Chapter Text
|||||||||||
|||||||||||
|||||||||||
Even remembering the cricket songs on hot nights, even in its community cooking and crackling radio – Will damns the bayou and everything it was a flag for. Like so much of his life and other mental files he calls pointless, he begs his mind to forget. (It can’t.)
There was no being different there. Minding one’s own business is a northern thing, a city folk thing. His dad wordlessly carried shame behind him like his third shadow (counting Will as the second of course), always seemed to care an awful lot about the nosy neighbors, even if, on the nights that he yelled, shame wasn’t so much on his mind.
In response, Will felt himself morphing into a wallflower with the sharpest tongue. Something he learned not from shame but from the well-buried resilience of any kid that grew up quiet but plenty angry.
Grass grows through pavement. So, of course, he recognizes the punching presence of another person forced into resilience at an early age… even if that person surrounds himself with wealth and propriety now.
Will hopes it’s a symptom of something – the reason he feels Dr. Lecter’s hand print for hours after a lingering touch – rather than the other thing. The undeniable connection thing. His doctor’s strangeness has a grip on Will. Trying to pull him into his cult of the pleasures like a siren of hell.
His sock catches on a large produce sticker half-stuck to the kitchen tiles.
It’s hard to assemble the string of data into coherent reasoning, but Will gets a bad feeling about Dr. Lecter. Or, rather, the threat posed by a kindred spirit when that common thread is violence.
Initially, the man’s plays at pursuing friendship fell between transparent manipulation and child psychology behavior models for creating bonds with traumatized youth. But, within the week, in a dramatic contrast, Dr. Lecter’s level of predilection for the taboo and straddling boundaries made a joke of his very own field.
He wants into Will’s brain, to take up more room there than anything else in his life. Just the doctor and his morbid curiosities to eclipse all other people and thoughts - forced to wear his discipline like a white coat or the world will see him for what he is: a man who can’t seem to help himself.
Which brings Will to his other disjointed feeling. Morbid curiosities and what tends to come after them. This psychiatrist in his life seems to be knocking on a wall hoping for an answer back. Unaware that the beast in Will’s chest has already seen daylight, is already well fed.
“What the hell do you want from me?” Will grumbles to the cold floor in his empty home. (Empty of conversation. An emptiness he either didn’t feel or didn’t hate just a month ago.)
The doctor’s – Hannibal’s – attempts at manipulation are obvious but still effective, which is a testament to his expertise. His wit and figure are disarming, while the prickly intimidation (that radiates around any room he’s in) makes for an arousing vulnerability. Will… wants to play the game. Find out who he’s dealing with. Another thing that Dr. Hannibal Lecter reminds him of: that Southern humidity. On the walls and skin, warping the air like it’s the Holy Spirit. He is something other than a man.
Will laughs at his own mental boundaries, speaking now to the rags under the kitchen sink. “Might as well be on a first name basis, even if you don’t know how close we are. I think I do.”
He recognizes another person who could never be ordinary. Whose childish morbid curiosity – awe of the lethal – never quite left. Never put down the magnifying glass when near a perfectly flammable ant hill, or couldn’t leave the wings on a butterfly. Will, too, couldn’t let the stick by the dead fox lie. He had to poke and poke. Always the scab scratcher.
To Hannibal, the mysteries in life seem to exist at the end of his machinations, where his fingertips cannot reach. Will muses, with no small sympathy, that it’s a quality born out of interrupted youth. Something, beyond just his arrogance and grassroot manipulations, separates Hannibal from the unquestionably human.
And lastly – or really firstly – as much as Will is loath to acknowledge, there is a friction point for any potential investigation: the man is disarmingly flirtatious. What’s worse, it comes from self awareness. More and more, Will finds he envies the talent and craves the attention that Hannibal offers. (Even if he’s just the dead fox of the month.)
The stubborn residue finally lifted from the floor, Will can admit to his own procrastination. (Intentional stagnation.) A full minute of his daylight life spent on removing sticker glue from his kitchen floor with a thumbnail and wet cloth while his evening life drags him to the underworld. Call that enlightenment. What Jack sees as a third eye, Will sees as a haunting, a willful possession.
The sound of hooves. Before he has a chance to look out the window – where he knows a feathered cervine creature waits just to stare back – his phone rings.
The number is familiar, even though he hasn’t felt the need to save a contact in at least five years.
“Hello?”
“Will, good morning. Is this a good time?”
And, God, it’s nice to hear his voice.
There’s no crackling or tinny quality to it; it’s clear to the point that Will swears he can feel the man’s breath fill the shell of his ear. “Depends on what you’re asking for,” Will quips, attempting deadpan but approaching something cheekier. Christ! What was the purpose of his paranoid anxieties if he walks right into the fire?
The cheekiness puts a bounce in the conversation that he knows his doctor thrives in.
“A moment of conversation… to invite you to my home this evening for dinner. I’m aware it’s last minute.”
Will chuckles grimly. As if ‘last minute’ would ever run into conflicting evening plans for him. The vet, the dentist, and auto shop all close at four. “Dinner. Is that standard practice with your patients?”
A puff of humored breath out through Hannibal’s nose. “No. I would never socialize with a patient.”
Will spares a moment for hesitation to consider the loss of their office conversations. So this is it. The puppeteer shifts the environment and Act One fades to black. So soon? The worst thing he could do right now is point out his awareness of the machinations. Yet, “was this velocity always intended in your plans for me or am I special?”
He’s met with silence. Then, “I have a great many plans for you, but if you have a trajectory you believe I’m following, I’d love to hear it.”
“The trajectory I think you’re following or the trajectory you want me to hope for?” What began as an accusation became a flirtation. Will can practically feel the strings around his wrists. He rubs his wincing eyes.
With a smile in his voice, Hannibal pivots the remark back to him, “now I admit I am more curious about your thoughts on the latter: not what you believe I’m doing, but what you believe I’m wanting .”
Painted himself right into a corner with this one. Well, there’s always deflection. Deflection hasn’t let Will down yet. “What time tonight?”
Sounding pleased with himself, Hannibal chirps, “come at six, we can eat at seven thirty.”
— —-
And that’s enough to bring him here, apparently, because he’s knocking on an opulent door in Chandler Square at 6:04pm.
He can hear a poised tap tap tap tap of leather on wood. Will wonders if the doctor even knows how eager his own footsteps sound. Will feels, not for the first time, like a toy. Or an artifact to entice the world of scholars around him.
The door opens to something exciting , too, and all agitation ebbs away. Maybe it is not so bad to be a shiny new thing. Hannibal's hair has fallen over his brow, his sleeves show off his forearms, his apron bright white over a navy shirt. If Will is wrong, if Hannibal doesn’t want him to want him, then maybe he actually is oblivious to the amount of power he has… over everyone.
No. Tonight will no doubt be a night of revelations, but finding out Hannibal Lecter has self esteem issues won’t be one of them. Even the glow of the foyer lights flirt with his form, haloing around him.
“Will, thank you for joining me and apologies again for the short notice,” Hannibal says while pivoting, making an effort not to miss a second of Will’s first entry into his home.
“Did a spot free up at your table?” Will asks, shedding his coat.
Hannibal takes the coat and smooths it before placing it on a black hanger. “A spot is often free at my table,” he says with a smirk, “if I am gleaning what you’re asking.”
Another heavy-handed play at ignorance over Will’s ambivalence. He’s ambivalent right? That’s why he spent 45 minutes this afternoon moving his mattress upstairs on the off chance this week becomes… busier? “That’s not– Jeez,” Will mutters, running a hand down his face. He came here tonight to bait and he is living his own catch and release, just hook after conversational hook.
With the plastered on, half-genuine-half-lie smile that he often dons around Will, Hannibal gets ahead of the inevitable rambling. “May I pour you something to drink while I finish the preparations?”