Chapter Text
Violence has a taste.
It’s not something that’s easy to explain to others. Not to normal people, not to his students or to the various members of the Bureau he has known in the past. For all the many and myriad talents, traits and tricks, inborn and learned and happened-upon that at this point in the history of the world are almost a requirement of law enforcement, this particular gift (curse is more accurate, but they find him too useful to let him speak that truth) of his is still rare. True empathy, they call it. Not mind-reading, no simple surface-skimming always too foreign to assign real meaning. He is a blank slate, an empty vessel, waiting to be filled up by what others leave behind.
He wears gloves whenever outside the familiarity of his own home. Even so most crime-scenes are enough to send him choking, filling his throat with bitterness, rotting meat and coffee grounds and sharp musk. Emotion so strong imprints itself into the very air. When he lets it in the clock flicks back and he finds himself alien, a watchful presence cradling another’s mind. Passion oozes into him, like falling into darkness.
It’s easy after that to go through the motions, shadowing what he has now done before, explaining himself as he goes. The fevered logic, the sexual or near-sexual satisfaction. The many motives, sometimes banal, rarely unique. He is blind to the watchful eyes of others, always wary, the little moments of fear that appear sharp as shattered glass in the shifting of a stance, the turning of a head whenever he is around. In the ghost of the past they no longer exist.
However much he absorbs the spoor of the horrible however, he can never reconstitute it into something others can truly comprehend. For all his examples in the lecture halls of the Academy, all he can use are the dry words of academia, plain photographs, arcane diagrams dredged up from scores of old works. He has felt the powers of others written and rewritten on the palimpsest inside his skull, which makes him a natural choice for teaching, yet he can never explain himself.
It’s strange really, almost a joke, that for all the other people that he has had inside his head (and not all of them monsters, despite that most of them are) it doesn’t make being around them any easier. Or perhaps not so strange. He does not like people. He does not like how much he knows about them. He does not like seeing so much. Hence the gloves; else with every handshake he would become no more than a mirror, constantly warping into someone else.
Jack Crawford, leader and currently head-hunter for the Behavioural Studies Unit, is not a mirror, nor someone Will would particularly like to reflect. His affable manner belies the strength that lies at his fingertips, the runes tattooed across the back of his hands, the old scars and more recent wounds that pattern palms and wrists. He is a man of good intentions – Will needs no more than glances to see that – and good at what he does as well. And it seems he has need of an empath.
There is no harm in accepting his request. If he is to be constantly at the mercy of the peculiarities of his own brain, the least he can do is to use if for good. He has tried locking himself away from the world before and found that world so narrowed becoming cloying, stifling, the mirror reflecting back upon itself in an endless parade of feverish dreams of things felt before. It is better when at least there are new terrors to make him sweat at night, rather than the same old ones constantly repeated in new and worse variations. He has found in his current post a kind of equilibrium.
The missing corpses of this new case are not so out of the ordinary. The uses of the dead are many and manifold, black magic being a way that contains within it many paths to power. There are darker things lurking in the shadows of the world than many would like to consider or acknowledge. Sacrifice, consumption, the rendering into parts for spells and potions... But this does not have quite that sense about it. This is not impersonal. These girls are important to their killer. Representative of something he loves and longs for. A sacrament.
The house of the most recent victim is heavy with the rose-petal perfume of love but beneath is the subtle scent of decay. A cat watches him unblinking from the foot of the stair, and when he makes to approach it guides him upwards, knowing. It scratches at the door, pawing. Dark shadows spill out from the crack underneath in a parody of light. Will breaths in. The visions are back.
Not hallucinations, although he once thought that might be so. They come in the small hours of the night, or when he is worn, or tired, or burdened with stress. Or when the world (or some unexplained power he does not know or understand) seems trying to tell him something. Visions are thought to be the preserve of shamans, oracles and prophets, or else conjured only with much preparation and ritual. He is, has done, none of the above. He does not know what it means that he sees such things.
He gives the cat to the father to hold, a protection against the death that lies beyond the threshold, and enters. The girl, Elise, is lying in still repose, perfect but for the small blossoms of wounds upon her torso. He can see her soul (a preserve of these in-between moments, these vision-times that can last for days or weeks or, rarely, longer). It flutters unhappily around her body. She has not been dead long enough for it to leave.
Crawford is gentle with him before he is left alone to take in the scene. He is given the freedom to approach it in his own way, and the promise of solitude away from those who so quickly become frightened of him and what he takes into himself. He can tell that the murder happened here. There is more than one ghost, and only one is dead. He stands where the other stood and opens himself up. Feels shuddering, grasping, hungry love, consuming love. Feels a man acting in fear. Feels the raw need that must be quieted by any means.
And then, suddenly, interrupted. For a moment he looks up with a monster’s eyes. But the woman is not the echo of his prey and so he shatters apart and reforms as himself. She is talking, too fast, too friendly, too familiar. He is badly off balance, stammers answers, tries to regain his feet. For a long moment the woman has the face of a fox. Then there are others, Crawford, another man, and it all ebbs and seeps away, and sharp-edged normality brushes aside the cobwebs of a fever dream. He is left with his conclusions which he carefully explains.
After, when he is no longer needed, he is permitted to go home.
----
That night the visions come again. By this point he has already adopted another half-wild guardian into his pack, but the door to the otherworldly still opens no matter how many watchers he has gathered to stand by the gate. Elise rises out of his reach, her side soaked in blood, on her back with her limbs hanging like a sacrifice laid out over a sacred stone. Life drips from her and lands on him like rain on hungry earth. It is soaked up and gone. He wakes sweating. For him sleep is always elusive, broken by fears and illusions and metaphors given flesh. They are the terrors of his memories, or else they hold some subtle truth. The latter never make sense to him, but that does not stop them coming. He exists in a constant state of insomnia. Inhabiting the power of true empathy as he does, reality never seems truly real.
There are more dreams when he slips back under, but (a strange mercy) he does not remember them.
----
Crawford is less patient with him next morning, pressing for answers in an Academy bathroom the red of arterial blood. There are fresh cuts hidden beneath bandages just visible at the cuffs of his shirt; he has been looking for answers in other places and has found none. Will bears it as well as he can. He has the morning for his lectures before he must attend the autopsy of Elise, perhaps open himself up to her shade in hope it might retain some shadowed memory of the killer’s face.
When he arrives the vulpine woman, Katz, is there with her spirit guide padding at her heels. The other lab techs are Zeller, who bears magi tattoos similar to those Crawford wears, albeit less advanced, and Price, whose skin ripples with the unreal phantoms of animal hides. He is a shape-changer, though Will would not see it at other times. Now he penetrates more deeply. They continue their work with little regard for his presence – outwardly, but he is not blind, he does not miss their wariness. They speak of little magics, tracking spells for the scrap of pipe, workings to glean some speck of knowledge from skin and hair and cloth.
The ghost of Elise watches, subtle as smoke. Will does not have to open himself much to feel her melancholy, her sorrow. Speech fades into murmur as the black shadows of the plastic body-bag catch his gaze, and the girl’s spectre caresses him as the apparition, half vision, half empathic taint, blossoms into existence in the dark.
The antlers spring from her like fast-growing fungus, slicked with blood that also stains the purity of her dress in brilliant rosettes. She looks at him and pleads. This close to all that remains of her, he slips into a mind ripe with the gasping need for air as she, or he, is strangled, pinned down, suffocated.
He rips himself away with an effort, shattering the container of his mind to let the ghost drain away. “She was mounted on them,” he says, as the dregs of the killer’s mind he captured before echo within his words. “Like hooks. She may have been bled.”
They see the liver then, cut and replaced. For a moment they take it (wrongly, once more) as botched black magic, a failure to fulfil whatever narrow criteria the arcane objective required. He corrects them quickly.
“There was something wrong with the meat.”
Consumption. Cannibalism. It is sometimes odd, how even murderers who gladly take dark paths will balk from that act. Taboos even they will not defy. This man takes these girls into himself, makes them a part of him, absorbs their very essence. Even had anything remained of the others, there would be no ghosts for them. He must own them, that they never escape.
He loves so deeply he must devour.
----
A day or two later he wakes from dreams of raw flesh, sticky and fresh and torn from the bone with a predator’s teeth. His heart beats like a drum in his ears, like something wild and feral. The taste of blood is still in his mouth. When he walks into Jack Crawford’s office that morning he meets Hannibal Lecter for the first time.
He is (it dawns on him right away that it is camouflage) a vision in beige, tall, pale, with dark eyes and a face that could only be called striking. Crawford introduces him, a psychologist here to help profile their cannibal. There is something about him that puts Will on edge, something he cannot quite define. There is some indefinable power about him, but that is not odd if he has been judged fit by the Bureau. When the light hits him, that man’s eyes seem to glow red.
Will could try and slip inside his head if he wanted, envelop him in empathy, but his curiosity is not enough to break long habit. It can be easy to get lost, if the other mind is still close by.
They exchange words, too sharp-edged for banter, too personal for professional interest. When he makes eye contact he is for a moment startled at how little he can see there. How much lurks, hidden, in deep depths. It does not take long to discern Jack’s real intent in bringing the man here. An empath is a danger. He must be analysed, corralled. Weighed and measured and perhaps fixed, if some way could be found to do so. Will knows there is none. He knows his own mind with the precision of one who would have been lost long ago if he did not. Even now it can be difficult to hold on, and he sometimes thinks he changes a little more with each new mind he takes into himself.
Still, angry, he leaves. Lecter is curious, but not so curious that he will let him into his head. There is too much darkness there. There is a reason why he is feared. Better Crawford not see it. He has it under control.
----
For a moment he thinks the tableau to be another vision. It has that same surreal quality. But it does not move and it does not leave, and eventually he must acknowledge it to be real. But it is not right. It does not fit the pattern. There is no love in this. There is nothing at all, no emotional spoor to perfume the air save some distant trace of disgust like the aftertaste of vomit. This is not their killer, their ‘Shrike’.
The mind here is slippery and hard to envelop. It has not felt deeply enough to imprint the air. Still he tries, gets little glimpses, the satisfaction of a predator, and hunger too. He does not need to get more of this murderer to know he has eaten of the victim. She is empty and hollow, and for a moment he sees her as shrivelled as a mummy, dried up of all her essence.
Whoever devoured this woman did not do it from a place of respect, from love. He did not want to keep some sliver of her close to his heart. He wanted to destroy her, and in so doing make all her strength his. And yet, for all that this is so very, very different to those who have come before, to Elise and all those others, it is different in the way the negative of film mirrors the true image. With clarity he dredges up the mind of the Shrike and understands that self better.
The insights come rolling from his mouth for Crawford and the others to hear. This is another step upon the road to catching their cannibal, and there is some dark part of him that almost wants to thank this cold, strange, psychopath for making it possible.
Who is this copycat?
----
There is another vision that night. While the cleansing waters of the shower soak him his eyes look out upon a different realm. In the forest depths the creature waits for him, chimerical thing of stag and crow, prey and predator, virile life and scavenging death. It watches him and beckons. Blood drips from the arcing tines of its antlers. He makes to follow it, but it bursts into a crowd of dark wings and is gone.
----
Lecter visits him in the morning with food and polite requests for entry. Not that Will thinks he is vampyr, for aside all else it is day and the sun is out. It is more likely that, being European, he adheres to tradition. There are some magii whose powers are weakened by thresholds, after all.
They eat in the half-light that Will prefers, when more is too much for sensitive senses and less brings on the horrors of the night. Lecter has brought him his own cooking, a powerful gift. Indeed, as Will eats it he can feel strength filling him, the shadows receding, or at least gathering in less obtrusive forms. The man opposite watches him eat with satisfaction, but that does not stop him from bringing up the subject of their last meeting, one that Will has no interest in discussing.
“God forbid we become friendly,” Hannibal says, and Will admits to himself his desire to know more of this man through normal means, not the cheat that his powers might offer him.
“I don’t find you that interesting,” he lies.
“You will,” Lecter replies. It is a promise truly meant. Again for the briefest moment his eyes turn from brown to red, the lustrous colour of a steak waiting for the hot pan. It’s an odd metaphor to spring to mind, but he knows instinctually that it’s the right one.
More metaphors sprout from their conversation, and Will finds himself become a teacup, and then a mongoose. He is surprised to find himself laughing – it has been a long time since he last did so. He feels oddly at ease in a way he never does around another person. What makes Hannibal Lecter so unique? So strangely charming?
When they leave the motel, as Hannibal passes the threshold, his shadow becomes strange, pulls apart into a multitude. Then it is one once more, and they are in the car and on the hunt. Will feels almost... peaceful. His belly is full and satisfied, and he feels better and stronger than he has in some time.
----
There is blood on his face and in his mouth. The taste is a bitter tang. The air is full of the calls of phantom crows, the rustle of feathers, the hiss of blood spurting from an artery. His hands are shaking. All of him is shaking. Hannibal’s eyes are dark pools, calm and placid and unreadable. Hannibal’s grip is tight and assured around a neck slick with blood. Will does not know what to do.
He has killed, and it was not within the memories of another’s mind. It was his own, and it felt good. Satisfying. What does that mean? What does that say about him? Is it the fault of all those others he has assimilated, has felt as if he was the killers themselves? Was it inevitable?
It seems a long time before the ambulance arrives. The house stinks of death and pain and Will is mired in it, drowning in it. His fingers clutch at Hannibal’s jacket, desperate for a life-line. The man is sure and steady. Whatever his gift or curse the aura of this room, the dead Shrike, the dying daughter, is not suffocating him as it threatens to do to Will. He hangs on and hopes for the help that finally comes.
When it is over, and the paramedics pull him out of the house, take the girl away yet living, he knows little more about the mystery that is Hannibal Lecter than he did before. Only that he was there when Will needed him, that he did not panic at the sight of human blood. That even in the horror of that moment he gave nothing away, did not foul the air with fear on top of fear. Did he fear?
No more mysteries for today. Will only wants to be clean, to wash away the blood. He is dirty, and death clings to him.
He goes home.