ? I seem to remember a little tit for tat from you not too long ago, so I could do without the lecture.” Frederick lets the water hit the planes of his shoulders, letting it shake him rather than the adrenaline wringing out from his muscles. The soap scalds his eyes, suds running into the creases of his lashes and they blur, burn. “I dream about Abel Gideon—that he takes my remaining kidney and my heart while he’s rummaging around in there. I don’t need to dream about whatever Hannibal Lecter is going to pull out of me this time.”
Graham takes his time answering. “You can’t run.”
A laugh, salt-bitter and acid, bubbles up his throat. “With enough sleeping pills, you can outrun just about anything.”
He’d never offered any to Graham—who kept sweating through the insult of open-back hospital gowns and chilled length of his bare legs at night, then in the jumpsuits kept scratchy blue by state standards that inevitably followed. Graham would probably be poorly thermoregulated the rest of his life, however long he managed to make it with the shadow of Dr. Lecter stitched to his bootheels.
Frederick had watched the nightmares take him firsthand—no thrashing, no tangling his legs in his regulation blankets. Terror made a whipcord line of Will Graham, frozen still with muscles winking under strained skin, eyes soft and darting under lids. He’d whimpered, could never quite wrench his jaw open all the way to scream until just the moment before he’d shipwreck awake.
“Not from the nightmares,” Graham corrects with that put-upon noise again. Frederick wants to rip down the curtain and strangle him about it. He’s not the one whose life is slipping out from under him. Not this time. “If you run, you look guilty.”
Frederick scrubs a hand over his face, waxy clean from grabbing at Graham’s bar soap. “You didn’t run and you looked plenty guilty.”
Hannibal Lecter’s been keeping an eye on him, making sure he gets the better grade.
The Chesapeake Ripper. Abel Gideon does feel like an anemic substitute in comparison.
Frederick swears, feels the hot flush of his neck and his chest start to pinch hard, and viciously twists off the shower. The tap patters to a dribble in the stark silence. There’s no towel; cold breathes in through the fingertip spaces between the tile and the curtain and where it scrapes against the old tub.
“Can I have a towel,” he says, breathing in the last thick air of the steam, “please?”
The curtain shuffles back. Not unkindly. Frederick knows what to do with unkind—stinging skin from Band-aids wrenched off, humiliation flushed and obvious across his chest, waking up to the news that one of the least-respected crime journalists had manually bagged him for nearly an hour and had waited by his sickbed to get the first interview afterwards. He doesn’t know what to do with Will Graham watching him, with all the heat letting out, with the water pasting his hair flat in the back to reveal his bald spot.
Frederick holds back a grimace at the dull ache and the watery sensation of weakness twitching in his low back, carving around his hip. Dr. Lecter hadn’t packed him a cane to go with the rest of his carry-on luggage—it’s always been more for the flair of it, even if Gideon did actually manage to knick something while spelunking in his retroperitoneal space.
Graham tilts a look at him. “I’m not in the business of making cases anymore.”
“Just the one very special one,” Frederick says and knows he’s got him there by the way Graham’s brows push up. “And I applaud you for trying to make something of yourself post incarceration, out from the thumb of the FBI, but you’re still the only other person to have walked this particular path and survived. And Jack Crawford seems like he might be amenable to listening to you, now.”
“No one’s listening to me these days,” Graham skirts a look to the side, laughing to himself in that way he does like he’s searching around for where his own private little joke has run off to. “They’re only asking for what they already want to hear.”
Frederick’s used to his body betraying him in new and exciting ways, small and large and humiliating. He can cover it up, with fine suits and finer lines on his resume, with cocooning himself away to heal in the wake of Gideon only to reemerge without anyone in his psychiatric circles having had to see the blood-streaked fragility of his organs or the first weeks full of bile and regurgitated soft foods.
But here, now, even shifting his hands can’t do much for a body that’s taking notice, buzzing and keyed-up, confused, aroused. Graham follows that twitch, the sudden pulse of tendons up his bare arms and down. And down. Frederick sets his jaw; nothing to apologize for, not when his ex-inmate seems determined to stand between him and the towel sitting on the far corner of the vanity. Actions, consequences, and as confusing as it is to be hard and ashamed, it’s still infinitely stranger to still be standing here with him.
“ I listened. I’m listening now,” Frederick says, suppressing a skittering shudder as a droplet darts down the back of his neck. “What is it you think I want to hear?”
Graham’s mouth tugs, irons out its little wrinkles like he finds something funny, but tries to keep it to himself. He moves, but Frederick has nowhere to go, so Graham crowds him close. Close enough that Frederick can see the translucence of the skin under his eyes, sleepless, rubbed tired, and above it all that serious blue gaze canted down.
Frederick flinches when a callused hand cups his interested cock. His heel cracks against the freezing tub, and his eyes startle shut under the pain and the suggestion of pressure that makes him nearly lightheaded. Lights dapple the dark behind his closed lids, mind spinning. Is this payback? Humiliation? Genuine interest? No, no —Frederick’s too smart for whatever game Will Graham is playing. But he can feel all his cleverness leaking out, dribbling down his back like the rest of the water beading off the ends of his hair. He scrambles after his willpower before it can spill out along with all the rest.
“That someone looked around at the devastation of their city and knew that Cassandra had always been telling the truth,” says Graham, gripping him steadily, weighing Frederick’s interest with insistence, thumbing at the foreskin to slip it back. Then pushing, working him in earnest, loose skin shifting with purpose. “That insisting you’re innocent will make a difference.”
“It made a difference for you.” Frederick peels his eyes open, mouth dry and slack and shivers at the chill, at the branding heat of Graham’s grip on his cock. “Eventually.”
“Eventually,” Graham— Will , Frederick can’t stop himself from thinking, staring at the little twists of too-long, humid curls—echoes, soft but pointed. “But Troy still burns.”
And Frederick stares down and down as Will goes to his knees, as the calluses vanish, as that mouth that smirked, scowled, frowned and frowned at him from behind bars parts for his cock. He chokes; Will doesn’t. Static snow blurs out the branded images of the men butchered on his countertops, the clean sectioning where Abel Gideon had been carved up for dinner, Hannibal Lecter in his ridiculous plastic suit. Helpless, hand curling against his own naked thigh. Frederick swallows a sharp noise when Will reaches his free hand up to pin that wrist, to keep his fingers splayed, going gently cold.
Why , he wants to ask.
He’s running out of time. He doesn’t know how far the FBI is behind him. Or if Hannibal has tracked him here, knew he would run, knew where he’d come—
Through lidded eyes, Frederick watches the crown of Will’s head move, the startled wet breaths he takes, the crude shivering slide of the tip of his cock against tongue and the ridges of the roof of his mouth. He wants Will to look up, so he can see the thick blue of his eyes cut out from under a spread of dark lashes. Desperately, he lets his head rock back, and his cock leaks at the thought, Will making an oddly soft grunt of surprise.
He doesn’t lift his head. Frederick screws his eyes shut and pretends.
He pretends all the way up until his chest stutters and he comes with a low, broken sound. No warning, no tapping, no place for his straining fingers to twist and tug as his hips stutter and Will Graham makes a noise Frederick’s only heard him make in his nightmare fits. The tiles echo with Frederick’s exhausted breaths and the ominous crack of Will’s knees as he silently gets to his feet. Frederick stares afterward, mournful and sick with something he doesn’t know how to name, at the semen spat into the sink. Age has stained it creamy yellow, all the better for the mucus white to stand out, dribbling in a slow slide to the drain, spotted on the edges of Will’s lips that he pushes off with the back of his hand.
The white line is to protect you , he’s always told the orderlies on their first go around the hospital. We’ve got cutters, pissers, and spitters here and even if you think you know which is which, I don’t recommend trying your luck.
He’s finally figured out which Will Graham is. Disappointment twists his gut.
Frederick shakes out of his daze when a towel thumps against his chest.
“Your clothes are down the hall,” says Will, and steps aside until he finally gets the hint and ducks out of the bathroom.
The door shuts definitively behind him. Frederick ambles, blank, down the narrow path to the only other room on the second floor, wondering vaguely if he should’ve offered Will a hand or if he should strain to hear what kind of sounds come out of his red, used mouth? The sink runs, loud enough to chase him down the hallway and into a room where his bag sits propped open on a chair. Reality slowly insinuates itself as Frederick drips all over the hardwoods, staring at the gape-mouthed zipper. He doesn’t know when Will— Graham —would’ve opened it, let alone propped up the garbage bag of his ruined clothes beside it.
Frederick scrubs a hand over his eyes and through his wet hair, unsure where to begin. Frankly, unsure how to begin taking stock of the past few days, hours, minutes. The smell of blood and Will Graham’s soap and the bleach-funk of come all sting his nostrils, phantom, some closer than others.
He pulls on his sweater and decides to thank any luck he’s still managed to hold onto that Will agreed to let him inside.
Frederick thrusts his hand around the bag, patting down his passport and his cash, and freezes when he glances back down at the bag to see a handgun sitting on top of it. He grips the unfamiliar gun carefully and lifts it off. He doesn’t even know what to begin to call it—revolver, definitely not a rifle, but he’s run out of names of guns he knows on sight—but it sits squared and black against his palm, finger too squeamish to curl near the trigger.
His forehead wrinkles hard. He doesn’t know when Will would’ve pulled a gun out either. He doesn’t know why he would’ve just left it here, either. Frederick fumbles it into the back of his waistband as carefully as he can. Might come in handy if Dr Lecter really has followed him out here to finish whatever job he started.
Your only choice will be to run , he’d whispered against Frederick’s skull, syrupy with the burn of the chloroform and jittery with all his thrashing.
Don’t run, said Will before his knees ever hit the tile.
Frederick scrabbles the rest of it into his bag, zips it up to hide the mess he’s made of it, but the gleam off the trash bag holds his attention. He barely startles at the soft pops and shifts of the floorboards and the brief waft of hand soap and artificial mint.
“I’m leaving. I’m leaving the country,” he says, without pretense, without waiting, then spins around and zips up his coat. He jerks his head towards the bag, then at Will, who stands in the doorway in his blue flannel and loose vest, watching him, faint and critical. “You’ll have to get rid of that.”
“I’m going to prove Hannibal Lecter is the Chesapeake Ripper.” Will looks away from him, casting a quick, put-upon glance to the window. “You took the gun.”
Frederick’s ratcheting anxiety and world grind to a halt. “What?”
Downstairs, the dogs begin to yip and bark. Then, the faint crunches and pops of gravel catching in slow-rolling tires gets louder and louder.
No.
Run, don’t run. He’s stumbled out of one trap and right into another, rabbit heart thrashing itself to death inside him. Will is going to prove that Hannibal Lecter is responsible, but no one ever believes Cassandra. That is the nature of her curse. She’s only right when the last bricks of the city fall.
No, no, no.
“Will.” Frederick's voice strains and he steps back, hand flirting with the gun tucked into his pants. “What have you done?”