Chapter Text
The doors of the visiting room adjoining Hannibal’s cell bang open. A figure storms through, bathed in wrath and scowling.
“Will.”
Hannibal looks genuinely surprised. His eyes are soft for just a bleed of a second before the serene mask mutes his features.
“Which part of not finding me or not looking for me would this be?”
The curl of Will’s lip is partially hidden behind the paper he slams against the glass.
“The fuck is this.” His anger sucks any questioning lilt from his tone.
Hannibal squints and scans the letter between them.
“A letter,” he says blandly.
“No,” Will says between his teeth, “this.” He jabs his finger at the upper right corner. At the drawing.
Hannibal frowns with a purse of his lips. “That,” he replies, “is a –“
“I know what it is!” Will retorts, pulling the paper away in an ugly crumple. “What the fuck is it doing on your letter?”
The question of why did you even write to me at all goes unsaid, hanging between them like a fine mist.
“I’m afraid I have no idea,” Hannibal tells him, hands clasped neatly behind his back. Will narrows his eyes.
“I highly doubt that, Dr. Lecter.” Will shoves the balled up letter into his pocket, making a note to straighten it later, which is quickly followed by a well of appalment at the thought.
Hannibal tilts his head and looks to the ceiling. “You are correct,” he admits, “I might have some idea.”
“What idea is that?” Will says, packing as much venom into each syllable as he can.
“The orderlies here have a penchant for crudeness. I have opened one or more letter to find its contents already… compromised. It’s entirely possible they defaced my correspondence.”
He turns away from Will and paces the too-small length of his cell. Will swallows down the rush of bile he feels at seeing Hannibal so caged. It doesn’t look right. He finds himself glad that Hannibal’s back is turned at that precise moment, so he cannot see this uncomfortable bloom of sympathy knocking at his chest.
“You’re saying you had nothing to do with this?”
Hannibal nods his head and Will scoffs. “You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to believe.”
“Forgiveness was never our suit, Will. However, I will remind you that you have seen my drawings. You know my hand. That,” he waves a disinterested hand towards the paper in Will’s pocket, “is not exactly my style.”
“No,” Will says very carefully, “it isn’t.”
“If you could also please explain to me what I might have to gain by drawing genitalia and sending it to you, I would be obliged.”
Will racks his brain, as he has done several times over since opening the letter. “I don’t know,” he answers, “the best I’ve come up with is ‘to fuck with me.’”
“Will,” Hannibal says, “I think we both know I relinquished that weapon.” He stops pacing in the center of the room and raises both arms to encompass his limited surroundings.
Will lets out a breath. “Okay.” Then, again, quieter, “okay.”
He doesn’t apologize. If he didn’t apologize to Hannibal for having a hand in his incarceration, he’s not going to apologize for accusing him of drawing dicks on his stationary. They stare at each other for a while in pregnant silence. Hannibal’s eyes start to warm, and Will can feel it in his blood.
He should turn away now, not say goodbye, just leave and never think again about Hannibal Lecter and the cage that will slowly collapse in on him. He won’t think about the circles under his eyes that were never there before, or the odd spaces in the lining of his prison jumpsuit from the weight he’s lost. He won’t think about the harsh and angular cot that looks sure to rust within a few years, how it will pain and jar his bones. He won’t think about Hannibal Lecter, dying in this cell with nothing but old read-over books and white walls to watch him go. He’ll walk away now, when there’s still hope for him left.
“Was there anything else you wished to say, Will?”
Except Hannibal Lecter’s voice has always sounded like rich Arabica coffee, with just a hint of cinnamon, and Will has been so, so tired. He slumps his shoulders forward a little, blinks back the regret from his eyes, and looks up.
“How – how have you been?”
Hannibal smiles.
-x-
They talk for another twelve minutes before Alana tersely ushers him out, and Will doesn’t miss the hard glare she casts over her shoulder at Hannibal as they exit.
“Don’t visit him again,” she says, and it’s meant to sound pleading, but she’s too angry and it comes out like a command, which scratches at Will entirely the wrong way.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Bloom,” he says with a twitch of his nose, “I wasn’t aware you were my keeper too.”
Her face softens immediately, and she puts a tender hand on his arm. “Will, I didn’t – it’s for your own good, you know that.”
“Spare me,” he near-spits, “since when have you known shit about my own good.”
It’s needlessly cruel, and she flinches from the sting of it, but there is too much feeling spinning around and hitting hard at his insides right now. He needs air, he needs quiet, he needs to be back in Wolf Trap and away from all this fucking madness. He needs something to settle the rage and guilt and sadness and that other thing he doesn’t name slamming against his ribs.
Whiskey will do.
He drinks himself into a mild stupor and falls into a heavy sleep filled with dreams of linen cloth. Sheets of it draped over him in lush, artful folds as Hannibal sketches him under pale sunlight. Will knows without it being spoken that he is not permitted to look at Hannibal as he works, but he steals a glance anyway and finds himself weighted down by a raw gaze, sharp with hunger. Hannibal licks his lips once, his wrist working in sharp flicks as he pulls the charcoal over the page.
“Look away,” he says, and Will does, the tightness in his stomach turning with him.
The last thing he hears before he wakes is Hannibal’s voice, rumbling and echoing inside him.
“Beautiful.”
The next letter comes eight days later, but Will waits another three days before he opens it. When he does, his fingers tremble.
It’s not a letter at all. It’s a charcoal sketch. One of Hannibal’s.
Slim thighs with a fine dusting of hair, jutting hip bones that point in a vee towards the coarser hair that gathers and curls lower. A thicket of it, nestling a penis that rests, softened, between those slim thighs. An impossibly detailed penis.
Will’s penis.
He doesn’t need to, but he stretches out the waistband of his boxers with a thumb and takes a cursory glance below to confirm that things match up. Of course they do.
He’s not going to march into Hannibal’s cell and demand an explanation this time. He’s not going to give him the satisfaction. He folds the sketch back into its envelope and sets it on the kitchen table, pours himself a sizeable drink.
Then he takes the sketch out again and examines it, bewildered. Hazy memory tells him that Hannibal must have seen him naked on at least two occasions when he changed his clothing unconscious, but the memory alters itself and adds another slide.
Pictured: Hannibal Lecter, sitting at his bedside, Will laying naked and supine, artfully arranged and breathing softly as Hannibal just… stares.
It should disturb him, disgust him even, he should feel violated, and he does, only – he also feels a heady twisting throb between his legs that does not belong there at all.
He picks up the phone.
Hannibal doesn’t even sound surprised.
“Hello, Will.”
“Tell me you didn’t touch me when I was like that.”
He can hear the sudden snap of cold hurt. “Never.” It’s said quickly and insistently, and it’s the first thing Hannibal’s said to him in a long time that he instantly believes.
“It’s still fucking creepy that you did that,” Will says, though there is far too much teasing laced in his voice. Hannibal doesn’t even reply but he can hear the dismissive shrug. Art is in the eye of the beholder, or some shit like that.
“Why did you send me this?”
“Because,” Hannibal replies, “I wanted to show the clear distinction between my skill and that of other… inferior artists. To serve as a clarification, if you will.”
Will rubs at his temple, squeezing his skull between thumb and forefinger. “I didn’t need a clarification, Hannibal.”
“Mm. Perhaps I did.”
“What part of ‘I don’t want to think about you’ don’t you understand?”
Hannibal’s silence echoes like a heartbeat. “You know I have no control over that, Will.”
Will sighs, a heavy exhale that takes away none of the roiling feeling that’s still holding sticky in his gut. “This is really weird, what you did. It’s weird knowing that you know… that.”
“Your naked form?”
“Specifically my dick,” he says needlessly, and bites on his tongue shortly after. The words came out far too low and rough. He can hear the spreading of Hannibal’s smile.
“Would you like me to send you mine?” He pauses before adding, “Even Steven?”
Will’s breath hitches, once. He does not say no.
He hangs up before he can say anything else.
-x-
The picture arrives five days later. He looks at it once, briefly, then sets it in the back of his bedside drawer. The very thought of looking again heats him too-hot too-fast, makes his lungs burn uncomfortably like he’s run a marathon.
He waits a day, then another, and another still, until one morning he can no longer bear it and pulls the drawer nearly off its hinges. The paper sits there, waiting. Will suddenly wishes he had taken a drink first, something to numb the mass yet again uncoiling inside him. Tendrils of things long buried reaching out and stroking gently. He takes the picture in his hand.
It is roughly the same frame as the one of Will: thighs, hips, and that which lies between. Hannibal’s thighs are thicker, the hair there more liberally dispersed. His hipbones don’t stick out as much as Will’s, but they protrude more than they should. Where Will expected the slight swell of a belly, there is only flatness.
Flatness and the shadow of an exceptionally hard cock angled toward it.
Of course Hannibal is fully erect, and proudly so. Will can count on one hand the amount of dicks he’s seen in his life, including his own, but this one is – well, impressive, to say the least. He finds himself swallowing unconsciously and he lets his vision blur for just a moment, just to pull himself back. But then the image regains focus, and he traces with his eyes every fine detail; the curvature of a thick vein that runs along the underside, the foreskin stretched taut and pulled back, the way the head shines slick even in its black-and-white reproduction. One clear bead swells from the tip, forever poised and ready to drip down.
A strange sound echoes from Will’s throat, halfway between a gasp and a moan, far too high in his register for him to know what to do with. A tiny bolt of electricity lights up in his groin and he palms himself sternly through his shorts.
“No,” he says firmly, “we’re not going there.”
His dick twitches mutinously. This is not the reaction he had prepared himself for.
Taking a centering breath that still shakes on the exhale, he folds the paper in half and sets it back in the drawer. Then he flings himself backward onto his bed and digs the heels of his hands hard into his eye sockets.
This needs more than a phone call.
He shows up at the BSHCI two days later, and Alana’s face looks drained and ashen.
“No,” she says quietly when she sees him, but it’s less of a denial and more of a woeful acceptance.
Will raises an appeasing palm. “I just need to tell him to stop, then I’ll be out of your hair and I won’t come back.”
“Yeah,” she replies, her voice hollow. She doesn’t ask ‘stop what’. Her mouth stays in a grim line as she begins the procedure of checking him through. When they get through to Hannibal’s cell he is standing at attention, face inches from the glass. His face doesn’t light up when he sees Will, because it’s already been lit up for several minutes in anticipation.
“I’ll be monitoring this conversation,” Alana says to the both of them.
Hannibal tuts loudly. “What happened to trust, Alana?”
Alana visibly bristles, then turns on her heels. “It’s Dr. Bloom,” she retorts, but the silent ‘fuck you’ is clearly heard by them both.
When the outermost door echoes shut, Will steps closer to the glass.
“Tell me why,” he demands.
“As I told you, Will. Even Steven.”
“Yes, but why… like that.”
Hannibal inclines his head thoughtfully. “It is an accurate depiction of my state when I think of you.”
Will’s eyes widen a fraction. “Since when?”
“Don’t play the fool.”
“I’m really not.”
Hannibal looks at him then, really looks at him, honeyed eyes reaching into the outer reaches of Will’s skull and tugging at the shreds of truth they can find. His mouth parts in humbled surprise.
“Did you really not know?”
“I knew… some things,” Will tells him, “I thought you wanted to destroy me.”
Hannibal draws out his hands from behind his back, and one hovers over the glass between them. “There is a fine line between consumption and destruction. You will find me upon its edge.”
He lets his palm sit there for a moment, watches Will watch it, still as a deer on the verge of startling. Quietly, he takes his hand away and places it by his side. Will looks at him with a new sort of fear, his eyes horribly wet.
“How long?”
Hannibal laughs once and with light solemnity. “Always.”
Will returns the mirthless laugh. “And this is how you choose to tell me?”
“I chose to show you truth.”
Something rattles at a cage Will has buried deep. The soil above it vibrates, disturbed. He lifts his palm to the glass.
“Truth.” Both question and request. Hannibal stares at his hand intently without moving and Will realizes he is memorizing his fingerprints. He presses harder, hopes he leaves an imprint.
“Truth is the only gift I have left for you,” Hannibal says.
“I don’t know if I can call this a gift.” Will releases his hand and wipes at his face with the back of his hand. It comes away damp and he grimaces. Hannibal looks pained.
“I did not mean –“
“Yeah, you did.”
Backing away from the cell, Will shoves his hand in his pockets. The paper there crinkles under his fingertips and it echoes obscenely between them. Hannibal cocks his head once and inhales sharply through his nose.
“Will.” His eyes are glowing. Will says nothing.
“Will,” Hannibal says again, softer now, “would you like me to show you more truth?”
Slowly, Will breathes in, holds it. Their gazes hold and lock.
“You have my address.”
-x-
Will doesn’t check his mailbox for two weeks.
When he finally does, it is jammed so tight he tears a few envelopes digging them out. Panic laces an icy shock through him, but thankfully it’s only junk mail and bank statements. Nestled between the rest of it is one slightly bent envelope addressed in a hauntingly familiar cursive. He opens it immediately.
The picture inside is not what he is expecting, and it sends him instantly to his knees. A broken cry spills out of him before he can clap his hand to his mouth.
On the page before him, Hannibal has sketched the two of them, only to the waist. They are held together in gentle embrace, Will’s hand cupping Hannibal’s shoulder, Hannibal’s hand resting on his lower back. Their heads are tucked together, eyes closed, and their mouths are fitted in an achingly tender kiss. Will can see the tears just under Hannibal’s lashes, the restraint wound through his muscles even as he holds Will tight, for fear he will bruise him once mroe. On Will’s own face he can see the tiny crease of a frown, the bittersweet pain writ there as he accepts this awful love that has wrestled its way forward to the joining of their mouths.
And this, drawn here, is love. There is no other possible way to describe it.
Will picks up the phone.
The line connects with a heavy click, but Hannibal remains silent. They listen to each other breathe.
“This is truth?” Will asks.
Hannibal does not reply.
Will swallows thickly. It echoes like a stone dropped in water.
“Send me another,” he says, and ends the call.