Archive of Our Own

‘Oh, please don’t go –
We’ll eat you up – we love you so’
- Maurice Sendak ‘Where the Wild Things Are’

*

He can't recall the fall, or which of them broke the choppy waves first, but he can remember Will's hand on the back of his neck, hot as a brand in contrast with the icy water that swallows them. The ocean has a hungry, cold vastness that unsettles even Hannibal, washing them against the rocks like flotsam – and with as little regard for their autonomy.

Hannibal pries Will from the grip of the Atlantic like a salvage tug bringing up a haul – first straining with the weight of the water, the ocean clinging greedily, unwilling to surrender her bounty – and then all at once Will is birthed from seafoam. He tears himself from the grip of the grave and onto Hannibal's legs, sputtering and clinging, raging against the siren lure of death. The cold, sour stink of saltwater masks the sweet copper scent of blood, but Hannibal can feel Will's life slowly seeping into his hands like air from a punctured car tire.

“Hannibal,” Will croaks. He crawls over Hannibal's lap and onto the rock, vomiting water and blood back into the ocean, shaking with the force of it. “Hannibal, are we alive?”

Hannibal climbs onto his knees beside Will and puts one hand in Will's mop of curls. He'll have to move them elsewhere soon, to see to Will's wounds and his own, but for one second, two, three, he lets waves crash over their feet while Will Graham turns and breathes hot and slow against his wet skin. “We're alive.”

*

They have the good fortune of locating a hunting cabin, hunched close to the water, but safely sheltered from view from both the main road and any naval efforts. The door is locked, but the frame is weakened by dry rot. Hannibal uses the butt of a rusted wood splitter and hits it only twice before the strike plate surrenders its prize: a dry, well-kempt interior with an unmade bed, a little iron-bellied chiminea attached to a stovepipe vent, and an open closet stacked with transparent storage totes. The cabin is well-stocked but weathered, and a layer of fine dust suggests the owner visits only on occasion.

Will bears it with surprising stoicism when Hannibal hauls him into the building and deposits him with care onto the bed, going limp with pain and exhaustion. They don't speak; there's no need and no energy to spare for it.

Blankets procured from the closet will help do the job that Will's body will soon fail to, if left unattended. “I need to remove your clothes, Will. Do you have the strength to stand for me once more?”

Will shivers, jaw clenched, soaked with seawater and blood. “Pretty forward of you,” he says, mouth twisted around an attempt at humor, too cold and in too much pain for his usual wry sarcasm to have any bite. The attempt alone gives Hannibal hope. “If it'll help with the hypothermia.”

“It will only be the first step, I'm afraid.” It takes some work, but Hannibal pries Will from his silt-filled shoes and removes him from his clothes, button by button. Even with a bullet wound in his belly, he can appreciate how well-made Will is. There's a slight leanness to him, a compact grace. Hannibal looks once, an assessing sweep from head to toe, Will scrutinizing him in return, and then politely averts his eyes from Will's nude form. Will takes a blanket without comment, sagging back onto the bare mattress.

A first aid kit provides Hannibal a sterile means to staunch the receding tide of life that swells from every angle of Will's body. He sets it on the table and lights an emergency candle with a match, the low sizzle of sulphur a comfort, a promise of warmth. Hannibal coaxes a fire to life in the empty stomach of the chiminea, and the kindling lights quick and hot. The flame will die before the night is through, but Hannibal has more pressing tasks at hand.

The wound in Will's chest is clean, Dolarhyde's knife work brutal, but his blade sharp and short. With no suture kit to stitch him, there's little that can be immediately done about Will's face except to cover it – time, quality of care, and genetics will prove telling on how he'll scar. Will hunches, blood dripping from his fingers onto the floor while Hannibal kneels between his feet, too tired to stand to complete his task.

“You need a hospital,” Will says, slurring, jaw stiff with pain. Hannibal can smell it on him, see the way it makes Will's eyes glassy. He looks savage, feral, lovely, and he has no concern for himself.

“The bullet passed through cleanly,” Hannibal replies. With the tacky blood cleared away, he does his best to irrigate the torn flesh without causing further harm; it would be a blessing if Will were to fall unconscious for a time, so Hannibal might feel around inside him for any debris. “I’ll keep the night – or not.”

Will tips his head up when Hannibal checks his eyes, is a model patient when Hannibal palpates his ribs and feels his abdomen. There is no obvious indication of internal bleeding, no abnormal pupillary response. When Hannibal is satisfied with his examination, he remands Will into his own care and fights exhaustion to stand and tend to his own injuries.

“You should take better care of yourself,” Will suggests. Wearing an agonized expression, he lowers himself into the bed with nothing more to contribute except an exhausted, “Don't think I can.”

When Hannibal touches his own abdomen there is palpable swelling, but there are no signs of putrefaction or rigidity, so he leaves Will on the bed to clean and pack and wrap the bullet wound with gauze and repurposed plastic cling film. Dolarhyde’s precise aim and his desire to watch Hannibal suffer is now Hannibal’s good fortune, but he’ll need more than the first aid kit can offer to tend to himself appropriately.

Hannibal drinks deeply at the small sink, sipping directly from his cupped hands. The water is cold and clean from the tap, and he isn't immune to the animal satisfaction of quenching his thirst. His hands tremble and he places them flat on the counter, drawing on the last vestiges of his self-control.

Pure discipline is no permanent substitute for care and maintenance of the human machine. Unconsciousness will come soon, whether he wills it or not. Better to surrender to the inevitable and succumb under his own volition.

When he settles on the edge of the bed, Will opens his eyes, unfocused with pain. He's alert enough, but not as practiced as Hannibal at hiding his physical suffering – it ill befits an ambush predator to betray a disadvantage.

“You might still throw yourself at Jack's mercy,” Hannibal says. Jack might still find in himself to forgive Will, if Will plays the wounded bird, thrashes about with his broken wing and bloody beak. Jack ever loves a lost cause, a frightened animal in pain. “You’ve done little that could be taken as anything other than self-preservation.”

Will shifts, mouth a hard, displeased line. “We both know that isn't true. And we both know that Jack would never let me out of his sight again, not knowing what he knows about you and I.”

“Perhaps that’s true,” Hannibal says. He slides his hand beneath the duvet and grips Will's leg with a tartly-delivered, “If I may, you were favoring this leg after the fall.”

Will cringes, tender from ankle to knee, but there are no signs of a fracture or break. The first night won't be the most painful, not until inflammation and exhaustion truly set in and the adrenaline rush of survival wanes. The human body is capable of great feats, but the miracle of their injuries is that they’re far less severe than they might be.

“What’s the prognosis, Doctor Lecter? Am I going to live?” Will asks, breathing in and out through his nose, likely in immense pain and struggling not to betray it. The color is returning to him as the fire warms the air.

“Your wounds are unlikely to fester, but should you wish to part from my company, a hospital is advisable,” Hannibal says, and unfolds a second blanket over Will. “I cannot be certain you will not damage yourself further without continued care.”

“Is that your personal opinion or your medical one?” Will’s skin is clammy beneath Hannibal’s fingers, but not feverish. His lashes rest at half mast, the thumbprint smudges beneath his eyes dark and deep with fatigue. “Abandon you? After everything?”

Hannibal inclines his head. “I find myself unable to separate my personal opinion from my medical opinion in your case. I find that I do not wish to see you come to further harm.”

Will curls his lip as best as he can, his distaste swiftly morphing into a grimace he attempts to conceal when he turns his face away from Hannibal. “Primum non nocere. A bit rich for you, don't you think?”

“A maxim I have rarely adhered to, but you are in no more danger from me than you ever were, Will,” Hannibal says. He runs his fingers over the smooth white bandage that sits over the gash in Will's body, then rubs them together thoughtfully. The touch is electric, a caress over the bruised nerves in his fingertips, raw from sea rock. He can only imagine what it must feel like for Will, who is torn mind and body.

“Is that 'always’ or 'never’ in danger?” Will asks, his voice trembling when Hannibal looks up at him. He's dark-eyed and exhausted, beautiful like the water-weathered stairs of the Isola di Murano.

“You know very intimately that either answer would be a lie, and I tire of the constant need for subterfuge,” Hannibal says. “You will be as safe by my side as I can ever offer. My life has become turbulent, but I might offer you some shelter from the storm.”

“As long as I do what you say,” Will says, insolence oozing from his mouth, even as he slurs his words. “Heel on your leash.”

Hannibal makes eye contact. The uninjured corner of Will's mouth slopes down into one of his self-contained little frowns, an expression that's easy to misread as disdain, even for Hannibal. “I have sought to use you as a scalpel and found the blade cuts both ways. No longer, Will. I spoke in earnest when I confessed I could not predict you.”

Will closes his eyes. Hannibal has difficulty reading the reason for it; Will has burst from his chrysalis a new beast, and that beast is wounded in more ways than one. Animals are at their most desperate and dangerous when all choice has been taken away – he expects no different of Will.

“Will you stay with me?” Will asks, strained and muffled by the pillow. There is nothing here to offer Will the kind of relief he requires, and he may yet die from the shock of the fall, the cold, the blood loss, and his pain.

“I have no intention of leaving,” Hannibal says, withdrawing. Will catches his wrist, halting Hannibal's retreat, then releases it almost immediately, as if burned by the brief skin-to-skin contact.

“No – I mean, here,” Will says, and runs his hand over the empty space in the bed. He looks at Hannibal then, directly, and it's like being fixed beneath the gaze of a wild animal. Hannibal must carefully school his expression in order not to betray the surprise he feels.

It takes some effort to lower himself into the bed next to Will, but the tribulation is worth the reward of Will curling into Hannibal's extended arm. There is no alternative to sharing, but WIll’s request and the way he seeks out the warmth of Hannibal’s body willingly changes the texture of the space between them.

“Will,” Hannibal says his name, but nothing else follows. He’s often felt a craving for Will’s touch but was uncertain of his welcome in Will’s personal space. He cannot help but be taken aback by the sheer physical intimacy when Hannibal has so clearly felt the borders of their relationship would come no closer than casual touch.

“Two sides of a coin. That’s us, always will be,” Will says. His head is tucked is beneath Hannibal's nose, and the warm smell of his scalp has begun to bleed through the overtones of salt and blood.

The scent of him sticks to Hannibal in a way nothing else ever has. The Will lying in his arms is an alchemical creature, transmuted by his kill and his maiden flight over the cliffs, but he's a man, too, just as Hannibal is. Warm, a conflagration of flesh and blood, laying lax at Hannibal's side – Hannibal would pour himself into Will if allowed, eat him from within even as he fills him, consume and be consumed.

“Rest now,” Hannibal says, and snags his fingers in Will's disastrously rumpled curls. “We'll have to fix our mess soon enough.”

“A mess is no problem. My dad always said you can't have a picnic without a few ants,” Will says, chuffing softly to himself, far beyond simple incoherency and delving into the sleep-addled land of dreams. He groans and pushes his face against Hannibal and falls asleep the way only the deeply exhausted do – completely, and without further preamble.

*

Early winter sunlight shining through dusty windowpanes wakes Hannibal. Frost curls across the glass, delicate fingers traversing outward from the wooden framing like the golden rococo scrollwork in the Basilika Vierzehnheiligen. Coherency eludes Hannibal for some moments, the world refusing to focus, the grip of sleep refusing to loosen.

Will is already conscious, laying still and silent, his skin damp with sweat and hot to the touch. Searing in the chill cabin, but not enough for Hannibal to be concerned with his fever, and his skin hasn't dried or chapped. They’re bundled under the salvaged quilts like caterpillars in a cocoon, dissolving into one another, and even the snarling pain in Hannibal’s side doesn’t prevent his satisfaction.

“I forget sometimes – how dangerous you are,” Will says. He reaches out and pushes Hannibal's hair out of his eyes, then feels his forehead. His palm is soothing over Hannibal’s skin. “You look different when you sleep. Soft.”

“You don't forget,” Hannibal says and rolls to face Will. Pain turns him in knots, like fire in his abdomen. The wound will need to be seen to, sooner rather than later. He'll need to take stock. There's a veterinary clinic six or seven miles inland that may have sufficient supplies. Hannibal puts his hand on Will's face in a reciprocal gesture. “You simply don’t remember to mind.”

The muscles around Will's mouth are tight, severe, but it hardly diminishes the force of his gaze. “Maybe so.” He touches Hannibal's face like a benediction: forehead, cheek, chin. His thumb slides over the slope of Hannibal's nose, fingertips still calloused from tying lures, a good fisherman, a good fisher of men.

Hannibal closes his eyes. In another time, another place, if they were other than they are, the thing he feels, the thing mirrored in Will's hungry, naked gaze, might be called love. The same part of him that is buried in a hidden place, in an unmarked grave alongside Mischa's bones, yearns for it.

He draws a fortifying breath and says, “Allow me to clean and bandage your wounds before we leave,” before extracting himself from the self-indulgent warmth of Will's body. Time is a currency they have little of now, though Hannibal suspects their convalescence will leave them rich with it.

Will knows how to hotwire the 1967 Ford pickup collecting dust behind the barn at the neighboring farmstead. The day is early enough that they only pass two cars on the narrow bridge connecting the island to the mainland, most of the small town still blanketed in sleepy Saturday fog.

The veterinary clinic is closed on the weekends, except by appointment, a gift for which Hannibal finds himself unexpectedly and immeasurably grateful. Hannibal parks in the rear lot in a spot labeled Employees Only, out of sight of the main road, and sits in the car for a time to be certain the clinic is uninhabited.

“No alarm?” Will asks, inspecting the simple key lock on the employee entrance when they finally approach the door. He looks paler than normal, a watercolor smudge of the man he was when he came to Hannibal for aid, but his eyes are bright and alert. “Surprising.”

“A situation likely to be remedied by our trespass,” Hannibal says, and easily jimmies the latch with Will's credit card – it will get more use as a lockpick than a valid form of payment. The FBI will have already flagged all of their known financials. The door yawns open, and Hannibal steps aside to allow Will entry. “It would be inadvisable to touch anything.”

“I know my business,” Will says, and pushes past Hannibal. Whatever drove him to seek the comfort of Hannibal's company in the night has evaporated, leaving Will stiff and distant. Hannibal tempers his expectations; Will moves carefully and speaks little, and must be in great pain, both physical and emotional. He knows well enough how difficult it can be to set aside the wistfulness for a future that has been laid suddenly and unexpectedly to rest.

Will turns on the little television in the waiting room while Hannibal slips on a pair of latex gloves and fills their borrowed bag with supplies: gauze, antibiotics, tranquilizers, tools of the trade. He opens a case of surgical equipment and runs his fingers covetously over the well-kept set. They gleam like stars beneath the sharp fluorescent lighting in the exam room. After a moment of consideration, he closes it and slides it in with the rest of the lot.

“They think we're dead,” Will slurs, when Hannibal returns to the lobby. He seems none the wiser to the reason for Hannibal’s delay. “The local news is reporting that Jack found Dolarhyde's body, and your blood on the rocks.”

“The FBI would not publicly disclose if they suspected we survived, and Jack is unlikely to rest on his laurels until the coast is scoured and the whole of the Atlantic dragged,” Hannibal says. Not all is beyond hope, though the net closes hourly, Jack’s manhunt as inevitable as the seasons, as the tide. It's still early, and the gas tank is nearly full in the pickup. “However, we may have at least a day's head start before our burglary is discovered.”

“I can't really be seen and not blow our cover,” Will says. “Not looking like this. A man with a gaping hole in his face is going to be noticed.”

“That could be remedied, though it’ll remain best for both of us to keep to the shadows. Dolarhyde's blade cut cleanly.” Hannibal sets the bags down, his body protesting, and tips Will's face up. “May I?”

“Are you going to stitch me up?” Will asks. There are spots of blood on his tongue, lips, teeth. Hannibal feels a sudden compulsion to bend and taste him.

“I believe you've done an admirable job of that in my absence,” Hannibal says. He lifts the bandage, still relatively fresh from its the morning dressing, and the injury is already crusted over with blood. Will’s cheek is pink around the edges where the skin hasn't been flayed to expose the red meat of the underlying muscle, but there are no visible signs of a serious infection. “However, I'll certainly be happy to help with this last bit.”

“Is there enough time?” Will moves more carefully than Hannibal remembers when he ushers Will into one of the small surgical theaters.

“Half an hour more can be spared,” Hannibal says. He touches Will's shoulder, above the bandaged knife wound. “Perhaps an hour.”

“What about you?” Will asks. He allows Hannibal to help him out of his shirt. Hannibal spied scrubs hanging in the employee lockers that will fit Will, so Hannibal lays the garment aside for later disposal. While Hannibal snaps on latex gloves, Will presses, “What will you do for yourself?”

“The wound is clean enough and the bleeding minimal. I'll pack the site, take a mild sedative, and administer broad spectrum IV antibiotics.” Hannibal does not say that it was Dolarhyde’s lucky aim, his careful precision, and his desire to see Hannibal suffer for a perceived betrayal that saved Hannibal, or that a larger caliber gun might have left him dead in the ocean. Will’s distress is palpable enough as it is. “You must monitor me for fever, if I begin to succumb.”

“We could still go to a hospital,” Will says, trembling under Hannibal’s touch. He reaches out and grips the collar of Hannibal’s shirt and then releases it, arm too weak to hold on for more than a handful of seconds. “It’s not too late, you know. We could blame it on Dolarhyde. I'd rather –”

“See me locked up than lose me again?” Hannibal tips Will's face up and, tone soft but firm as he might use with any other truculent patient, instructs him, “I cannot allow that, Will. Not when you’ll be kept from me. Open, please. An alveolar block will provide you significant relief.”

Will grimaces at the injection, and Hannibal mops the excess lidocaine from his mouth with a clean cloth. “I didn't know you trained in dentistry.”

“Oral surgery is not my specialty, but I've found some use for the techniques over the years,” Hannibal says. He would prefer surgical glue for Will's face, but the clinic has absorbable sutures.

It takes nine small, neat stitches to make Will’s face whole again. He would fill the gaps with something new, were Will's flesh his to shape, but there is also beauty in the untempered rawness. “There is a Japanese art technique called kintsugi used to repair broken porcelain. The cracks and gaps are filled with a resin which contains powdered precious metals. The results are often striking.”

Will touches his cheek, just below the stark lines of the sutures, as neat and slim as birch trees backlit by a crimson sunset. His gaze is sullen, wary. “I'll keep that in mind if I live to see these out. What about my shoulder?”

“Better to let it drain for now, to allow any debris to be expelled,” Hannibal says, and resists the impulse to press his fingers into the knife wound and taste the sharp salt flavor of Will’s blood. Instead, he tips Will’s face up under the thinly-disguised pretense of examination. “Will you come with me, Will?”

Will’s eyelashes flutter, sweeping darkly over his pale eyes, brush strokes Hannibal could have not rendered so perfectly himself. “Where else am I going to go?” His composure falters when he reaches out to touch the dried blood staining Hannibal’s shirt. “Can you do something about this?”

“It would be impossible for me to perform the surgery without a third hand, as it were,” Hannibal says. “Should you be willing to assist, I might have some chance in mending much of the damage Dolarhyde dealt.”

“Luckily, one functional hand is what I have left. It’s steady, if that’s all you need,” Will offers, and Hannibal is nearly dizzy with the awareness that Will might run any number of the operating implements into his belly and kill him where he sits.

The suite is equipped for surgery, so he numbs the region with local anesthetic, then reclines on one of the patient tables in the operating theater. When he peels his shirt away from the bruised flesh beneath, the gauze is dark and grainy and muddy, reeking of bowel like a badly butchered hog.

It takes the matter of a few moments, some good lighting, and a mirror to clean and widen the messy hole created by the bullet wound. It takes somewhat longer, and a steadier hand, to advance the laparoscope along the path of the bullet. Will watches silently, eyes fixed on the monitor, lips parted as he sucks in sharp, shallow breaths over his teeth.

“How long has it been since the last time you did this on someone?” Will asks. Hannibal scrutinizes Will’s expression for a hint of doubt but finds none.

“A decade, at least.” Hannibal locates the source of the bleeding, a split section of bowel that is leaking sluggish, poorly clotting blood into his abdominal cavity. Even if he mends it, he may die of sepsis, rotting from the inside out with fever. He reaches for Will’s left hand, guides it to the laparoscope when his own trembles. “Put your hand here. Hold it steady as you’re able.”

Will watches, lips parted and wet, as Hannibal slices himself open adjacent to the bullet wound. He thinks of Will pushing his arm forward, of the easy way Will could impale him on the metal rod embedded in his stomach, and the deliciousness of Will’s power distracts him from the discomfort of the intrusion.

Blood drips over his fingertips, over the scalpel, hot and vital, and he pushes the long, stapler-tipped rod into his abdomen into the opening he’s created alongside the camera. The area is not properly prepared, so he must make quick, sloppy work of it. Will’s breathing is uneven, but Hannibal can scarce afford to look away from the mire of red and black and glaring, angry, vicious pink that fills the monitor.

Five staples save him from a gut full of virulence, the anastomosis is uneven but sturdy. Such a small, simple task, to reach inside himself and staunch the onset of death. He feels as though he has his hand around the sun, grasping life itself between his fingers. When he looks up at Will, his gut clenches at the hungry, wide-eyed way Will is watching Hannibal’s hands.

“Will you be okay?” Will asks, voice rusty with Hannibal’s reflected arousal. His eyes meet Hannibal’s and the feeling that Hannibal experienced on the cusp of death blooms between them, sharp and hungry. Hannibal wants, for the briefest of moments, to slide forward into Will’s hands, to impale himself on Will.

But the operating table is not the time nor the place. He guides the implements from his body and staples himself shut, dabbing them clean with sterile gauze. There is blood on him, on the table, on the floor. Hannibal closes his eyes and beats back the wave of dizziness.

“I’d offer you some of mine,” Will says, prescient at the moment of their connection, anticipating Hannibal’s needs before Hannibal thinks of them himself, “but I don’t think I have that much left either.”

“I simply require a moment, no more,” Hannibal says, breathing steadily. Inhaling through his nose, exhaling past his clenched jaw. “We must leave soon.”

When Hannibal opens his eyes, Will has abandoned the bloody laparoscope and is hovering close, his face pale and eyelids fluttering like moth’s wings with the force of whatever he’s feeling. Hannibal slips his gloves off and reaches up to touch the uninjured side of Will’s face, but Will sucks in a hissing breath and steps away, shoulders hunched, and disappears into the dimly lit waiting room.

*

Hannibal has bridges he hasn’t burned, so arranging passage across the Atlantic is only the work of a few careful calls placed from an old pay phone. Money is no material obstacle; a few hours and a sum wired to a run-down Western Union ensures enough cash on hand to make the misty drive up the coast through Canada. Will sleeps poorly, head pillowed on a wool blanket, and speaks to himself in his sleep, plagued by nightmares.

When he remembers it later, he’ll only recall the ocean stretched out, flat and lifeless and cold, drained of all the rage that characterized their plummet from the cliff. Travel by ship is mean and coarse, but Hannibal had no foreknowledge of their circumstances. The fire in his belly subsides slowly, improved by sleep and fluids. A week crawls by, unassuming, boring, plagued by pain and the routine shuffle of pills and injections. Even his mind palace provides no succor; he cannot afford to retreat inside himself with Will to tend to.

Will rests the best part of each day, as equally restless and irritable when he wakes as when he sleeps. They share a narrow berth on a freight ship that has few amenities but even fewer men to ask questions. More notable are the sweet between moments, and the way Will curls against him, breathing evenly.

For the first few days, when Hannibal tends to his injuries, Will takes no more than medicine, water, and a thin brothy soup that Hannibal stews after hours in the ship's galley from kitchen scraps. After the third, he still sleeps, but rises and drinks insatiably, until he chokes and sputters around his own swollen, fevered flesh and Hannibal stops him.

The freighter disgorges them at the docks in Cardiff, where Hannibal has little trouble finding a laborer willing to trade an aging truck in exchange for the rest of their American money. He'll collect his goods from his safety deposit box in Worcester at some other date; his arrangement with his business contact included funds for necessities via an anonymous intermediary prior to Hannibal's arrival. The house will be well-stocked with essentials.

“Where are we?” Will asks, rousing from his slumber at Hannibal’s side. His forehead is red where he rested it against the seat. Hannibal would reach out to touch him, but Will’s skittishness has returned with an unusually comforting constancy.

They stop in front of a cottage with a rambling stone wall and a shingled roof. Moss grows as thick and vibrant as crushed green velvet, and the rear garden is overgrown with creeping foliage even this late in the season. Summer long ago suffered her death throes, leaving Autumn to settle over the countryside. The leaves have begun to turn, but the mountains are not yet crested with caps of snow.

“We’re somewhere in Wales,” Hannibal says, and cuts the ignition. Will is in the worst stages of healing, the entire right side of his face bruised and yellow and hideously entrancing. Hannibal would kill Dolarhyde again, a dozen times over, for injuring Will. “The farmstead is quite remote, so I’ll show you on a map when we unpack our belongings. I find the vistas rather appealing.”

“Another bequest from a dearly departed client?” Will asks. He opens the truck door and leans on it. In profile, he looks undamaged, the picture of the man that Will wanted to be, that Jack Crawford wanted to see. “It's amazing how much you've gotten away with.”

On occasion, Will’s facade and the razor-wire hunger inside of him eclipse, and in the brief moments that the facade slips away, Hannibal can see all the way down to the very marrow of Will’s righteousness. It knows no limits, a consuming fire that smolders irrepressibly beneath Will’s skin.

“A legitimate purchase, not an untimely inheritance,” Hannibal says, studying Will’s expression the way a master sculptor must peruse unspoiled marble. “There are personas I've cultivated that do not overlap any life I've led – in Baltimore or elsewhere.”

“How privileged you are to have an escape hatch,” Will bristles. Hannibal can’t read his expression well from this angle when Will turns his face away, but he doesn’t need to. The hunch of his shoulders and the stiff angle of his body are more than enough augury to inform Hannibal of Will’s black, resentful mood.

There’s no point in denying it. Hannibal came from means, plunged into obscurity, and rose again through his own wiles. That society at large might consider his methods amoral is of little personal concern to him. He’s long known that Will, a man of little himself, is uncomfortable with the power and influence that Hannibal has wrested back. “Wealth is immeasurably useful for an individual of my preferences and proclivities.”

Will closes the door and peers at Hannibal through the rolled down window. He says, “You bought this for me, didn't you? This doesn't seem very –” he pauses, makes a vague gesture at Hannibal “– you.”

Hannibal returns Will's analysis with a thin smile, because when Hannibal purchased this particular property, he found himself considering how Will would look knee-deep in the stream at the base of the accompanying pasture. Will isn't entirely incorrect, on either count. “Times change, and we must change with them.”

“I really don't think you're capable of change,” Will says and doesn't wait for an answer before slinging their bags over his left shoulder and stumping into the cottage.

Hannibal allows himself a moment of silence and peace to weigh Will's assessment. The journey has been more taxing on him than he hoped. His own wound is healing cleanly, an unsurprising course of events given the efficacy of his self-treatment and his overall health, but Will is still plagued with pain. He's said little, but the inevitable nerve damage from Dolarhyde's butchery and the malaise of healing have rendered Will intractable.

They must have more time: more time for Will to recover, more time to discover one another, without the filter of Jack or Alana or the impolite fiction of their professional doctor-patient engagement.

“This is nice,” Will says, when Hannibal finds him again in the small kitchen. The cottage is cozier than Hannibal has grown accustomed to, smaller by far than even his stolen apartments in Florence, but plenty of space exists to give them both privacy should they desire it. “Are we bunking together?”

“I wouldn't be so presumptuous,” Hannibal says, depositing the remainder of their personal effects on a cafe table only big enough for two. Upon entering, it must have become rapidly apparent to Will that this home was intended for a couple alone, and no entertaining. “The attic space is also finished and furnished, and I’m told the view from the loft space is quite lovely.”

Will looks up at him, steady and measuring. “We've been sharing everything so far, why stop now?”

“You need only express your dissatisfaction,” Hannibal says. “Our arrangement is as fluid as you require.”

“I didn't say it dissatisfied me.” Will sits, unraveling. He spreads into his space as though he’s only just decided to be present, to continue existing in this home that Hannibal has prepared for them. “I miss Molly and Walter.”

The mention of Will's found family rankles, but Hannibal goes to Will and slowly peels the bandages away from his shoulder. “I fear myself at a loss. To say I wish that you could be reunited with them would be disingenuous, but it would be unkind not to offer you comfort in your distress.”

“Do you feel any remorse at all?” Will asks, gaze searching. Hannibal does not try to hide himself, a task which proves both uncomfortable and liberating. Old habits die very hard, particularly in the realm of allowing such deep, probing intimacy directed at his person. “No, of course you do. You feel far more than you want to.”

The well-oiled clockwork routine of Hannibal's life, the care and caution that allowed him to remain untouchable in his proclivities, was most surely disrupted by Will's entrance into his life. Hannibal has been a careful artist over the years, sketching the farce of the cruel and repugnant alike in the broad strokes of their entrails.

Will has burst through every barrier between Hannibal and the outside world and left ruin in his wake. Even in the BSHCI, trapped in his empty, windowless cell with nothing but four walls and the full-to-bursting corridors of his mind palace to keep him company, Will was an omnipresent specter, and absence has made the heart grow ever fonder.

There is no putrefaction to be found in Will's injury; indeed, it appears to have progressed to the point where it may cause more harm than benefit to keep it tightly covered at all times. The skin beneath the bandage has a medicinal smell and is healing wonderfully.

“It is impolite to analyze a person unasked for.” Bedelia had the habit as well, but also the long-standing armor of her professional care. He retrieves the gauze and medical tape and sets them beside Will; it's time Will care for himself. “Leave the injury exposed to the air and rebandage it before you retire to bed.”

“It's also impolite to try to kill someone's family out of jealousy,” Will says, unwilling to drop the subject at hand, stormy with well-justified ire. He crumples the roll of gauze, squeezing it like he might like to squeeze Hannibal's throat. “Excuse me if I make a few social faux pas in the wake of your absolutely disastrous attempt at pigtail pulling.”

“You destroyed the family I gave you,” Hannibal says. Even as he does, he knows the tactical error will cost him in some unknowable way later. Will is only as malleable as he wishes to be.

Will gives him a long look that dissolves from anger to pity. “You still can't say it, can you?”

“If you’re searching for love, I’ve given it freely,” Hannibal says, answering Will’s gaze with an unflinching stare of his own. He won’t be pitied – not even by Will Graham. “If you find its appearance grotesque, perhaps you have simply not allowed yourself to be open to the possibilities at hand.”

He knows the question Will is thinking, reads it on his face, writ plain in the twist of his handsome features – What kind of love consumes? – but Will is silent. Just as Hannibal knows the question, Will knows the answer to it.

Hannibal leans in and brushes his mouth against the tender shell of Will’s ear, “I would eat the world whole if I could, just as the whale swallowed Jonah. Do you think among them there would be enough goodness and repentance that God would grant them respite from my belly?”

*

Will vanishes into the dark corners of the house. Hannibal allows Will his license to privacy and takes the truck to retrieve the remainder of their assets. A storage locker contains all the paperwork for half a dozen identities. Six new lives for each of them to assume, should the occasion arise. There are several cards at the bottom of the bag, carefully labeled with a PIN; the accounts are held in China, the UAE, Switzerland, Luxembourg. Plastic money for plastic people.

In all of these, Hannibal and Will are paid generous sums for their fictional professions. A legitimate paper trail exists for each identity, should they wish to rejoin society with a measure of anonymity. Funds are deposited and deducted regularly to uphold the narrative of two mundane lives lived six times over. They could step into any one of them, assume the pattern of income and spending, and draw little to no attention.

They will have none of Hannibal’s decadent habits to betray their passage, should they remain cautious. When he returns home, he selects Will’s identity and places it neatly with his own on the dining table, then sets about cooking their first proper dinner.

Fresh, sweet onions sweat in the frying pan alongside fragrant garlic and sharp green jalapeños. The ground meat is seasoned liberally with cumin, freshly ground white pepper, and salt, and the kitchen fills with the smell of cooking meat. The cow that will fill their bellies tonight was of the usual sort, farm-raised and an unassuming, a happy summer grazer. The meat led a good life, fat and pampered, and the taste is delicate and fragrant.

Will descends and lingers in the doorway while Hannibal folds the hash into two dozen small pastries, little half-moons which he washes with egg white. He turns to face Will after he slips the neatly arranged baking sheet into the oven and sets the timer.

“You’ve been gone a while,” Will says, arms folded across his chest. He’s changed into fresh clothes and bathed, his hair still damp from the shower. Even from across the room, Hannibal catches the faint scent of his soap and freshly laundered cotton. Will is barefoot, toes curled against the stone floor, skin pink from scrubbing. “You really do have everything covered, don’t you?”

“I have a gift for you, should you like to examine it now,” Hannibal says, gesturing towards the small pile of papers laid out on the table.

Will does, unbending himself from the doorway to look at each document with practiced scrutiny. It is often easy to forget that Will has law enforcement experience; he doesn’t carry himself the same way an officer might, is quieter and less eager to physically assert himself. “These are real, aren’t they? These people, they’ll have lives. Birth certificates. Jobs, medical records, they’ll have taken vacations.”

“It felt correct to be thorough, a suspicion affirmed after the incident with Mason Verger,” Hannibal says, tidying up the scraps of vegetables. He considers the virtue of beginning a compost heap and the slim likelihood of them remaining here for long enough to use it, then dumps the roots of the onions and paper-thin garlic skin into the garbage on top of the pepper seeds. There will be time enough later to decide.

“Mason Verger hasn’t been an issue for a long time. You were worried about Alana, weren’t you?” Will sets everything down and moves into the kitchen proper. His gaze shifts curiously about the room, from the hanging baskets filled with round, beautiful onions, to the glass containers filled with flour and sugar. “When did you have time for all of this? Certainly not when you were locked up in that goldfish bowl, playing the good guppy for Doctor Bloom and her cadre of minions in white coats.”

“Alana is a clever girl, but not half so clever as she wishes she was,” Hannibal says. Not a single scrap of outgoing mail had contained an encoded message, no ciphers for the FBI to crack. Not a single word breathed about this during his captivity. “No, I was playing a much longer game. Frederick Chilton would roll in his hyperbaric chamber, were he to find out.”

Will huffs, an exasperated little sound. “Frederick Chilton won’t be doing much of anything for a while, not after suffering Dolarhyde’s tender mercies.”

“He may yet outlive all of us,” Hannibal muses. Chilton is a self-serving pig of a man, but his flexible scruples and vanity often entertained Hannibal more than most. His foolishness in thinking that Will was above using him as bait was nearly his undoing. The biggest fish are often landed with squirming game.

“I would’ve thought he’d be on your short list of midnight snacks,” Will says. He leans his hip on the counter, only a few feet of space between them, well within striking distance if Hannibal were so inclined.

He isn’t — at least, not in the way that he might pursue a squealing beast like Chilton. Hannibal shifts closer and says, “I have no plans to devour Dolarhyde’s excrement. Chilton will rise from the ashes of his own corpse like the phoenix reborn from your sacrificial pyre — or not. Seeing which is barely even a matter of professional curiosity.”

“You have bigger fish to fry these days,” Will guesses and he’s correct, even if he is oozing sarcasm.

“As you say.” Their safety is paramount. No other piece of the puzzle between them will fall into place if the very structure supporting it collapses.

“I don’t care for Chilton,” Will says. “Not for him, not about him. He’s meat on the rack as far as I’m concerned. What are you cooking? I presume we’ve safely eliminated Frederick from the menu.”

“A wonderful trick that would be. See for yourself.” Hannibal steps aside to allow Will passage. Will moves past him with unstudied carelessness, the way he did before he learned of Hannibal’s predatory predilections. He inhabits Hannibal’s space as if it’s his own, and it stirs somewhat of a different hunger in Hannibal to be treated so carelessly, so familiarly, so intimately.

“Empanadas? I haven’t had those in years. I didn’t know you cooked anything other than haute cuisine,” Will says, cracking the oven to peer at the browning backs of the pastries.

“I’ve thought fondly of warmer climates of late.” Hannibal undoes the strings of his apron and sets it aside. A twinge in his side informs him he has exerted himself enough for one evening.

“Then why bring us here?” Will meets him head on with the question. Hannibal did not purchase this home for Will, but Hannibal’s decision to retreat here was undeniably influenced by him. “You can’t claim to not have options. I saw the assets the FBI seized, and I know that must have been the tip of the iceberg.”

“Ease of access,” Hannibal says. “And perhaps I languish overmuch in my age, but a convalescence spent sweating beneath mosquito netting has little appeal.”

“And you thought I might like it,” Will proceeds with his analysis. His time spent exploring the cottage will have confirmed it’s set for two; Hannibal has always intended a companion for the venture.

“Yes,” Hannibal says, and neatens a stray curl. His hair, drying askew, has given Will somewhat of a faunish look, coy and cast in bronze in the warm kitchen light. “Above all else, this place was considered for your pleasure.”

“You want me to stay with you,” Will says, fluttering at the touch. He looks as though he might bolt, muscles straining against nothing for the span of a second. “You keep asking.”

“You’re yet undecided.” The space between them narrows to nearly nothing, an insignificant distance, as Hannibal takes a step forward.

“It’s a damn big decision.” Will blinks, doesn’t look away, holds steady, like an anchored ship in stormy seas. A fine tremor runs through him, visible only because Hannibal is looking for it.

“One you have made again and again,” Hannibal says. He cups Will’s neck, pressing his thumb below the knob of bone behind Will’s ear.

Will tilts his head up to look at Hannibal, meets his eyes without blinking. Hannibal marvels at the thing Will has become, sloughing his timid skin at will. Will says, “You’re painting a pretty strange picture of domesticity.”

“Not so strange, when you consider all I’ve never believed I could have is standing in the flesh before me,” Hannibal says. Will’s lips part, then close, and he swallows audibly. How precious, how wonderful it would have been to live out the sweet domestic fever-dream with him; fathers to a daughter, bloodying their hands all across the fine places of the world. But Will is much more than Hannibal ever reckoned.

Occasionally, Hannibal has been struck with how mercurial Will is, and how strongly he makes Hannibal feel. Hannibal’s attempts at emotional reconciliation have left Will broken open, like the hull of a ship splintered on the rocks of Hannibal’s desires. Here, now, by the warm hearth, in a kitchen filled with savory fragrances, they may begin something entirely different.

“What would we have done?” Will asks, the gravel rasp of his voice intimate, compelling. “Where would we have gone? What would it look like, what you had planned for us?”

“Before Dolarhyde? Before Abigail?” Hannibal touches Will’s uninjured cheek with the barest of caresses, barely daring to touch his fine linen-pale skin. Will is both enduring and ephemeral and might unravel with too heavy a hand. “I would have spent my days with you in Florence. We would have eaten well, drank deeply, and prayed together during the evening vespers –

“What would you ever pray for?” Will asks doubtfully. His lashes are dark, damp, eyes wide. For a moment, he seems to have forgotten himself entirely, the whole of him held open so Hannibal might see his aching vulnerability – and the wrought iron strength of him.

Hannibal desires to gather Will into his hands, reshape him into a creature that can feel no pain, suffer none of these wounds the world so constantly inflicts upon him. But to do so would change him irreparably, snuff out everything that Hannibal finds so alluring about him. “For you, Will, I’ve done my share of praying.”

“We can share the bedroom,” Will says, and reaches up to place his hand on Hannibal’s elbow. His fingers slide — warm, calloused, enticing — up the length of Hannibal’s forearm before settling over the joint. Hannibal feels the touch from chest to pelvis, a stirring of sharp, jangling desire that wars with the deep ache of his healing body. “I’m just as much here with you as I was with Dolarhyde, but — it’s all still – new. To me. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Recovery is never linear,” Hannibal murmurs. He does understand; a small part of him is still cold, afraid, frozen in the moment between having Mischa and losing her. The loss and emptiness resonate with him on an elemental level.

The kitchen timer buzzes and Will startles, abruptly ducking out of Hannibal’s grip, his mouth open and eyes averted. “I’ll set the table.”

*

Their first week of residence is characterized by Hannibal waiting Will’s bad temper out. It’s not the first he’s seen of it; many times, Will would fling himself amongst Hannibal’s belongings, take liberties upon Hannibal’s hospitality and courtesy when the forest of his mind grew too dark and dim and the river faded from view. Now, though, he’s simply a poor patient, a rotten bedfellow, and a ghost walking around in Will Graham’s animated corpse.

Still, the abrupt, riotous change is hard for Will to stomach, particularly after the failure of his efforts to rid the world of them both, so Hannibal keeps to his side of the vast mattress they both occupy, cooks for two, and bides his time.

Life moves sedately, and Hannibal spends the lengthening nights in a chair by the squat fireplace in the den, looking for sign or symptom of Jack Crawford’s hunt. He and Will are both presumed deceased in the media, but BOLO is issued and cautions are posted in every country with an extradition treaty.

Jack Crawford grows closer day by day, but not obviously, lingering in the background like a wolf prowling in the night. The two of them are hardly rabbits trembling in their warren, and they bed down, and Hannibal reads about the FBI in London, Paris, Cairo – then further away as the first week turns into a month. Tbilisi, Hyderabad, Mandalay, chasing ghosts and old leads, dummy rabbits that Hannibal has set afield far in advance.

The idea of Jack Crawford slogging through the alleyways behind Burmese temples, looking for trace evidence of Will and Hannibal while they convalesce in the English countryside pleases him beyond measure.

TattleCrime has significantly more to say on the subject, but nothing of merit; the website itself is riddled with conspiracy theories that each only contain small, vague fractions of the truth. Freddie Lounds places them somewhere in China with a rather presumptuous article on the state of their private affairs. She’s included a few grainy, poorly-doctored photographs that scrape the bottom of the barrel, even for a habitual muckraker like Lounds.

A winter chill moves over the moor early, covering the grass and depositing a freezing rain so heavy that it snaps the spines of the tall, fragrant sedge grasses bordering the stream at the foot of the hill. When it becomes apparent that they’ll be weathering in the countryside for some time more, Hannibal turns his attention to more local affairs. He is unaccustomed to boredom but has no doubt that he may weather the winter without finding it a chore – Will, on the other hand, moves restlessly, sleeps little, and grows irate at the very mention of his previous life.

The headlines out of Oxford are grisly. Rare that the press would release such a detailed spread, the gore spreading rapidly across half a dozen news sites like oil in the ocean. The photos have the quality of an art student rather than a journalist, young and optimistic, the angles elegant rather than useful.

Hannibal inspects them: a dead man in a massive clay urn, flayed open from neck to groin, his organs removed, exsanguinated before the butchery. In their place, thousands of copper coins, all defaced. The symbolism is a bit heavy-handed, even for Hannibal’s macabre tastes, but the gleaming copper strikes a rather lovely balance against the dark, bruise-red flesh of the man's torso, which has been scraped down to the rind of his body like the skin of a blood orange.

The photographs are of both personal and professional interest, so he leaves the laptop open to a particularly lovely still. Hannibal finds little fine art in the murder itself, the tableau of Diogenes’ life and sins wrought by a hand afflicted with a mawkish need for self-aggrandizement. Motive is clear – the deceased is a professor at Oxford University proper, a tenured gentleman with a few unproven plagiarism accusations under his belt.

Will sees them the instant he descends to kitchen, and broods all morning, through his breakfast and the chores that have become rote. Hannibal bears Will's mood with grace, until he can bear it no longer.

“He is yet untutored. The choreography of this man’s death lacks an ultimate structure,” Hannibal says to Will’s tense back. “This appears to be the work of a fledgling hand.”

“His brushstrokes are uneven.” Will bends to inspect a wine glass, poorly feigning disinterest in the topic. It lasts all of a minute, each second pregnant with Will's anxiety. Hannibal allows him the moment without disrupting it, to see what Will will do. “He may not even kill again.”

“Perhaps,” Hannibal says agreeably. He folds his newspaper, a creased copy of The Sunday Times, and rises to bring his coffee mug to the sink, where Will seems inclined to remain until his dotage. “May I assist you in some fashion?”

“It feels rude not to earn my keep,” Will says, but concedes some space to allow Hannibal to assist. He still leans heavily against the counter, favoring his injured shoulder, easily tired. Hannibal will check later, when Will is feeling more pliable, to be sure the tissue is healing adequately.

“Do you feel yourself kept?” Suds slide up his forearms when he lifts his hands, and Hannibal tracks the bubbles, iridescent with soap, as they gather in the crooks of Will's elbows.

“How could I not?” Will asks, avoiding Hannibal's gaze. The tremor in his voice is further pronounced when Hannibal moves fractionally closer. “I threw everything I had and everything I was into the ocean with you.”

“You also threw me into the ocean,” Hannibal opines. Threw them together, but Hannibal has no doubt that Will intended for both of them to end. Neither of them could hope to survive the fission of their conjoined nuclei.

Will bends his head again. It would be easy to step up behind him, trap him against the countertop, put his mouth on Will's skin, sink his teeth in. Will wakes in him a hunger for contact he has often found eclipsed by other desires. “I said everything that I had.”

“You still have me, Will,” Hannibal murmurs. He settles for placing his hand at the small of Will's back. Familiar, but not entirely presumptuous. “Were the land to crumble into the sea, I would remain standing by your side.”

“Maybe that's exactly what I'm afraid of,” Will says. He tilts his head, birdlike, considering Hannibal like a raptor sizes up its next meal. So often, Hannibal is doing the hunting, so he allows himself to bask in this rare moment when Will's newfound awareness of his own power and autonomy does not actively conflict with his vestigial guilt. “What are we doing?”

“Surviving.” Hannibal takes Will's hands, one at a time, and towels them dry.

“What if I don't want to just survive? What if I want to thrive?” Will knots his fingers in the cloth and pries it from Hannibal's hands. It falls to the floor, and Hannibal becomes aware of a shift in the tension between them. Will looks up at Hannibal from beneath his furrowed brow, lips parted, tongue curled neatly behind his teeth.

Hannibal cups Will's face, from the hinge of his jaw to the tip of his chin. “There is time for that yet.” He caresses Will's lower lip with his thumb, memorizing the soft sweep of skin, and watches with barely-concealed wonder as Will reflects his desire. “There is time for much more.”

Will remains a fixed point even as Hannibal moves out of his orbit, vibrating with the heavy emotion that passes between them. Hannibal turns away – a necessity, lest he push too far, too fast.

“I feel like I should do something about him,” Will says, and Hannibal listens carefully, taking note of his distress. Will feels a great many things not his own, often only bright baubles of intense emotion skimmed from another's mind, but Hannibal himself has no interest in this fledgling killer, so Will must be the sole author of his own desires. “I can't just sit back and let this happen over and over again everywhere we go. I don’t think I have it in me, Hannibal.”

“What would you have me do?” Hannibal leans in, feeling the warmth of Will's body so close to his own. “Kill a killer? Am I to be the bullet in your gun?” He is not entirely opposed to the idea, but the short time between their escape and the present makes even the premise of a hunt dangerous.

“I'm no gun,” Will says, and steps away from Hannibal, abandoning the half-washed dishes to peer out into the moor beyond the glass. “I barely even feel like a man. A hound, maybe.”

“There are hounds that tree their prey.” Hannibal towels the glasses drying on the rack, blotting away the water spots. He's content enough to let the silence linger for a time, letting it settle over them like a comforting mantle before he speaks again. “There are also hounds bred to bring down predators. Which are you to be, I wonder?”

“I don’t really know what I’m doing here,” Will says. The wind rattles in the eaves, gusting hard across the open moor. Will looks up at Hannibal and then back out the window. The sky is darkening early in the day. Will won’t meet Hannibal’s gaze again, he knows, the set of his shoulders tense and undecided.

“Perhaps you merely need time to orient yourself,” Hannibal says. “The stars are different now. The night sky unfamiliar.”

Will checks the latches on the windows, one at a time, then shoves both hands in his pockets. He’s looking at his coat and boots, only just broken in, Will straying further and further afield as he mends. “Smells like a big storm's coming.”

“We've supplies to weather it,” Hannibal says. The temperatures have begun to dip low enough at night to deposit frost on the flagstones, and rain leaves icy deposits before dawn. “Will you look into your killer? The manner of the death suggests he may kill again, perhaps in the same fashion.”

“It’d certainly make him a person of interest to local law enforcement,” Will says, bowing his head in thought. Framed by the light from the window he looks like a stained-glass painting rendered in charcoals.

Perhaps, by this time next year, if they haven’t driven themselves restlessly on to some other bolt hole, they might see to having the old barn repaired and acquiring livestock to bring out of the weather. Hannibal finds raising his own sheep and cattle appealing, would not despair of having fresh eggs and a goose or two.

Will turns abruptly and shivers as if someone's walked over his grave. He says, “I'll go bring in more firewood, just in case. If it rains, it'll be too wet to burn well.”

*

The storm is in full force, howling uselessly across the peat bogs, and Hannibal is reading fireside, turning pages by candlelight, when a heady cloud of bergamot and warm salt water fills the cottage.

Hannibal, given nothing more diverting to engage in, goes in search of the source. He discovers Will sulking in the bathroom, soaking up to his sternum in a steaming tub full of scented water, both arms draped over the side. The room is filled with amber light from half a dozen votives, arranged in shrine-like fashion around the sink basin. he shadows they cast flicker over the walls and ceiling.

“If you're going to stare, you might as well just come in and do it,” Will says without opening his eyes. “It’s uncharacteristically rude of you to let all the heat out.”

“I was uncertain you would tolerate my company in such an intimate setting.” The latch clicks softly behind him and settles on the stool near Will's head. He and Bedelia shared this sort of dangerous familiarity once, though Will Graham is no calf to fatten for the slaughter.

Will meets Hannibal’s eyes directly, the tilt of his jaw both insolent and appealing. “That's never stopped you before.” His newfound bullishness should make Will seem even less fey than the waspish, withdrawn man that Hannibal once sat in opposition to in Jack Crawford's office, but with his damp curls and wet skin he looks more electrifying and wild than ever.

“Perhaps it should,” Hannibal says, and doesn't bother unbuttoning his shirt cuff. He plunges his arm into the water, soaking the sleeve up to the elbow, and fishes out a washcloth that has drifted to the bottom of the tub.

“I guess I’m just getting used to your flagrant disregard for personal boundaries. If you decide to change your spots now, it'll just throw me off,” Will says, tense from head to toe but clearly not willing to retreat from Hannibal's presence and make himself a liar. “I'm an old dog. It gets harder and harder to learn new tricks.”

“I am merely reassessing our interpersonal boundaries,” Hannibal says, and Will tilts his head without complaint when Hannibal draws the wet cloth slowly up Will's shoulder and neck. The tremor that travels through Will's body is delectable. “Many modern cultural value structures might place us at a level of intimacy beyond a concern for simple nudity, given we've taken a life together.”

“I really don’t care what society thinks of our relationship. Wash my hair.” It's not a request, and the way Will’s jaw clenches only makes Hannibal wish to close his fingers around Will’s throat. “You can soliloquize about morality and boundaries later.”

“Insolent boy,” Hannibal says evenly. Will's prickliness is part and parcel with his overall appeal, but even Hannibal is not wholly immune to the sharp side of Will's tongue. He's aware his reluctance to play avenging angel for Will during their convalescence stokes the fire of Will's resentment.  “What've you done to deserve such coddling?”

“You did it for her, didn’t you? Bedelia? But you wanted to do it for me,” Will says, too close to the truth for comfort where Bedelia is concerned. She was a pretty centerpiece, and would have made a prettier main course, but Hannibal has certain tastes that she could not satisfy, no matter her seat at his table.

Will sucks in a sharp breath when Hannibal rakes his nails over the sensitive new skin where Dolarhyde's fang punched a hole clean through to bone.

“Are you so certain?” Hannibal asks, low. He's eaten men alive for less presumptuous questions, and with one motion Will's throat rests in the cradle of Hannibal’s elbow. If he squeezes, Will's breathing will be compromised; he lingers over the thought, but he hasn't brought Will this far to ruin their fragile intimacy with an impotent tantrum of his own. “Perhaps I shared this with Alana, instead.”

“You didn’t share anything with Alana, except for me,” Will says, full of bite and spark. His directness is as enticing as his combativeness is frustrating. “Was it easier to imagine it was me you were fucking with her or with Bedelia?”

“They both had many virtues and were not like you at all.” Hannibal tightens his grip pointedly. His own transparent desire is mildly uncomfortable; it feels as though Will has stolen it from him and now wields it like a knife. Hannibal must tread carefully lest he be disemboweled. “My imagination has no difficulty, I needed no assistance, and they brokered enough respect to hold my attention.”

“You're just proving my point about how much you want this. Is your cock hard right now?” Will asks, kicking upwards for leverage. He slips in the bath, unable to find purchase in the soaped-and-salted water.

Hannibal fists a hank of Will's curling, wet hair, halting his attempt to rise, and holds him against the porcelain with a firm hand. He counters, “Is yours?” and glides the flat of his hand down the slick center of Will's chest, the muscular steppe of Will's belly, and palms Will's hip.

He goes no further. Had he a knife, he could gut Will from hip to sternum.

“Why don't you find out?” Will challenges, voice gone breathy and strained. He arches beneath Hannibal's touch but finds no resolution. His breathing becomes steadily more ragged, his heartbeat so thunderous in his veins that Hannibal can feel at Will’s femoral pulse point. Hannibal is uncertain of the cause – fear or desire. Both lie equally close to the surface, both are deeply tantalizing, both hazily delicious.

Will jerks in his grip, reaching back to claw blunt nails down the length of Hannibal’s arm. His fingers snag on the fabric and yank, not really fighting Hannibal at all, but playacting at it in an incredibly transparent bid to incite Hannibal to action. The ploy works, for all Hannibal is aware of the farce. A hedonistic compulsion to bite down on Will’s bare skin makes itself known, and Hannibal feels a surprisingly ill-controlled urge to rip him from the tub and rut against him right there on the wet tile.

“What are you aiming to accomplish, Will?” Hannibal asks, holding fast and careful against Will's renewed struggling until Will tires and goes limp, sucking in sharp breaths. “What do you gain from goading me now?”

“Everything in the world is about sex,” Will says, rasping at the pressure Hannibal is exerting, “except sex.”

“Sex is about power,” Hannibal says, restraining both a growing sense of impatience with this dance that has kept them circling one another – not just for weeks, but for years — and his own deepening arousal. “I'm familiar with Wilde.”

“Maybe I'm just wondering if you believe him,” Will says. He wrenches his head around and looks up at Hannibal through slitted eyelids, lashes clumped, pupils dilated and dark and hungry. “Did you fuck Bedelia when you had her under your thumb?”

Hot water sloshes over Hannibal's bare feet, and Hannibal gives in to the invitation Will dangles before him. He reaches into the murky water and finds the puzzle piece he's been missing, the Rosetta Stone that unlocks the translation of Will Graham's belligerence. Will's erection is hot and hard and tantalizing in the cage of Hannibal's fingers and the sound that Will makes is so unrepentantly savage that Hannibal feels it all the way down to the core of himself.

“Hannibal.” The way Will says his name is barely an exhalation of air, a puff of smoke, a ghost of desire that vanishes into the steaming air. Heat grips Hannibal in a solid line down his torso, desire flaying him from throat to the cradle of his pelvis. “Please, Hannibal.”

Power, heady, and the lust for more of it, surges up Hannibal's spine, guides his hand up and down the length of Will's cock. Will reaches back and paws blindly at Hannibal's shirt collar with wet hands, struggling for purchase, but Hannibal is unyielding, hard as marble in his own pants and uncompromisingly firm with Will.

“Is this what you require from me, Will?” Hannibal asks, pressing his cheek to the crown of Will's head. He can feel Will trembling beneath every squeezing downstroke, every deliberate upstroke, until Will bucks into his grip. Water sloshes over the tile floor and Hannibal's bare feet.

“Yes, please,” Will hisses, twisting, but goes limp and lovely when Hannibal closes his mouth over the meat of Will's neck and sucks hard. The taste of Will’s skin makes Hannibal feel as though he has been floundering in the rapids and finally gripped the rock that would save him.

Will arches wordlessly, flushed rosy and beautiful, his marred body sculpted in part by Hannibal's own hand, in part by his own machinations. Hannibal rubs his thumb in tight circles just above Will's circumcision scar, up the slick, exposed underside of Will's glans, and then around the head, seeking the secret, sensitive places of Will's body. He would happily feast on Will’s desire in a more deliberate manner, his hunger easily the match of a starving man at a table set with ambrosia, but the thing fruiting between them has not yet ripened for the harvest.

“Relax,” Hannibal murmurs into the vulnerable expanse of Will's neck. He draws his nails across Will's scalp and is rewarded with a throaty noise. “Be still.” An impossible instruction, but if anyone can offer him the impossible, it will be Will. “Let yourself feel it. Take this for yourself alone.”

Will tries mightily, quivering with the effort of self-restraint, and Hannibal drinks in the sight of him, his bare body, his taut muscles. He knows in that moment that, no matter what, a specter of Will will haunt his memory palace in perpetuity: even in the darkest of outcomes, he'll know the rich sound of Will's pleasure, the fine texture of his rigid cock beneath Hannibal's palm, the infinite beauty of Will's voluntary helplessness.

The line of Will's body arches in counterpoint to a slippery downstroke of Hannibal's hand that takes him from the tip to the root of Will's cock.

Will twists and kicks in the tub, reaching for Hannibal, and orgasms in wordless, shaking bursts, his damp hair soaking Hannibal's shirt, Will’s thrashing sloshing water onto the tile. Hannibal briefly regrets the choice of venue for this moment of intimacy; he would prefer to be able to smell and taste the evidence of their tryst. The water washes it away.

Hannibal is still erect, trapped in his own suffocating clothing, but he gently rebuffs Will's reaching hand. He makes a soothing noise and presses his mouth against Will's temple, not quite a kiss, and then leaves Will wrung out and perhaps somewhat less tidy than he found him.

*

Hannibal is aware he's been manipulated, even as Will pauses on the walk outside the university. He allows it, is indulgent of it, though a public appearance is reckless. The tension between them spools out, and he'll follow Will's lead in this instance, because Hannibal is still learning how to reel in prey that has knowingly hooked itself but fights the whole way. The line may still yet snap.

“You shouldn't worry so much,” Will says. He looks good, if a little thin, dressed in a butter-soft cashmere and dark pants. Even his smile is tailor-made to intrigue Hannibal. He pulls off his gloves one at a time and tucks them into the pocket of his unbuttoned coat. “It’ll give you wrinkles.”

“I have a natural inclination towards caution,” Hannibal says.

“You also have a natural inclination towards me,” Will counters. His mouth is pulled taut with a severe smile, his right cheek puckered with healing, pink scar tissue. The other side of his face could be mistaken for a Lysippos, were it rendered in stone instead of ruddy flesh. Will catches Hannibal staring and asks, “It's a little bit Phantom of the Opera, isn't it?”

“Hardly so melodramatic,” Hannibal says. He reaches up and deftly tucks a stray curl behind Will's ear, relishing the way Will shivers at the touch. “For many, there is a certain appeal to scars and their stories.”

Only the blind could miss Will's satisfaction. The morning is frosty, and it’s early enough that they have no company on the walk, so Hannibal steps into Will's personal space, testing Will's tolerance for his deliberately proprietary behavior.

“Hannibal.” Will's voice is soft and warm, but also a gentle rebuff. His gaze shifts to Hannibal's mouth, lips part, a hint of his red tongue visible behind his teeth. They're both thinking of the moment shared in the bath, and Hannibal can still smell the faint, musky citrus bite of the bergamot lingering on Will's skin. “I'm sorry. I can't let this go.”

“Are you Sisyphus, to forever bear this burden?” Hannibal murmurs, holding out his arm for Will to take.

“You saw to that,” Will says, looking at Hannibal from the corner of his eye. He's a sly creature now, canny about Hannibal's manipulation, and Hannibal finds he must navigate the murky waters of their blossoming companionship with a careful hand on the rudder. “You wanted me to become who I really was. It seems disingenuous of you to turn me away once you've seen what that is.”

Hannibal halts him, arm circling Will's waist, drawing him closer. “Please do not mistake my honest reservations about drawing attention to our residence for rejection of your true self.”

“I could never mistake you.” Will looks at him, steady, despairing, beautiful, and then pulls away. Hannibal allows Will to place some distance between them before pursuing. “Not again. Not in any lifetime. Not even for a single second.”

They enter into a building filled with windows and corridors, each with doors that lead into several series of lecture halls. Here, the walls are hung with paintings, most of them student works on display. He watches as the set of Will’s shoulders slowly loosens, distracted by the artwork or the airy, stately atmosphere of the ancient corridors.

“Have you read The Old Man and the Sea?’ Will asks, pausing by an extremely faithful recreation of Francisco de Zurbarán's Agnus Dei. The Lamb of God, bound helpless and awaiting sacrifice.

“I am not a great appreciator of Hemingway,” Hannibal says, angling towards Will, though his eyes remain fixed on the painting. “I find his writing to be rather pedestrian.”

“Most people aren't,” Will says, shoving both hands in his pockets. “I had a college professor insist it was about hubris, but I think it was just about struggling to find yourself again when your identity is changing without your consent.”

“Will you share the story with me?” Hannibal prompts. The face of the lamb wears an expression of either resignation or fear – concepts as unfamiliar to Hannibal as they are rote to Will. Zurbarán's rendering of the beast's wooly coat is done so lovingly that, even in reproduction, Hannibal can imagine the feel of it beneath his fingers, and the sharp scent of lanolin rises in memory.

“You wouldn’t like it much. It's a fishing story,” Will says, and seems disinclined to explain further. He turns his attention very pointedly away from Hannibal and studies a marble bust. The piece is labeled as a student's work, and the fine chisel marks carry the torturous weight of a hand still impossibly striving towards perfection of another's vision.

“Are you aware of the concept of patronage?” Hannibal allows Will the space to respond without scrutiny, content to admire the art. The student pieces are crude, but emotive, and Hannibal has always been drawn to the vast array of imperfect emotion in amateur art. Like Will, they contain far more spirit than they're able to express, not yet fluent in their medium of choice.

Hannibal has never quite believed the widely-held mythology that Will is simply the shade of whomever is held up to him. There is something savage and untethered nesting in Will's heart, and with it a desire to bring justice to the unjust.

“Am I to be your patron, then?” Will asks. He turns and, in the dim light of the empty corridor, slips his fingers around Hannibal's forearm. His palm is cool and dry, and his gaze is steady, and they're standing too close not to attract scrutiny were another to come upon them. “What would you ask for in payment?”

“Nothing more than you're willing to give,” Hannibal says, bending to scent the skin that is stretched like fine silk over the delicate bones of Will's wrist. He grazes his lips just over Will's pulse point and keeps his eyes lowered. He doesn't need to look to feel the tremor beneath his touch, or the thick, heady aroma of Will's burgeoning arousal.

“That still might be too much,” Will says. He takes his hand back, and turns his body away from Hannibal, shuttering his desires behind the polite, meek facade he hasn't worn with Hannibal in years. “We both know that I’ll just keep giving, and who can say how much of it I’ll lose.”

Hannibal doesn't fight the inevitable retreat; Will must deal with his own longings from a place of safety, lest they overwhelm and best him.

A handful of chipped and weathered Aegean artifacts sit on a raised dais behind a wall of display glass. Will feigns interest in a large storage jar wrapped with an abstraction of an octopus, studying the way the creature wraps eight legs around the throat of the clay vessel.

“The ocean is symbolic of life and death in many cultures,” Hannibal says at Will’s shoulder. Will flits forward to the next display, and Hannibal tails him loosely, his omnipresent shadow, a wraith in Will’s train. “A source of food and succor, the sea is also a dire, uncaring mistress.”

“A sailor’s first wife, his bed, and his grave,” Will says, and doesn’t veer away from the touch when Hannibal makes contact again. “One of the last truly unexplored places we can reach without leaving atmosphere.”

“The heart will sooner divulge its mysteries than the sea,” Hannibal agrees. His taste for the ocean, the hungry vessel of their birth, has not been dulled by their narrow escape from her icy grasp. “Do you fear the ocean, Will?”

“Sometimes I wake up after the waves swallow me. I dream about the ocean, about wading into the water and letting the riptide take me, but I’m never afraid. There’s a lot to be afraid of that I’m just not anymore,” Will says, straightening. Watching him expand into himself is nothing short of miraculous, a wonder to bear witness to. “It just feels like I’ve taken up a bigger line with live bait.”

They pass unnoticed and in silence, the students and staff blind to the predators that walk among them. Like stalking cats, they go camouflaged in their smart trousers, their fine coats, their dark brooding consideration of the artwork and architecture.

They pause by an open doorway. Inside, a man is packing his belongings into a bag, speaking to an older woman about a novel Hannibal has never read. Will looks at them for only a few seconds and moves on, so Hannibal asks, “Do you care to share what we’re looking for?”

“Our killer,” Will says, confirming Hannibal’s suspicions. They’re tracking the beast in his lair, then – or at least in his hunting grounds. Will must think their killer a clumsy predator indeed if they’re hunting for him here.

Several of the lecture halls are occupied, doors propped open. As Hannibal and Will stroll past them, one of the rooms disgorges Alberto Moretti – identified as such by a small staff name badge. Tailing him is a small, dark-eyed man with a sour expression, arguing quietly with Moretti.

His expression is angry, the opposite of Moretti’s, and when they pass Hannibal catches the smell of bleach clinging to his skin, as though he’s bathed himself and his clothes in it regularly and the scent lingers like a swampy cloud about him. Nothing about his appearance stands out to Hannibal as remarkable; he must exert himself to find his face memorable at all.

“Will,” Hannibal says, placing a hand on Will’s elbow. “A moment.”

Will looks at him, and then his gaze sharpens and swings around to face the pair of men like a scenthound catching a trail. Hannibal nods to him, and turns to stride after them, raising his voice as he goes, “Excuse me, Signore, I could not help but overhear – you are lecturing on Signora Violante’s interpretation of The Beggar’s Opera, yes?”

The man with Moretti has an immediate rebuttal at hand, and turns on his heel to face Hannibal, puffing up like a cornered skunk, his immediate vitriol just as pungent and distasteful. “Signora Violante’s compagnie plagiarized The Beggar’s Opera, you mean.”

“A good ear, but you are not from the University, I think?” Moretti asks, not casting so much as a glance of acknowledgement towards his companion. He looks at Will closely, but his demeanor is open, friendly, genial about their intrusion. “You might join us for tea to discuss her further. We were discussing a curriculum for study of Commedia dell’arte, and the best way to educate young minds on the deeper nuances of the art.”

“From the expression your companion wears, you must be cast as Il Dottore,” Hannibal says, and Moretti bares all of his teeth when he laughs at the joke, two perfect rows of ivory behind a shock white beard that touches his chest in a well-manicured point when he speaks. “Perhaps you are keeping him from that which he desires most?”

“As it were,” Moretti says, offering his hand in greeting to both Hannibal and Will. Hannibal takes it, inhaling the scent of books and tea and old linen. Moretti is harmless, a tenured professor in a niche subject living a well-worn life. “Your unusual appearance in our midst has made me forget my manners. I am Alberto Moretti, and this is Professor Aloysius Diego, a much more recent transplant from the Mediterranean — and, I fear for my sake, far more passionate about where the line lies between creative pilfering and transformative media.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintances,” Hannibal says, offering both hands to Moretti, and trusting Will to follow his lead. “Edward Antonaitis, a delight to meet experts in the arts, and this is my companion, Doctor William Smythe.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Will says with an appropriate quantity of disinterested boredom dripping from every word. Hannibal senses the immediate shift in his demeanor, the way his shoulders straighten and his eyes focus on something distant.

“An American!” Moretti looks delighted. Diego’s response is more immediate, souring at Will’s cold shoulder, and Hannibal is aware of Will making an assessment and reassessment of Diego, synapses firing like rifle shots in the stormy depths of his relentlessly empathetic brain.

“It’s not as if we’ve never had the pleasure before,” Diego says, as if meeting an American is not a pleasure at all and never will be, no matter how sophisticated they may be.

“Doctor Smythe is a prodigious collector and lecturer on creation myths, and consented to journey with me to learn direct from the source about the birth of the universe,” Hannibal lies, never allowing an ounce of his regard to shift from Moretti. Diego is Will’s purview, and well within it.

“Oh, you must join us now, and tell me what you’ve learned,” Moretti says, and then to Diego, “Perhaps your studies of early philosophers might be of some academic interest to our fellows.”

“My horizons have only begun to be broadened,” Will says, and he turns to smile at Diego, sudden and blinding. Dolarhyde was very wrong; Will is deeply attractive, if given a moment’s consideration. Diego is considering him. “We’ve been abroad just a handful of days, and we were about to leave for Budapest when we heard about the murders.”

Moretti’s expression falls and his attention darts to Diego for the briefest of moments. He is concerned of Diego’s reaction, perhaps imagining some attachment to the deceased, but is certainly unaware of the potential danger. “Ah, yes, a sordid tale of horror. Very macabre, and not at all fit for polite society — though, if you like art and philosophy, I can see very much why you might be interested.”

“The work is very much transformative,” Hannibal says, leaning intentionally to make Moretti feel as if he were in on the very best of macabre jokes, and to exclude Diego from his intimacy. Best to make an enemy of Diego, so that Will might find the gap in his armor more swiftly. “What poor, sad fate it is to be an unappreciated doctor of philosophy and find yourself dead at the hand of a killer that can’t even be bothered for a little originality.”

The laugh he earns from Moretti is sharp, startled, and guilty. Hannibal expects it to have taken longer to incite a reaction from Diego, but Diego snaps, “It is ill-fitting for a scholar to speak badly of the dead. These deaths are no joking matter. I expected more from you, Professor.”

“Ah, Aloysius, forgive me,” Moretti begins, but Diego is already striding away, red-faced and seething. “A thousand pardons, gentlemen. I had best get after him. He’s been jumpy since the first person died. No doubt we’re all just trying to keep our heads above water and put on a good show.”

“Do you have a business card?” Will asks, shouldering subtly between Moretti and Diego’s retreating back. “It would be a terrible shame to waste the opportunity for learning just on a joke in poor taste.”

Moretti brightens and fumbles in his coat pocket, passing Will a card. “Certainly, young man. Doctor Smythe and Mr. Antonaitis, if you would excuse me.”

Will watches after them with bright eyes. Hannibal waits until they are out of sight, puts a hand on Will’s shoulder, murmurs, “A good fisher of men, indeed.”

The look in Will’s eyes is invigorating. “Nets are always easier to drag with two.”

*

They cross the narrow lane bordering the university campus and hike away from the aging buildings, wind whipping the tail of Will’s scarf, then pause by the small, green graveyard that occupies the narrow space aside the Saint Mary Magdalen church. The Ashmolean Museum squats in the background, peaches-and-cream courtyard filled with tourists enjoying a rare moment of sunny weather.

“It’s him, I think it’s him,” Will says, pulling his scarf up over the lower half of his face. In the warm, dry confines of the university proper, his scarring drew only a handful of curious glances. Outside, the attention he garners is considerably greater.

Hannibal angles himself between Will and the gawking passersby. Few people might recognize them, but Hannibal wishes to minimize the risk of being spotted publicly. “Diego certainly did seem passionate about his philosophies.”

“A small-minded, overly ambitious man who lucked into his career and feels as though he deserves a seat at the table without having paid his dues,” Will says. He puts his hands on his face, scrubs at his stubble, then drops them. “I can feel him rattling around in my skull. He’s gorging on knowledge and feels as though he’s being fed scraps.”

“A child throwing a tantrum.” Hannibal reaches for Will’s hands, holds them between his own, and leans in to warm the tips of his fingers with his breath.

“No, not a child. Children don’t understand how the world works. Fear and anger in the face of a strange world is part of the human condition.” Will is indulgent of Hannibal’s pampering for the briefest of moments, and then withdraws. He says, “Diego is a grown man, very likely killing people because his boss won’t give him a raise. Not exactly a tale of woe and tragedy.”

“The path to murder is rarely paved with a singular stone.” Hannibal unwinds his scarf and drapes it over his arm; the warmth of the sun touches him uncomfortably in the temperate weather.

“We can look for the clues – the smoke, the ash, follow it all the way down to find the flame,” Will says. “I just need to find the place where it all leads. You’ll help me, won’t you? That’s what you were offering before we met with Moretti, wasn’t it?"

“The things that are connected for you are not connected for me, Will,” he says. There are other associations Hannibal has made — the scents and textures of the body, of Diego’s oppressive stink, the reek of sour bleach beneath his nails, his chapped hands incongruous with the fastidious care he takes with the rest of himself. “But, perhaps together we might paint the entire picture.”

They begin to move again, and when it feels they might pause a second time to take in their surroundings, Will simply turns a corner into a slightly shabbier part of Oxford, where the only stop they make is to pay for a copy of the morning paper. Will gets a cheap cup of coffee, too, but Hannibal abstains on principle, the secondhand experience of it affront enough. They turn up a shaded walk.

The paper has a headline on it that directs them to the inside page for more information. It’s clear there’s been another murder. Will pointedly doesn’t look, keeping it tucked under his elbow while he drains his styrofoam cup to the last scorched dregs and discards it in a park bin.

Hannibal can nearly feel the way Will’s brain is working, nearly taste his desire to repeat the ritual experience of slaying the Great Red Dragon. Will longs to rise the hero, the seductive pull of justice unencumbered by law warring with propriety up and down the well-worn paths of his mind in which mute morality lurks.

The drive home is lengthy and the hour is growing late enough that Hannibal desires to vacate the university campus before the night security staff — always more paranoid, with infinitely more free time to occupy staring at the international Most Wanted lists — begin their shifts.

He watches Will take the newspaper from beneath his arm and crinkle the edges of it several times before he asks, “Shall we return home and discuss this further?”

“Would you kill him for me?” Will asks, and turns up the walk towards the truck, parked in an unmonitored public lot a short distance from the university.

Will doesn’t wait for Hannibal to answer, just keeps his head low, blends in easily with the street noise, a harder task for Hannibal. The cameras in the vicinity are all CCTV, but neither of them survived for so long by being overly stupid and coming out is risk enough with Jack Crawford still above ground.

As he dogs Will’s steps, he spares a stray uncharitable thought for Jack for the first time since they put the knife to Dolarhyde. Will would be better off without Jack rattling around in his head, gumming up the works. But he considers for a moment: the best way to punish Jack would be to put them in a room together, let Will whine and whimper like a kicked house pet. Jack so easily forgets that Will is a fully grown beast with fresh blood on his muzzle.

The thought gives him a brief prickle of satisfaction, like a good glass of brandy and a better book. He once enjoyed Jack’s friendship and now equally enjoys the thought of Jack’s suffering, particularly since uncovering the spectacular fact that Jack’s moral underpinnings are far less rigid than Jack allows others to assume.

Will slides into the driver’s seat and Hannibal has no interest in arguing when Will seems to require control over his own trajectory; he’s had precious little. Hannibal hands over the keys. The cab of the truck is warm, the heat absorbed from hours in the sunshine swaddling them like a blanket.

They sit in silence for a length of time, sun slowly sinking towards the horizon. The truck keys rattle together in the palm of Will’s hand, absent, thoughtful. The newspaper sits on the bench seat between them, folded over so that neither of them can see the article.

“What do you think he’s done this time?” Will asks. He leans forward and rests his head on the steering wheel. Hannibal reaches out and touches the back of Will’s neck and watches as Will slowly relaxes at the contact.

Hannibal rubs his thumb over the knob of bone behind Will’s ear. “Speculation is not necessary. He’s killed again and a pattern will form. Would you care for me to look?”

“Don’t think that’s necessary. They’re not going to run photographs of this one in the paper,” Will says. “That was a one time deal, an amateur mistake by the newsroom. The authorities will have gotten this one on lockdown, and they won’t want to stroke the killer’s ego.”

Hannibal considers the options. He’s certain the culprit is Diego, but Will requires vetting beyond a hunch and an untimely fit of pique. “The authorities won’t leave him at large for much longer. He’s been fortunate thus far to have left minimal evidence.”

“They’ll don’t even have a partial print yet. He’s been wearing cotton gloves. He’s likely someone who handles archival books or media, but he’s equally unlikely be a restorer, just an enthusiast.”

“The arrangement of his tableaux suggest someone who is artistically-leaning but lacks the skill for visual transmutation.” Hannibal has recreated his own share of paintings and frescoes in his venture of conveying an overall message to his pursuers, but the transformative nature of death elevates and equalizes all things, even the suit-wearing cattle he’d used to sculpt his offerings.

This killer has no respect – none for the living, none for the dead, and none for the art he derives his message from.

Will fiddles with the dials on the center console, but with the truck off, his nervous tics produce no results. “We can’t discount the assistants at the university, but it’s more likely he has access to the rare book collection and stole the gloves.”

“The cuts on the first victim were done with a dull kitchen knife,” Hannibal contributes. The wounds left the corpse raw, hollowed out like a melon rind. “He’s not a hunter, or a butcher, or employed in a medical field.”

“Well, we’ve ruled out who he isn’t, and we have a suspect based off circumstantial evidence,” Will says. “Where do we go from here with this information?”

“The decision rests entirely in your hands,” Hannibal says. In earnest, he would rather avoid drawing too much attention, but Will’s determination in removing the cancerous growth on this community may prove to be too powerful to resist. Or too dangerous for him to ignore. Hannibal will be unable to allow Will to compromise his safety, not with so much left to be said.

Will frowns and touches his scarred cheek, a gesture that’s become frequent. It must itch viciously around the faint scabbing. Hannibal still finds his visage nothing short of stunning. “Are you ever going to answer my question?”

Hannibal buckles himself in and says, “I would kill anyone, if you could ever ask it of me. I would rip God from his throne in the Heavens and devour him at your feet, Will.”

“But you won’t do it unless I ask,” Will says, gripping the steering wheel like a life preserver. Hannibal imagines Will drowning in slow motion; the fantasy is not a stretch. Will has been dragging himself back under for weeks, unwilling to believe he deserves to live at all.

“You’ll never ask,” Hannibal says, and reaches out to Will, pulling his scarf down so that he can see the heavy-lined art Dolarhyde carved into the devastating plane of Will’s cheek. The ridge of the scar tissue is as white as chalk, the meat around it as red as wine. “You’ll dirty your own hands again before you use me to mete out justice for you, Will.”

Will’s eyelids flutter, mouth opening then closing, a fish on a hook, every inch of him beautiful while he suffocates beneath the rubble and ruin of his old life. “You’d like it far too much. Can it be justice if you enjoy doing it?”

“Only in the human condition do we find virtue inextricably yoked to acceptable forms of joy,” Hannibal says. “And so many equally fine pleasures relegated to amorality and taboo. The lioness must be well-pleased to kill a gazelle for her meal and is no doubt equally satisfied when she bloodies her jaws on the hyena stalking her prize.”

“I’m not a lioness,” Will says, irascible, and turns the ignition. The truck engine rumbles to life, settling into a familiar buzz of engine noise. “I’m a man, and I can discern moral from amoral.”

“Hold on to that feeling,” Hannibal suggests. He unfolds the newspaper across his lap and looks again at the article, the killer already banished to page three. There are no pictures, but the article provides enough detail for Hannibal to imagine it. Soon enough, Will’s brain will be full of the shadows of rats, phantom vermin that gnaw the innards from an unending line of dead men. “I believe you’ll need a reminder of it before the week is out.”

*

The other side of the bed is cool and empty beneath Hannibal’s palm, sheets rumpled, evidence of Will’s occupation and abandonment. Will is not always curled into the opposite side of the bed, preferring to sleep where he might and creep in beneath the blankets when the night has stilled. It is not unusual to wake and find him having departed, but something shifts in the air — cold, too cold, fingers of frost penetrating the house. The icy air had felt much the same way the night they took Mischa and fed her to him in his hunger-fevered state.

Hannibal feels fear, a state not unheard of; he has experienced the physiological effects, occasionally languished in them. Now, unlike other times, his heart rate jumps far beyond his control, breath fogging the wintry air that permeates the very heart of the cottage.

He only fully understands the nature of his apprehension when he descends from the bedroom to find the kitchen door flung open to the night and the whole house still.

Will is gone. His winter coats all hang untouched on hooks in the mud room.

Beyond the rear boundary of the homestead, past the low, rambling stone fence, lies naught but peatlands. The decomposing fields of plant matter are pocked with invisible pools of water, some deeper than a man is tall and filled with snaring roots. A fine, fetid trap for a young man lost in a nightmare.

Hannibal sets out into the cold night without donning shoes or coat. The moon is bright enough to see by, full and ponderous above the horizon, and the sky is filled with the kind of breathtaking starlight only found in wild places. He pelts down the gravel path, heedless of the sharp bite of rocks underfoot. Hannibal slows at the border of the homestead, picking his way carefully over the strips of sedge grass bordering the bulge of the large peat hag, poorly tended and eroding. The grimy mound looms against the skyline like a dead animal, the belly of the hill gutted and exposed; the air is earthy and rich where Hannibal’s footsteps break the surface layer of vegetation.

Will is standing close enough to naked in the moonlight, shivering in shirt and boxers, hand outstretched to the stars. He's ankle deep in mud and water and the churning slush that's only begun to harden after nightfall leached away the sun's warmth.

Hannibal creeps forward by feet, then inches, until Will is within his reach. He weighs the situation; Will is not yet showing signs of hypothermia, but he fears if some episode has come over Will, that Will might startle and mire them both in the dirty water.

“They're beautiful,” Will says, and lowers his arm. “I could almost touch them. There are so many.”

Hannibal looks up and is finds himself equally transfixed by the sight of the night sky. It is simple enough, looking up at each facet in the jewel-embedded firmament, the blazing done of stars, to see why men have looked up at the infinite night and uniformly experienced awe.

“It is understandable to want to believe in a God when you are so easily made to feel small in the face of nature's majesty,” Hannibal says. The sight is arresting, so far from lights and civilization; there is some appeal in the beauty that isolation brings.

“Tell me about the God that could create these,” Will says. “You always tell me about death. Tell me about something else, if you even can.”

“The Maori have a mythological figure, Mangōroa i ata,” Hannibal says, and fixes his hand under Will's elbow. “The name means 'long shark in the early dawn,’ and, from my best understanding, they believe it gave birth to the stars, which are worn as jewels by Sky God.”

Will turns and Hannibal sees what he could not see before: agony, ecstasy, further transformation that Hannibal can take little credit for. When he reaches for Will, Will comes easily into the circle of his arms, skin cold to the touch, his body like meltwater rushing from the foot of a glacier into the open harbor of Hannibal’s limbs. “I have to find him. I can’t do what you’ve done and still be myself, but I can do that much and still be myself.”

“You would make yourself a destroyer,” Hannibal says into Will's hair. “Could you bear the burden of such a thing?”

“He’s going to kill again, and I could stop him.” Will shivers violently and Hannibal regrets not having brought his coat. “I don't want to play God. I just want to stop bad people from doing bad things.”

“Destruction is necessary,” Hannibal says. The universe has been wanton with Hannibal, and in turn Hannibal has been wanton with the universe. Will is a force entirely to himself – singular, remarkable, enough so that he has shaken the foundations of Hannibal's life. “Rivers carve their path through the land, shaping and sustaining life. Fire destroys old growth so that the new may flourish.”

“Is what you did necessary?” A stiff wind blisters over the moor, frigid and cruel. Will presses himself tight into Hannibal's grip. Before Hannibal can formulate a response, Will asks, “It only seems cruel. Can we go inside?”

“You only ever need ask,” Hannibal says, and helps Will back up to the dirt path. They walk in silence, barefoot and shivering. Will's unease sits over them like a funeral shroud, like smog, like the waves that swallowed them up, heavy and clinging.

Perhaps Will Graham was not the only one born anew from the sea. Will falters when the cottage comes into view, and they stand at the end of the drive a moment longer, looking at the warm glow of their home, a beacon of light in the darkness. The tension bleeds from Will, and he leans into Hannibal's grip when they start again towards warmth and safety.

As they gain the dark flagstones that mark the gate into the cottage garden, it begins to snow. Fat flakes drift down and cling to Will’s hair where it curls past his ears.

Hannibal closes up the cottage and rekindles the hearth. It's only the work of a few minutes to revive the fire guttering in the hearth, and he diligently feeds it until the blaze is palpable. Will shivers beside the dining table, pooling mud and the green swamp stink of peat around him like a stray dog come in from the night.

The bucket stored beneath the kitchen sink is not his first choice for the task, but it's sturdy and wide. He fills it with warm water at the tap and is acutely aware of Will watching him while he adds a concoction of rosewater and lavender.

“You don't have to do that,” Will says as Hannibal lifts his cold, dirty foot and places it in the water. It smells heavily floral, sweet against the damp scent of the earth clinging to Will's skin. “Really, I'll just shower.”

Hannibal digs his thumb into the tense muscle at the arch of Will's foot and watches the way Will’s expression shifts from concern to pleasure. “Do you know the name for the act of foot washing, Will?”

“I don’t, but I guess you're going to tell me,” Will says, and slumps visibly. He makes a fluttering motion with his hand, gesturing at Hannibal. “That does feel great.”

“Maundy,” Hannibal says, and lifts Will's leg out of the basin. With the cupped bowl of his hand, he washes away the lingering grit, then raises the limb so he can place a delicate kiss in the clean arch of Will’s foot. “The term comes from Latin, mandatum, to command. Performed by holy men as a reminder that even the most divine is only as great as the poorest of his flock.”

Will's eyelashes dip, breath stuttering when Hannibal pushes his thumb into the ball of Will’s foot. “Do you think me poor? Of body – or of spirit?”

“I think myself gone too long without knowing service to another,” Hannibal says, and in one smooth motion, sweeps Will's other foot into the water. Head bowed, he can't see Will's reaction, but he can smell Will's arousal, feel Will's pulse speed under the pads of his fingers. “On occasion, even I find it appealing to surrender control.”

“Is that – what you want?” Will's grip closes around the nape of Hannibal's neck, and a violent thrill runs through Hannibal at the thought of Will’s teeth sinking into his flesh. “Do you want me to take control, Hannibal?”

“I simply wish for you to feel as though you have the agency you actually possess,” Hannibal says, aware of every minute shift of Will's body in relation to his own. “Perhaps an unorthodox method may prove to be more helpful in our case.”

“Maybe you've played too many games for me to trust you, is all,” Will says. The bright firelight on his face makes him look like a painting of a man facing the pit of Hell. Hannibal has always imagined himself acting in pale mimicry of God, with violence and dispassion, but now he sees that perhaps, with Will, he has been a devil, full of greed and base desire.

Hannibal inclines his head, circles Will's wrist with his fingers and times his pulse; it speeds, and Hannibal finds he is unable to look away. “Forgive me.”

“I can't seem to stop,” Will says, and squeezes Hannibal's throat.

His eyes fixed on Hannibal's mouth, Will leans in close, closer, until Hannibal can feel the heat of his skin, the bellows of his lungs, smell the sweet temptation of his blood. Will must feel it when Hannibal's pulse jumps at his proximity, he must sense it when Hannibal catches the aroma of Will's arousal, he must, because his tongue is pressed hard and pink behind his teeth.

“Will,” Hannibal says, “I wouldn't have you do a single thing you didn't want to do.”

Will's hair curls around his face and in that moment, like so many others, Hannibal wishes to memorialize him. He brings to mind a faun with pale eyes and savage tastes, a woodwose attendant of the Green Man, ushering Hannibal into the unmapped forest of the mind.

Hannibal opens his mouth and Will slides his thumb past Hannibal's teeth. He sucks in a sharp breath when Hannibal licks the underside of it, a plain promise of more oral delights.

“I want to fuck you,” Will murmurs. He bends and places slow kisses on Hannibal's bared neck, then bites down on the slope of Hannibal's trapezius. Against Hannibal’s saliva-damp skin, he says, “I want to invade you like you’ve invaded me.”

“Yes,” Hannibal says, because he can think of nothing more beautiful than being torn apart by Will Graham, whether in rage or desire.

He could eat and eat and never fill that fathomless nothing left behind by what was done to Mischa, by what was taken from him. Will is a remote kindness precipitated by a cruel deity. No person or thing can mend the fatal facet in Hannibal's soul that sets him apart from the herd, but in Will he might find a bridge back from the lonely isolation of himself.

Will peels off his shirt, and Hannibal gazes up at him, basking in the sensuality of the display. Hannibal has found Will’s mind to be the most powerful aphrodisiac, but Will's body is beautiful – the scars on his narrow belly, the smattering of freckles that bedeck his chest and shoulders, the ridge of Dolarhyde's claw marks on his face, the roughshod edge of Hannibal's duplicitousness evident on his scalp, his stomach, the scuffed rounds of his knuckles.

They've marked one another inextricably, with their own hands or others’.

The fingers knotted in his hair are ungentle, but careful not to push too far. He cedes control to Will, tipping his head back, and relishes the taste when Will's tongue seeks out the heat of Hannibal's mouth.

“How long have you wanted this?” Will asks, each word curling hot against Hannibal's skin. The rasp of Will's three day beard against his skin is riveting, the nominal discomfort eclipsed by the urge to taste, touch, consume.

He turns his face against Will's collar bone, over the snarled red knot on his shoulder, laps at Will's salt-sweaty pectoral, drags his teeth over the mess of scar tissue. Will's fingers convulse and he moans, low and ragged. With all the honestly he possesses, Hannibal answers, “Since the moment you first met my eyes, Will.”

“I want you in a bed,” Will says. His jaw works, and he hauls Hannibal upwards and kisses him hard, savage, relentless, then, “I want to take you apart as completely as you've taken me apart.”

“You've already turned me inside out, Will,” Hannibal murmurs, letting Will lead him, step by step, down the dark hallway. The house is still frosty, but Will’s skin is as hot as cast iron. The floorboards creak underfoot, each breath bullet-loud in the death-still night.

At the doorway, Will says, “Once more, then. This time, I want to watch it happen,” against Hannibal's mouth, and crowds him backwards until they slide onto the bed. The transition is seamless, Will in full command of himself and of Hannibal, shedding their clothes with each step until they're twined together naked and unburdened by the masks they must wear with everyone except the other.

The lack of light makes it difficult to discern the course of Will’s desire, so he allows his other senses to take lead in this tricky negotiation of two wary bodies. Will shifts powerfully, rocking against Hannibal. The sudden smell of his leaking preejaculate is like a burst of wet spring rain pounding against arboreal loam, unexpected in the midst of the dry, biting winter that long ago planted seeds in Hannibal’s heart.

They part and then collide, and Hannibal is momentarily uncertain of how he was ever able to resist his own desires, to ever remove himself from Will. He would forgive all trespasses, only to know Will desires him just as viciously in return.

Fumbling in the dark has a certain appeal. Anticipation heightens Hannibal’s enjoyment, and Will’s seeking mouth roves everywhere — neck, chest, belly. Hannibal, long accustomed to aiding a lover in maximizing their efforts, finds a new delight in allowing Will leave to fumble and grasp with the sense of cavernous, carnivorous hunger that consumes them both.

A moment’s rustling and Hannibal catches the sweet, damp aloe scent of lubricant. Will bites his lip, rutting against him, in the fever grip of a lust too long untended.

Will's fingers press sudden against his body, slick and firm and steady. Hannibal digs his nails into the meat of Will's back, encouraging him to move. “Do it, Will. Have me how you've wanted to have me all along. There are no rules here, not between the two of us.”

His eyes are all pupil, mouth open, and he pushes into Hannibal with two fingers, parting Hannibal's flesh. White hot pleasure lodges beneath Hannibal's sternum, a beastly hunger that slashes and claws at him from the inside, gnaws at his heart. Hannibal has never taken a lover that saw behind the polite fiction of his daily self, and he long underestimated the potency of being seen and desired.

“How much do you need?” Will asks, fingertips searching. He moves clumsily, but with intent, and Hannibal angles his hips to assist in the process. The sensation that skitters through him is fleeting at first, then grows with each shallow breath he takes. “I don't want to hurt you, not this way.”

“Only a moment more – there –” And for a bright, blinding moment, Hannibal feels as though Will might drive him to the very brink true madness with the stroke of his fingers. “Now, Will.”

Having been guided once, Will learns quickly how to fit himself into Hannibal. His cock is sizable enough to make Hannibal's body burn with the intrusion, but his touch is confident, competent, that of man who gives more than he takes. The way he angles himself promises an openness, a vulnerability. He's poised to be wholly intent on finding every way of unraveling Hannibal's self-control.

Incandescent with pleasure, Hannibal arches beneath Will, rising to meet the first thrust that spears Will deep into Hannibal's body. The physicality of Will’s lovemaking rivals Hannibal’s own, untutored in Hannibal’s particular preferences, but striving rigorously and studiously towards them anyhow, a fast learner with the unpainted canvas of his empathy hung between them.

Will drives him towards an edge, and Hannibal cedes beneath him. He grips blindly at Will, too struck by the heat and movement to desire more than what he's being given moment-to-moment. With one hand, Will pushes his leg up and drives himself as deep as he can go with each pistoning thrust, growing more confident with each motion.

The deliciousness of his own helplessness is not at all lost to Hannibal; he lets it rise over him and break again and again, the sharp sparks of Will’s cock sending flurries of pleasure through his burning body. Even more, the snarling tangle of heat and abject adulation that rises from beneath Hannibal’s skin — Hannibal the spotlight, Will the mirror reflecting his adoration as bright and blazing as a lighthouse guiding a ship home in the night.

“What do you see, Will?” he asks, reaching up to touch Will’s face. Will’s eyes are wide and clear, watching Hannibal unravel beneath him.

“Everything,” Will groans, burying himself into Hannibal with each thrust. “I’d crawl inside you if I could. Oh – Hannibal, I’m going to —”

“Do it,” Hannibal encourages, and his spine arches involuntarily when Will’s hand closes around the neglected length of him. He leans into it, rolling himself upwards, guiding Will’s hand to hasten the end for them both.

Will’s orgasm is desperate and beautiful, his thrusts growing ragged, savage, deep, gripping at Hannibal like he’s trying to climb inside of him. Hannibal pushes back, striving for every ounce of connection, and tumbles headlong after Will through it.

Hannibal is the only safe harbor for Will’s darkest, most toothsome pleasures. The last barrier between them shattered, Hannibal can mark each foothold that Will has carved into him. Like a river wearing a canyon into the stone, Will has opened Hannibal, made a place for himself.

His touch is indelible, driving a knife of pleasure through Hannibal, and Hannibal is aware he’ll find no deeper satisfaction than the angle of Will’s head tilted back in the final throes of his ecstasy before he collapses atop Hannibal.

Will’s breathing mellows, slow but sure, his head pillowed on Hannibal’s chest. He cards his fingers through the thick hair over Hannibal’s sternum. Hannibal can feel the vibration of the words beneath his palm when Will speaks, dark and sweet and melting over his skin like chocolate. “When I was trapped between choosing you and Jack, when I picked up that phone to warn you, I could only think — this is exactly what it’s like to have two terrible ideas at once.”

“And now?” Hannibal breathes into the languid silence that has settled around them. In this home they’ve taken for themselves, in this bed they now share, they are warm with each other — but not at all safe. Will’s words threaten to cut. Hannibal is unafraid of the blade.

The sheets rustle and Will presses his forehead against Hannibal’s ribs, breathing easy, at peace. “There’s no other idea I can have.”

*

Hannibal wakes again without Will at his side, the second time in the same night that he has slept so firm and so fast that his bed partner leaving has not roused him.

It’s an oddity. He opens his eyes and looks at the ceiling and feels none of the animal alarm that plagued him before. The cottage is warm, and beyond the bedroom door and down the hallway, golden light shines in evidence of an early riser going about their day.

Hannibal is sore in ways that deeply please him. He hasn’t taken a male lover since he was still ensconced in his surgical residency, up to his elbows in cadavers and full of the youthful hunger of knowing his own body and mind and the bodies and minds of others. He always hoped to take Will as his paramour, from the first day he knew him – if not in the way of bodies, but of two minds that see one another without fear or judgment.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Will says when he appears in the doorway, kicking his muck-covered shoes off in the bedroom. There will be a trail of dirt and snow and salt to clean up later, but if the monster that slumbers where Hannibal’s heart once was can love, it loves Will Graham and the unrefined mess he leaves everywhere he exists.

“As are you,” Hannibal says, and pushes himself upright in their bed. The sheets are soft, the pillows plentiful. Will is holding a manila folder filled with photographs, and none of them will be romantic in the sense that many people mean. But he brings Hannibal a gift as good as flowers and wine and breakfast in bed – a mystery, a hunt, a death.

“He set the table, picked out every flower, every scrap of linen,” Will says. He kneels on the edge of the bed and then rolls into it, focused on his prints, his prizes. His shoes may be off, but he's still dressed warmly, come from town, from a copy shop filled with the clinging odor of toner and paper, and his cheeks are pomegranate-red from the cold. “But it’s all a facsimile.”

Hannibal sets the images out side by side on the cream linen sheets between them. Will’s eyes are bright, his appetites whet from the hunt, a feverish air about him. The photos contain fantastical violence, but he watches Will instead, and asks, “Tell me about what you’ve done?”

The day has barely begun, but Will has the scent of something tangible and Hannibal knows he'll follow it to the source if allowed. “I paid to have copies made from the web article. I couldn't get a sense of it until they were all laid out in front of me, but once they were, it was like seeing an optical illusion”

Hannibal lifts one of the photographs to better see it in the thin morning light creeping through the bedroom window. “He did not come from means; the place settings are shabby – the jewelry on the mannequins is costume, the place settings cheap, the artificial flowers are plastic and not silk.”

That Hannibal recognized more quickly lands hard with Will, who must be recalling his mean roots, his feet still mired in the bayou mud where there was never quite enough money to go around. But Hannibal knows exactly how gnawing an empty belly is, how fearfully hunger and poverty can wear a groove into a man in the shape of itself. “I couldn’t see it at first. I didn’t even think. Not everyone can be an expert in culture and entertaining.”

Hannibal runs his fingers over Will's side, soothing. “His amateurish presentation tells us more about who he is. Look. You can see, here.” Hannibal chooses one of the photographs and passes it to Will. He keeps himself draped against Will's body. “Look again. I cannot tell you the meaning of this display any more easily than you might tell me the cost of the materials, but there may be something less mundane these photographs can illuminate. Tell me – what do you see?”

Will closes his eyes, breathing slowly, and then fans out the photos on the quilt. Hannibal keeps his hand on Will's back while he looks, steadying him. “This isn't his design; he's trying to replicate someone else's work, someone who’s had success before, and the murders don’t quite fit the message. These settings — they were never meant to have a body in them. There’s no place for them.”

“Like the student must copy the master to learn technique, our friend is taking the lives of others and disguising his trail with the techniques of others,” Hannibal says.

“He's not imitating another killer, though,” Will says, frown deep and crooked. “Even in the states we would've heard about something like this in the FBI. Been invited to study it.”

“No,” Hannibal agrees. “Life is not imitating life. Art is imitating life. Are you aware of the manner of death commonly attributed to Plato?”

“No, but I think I can make an educated guess,” Will says. He bends his dark head to the photographs. “So, he does have a distinct signature. The link to Diogenes from the first kill isn't a one time thing.”

“The papers haven't released the name of the victim, but I believe it likely we'll discover his name on the faculty list,” Hannibal says. The body is the incorrect size to be Moretti, so the old professor has yet been spared his protégé’s specific brand of criticism, but Hannibal speculates that it will only be a matter of time.

“No doubt we'll find Diego is our most likely unsub,” Will says, and takes one deep, shuddering breath. “I couldn’t tell in the first set of photos, but these cuts look like they were done post-mortem. He depersonalized the victim at the crime scene. That suggests a very specific pathology.”

“Indeed, it does.” Hannibal tilts Will's face towards his own and plants a kiss on the bridge of Will's nose. Will chuffs softly, like a big, pleased dog, and sets the photographs aside. “Would you like for me to depersonalize our killer? Would you like me to make him into art for you? Sculpt his hatred into a thing of beauty?”

“'Our killer’? You make it sound like we've fabricated him.” Will comes to him easily, and Hannibal can read the amusement in the crinkled lines around his eyes like a palmist drawing a fortune.

“Have we not? Do you think he would be anything except a crazed man in the eyes of the public? Do you not think that observing him, knowing him, does not resemble creating him?” Will straddles Hannibal's lap and Hannibal slides both hands under the rough sweater and rougher oilcloths of his coat. His own hands are cold next to the furnace of Will's ribcage, icy against the meat of him.

“Maybe. But maybe he's just one more bad man.” Will's hands seek out Hannibal's skin. He strokes Hannibal from shoulder to hip, lingering in the thatch of hair covering Hannibal’s chest. “If he's just a man, a very rude man, will you eat him?”

Will's eyes are bright and alert, and Hannibal's hands slow, deliberate. He drags his nails down Will's back, from just below his ribs to the lush curve of his ass. This thing growing between them is a casket sealed and buried at the bottom of the ocean, a chest of horrible treasures that, once opened, will gleam between them like the darkest garnets, like spilled blood under the moonlight.

Measured and careful, but honest, Hannibal says, “A belly full of lead has sated my appetites considerably – for a time, at least.”

There is no lie for Will to pick apart, but Will looks closely all the same. Hannibal allows him to see, an open book for Will to pore over. “You'll hunt again, won't you? Not like we’re doing now, but before. There's no stopping it.”

“I would not be myself if I did not,” Hannibal says. He undoes the buttons of Will's dusty red coat and peels him out of it, like relieving an apple of its autumn jacket – pale and far sweeter beneath.

“One day,” Will says, and drapes himself lazily over Hannibal, his smirk puckered but not entirely unkind, “one day soon, you'll go into town for an errand, and some snotty little brat will mouth off, and then you'll try to serve me a person for dinner.”

Will obligingly wriggles out of his jeans when Hannibal pries open the button and fly. Hannibal holds Will to his body, palm flat above his tailbone. He could be a snake, for how sinuously he moves against Hannibal, with a younger man's impatient need for a body so abruptly against his own. “What makes you think I need look elsewhere for my fill of impudence?”

The sweep of Will's lashes is slow, distracted instead of distracting; he's ceded the upper hand to Hannibal once more, out of habit, or trust, or simple craving. Hannibal won’t deny him his satisfaction. Will’s teeth scrape once across Hannibal’s lower lip, breath hot and sweet. “I think you’ve come to like me far too much to eat me.”

Hannibal rolls Will face down beneath him, hand fisted in Will’s hair, and bites his way down the nape of Will’s neck. “There is more than one way to enjoy a delicacy.”

Will stretches out below him, languid, lazy predator, his skin warm and salty from his morning jaunt. Hannibal mouths his way down Will’s back, spreads him open, and takes in the odor of him, sharp and pleasing. When he ducks his head and licks at the opening of Will’s body, Will moans low, ragged, a velvety sound that matches velvety flesh.

He gives Hannibal every liberty, squirming beautifully on his belly, cock leaking thick and fragrant on the sheets. Hannibal will enjoy, after he is done with Will, the task of stripping the linens so he might breathe Will in. He pushes his tongue inside of Will in determined increments, intoxicated by the taste and smell of his skin. Will opens slowly, wet with Hannibal’s saliva, first for Hannibal’s tongue and then for a finger, two.

“If you’re planning on fucking me, the lube is in the drawer,” Will says, pushing himself demandingly against Hannibal’s hand.

“I was considering educating you in the long lost art of patience,” Hannibal says, amused by the new layer of Will’s presumptuousness. He bites down on the tender mound of muscle where it joins Will’s thigh. “However, should it please you more, I may be convinced to expedience.”

Will arches minutely and Hannibal has a firsthand view of the muscular flex of his back. “I’ve been thinking about how I got inside of you, and how much I’d like you inside of me.”

“One final, untested frontier to be delved,” Hannibal agrees. Will is empty, with a hunger rivaling his own ancient need, and must be filled. Hannibal can understand the dire edge to it, feel it in the shift of Will’s body below his, see it in the way his skin flushed, pupils dilate. Obligingly, he retrieves the bottle and drizzles the contents between the globes of Will’s ass, guiding the spread with firm strokes of his thumb.

The stuttering breath Will draws is enchanting. Hannibal rubs deep into him with his forefinger, then two, and coats his own weeping erection with a generous measure. He knows from the tension in Will’s shoulders that Will has never done something quite like this before, but Will lifts his hips off the bed and allows himself to be taken all the same. The slick grip of his body is like wet silk, luxurious, and Hannibal presses into it inch by consuming inch.

Will’s erection does not survive penetration, so Hannibal must coax it to eagerness again. His slicked-up hand works patiently around the shaft while Will groans his appreciation, and when he surges forward on the first real thrust, Will makes a high noise, beyond coherence. The fire from the night prior leaps in Hannibal’s belly, tearing up through him with a vengeance, a hot piano wire wrapped around his spine and bleeding up over his scalp.

“Stay with me, Will,” Hannibal coaxes, holding Will steady beneath him. Will’s fingers curl and clench in the sheets, and when Hannibal angles his thrust to seek directly for Will’s prostate, Will yanks hard, tugging them from the mattress with a muffled shout.

“You still think there’s anywhere else for me to go?” Will says, drawing hitching, hissing gusts of air to punctuate each one of Hannibal’s rocking thrusts. The plush drag of Will’s body clinging around him is decadent, irresistible.

Sweat beads at the nape of Will’s neck, and Hannibal leans down to scrape his teeth across the muscle, drawing a full body tremble from Will. He retreats from the clutch of Will’s body. Will makes a sound of protest, and Hannibal says, “Come, I wish to see your face.”

Will pushes himself up on his elbow and Hannibal reaches for him, reclining against the headboard with Will astride his lap, smearing preejaculate against Hannibal’s belly when he bends to kiss Hannibal like he wants to share every molecule of oxygen between them.

Hannibal bites red half-moons into Will’s skin, marking the slopes of his chest and shoulders with his teeth. Will wraps around him, one hand in Hannibal’s hair and the other wedged behind Hannibal, palm flat over the brand left by Mason Verger.

In one smooth motion, Hannibal seats Will on his cock, and can think of no experience more singular than the way Will’s writhes at the ungentle thrust. Every muscle in Will’s body tenses and strains, then goes sweetly lissome when Hannibal pumps upwards a second time, a third, a dozen.

He could keep Will trapped at the precipice for quite some time, and may later, but now he wishes for Will’s undoing.

“Hannibal,” Will says, soft-tongued and distant with his own pleasure, and bites back an involuntary sound when Hannibal’s slippery grasp encircles his erection.

Will twists above him, driving himself down onto the length of Hannibal with a wanton, primal grace. The curve of his body working on Hannibal’s cock far more beautiful and more marvelous than the intimacy of Hannibal’s knife in his belly, the very sight-smell-taste of him more than enough to pitch Hannibal headfirst into a molten spiral of burning desire.

The world phases into a bright, golden, sun-soaked haze. Hannibal’s limbs go stiff, then loose, and Will stripes his bare abdomen with thick, hot strings of come, yanked headlong after Hannibal’s own orgasm.

A delicious prospect for later, tormenting Will at the edge of that elusive state. He allows himself to drift for the moment, lost at sea alongside Will, but the waters are sunny and calm. Will looks down at him, breathing hard, and sees him, is seen, and the recognition sparks aftershocks of startled pleasure that settle just beneath his skin.

“Do you want to look at the photos again?” Will asks, swear-damp fingers pushing Hannibal’s hair from his eyes. He lowers himself and kisses Hannibal’s skin like he’s memorizing it. Hannibal watches Will indulgently through his eyelashes.

Hannibal captures Will’s hand to give each of his knuckles a kiss. He scrapes his teeth across the pad of Will’s thumb and tastes the day on him already. “Before we play God, we might first tend to our very worldly mess.”

*

Will leaves and returns several times, and Hannibal knows that Will is going to see for himself if he believes that Diego is their monster. He must reaffirm his beliefs. His lack of immediate faith does not overly concern Hannibal, his need for reassurance a deep-rooted holdover from a time when Will could not trust his own mind, so Hannibal remains silent for the duration of Will’s research.

He will wait as long as he needs, but he thinks he need not wait long, the way that Will’s very presence sets the space around him humming with anticipation.

It’s a rainy Wednesday when Will finally comes to Hannibal, hands stuffed in his pockets, ready to talk about the death he’s planning. Will knows about finding killers, but Hannibal has been on the wrong side of the law for the entirety of his life and knows how to disassemble a man without leaving a trace.

He comes back with a wet coat and wet boots, stands in the hallway for a long time and watches Hannibal cleaning up the kitchen, and then asks, “Can we talk about this?” before peeling off his outerwear. Will dumps it on the floor at his feet and then seats himself heavily in the dining room. Hannibal allows Will his mess without the irritation he would normally feel; Will cleans up after himself thoroughly, but on his own emotionally-driven schedule.

A university is a microcosm of closeness that Hannibal could never afford to linger in overlong, though he much desired to join the flock of high society academia in Florence. With the steady rotation of students and staff, there are too few ways for him to control his own narrative in such close confines, more intimate by far than society dinner parties or the unwillingness of his rare professional compatriots to betray much lest they be scrutinized themselves.

Academia is a poor place for a killer to make a bed for himself, too full of the curious and incautious.

Aloysius Diego is a small man, dark-haired and plainly mean around his narrow-jawed anger. He's no beast in the night, no predator, but a spiteful, severe creature with narrow eyes and a sour-looking expression. Hannibal locates the profile for him on Oxford University's website and slides his cell phone across the dining table for Will to see.

“He couldn't even bother to smile for his staff photo.” Will hands the phone back to Hannibal. “Not much there to like.”

“He bears further examination before you make the call.” There could be only a few suspects – only a handful have the trifecta of motive, means, and opportunity. Out of all of them, Diego is Hannibal's first concrete choice. Long years of sitting across from fledgling killers, listening to them clamor for their egos to be fed, has made him especially keen at spotting the signs.

Will stares unblinking out the window. “If we decide to take him, how would we do it?”

“If Diego is a quarter the predator he wishes to be, we need only bait the hook,” Hannibal says. “His instinct will always be his weakness. He will be confident, vulnerable to praise. You need only aim for the softest parts of him.”

“Not shy because he’s never been bitten,” Will says, mouth twisting wryly. He pins Hannibal with his gaze, and Hannibal is reminded yet again of the force of Will’s personality, of his dedication and ferocity. “You don’t have to coach me on how to handle speaking to him, you know. I’ve lied to killers before.”

The I’ve lied to you is heavily implied.

Hannibal feels a warm surge of pride. He takes Will’s shoulder, pleased by the way Will leans in to accept the lingering kiss Hannibal offers. They’re familiar with one another in so many ways. “Forgive me for seeming as though I don’t trust your expertise in the matter. I would be beside myself if Diego were to snatch you from me so quickly after our reconciliation.”

“When I ask how we’d do it, I mean — the practicalities,” Will presses, brow rumpled as though he’s displeased by Hannibal’s attempts to distract him. “My work hasn’t had me in the field running down criminals in more than a decade.”

“There will be no need to run him down,” Hannibal says. He touches Will’s mouth and smiles. “Let him simply find you as interesting as I do, and he’ll invite you away — to admire him and be admired.”

“You want me to be the bait.” Will leans into Hannibal’s space, unconsciously, involuntarily, shifting the same way continents drift and the orbits of stars decay — inevitably, achingly slow. “Will you kill him for me, if I’m the bait?”

Hannibal touches Will’s shoulder, his waist, his hip. He finds now that he’s begun, he has difficulty stopping. “I’m merely encouraging that method which I believe is best suited to you. It fooled Chilton, did it not?”

“Chilton was a vain man who wanted me to think he wanted to be my friend,” Will says, a feeble protest. Chilton capitalized off of the malleable mind of a man who didn’t know himself, off of Hannibal, off of Will himself. He’d sinned no less than Hannibal had. He’d been no less interested in Will Graham’s mind than Hannibal ever was.

“As might Diego be,” Hannibal says. “You still don’t recognize your own power, Will.”

He scoffs, and folds in on himself, rakes his hands through his hair. “What? That I can turn the heads of murderers?”

“Your empathy is peerless, and man, alone in this world and in his mind, wishes only to be understood. You can do what no one else can do, Will,” Hannibal murmurs. “You can reach into the mind of a man and find the place where he’s loneliest and hurt him with it — or heal him.”

Will’s mouth puckers with a frown. “Is that what you’re implying I did with you?”

Hannibal was too far gone down his path when it first intersected with Will’s. Even Will cannot hope to entirely fill the empty space in Hannibal where a man should be, but he has crawled inside it and filled Hannibal with an awareness of that hollowness for the first time in decades. There are gaps around Will, holes in Hannibal’s foundations, ghosts haunting the airy caverns of his mind. But where his heart should be, there can only exist Will Graham.

“No, Will,” he says, but he smiles at Will. “There’s nothing left of the boy I once was. But only the man I am now can help you do this thing.”

“A dark and terrible desire,” Will says. When he closes his eyes, Hannibal can only guess that he is overwhelmed. “You know a lot about dark and terrible desires. Is that all my feelings towards Diego amount to?”

“You, far more than anyone, want to see justice. True justice, Will.” Hannibal tips Will’s face up and grazes his knuckles over the scar on his cheek and forehead.

Two wounds for two foes, and Will the victor in both battles. Will in Jack Crawford’s office, Will on his knees covered in muddy pawprints from a stray dog, Will eager to carve an apology from Hannibal’s flesh – he is comprised of all things beautiful and vicious. If he does this thing, Hannibal will do it with him, Jack Crawford and the FBI’s hunt be damned.

The corners of Will’s eyes crinkle and he looks away. Hannibal grants him that, the new emotions between them so fresh that they scrape and chafe, not always pleasantly. “You’ll help me. You will. I wasn’t sure, but I can see it now.”

“Come, look,” Hannibal says, “see what I’ve found for us.”

Diego has a social media page full of pictures of himself at conferences, symposiums, shaking hands tersely with colleagues. Most of the page is dedicated to sharing academic resources, scrubbed clean of any personal opinion, carefully curated to feel intellectual and unemotional. Only the facts.

“What am I looking for?” Will leans against the desk, peering over Hannibal’s shoulder. Hannibal can feel the heat of his body through their clothes and lays his hand on Will’s thigh just to remind himself that he can. Will’s mouth quirks up at one side, aware and permissive of Hannibal’s possessiveness.

“Our opportunity.” Hannibal enlarges one of the pictures, one of Diego working at a booth for the University, a paper cup with a logo in hand.  Then another, and another. “The business is privately owned, a small cafe with no cameras in the front of the house. We’re likely to find him there on his route to work. Perhaps on his way home, given the frequency of his habit.”

“Like crocodiles waiting at a watering hole,” Will says. He puts his hand over Hannibal’s, blunt fingernails digging into the spaces between Hannibal’s knuckles, the feel of his rough palm on Hannibal’s softer skin a provocative contrast. “But we can’t take him there. I don’t care how good you are; we’d still have to kill every single person in the cafe to get out of there without being seen.”

“I’ve no intentions of confronting him there. I was hoping that you might persuade him to take you elsewhere. Somewhere with privacy and no prying eyes,” Hannibal says.

Will leans down, face hovering near Hannibal’s. He’s smiling, his mouth pulling to one side. His breath is hot on Hannibal’s temple. “And how do you think I’m supposed to do that?”

Hannibal grips Will’s chin and noses along the smooth skin above his stubble. “You have a way about yourself. Trust in it, and Diego will be unable to resist.”

“If he’s anything like you, he’s going to try to kill me,” Will says, but he’s pushing further into Hannibal’s space, eyes dark. “Or fuck me. Not necessarily in that order.”

“We must count on him finding you as distracting as I do,” Hannibal says, one arm around Will, the other unbuttoning his shirt. Will is burning, bright, brilliant. His presence stretches out in the hole in the shape of Hannibal’s heart, fills Hannibal full to bursting. “We’ll make an attempt tomorrow. You must let me help you dress for the occasion.”

*

Hannibal watches from the cafe across the street as Will approaches Diego, Will’s hands shoved deep in his coat pockets and his shoulders hunched unassumingly against the chill. Most of his face is covered by a heavy, expensive scarf, which he pulls down when Diego looks up; his clothes are smart, a concession he made with the easy logic of someone who knows how to pass unnoticed. Will looks the same as any other wealthy academic dressed for a cold weather excursion.

They exchange pleasantries and Will looks around before motioning indulgently towards the cafe. Hannibal observes when Will’s posture changes to accommodate Diego’s: insouciant, affable, harmless. Will barters his smiles freely, and the tension apparent in Diego’s sloped shoulders slowly dissipates; Will’s mannerisms aren’t outright flirtatious, not exactly, but they’re intimate and admiring.

No doubt they’re conversing of Diego’s work, Will fueling Diego’s lust for recognition. It takes Will Graham less than ten minutes to slip behind the guard of a man putting the knife to his colleagues.

Hannibal is thoroughly acquainted with what Diego must be experiencing. Will’s unabashed regard is like a needle directly into a vein. Diego hesitates, hand on his bag, ready to make some excuse of his work. When he follows Will, who starts across the street without looking back to see if Diego is following, leading him to the cafe where Hannibal waits for them out of sight, Hannibal feels a surge of secondhand satisfaction and withdraws to a less obvious location. The plot will be foiled if Diego catches sight of Hannibal.

With Diego’s attention thus focused, it is a simple task for Hannibal to insert himself within earshot of their conversation. A divider with well-manicured greenery provides a private barrier between their booths, ensuring Hannibal anonymity, even if Diego should stand and turn his way.

“Tell me about your work at the University,” Will is saying, and Hannibal can hear him paging idly through a menu, intent to keep Diego speaking for some time. “I’m intrigued. I wanted to hear more when we first met, but my research partner has a way of monopolizing the conversation.”

Diego shifts his weight audibly, crossing and uncrossing his legs beneath the booth. Hannibal can smell his anxiety and apprehension, even over the normal olfactory clutter of the restaurant. “You didn’t seem to mind so much when he took the spotlight. Don’t think I’m not aware of your little arrangement. It’s obvious to anyone who looks that the old man is invested in you as more than just a colleague.”

Will laughs, convincingly derisive. “What works in the bedroom rarely works in the office. Our arrangement is convenient for me, but that’s all it is – you put up with what you have to just to get ahead in life, if you get what I mean.”

Hannibal is uncertain if Diego has an interest in men, or simply an interest in Will. Either are equally likely; Will has learned himself well enough to use empathy as a weapon, to lessen the way it cuts at both ends. No doubt, letting Diego in will cost Will dearly, but not so much as it once did.

“There’s little merit awarded to the people who put in hard work,” Diego says, low, angry. He raps his silverware against the table, an ugly, out-of-place sound in the intimate cafe. “Instead, we have to bend to the whim of our predecessors, who think themselves our betters out of habit.”

Hannibal closes his eyes and imagines Will’s rapacious, empathetic smile. The way Will’s eyes must crinkle with the kind of engagement that few people can fake; the way Will isn’t faking it at all, but will be sick with it later, full up to the brim with Diego’s violence and malcontentedness.

“Ain’t that the truth?” Will offers, letting his New Orleans affectations slip through, his accent softening noticeably around the edges. “But what can we do about it except slog our way ever upwards and hope to get noticed?”

Hannibal tunes out the conversation that follows – Diego’s maddening, rapid-fire statements of his own superiority, which manage to be both arrogant and insecure, give their speaker little credit as an intellectual.

The autonomic nervous system can be convinced towards half-hearted participation in a well-rehearsed half-truth, but never into an outright lie.

Will slides his foot across the tile floor. It must be close to Diego’s shoe, and Hannibal mentally transposes himself with Diego, knows that Diego must feel an electrified awareness of Will’s proximity just as keenly as Hannibal does.

Diego is utterly transparent to Hannibal: a narcissist turned violent, scrabbling for gratification and position by eliminating his competition in the most direct and literal way possible. A small mind with a small motivation, requiring an equally small effort on Will’s part.

The only remarkable thing about Diego is that he hasn’t already acquired some equally ineffectual hanger-on that might interfere with their objective, and that he seeks Will as the first victim in the cult of his ego.

Will’s trap is too clever and too fine by far. He draws the unrecognized to him like a moth to the flame, all the best and darkest things of others reflected in his visage.

The waitress brings a glass of water and takes his order. He smiles at her beatifically, but she only frowns and hurries away when she finishes scribbling her note.

“You have some interest in creation myths?” Diego asks. Teacups clink down on the table; the waitress has made their rounds. Hannibal imagines that Will must look much like he did when Hannibal first brought him breakfast, smiling over his eggs, almost all of it keen, clinical observation under the guise of reluctant affability.

Hannibal wonders when Will first expected that something far less friendly lie beneath Hannibal skin, far less man, far more shark. When he stopped caring. Hannibal might ask, but Will likely doesn’t know it at all himself.

At the tail edge of a polite amount of time to consider Diego’s question, Will makes a noise of assent and says, “I have an interest in audiences.”

“I don’t follow,” Diego says unhappily. “What do audiences have to do with creation myths?”

“I’m more interested in audiences of creation myths. Conventionally religious or otherwise. The idea of God, or a pantheon, and how those ideas spread in culture.”

“Ah, an anthropologist studying literature,” Diego says, as though that’s far less impressive and interesting than anything he was hoping for. Perhaps the field relies too much on analysis and fact for Diego’s tastes.

“Do you broadly consider the Bible to be literature?” Will opens several sugar packets at once. Hannibal can hear Diego stirring milk into his tea. “That might color our discussion, if you don’t take the narrative seriously. If not in a literal since, then in its cultural impact.”

“‘The Lord is good, a haven in a day of distress. He acknowledges those who take refuge in him.’” Diego quotes. Hannibal recognizes it, an oft-quote passage on the wrath of the creator figure. “It is, at best, bad genre fiction. At worst, wildly contradictory and harmful. Brain rotting stuff.”

Hannibal can hear Will’s smile, the crinkle at the edges of it, the faint derision. “And, therefore, has no literary merit. Tell me, do you think the cult of post-modern English students mindlessly scraping away at Hemingway’s minimalist parenthetical phrases is going to have any more luck trying to find some deeper meaning in the universe?”

“Have you found some deeper meaning than art, Dr. Smythe?” Diego asks. The question oozes with arrogance, as if he thinks Will might not know the right end of life from the wrong. As if Will hasn’t become something bigger, more beautiful than Diego should ever hope to imagine. Will has done with his bare hands what Diego cannot possibly hope to accomplish.

“I’ve found,” Will begins, and there’s a slide of something across the lacquered tabletop, Will pushing his cup and saucer out of the way, “that there’s no deeper meaning in anything at all. Those at the top stay there, those at the bottom are doomed to obscurity, and the masses remain entertained by stolen art reduced to cheap, mass market swill.” A significant pause. “Don’t you think it’s difficult to find a man who can think for himself these days?”

Diego’s hand trembles when he sets his cup down, rattling against the ceramic. His arousal is painfully evident to Hannibal — perhaps because Hannibal himself has been aroused by Will’s sharp tongue. “I have a few thoughts on the matter. Many are not suited for academic conversation.”

“Maybe we can go somewhere a little less academic and talk about them, then,” Will proposes, his tone sly and sweet and full of the implication that academic conversation is the very last thing that they might engage in. “I’m very interested in hearing your arguments.”

The feeling that seethes in Hannibal’s gut is not unfamiliar, but it burns at him with a new intensity. He might have thought himself free of the grip of jealousy after having Will’s affections confirmed and returned, but the sharp edges of it claw through him with renewed vigor.

Diego sounds as though Will has caught him off guard but doesn’t decline the invitation. “I have a few bottles of wine at my home, should you be interested in a more lengthy, private discussion about the virtues of – dismantling the power structures. Unless, you’ve Mr. Antonaitis’ needs to attend to?”

“He’s at a social engagement with some old friends. He won’t be back until late.” Will’s shoes scrape across the floor when he stands. Hannibal can smell him, the sweat, the edge of his anxiety and the tang of his eagerness. Will isn’t afraid to carry this out. Looks forward to it. “I have some time.”

There a weighty silence, and then Diego asks, fishing for Will’s availability, for whether or not he has someone keeping track of him. His motive for the question arouses him, but the reason could be either sexual or violent. “Won’t he miss you when he returns from his engagement?”

Hannibal takes the time to neatly fold the ten pound note that he leaves on the table, while Will says, “You vastly overestimate my regard for his attention or his approval.” He waits until Diego dons his coat, helps Will with his, fussing and fretting and overeager, and takes his leave.

He unfolds his otherwise untouched cutlery set and, with utmost care not to be seen doing so, pockets the knife. The instrument is dull, but should he require use of it, that may make peeling Diego’s skin from his flesh all the more enjoyable.

As soon as he stands up, the waitress watches Hannibal with dark eyes, hovering nervously at her station in the corner of the diner. Hannibal allows his person suit to slide all the way off, leaving nothing on his face but the raw, vicious truth of himself. He smiles at her as he leaves, baring just a hint of teeth. She’ll remember little else except him; certainly not Diego nor Will as they slip out the door, Diego’s hand dangerously low on the small of Will’s back.

*

Diego lives in a house, but barely. A mid-century walk up flat on some rambling farmhouse lane is better than he deserves. Hannibal stands at the foot of the drive, looking at the sagging house with all its dark windows, and fantasizes about dividing Diego up one segment of flesh at a time, starting with the hand that touched Will.

His disdain coils in him. He marks his jealousy for what it is and discards it; Will’s only interest in Diego is one they share.

The front of the house is dark, the drapes drawn, windows closed. Hannibal closes the door behind him and stands in the gloomy mudroom, motes of dust dancing around him, recently disturbed. An umbrella stand has been tipped over, the contents scattered across the floorboards.

There are no photographs on the walls. No family portraits, no personal art, just a handful of bland landscape paintings with cheaply painted frames. A staircase with a well-worn rug leads up to the second floor. The wall sconces have collected a heavy layer of dust and several are missing their bulbs altogether.

Just beyond the staircase, the narrow hallway opens left and right – to the right a small bathroom, mostly empty but extremely clean and recently scrubbed. To the left, a library with an extensive collection, the covers of each book well-worn and faded, but with tender use, not neglect.

Hannibal examines the covers. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Proust, Conrad. A collection of literary greatest hits, all collecting dust on their threadbare bindings. More frequented are collections of Italian and Spanish plays, likely in demand for his coursework.

A book of cantos contains well-read sheet music – at least, the first quarter of them, as though Diego opened and committed to the pieces only as a conversation starter, and gave up when the challenge set in. Hannibal can imagine Diego skimming the pages of his books, looking for a pithy quote to drop in an attempt to engage in the kind of conversation passes for droll small talk at conferences and symposiums.

Men like Diego are a familiar archetype – convinced of their own genius, their self-worth overinflated, wanting desperately to rub elbows with the academic peerage without putting in the work. It took only moments for Hannibal to track Diego as the kind of man who desires to be perceived as intelligent, rather than pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Even Chilton wasn’t so mean in his tastes.

Hannibal spots a copy of The Old Man and the Sea on a high shelf. He considers it for a moment, then slides the slim novel into his pocket. A sound from the kitchen, a dull rattling and the slick noise of shoes on something wet, draws his attention. He approaches the doorway and pushes it open, overwhelmed by the acid copper scent of fresh blood.

Glass crunches beneath Hannibal’s shoes, a whisky decanter scattered in pieces like diamonds on the floorboards, liquid seeping between the wood grain, dark and honey gold. Will is holding a knife, shoulders heaving, and there is blood on his face. Hannibal is drawn to him, irreparably ensnared by his desires.

Will looks up, eyes wide, and Hannibal keeps his distance because Will is stretched thin, taut, like an overtuned piano string. Hannibal tries to ascertain the frequency at which Will vibrates; if touched, he may snap and strike the hand that seeks to help. “He tried to kill me. He thought I was an undercover police officer investigating him.”

“How unfortunate for him that you were not.” Diego’s body is crumpled in a heap at Will’s feet, lifeless. “A foolish plan of action on his part.”

“I don’t think he had a plan for me at all,” Will says. His grip on the knife loosens and it clatters to the floor, as easily forgotten as it was no doubt acquired. “He just wanted to hurt people, be noticed. His ambitions were — small-minded.”

“He an animal, no more, satisfying a base desire, an impulse.” Hannibal steps over Diego, attention fixed on Will, and takes Will’s bloody hand in his own.

“Animals are more honest in their desires,” Will says with great distaste, wiping his hand on Diego’s clothing. “He was selfish, cruel, petulant.”

“Diego had not the cloths of heaven — shall we tread upon his dreams?” Hannibal asks, unbuttoning his jacket. He smiles at Will with unfettered delight. There is a great deal of blood, and the kill is only the start of the work they’ll need to do, so there will be a great deal more and Hannibal does not wish to get his overcoat dirty.

“I didn’t take you for a Yeats fan,” Will says, corner of his mouth ticking upward. There is a splash of red across Will’s chin and Hannibal considers licking it away. “A little on the nose for you, as far as jokes go.”

Hannibal puts his hand on Will’s hair and bends all the way down to taste the hot, salty droplet drying on the curve of Will’s lower lip. “It seems only fair that we should broaden our horizons together. The direction of our journey is intellectual as much as physical.”

“How should we get rid of him?” Will stands slowly, careful not to disturb the corpse’s repose. Diego lies at an unnatural angle between Will’s boots, his torso brutalized by the finality of Will’s self-defense. No doubt Diego was dim enough to believe that Will couldn’t possibly complete the labor of taking another human life; the knife marks scoring Diego's belly bear silent testament to the price of his ignorance.

“The tribute to his work should fit the crimes,” Hannibal says, and considers the twisted sprawl of the body. “Philipp Mainlander put forth something interesting in Die Philosophie der Erlösung. He believed in the death of the divine, and that death was divinity.”

“Isn’t that Nietzsche? ‘God is dead’?” Will looks skeptical. “I haven’t thought about him since Freshman year of college. And you accused Hemingway of spouting pretentious bullshit.”

“There they laugh: they do not understand me. I am not the mouth for these ears.” Hannibal’s smile broadens. “A sentiment I am certain Diego shared. Some academic circles suggest that Nietzsche outright plagiarized Mainlander’s work. It would be a fitting end.”

“Make it look like he took his own life.” Will rubs his sticky fingers together, the drying blood flaking off. “It seems like such a colossal waste.”

Hannibal finds himself in agreement. Life is as vital as death. To have one without the other would be tantamount to heresy. “Do you agree that which does not struggle to live does not deserve life?”

Will’s muscles shift beneath his shirt. The fabric clings to him, plastered to him with gore, a wash of sticky cabernet color from sternum to hip. Later, Hannibal knows he’ll peel it from Will and think of Diego’s death and Will’s terrible, furious beauty when he traps Will between their sheets.

“Diego was enraged by his colleagues’ success when they stole the labor of others, but his magnum opus is theft by his own definition. What’s more pointless and impotent than this violent hypocrisy?” Hannibal can see Will’s reconciliation between the act and the taboo as clearly as if Will’s mind were laid open to him. There is none of the residual guilt and agony of Garret Jacob Hobbs left for Will to feel. “His god was the institution he put stock in, and it was as good as dead. How did your philosopher die?”

“He hung himself,” Hannibal says, “a rapid end to a brief, unnotable existence dedicated only to self-flagellation in search of the virtues of oneness with the universe.”

Will gives Hannibal a glittering, calculating look and licks his lips deliberately. Hannibal would break the spine of the world for him. “I’ll go find the rope.”

The kitchen is gated off, and while Will vanishes to search for the tools to complete their display, Hannibal steps over the barrier. The room is small, tiled in cobalt squares, recently remodeled. A stainless steel sink overflows with unwashed dishes, bordered by a white subway tile backsplash that is lined with several dying plants. Diego was not a man who knew how to care for the living.

A low whine comes from behind a door, a plaintive, begging sound. When Hannibal opens it, a dog emerges from the basement, tail tucked between her legs, no doubt rendered anxious by the lingering scent of violence. She crowds against Hannibal’s knees, whining nervously, her tail tucked between her legs.

Hannibal reaches down and strokes behind her ears, making a soothing sound. He appreciates the honesty and unassuming loyalty of dogs, and his constant presence among Will’s pack of rescues in Wolftrap has afforded him some thoughtfulness in dealing with skittish animals.

“It appears that Diego kept a companion,” Hannibal says when Will rejoins him and peers into the room. “Will you come meet her?”

The dog, short-haired and friendly, won’t survive alone for long; no one is likely to check on Diego’s whereabouts soon, as unpopular as he was with his colleagues. Hannibal knows they’ll keep her, even as Will drops the length of rope and goes to his knees on the kitchen tile.

Her cautious slink morphs into a delighted prance when Will holds out both arms to greet her, and she seems not to mind at all that Will’s hands are tacky with her recently departed master’s blood. She leans into him when he scratches behind her ears and straightens her collar, discovering her tagless. Unlabeled, such as they are. A nameless animal for two nameless men doing nameless things.

“Hello, darling,” Will says, and for all he’s still, Hannibal can see his heart dancing in his eyes. Will’s love for this abandoned creature is instant and unconditional. Hannibal cannot be jealous of the beast; she’s guileless and agreeable.

“She appears to be a good judge of character,” Hannibal says agreeably, looking at Will, arms full of wiggling dog. Will looks luminously happy, like a burden has been lifted from him, a veil removed from his eyes. Hannibal, too, feels the long-standing tension between them easing, a wound lanced. They’ve taken a life together and it lies between them guiltless, a gift from the universe and the world filled with one less evil. A satisfying resolution for them both.

“She can’t stay here,” Will says, glancing behind them to the mess they’ve created.

“There is room for her,” Hannibal says, and goes down to his knee next to Will. The dog twists and thumps her tail when Hannibal knuckles behind her floppy ears. “What will you call her?”

Hannibal starts when Will fists his hand in the front of Hannibal’s shirt. Hannibal tilts his head indulgently and Will pulls him into a kiss.

*

It is only small trouble to arrange portage for the animal, less so than two fugitives. Jack Crawford is ceaseless and shall remain so as long as Hannibal continues to indulge Will’s thirst for retribution. It’s a conscious choice to stay ten steps ahead, rather than necessity, that drives them from their bolt hole and into the next unknown.

Hannibal has no plans to stop, not until Jack Crawford or some other hero of the day bests him. With Will at his side, the parameters of his daily operation have shifted, but he has no intention of carving out less than his share of the world. He stands on the deck and looks out at the romance of water and earth, waves rocking against the grassy Uruguayan shoreline that marks the mouth of the estuary separating it from Argentina.

Buenos Aires, crouching at the outlet of the Rio de la Plata, is a far cry from their convalescent cottage. The tropical summer heat has driven Will below for much of the last leg of the journey, but he emerges at sunset to observe their reentry to the civilized world.

“My Spanish is a little rusty,” Will says evenly, looking at the small space between them. Hannibal feels the warmth of him, Will’s steady regard like the sun and moon and stars have all fallen into orbit around Hannibal. Between them, a whole microcosm exists, free of fear and shame and full of heady desire. Hannibal touches the inside of Will’s wrist, feels Will’s pulse with the tips of his fingers.

“Then I shall have the pleasure of assisting you in translation until it’s not.” Hannibal leans close to Will, smiling, and breathes in the scent of his hair. The salt and sweat of him buoys what remains of Hannibal’s heart. “You may yet fall in love with Buenos Aires. It is a city to get lost in, should you wish to do so.”

Will turns his gaze towards the horizon. His mouth turns upward, and his fingers slide between Hannibal’s as easily as water through a drag net. “I’m in no danger of losing myself again.”