Chapter Text
Participation.
She watches. She says nothing. She trembles and Hannibal can tell that for once, for once she actually sees him. Not as a figment, not as a shadow or a mask, not as a fascinating patient but as himself.
She watches, and once Hannibal has had his fill watching her, he ducks his head to follow the thick smear of blood along the parlor floor, where Anthony Dimmond drags himself to the door. He is a beautiful man, elegant and lithe, and clever, so clever. Hannibal loves him, even then, with struggling and pitched little breaths, with reaching hands and blood-messed hair.
He misses him, when he’s not there.
A step, a swallow, another, rinse, repeat. Over and over until Hannibal is standing over him, hands cupped beneath his chin, tilting his head enough so that he can see his wide eyes and parted lips -
“You scared me.”
“I didn’t think you would be awake so early,” Hannibal murmurs, fingers caressing the skittering pulse at Anthony’s neck, thumb stroking his jaw until the poet turns to kiss his hand, instead.
“The muse,” Anthony laments, adjusting how he was sitting on the couch before Hannibal came to greet him. “It pulls one from slumber and comforts for its own whims. Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“Uneasy dreams.”
It’s enough of an answer, and enough of a comfort when Anthony returns his kiss upside down, resting a hand against Hannibal’s wrist. He strokes his thumb against the tendons risen along the back of the doctor’s hand, and though their lips brush again, again, this too slows.
“You’re so tense,” Anthony tells him. He nuzzles a kiss against the hand that holds his face, lips parting on a sigh. “Come sit with me?”
“If I’m not interrupting.”
“Never.”
Hannibal hums, lets go of Anthony’s jaw and walks around the couch to settle into it, as the poet is. Without a word, Anthony shifts around, sets his head into Hannibal’s lap and hums contentment when a warm hand comes to rest in his hair.
“Will you tell me about it?”
“My dream?”
“Your dream,” Anthony agrees, bringing a hand up to cup against Hannibal’s knee, gently splay his fingers down his leg, back up again. “Perhaps I can interpret it. Recall some of my formative years when I had to study psychology as an elective. Tell you that a cigar is only a cigar.”
Hannibal eases into a breath of laughter. “That also means that a penis is only a penis,” he considers. “A far more troubling tautology considering where our minds may take us.”
“Is that what you dreamed about? No wonder you’re up so early.”
“No,” Hannibal smiles. “I dreamt of you.”
He fans his fingers softly over Anthony’s lips, watching as they part beneath his touch. Hannibal waits for the touch of a tongue, the press of teeth, a sigh warmly pulled from within. He waits. He waits for an answer, a musing, he waits for an easy laugh and he waits for breath and he waits until his hand begins to shake and he sets it back to the floor where he has laid Anthony out.
She has gone from the room, perhaps minutes ago - perhaps hours. He heard her sickness in the bathroom and then the running of water into the tub. In some way, he is grateful for that. It is a note of discord, a hammer to the string, to not hear the shower’s spray and soft, deep murmurs beneath it. He might, again.
There is nothing he would not do to hear those gentle sounds again.
There is nothing.
He wraps his hand in the poet’s scarf, lifting his head to remove it. It is clean, nearly, but for a few wet spots stained black against it. The blood has stopped, staunched with a formaldehyde powder made commonly available to taxidermists before it could permeate the floorboards. Hannibal sweeps a little of the white dust from Anthony’s cheek, and with no one watching but himself and God, he cradles the poet’s cheek in a gentle squeeze, and then begins to remove his clothing.
Soft skin and a dusting of hair from the navel down to the waistband of Anthony’s underwear. Hannibal sets his hand against it and closes his eyes when he hears the ghost of a laugh, breathy and quiet, still.
“Your husband didn’t wake from your uneasy dreams?” Anthony whispers, arching his body to allow Hannibal to peel his underwear off him as well, ducking his head to watch. He is comfortably semi-hard, contented by the familiar touch, comfortable to be pressed so close.
“He did not dream them,” Hannibal says, and Anthony grins before slapping him gently against the thigh.
“Semantics,” he complains, squirming a little and arching further into Hannibal’s arms, turning his head to kiss against his stubbled jaw. “Did he not wake when you woke from your uneasy dreams of me?”
“No, Will sleeps,” Hannibal murmurs, nuzzling soft lips against Anthony’s temple, against his soft, warm hair. “He does not have the curse of nightmares to plague him. He never did.” Hannibal’s lips slip over sticky blood and he inhales, opens his eyes and stares at the blood-smeared floor beneath them both.
Anthony looks smaller, in his arms, than he ever did in his mind.
In a chemical reaction, the reagents and their catalysts are consumed to create a product. No longer can the first materials be extracted once this change has taken place; no longer can one reverse what one has done. And so, with especially rare components, one must be certain that the result is desired enough to lose that which would be difficult - if not impossible - to replace.
Hannibal tells himself that he is certain, and it eases the strain he applies to Anthony’s arm to break it backward.
The bones collide like a gunshot, loud enough that Hannibal holds Anthony’s hand against his chest for a moment more as if to await sign that someone heard. There is no such reason for lacing their fingers together, glad that the Florentine heat has kept Anthony’s skin pliable, almost alive. Glad for the twitch of stiffening that for the length of one staggered heartbeat feels as though Anthony is squeezing his hand in reassurance.
He would understand what must be done for the result that Hannibal needs.
He would sacrifice his own time, he always did, to give them theirs.
With care, Hannibal lowers the poet’s arm to the floor, looking past the unnatural angle of it to study his body instead. Bared, now, tall and lean and beautiful. In the thin slits of darkness visible beneath his lashes, in the spread of his lips as if held in a moan, there is potential energy.
There was always that, in one world or another.
He runs his hands up Anthony’s side, turning him towards his right. His leg shifts, he draws closer to the floor, and Hannibal mutes the press of a sigh from his poet beneath the repetitive snap of ribs breaking beneath his hands. Dry kindling for the conflagration; a sacrifice for the pyre. Hannibal splits them one by one, and when he sets his fist to rest against Anthony’s sternum, he closes his eyes as if it might stop the shaking.
It isn’t the first time Hannibal has shattered a sternum to bring a stopped heart back to life.
He presses down, ducks his head over the young poet and parts his lips over Anthony’s in turn.
“Oh fuck -” Anthony bites his lip and grins, shivering as Hannibal rocks harder against him, cocks slicked together and the friction perfectly teasing. Neither need to fuck, not now, but the closeness is appreciated, as Hannibal drags hot and sloppy kisses over the poet’s throat, as Anthony draws his knees up around Hannibal and draws nails sharp down his back.
“You know, I was actually writing about you,” he says after a moment, voice low and purring, eyes hooded and lips parting when Hannibal leans to kiss him again, a deep and questioning hum for him to continue. “You and your husband. This house. Us.” Anthony groans and squeezes his thighs around Hannibal harder, clinging and tugging, nuzzling close as they rut pleasurably together.
“We have created a world for ourselves here, as who we want to be, as who we are together and with no one else.” A sharp gasp draws Anthony’s brows tight together and he moans, low and long, head back and lips tilted in a grin.
“We are in our own little paracosm,” he sighs. “Building blocks and shiny shattered objects. How long do you think we can build that sandcastle?”
Hannibal’s eyes draw up in the corners, and he grins against his poet’s mouth. “For as long as we can, of course.”
“But eventually the tide comes in -”
“No.”
“- and brings the walls down.”
With a low sound, something between a purr and a growl, Hannibal sucks another kiss beneath Anthony’s jaw. The man’s laugh fills him, satisfies, quenches for a moment the need to find Anthony’s pulse and feel it speed beneath his tongue. He knows where it should be, just there, cradled against his clavicle. Or just beneath his ear. Or along the elegant curve of his throat.
There is nothing.
He rocks forward, straddling the man, his hands no longer pressed to Anthony’s chest but beneath it. Over his forearms lays a blanket of skin pried free from the body beneath, tearing with a sound like rent burlap. Another push against moorings unwilling to yield to him, muscle clinging to dermis as if afraid to be bared.
“Does it scare you?” he asks, shoving forward again as Anthony’s stomach wrinkles against Hannibal’s inner elbows. He feels the first rise of collarbone beneath, the splintered shards sharp against his fingers. For a moment there he rests, choking down a swallow, and nuzzling beneath Anthony’s jaw. He kisses him, at the hollow of his throat, still intact, and feels his own breath pool back against his lips.
“The tide?”
“That there may be no tide at all. That perhaps we have, by some lucky turn of fate, constructed for ourselves a paradise.”
“It sounds more like purgatory,” Anthony grins, and Hannibal spreads his fingers wider, watching the shadows shift as his poet’s skin stretches tighter across. “Is it yours?”
Hannibal blinks, into sunken eyes grown darker, towards lips that part inviting for him to kiss again.
“It is, isn’t it,” Anthony sighs, head turning aside as Hannibal kisses harder beneath it. “A limbo of your own construction, an eternal waiting room.”
“A place I built for us,” Hannibal grits out, fingers digging sharper into the skin beneath him and Anthony makes a tiny sound, of pain or pleasure it’s hard to tell, but it pushes him closer against Hannibal, skin slick, now, with the sweat between them.
“It’s shattering,” he murmurs, and Hannibal shakes his head harder. He brings a hand to stroke Anthony’s hair from his face and smears his blood there instead, bright against his pale skin, dark against lips that were once pink and flush and perfect.
“No.”
Anthony just smiles, and Hannibal wants him to see, to understand, to feel this as it should be, as it is. Their world, for them, for him and Will and Anthony in it, together, all of them, a triad keeping each other upright and steady.
The skin comes away easier now, and Hannibal’s hands slip against the floor in the mess.
“It is not,” he breathes. “It is rooms upon rooms of sanctuary that I let you into! That we invited you to! And your words, your words, they started the crack that shattered the ceiling, that pulled down the walls. Damn your words!”
Hannibal pants against Anthony’s chest and closes his eyes, rubbing his forehead against the slick skin there, shuddering when a hand slips into his hair and gently tugs it. They are spent, now, the poet and he, exhausted together in mutual warmth and pleasure. Hearts slowing, breath easing.
“I’ll change the words a little bit,” Anthony mumbles, dropping his hand away and letting it brush against the carpet by the couch. “The rhyme still feels off. And once that line is written, you can invite me back again.”
A grin, rakish and pleased. “You promised.”
“Always,” Hannibal whispers. He touches his lips to cloying skin, the sweetness of sweat and the metallic tang beneath. He seeks Anthony’s mouth and closes his own against it, again and again, and murmurs, “You are always welcome here.”
They lay together in stillness. The room is quiet but for the tap of fingernails against the floor, the patter of blood from severed limbs. Hannibal has taken his poet’s words from him, his voice, his throat, and so when he murmurs softly, Hannibal startles.
“Your husband is awake.”
He lifts his head from Anthony's chest. Hannibal can imagine the deeply drawn breath, a gasp, as Will stirs - he can see blue eyes blinking sleepily open. He sits back gingerly from the prone poet beneath him and looks toward the sound of unlikely footsteps, clicking against the floor.
Observation.
The steps come closer and turn away, to another room, not nearing Hannibal but tempting him to come near. He leaves Anthony where he lies, doesn’t turn back at the small sound he makes - the susurrus of skin against fabric as he turns on the couch to rest and nuzzle against it.
Step after step Hannibal moves further into the house. Not to the bedroom, Will won’t be in there now, he goes to the bathroom first thing upon waking, and then the kitchen for coffee. Hannibal pauses, glances to the shiny chrome countertops he can just see through the doorway. He considers setting the coffee to brew, for them both, for them all. No. Later. Later, together, when he can have Will nuzzle between his shoulders and sway to a song he hums under his breath as Hannibal makes the coffee for them both.
He has a beautiful voice when he raises it.
To the stairs and up them, to the master bedroom and the bathroom through it. He starts to work buttons through the holes, one after the other, slipping the shirt and suit over his shoulders and down to the floor. His shoes, next, unlaced and left, not pushed carefully away. Socks then. Slacks and underwear. Hannibal goes to the shower and starts the water and waits for it to warm, waits for Will to come to him, as he always does. Perhaps from the walk-in closet, perhaps from the adjoining sun room.
He waits and the water warms, and Hannibal steps under the spray and lifts his face to it, feeling it pound against his eyelids and his cheeks, over his lips and down his throat. For a minute, it feels like rain. For a minute, he feels like he might cry.
Maybe this is what happiness feels like.
Cool hands wrap around Hannibal’s middle and a familiar stubbled cheek nuzzles against his shoulder.
“I slept in,” Will tells him, a purring tease of pleasure before kissing Hannibal’s shoulder.
“It’s good that you slept,” Hannibal answers. He grasps Will’s hands in his own, hands that have touched and caressed, have felt the gout of hot blood and the quickening pulse that pours it fast beneath skin, from it. Lifting them to his mouth, Hannibal sighs against the damp and presses Will’s fingers closed against his face. “I missed you.”
“When I was asleep?”
“I miss you always,” he says. “Any time your presence is absent, as if a part of me were cut away.”
“A severance.”
“An amputation. It is not impossible to live without you,” Hannibal murmurs, gathering the warm wetness between his lips, “but it is difficult. I feel it in every attempt to move, or breathe, or function. What I would not give to feel you there again, and make myself whole once more.”
“Including -”
“Yes.”
“Him.”
“Yes,” Hannibal whispers.
Another soft nuzzle, pushing Hannibal further under the spray as Will’s arms slip from around Hannibal and rest on his hips, then slowly, gently, he turns his husband to him. Will doesn’t look up, he looks down at the water swirling pink into the drain. Blood and viscera and pieces of skin that had caught under Hannibal’s nails.
An amputation. Self-administered.
Will’s fingers rest beneath Hannibal’s chin and lift it, blue eyes seeking his beneath the warm rain of water against them, and gently Will smiles.
“You know he’ll be back. He wanders,” Will says, stepping close and leaning in to kiss against the blood running rivulets down Hannibal’s neck, down over his chest. Will’s fingers splay in the thick hair, against the soft skin beneath, to the pounding heart beat.
Hannibal doesn’t let his eyes close, as he normally might, he won’t risk turning away and losing another anchor in the place that he built. And this man, his Will, he is the foundation. For him to go would shake what walls remain; for him to go now would leave nothing. Hannibal’s throat jerks in a swallow, clicking loud, and he draws a breath when Will’s fingers tug.
“Not this time, I fear,” he murmurs. Lifting a hand, he trails his knuckles down Will’s scruffy cheek and rests them beneath his chin, bringing him closer to kiss, his own hand in the way, fingers pressed across parted lips, his own and Will’s, brushing past. “But I have you, here with me. Don’t I?”
“You get sentimental in the mornings,” Will mumbles against him, reaches past Hannibal to get the sponge, the soap to begin to wash them both, and Hannibal wonders if perhaps he has finally lost his mind. He wonders if this is what he had done to Will, years ago, if this was what he had made this man feel, before he brought him close, helped him heal, helped him hate, helped that hate become -
“Do I?”
“Often,” Will laughs, working the soap into a lather against his palm. “You claim to be entirely emotionless, you put on such a facade. But I know you beyond that.” A sly grin up at Hannibal before Will flicks his wet curls from his eyes and tilts his chin up. “You gave me that gift.”
“Of seeing me?”
“Knowing you,” Will amends, stroking the sponge gently over Hannibal’s chest, up to his neck, suds slipping pink down his body. “I saw before, I will see after.”
The ancient floorboards creak on the landing outside the bathroom. Hannibal lets his attention turn briefly to the door, a smile appearing from habit, welcoming and warm for their poet to come and join them. The presence there lingers, listening, Hannibal wants to call to him but his voice catches in his throat and his brows draw in when he finds himself, childlike once more, unable to push words past his lips. He knows, turning back to Will, that Anthony will not come to them now. He knows, burying his face against Will’s neck, that broken men cannot walk.
“So long as you are with me, I need nothing else,” he whispers. Draping an arm around Will’s shoulders, he twines heavy, wet curls between his fingers. Hannibal brings his other hand to Will’s arm, slides it to his back, cradles him close as a small sound escapes the other man.
A laugh.
A sigh.
A sob.
Will’s hands come up to cling to him in turn, one out still to hold the sponge, the other digging into Hannibal’s arm as though he cannot fathom, ever, letting him go. Another little sound, just heard above the white noise of the water, and Will nuzzles against Hannibal’s neck.
“Hannibal,” he whispers, and Hannibal thinks of early mornings, when the same voice had woken him, the same man whose nose would wrinkle in pleasure as Hannibal hummed that he was awake, even when he refused to open his eyes fully. He thinks of holding him close and feeling Will breathe against him, the fussy sounds he would make when Hannibal shifted. He thinks of the way Will’s lips taste, that gentle sweetness, like grapes still on his tongue, or figs fresh in summer.
“Hannibal, I’m bleeding,” Will tells him.
He shakes his head, and clutches his fingers tight in Will’s hair. No, it is the water from their shower that spills hot around his feet. It is the soap that runs viscous between their bodies. Will’s hand slides from him and he spreads it over his stomach, that soft skin that Hannibal traces his mouth against when they lie in bed together, that tender flesh at which he worships with warm hands and gentle kisses. No.
No.
The sound that splits from Will’s lips is neither laugh nor sob, but agony made audible. He snares his arm shaking around Hannibal’s neck as his feet slip against the tile, and Hannibal watches helpless as he tries to hold Will to him. The water circles the drain in scarlet. Will’s belly widens into a ravenous maw, a gaping mouth parting red.
“Will,” he breathes, sinking an arm around Will’s waist to keep him standing. His touches stain crimson over pale skin, scruffy cheeks, pink lips. “I need you to come back. Do you understand? I cut out what was not needed. I cut out what would have made us ill. I need you to -”
Hannibal’s voice gives way. The imago in his arms is only his own bare body, held tight by himself, beneath the water running cold. Footsteps stride softly away from the door and only when Hannibal hears the door to the bedroom close, does he let a silent shudder shake his shoulders.
---[x]---
It’s cool, but warm enough to make one forget that winter is just outside the window, covering the grasses and trees and the rough path with a dusting of snow. Will has the kettle boiling, an old heavy whistling thing he had found in a market somewhere and had never felt the need to replace. It works fine, it does its job, and certainly makes life easier when his coffee machine is coughing its last and he won’t be able to get into the city for a few days yet to get it fixed.
The windows fog and he wipes a smear clear with the palm of his hand, just looking. When it fogs over again, Will turns away and goes deeper into the house to grab a sweater to shrug onto his thin form, now that the warmth of the shower has finally worn off enough to feel the tendrils of cold.
The kettle whistles just as there is a knock on the door, and Will hums displeasure, deciding, after a moment of shrill screaming from his stove, to just get the door instead. It takes a fumble, first with the main door, then the screen one, but when it’s open, Will’s smile splits to a grin, breath steaming in the cold air as he tilts his head and rests his shoulder against the doorframe.
“Thought you’d never get here.”
Behind him, the kettle stops whistling, and a mild curse is whispered through the house before there’s a sound of heavy footfalls.
Anthony doesn’t even bother to dress in the mornings anymore, apparently entirely immune to the cold in his thin shirt and Will’s boxers that sit snug and comfortable against his hips. He presses his chin down against Will’s shoulder and hums, smile just as wide, just as delighted.
“You almost missed the party,” he murmurs, finally moving around Will to step up to Hannibal and hold the lapels of his heavy coat in his hands, pulling him down to kiss. “How was Florence?”
Hannibal’s smile is soft beneath the lips of their impetuous poet. He lifts a hand to stroke down a bearded cheek, raising Anthony’s chin and seeking between dark eyes that carry their own inner light, like stars piercing the night sky.
“A trial,” he answers. Another kiss is shared, brief and warm, before he turns to the man who regards him with a lifted brow, glasses settled on the end of his nose. Hannibal touches a finger to their center, and slips them higher up Will’s nose. “It was not the same without you.”
Before Will can protest - and blissfully ignoring when he does - Hannibal snares his arms around his husband’s waist and lifts him. Will’s bare toes drag against the floor and his arms drape over Hannibal’s shoulders as they kiss, lips tangling, tongues ensnared, as if they had never done so before. As if they had not done so countless times.
It feels new again.
Hannibal supposes that it is.
Anthony steps back to let the dogs barrel out into the snow, giving big brown Maggie a pat as she pads by. He closes the screen door softly, and pads on quiet feet to snare his arms around Hannibal’s waist. His breath is hot between Hannibal’s shoulders, despite the weight of the wool overcoat he wears, the layers beneath.
“Did you miss us?” Anthony asks, and Will snorts out a laugh, grinning. The poet just grins, bright eyes over Hannibal’s shoulder to meet Will’s, narrowing in pleasure.
“It never hurts to ask,” he says.
Hannibal sets Will down and ducks his head to breathe him in with closed eyes. The warmth and sweetness of him, the oils in his hair, the dogs and cheap shampoo. The lingering smell of sex, between him and the poet behind him. He smells perfect. He smells alive. He smells like home.
Dark eyes open to a dark room and stone walls. Enough space to pace twice, perhaps three times to the bars that frame one wall of his room, that give access to the corridor beyond, the hospital beyond that. The doctor hums. It must still be too soon to have the lights on to simulate daylight for the prisoners kept here, must still be within the comforting realms between quite late and too early.
He watches the corridor a moment longer, hears nothing but the sniffing a few cells down, where one man is crying, the heavy breathing of another who had found the comfort of sleep. Hannibal doesn’t care for this room. He doesn’t care for the acoustics of it, the size, the arrangement. He doesn’t care for many things, anymore.
So he just lets his eyes close again, in comfortable slumber, his mind seeking like gentle hands through a lightless room for the switch. He seeks and he sighs, and the smell of Wolf Trap fills his nostrils instead, covering immediately the disinfectant and stale breath that had permeated his prison cell.
Did you miss us?
He smiles, freeing one arm to drape it back around the lanky poet who presses against him insistent, a friend missing another, a lover missing their other part.
“Always,” Hannibal tells him.
Always.