Chapter Text
His mouth was dry and gritty, his head full of wasps and needles. He tried to move but had to stop and breathe deeply first. Every part if him felt strange and only barely connected.
Slowly, Will prised his eyelids apart. The light was dim but still hurt his eyes at first. He was used to headaches, so the one which crawled up from the base of his skull in response didn't affect him greatly beyond making it hard to keep his eyes open against the brightness.
He was seated, he realised, in a comfortable chair with wide arms and black leather upholstery. One of his hands was stuck to it, like he had been there some time, lightly sweating. Will prised it away and was grateful for the slight shock of sensation it provided. It helped to bring him back to consciousness.
Will made an effort to lift his chin. The blurry figure of a man slowly came to him. He recognised this, this position he was in, this view. It was familiar enough to be soothing. His heartbeat, which had been thundering, began to settle at the face he saw there.
"D'ctor?" he groaned and tried to swallow the grit making his mouth feel like sand. "Did... did I fall 'sleep?" That had to be it. He must have drifted off while they were talking.
"No Will," Lecter responded, and for the first time, Will realised that the expression on his friend's face was not one he'd ever seen before. It was serious as ever, but he also looked strangely concentrated, disquieted.
"I feel strange."
"You have been drugged." Lecter said it so perfunctorily, he might have been telling him about the weather. "A mild sedative. It will wear off shortly."
Will brought his surroundings into focus and realised that they were not, as he had initially believed, in Dr Lecter's office. The position of their seats were exactly as they would be in his practice room, but the room was smaller. It was Dr Lecter's drawing room. They were in his house in Baltimore.
He searched his mind for some indication of what had occurred before he woke up there. Where had he been before the darkness swallowed him?
A sudden tingle in his gut brought his memories back to him like a dart hitting bullseye. Of course... he had been at home, locked in his room, going back and forth between his phone and the box containing his hormone suppressing drugs and stimulation aid of choice for heat cycles. He had been securing his nest of pillows and sheets, so that when the heat began he would be able to relax.
"How... How did I get here?" he asked, throat still scratchy.
"I entered your home, using your spare key, and administered the sedative with a syringe. Forgive me Will, it was very discourteous, I know. Particularly given your impending heat."
Tension entered Will's posture as he looked, really looked at Dr Lecter properly. He breathed in through his nose, almost without thinking, and scented the man sitting across from him. The air was thick with Alpha pheromones, the fullness of which he had never tasted before. His body twitched all over in response, his Omega cycle responding.
The slight curve of a smile which appeared at Lecter's mouth indicated that he noticed Will's primal response.
The thinking part of Will burned, shame starting at the tips of his ears and draining downwards. He had never been in the vicinity of an Alpha while his body was undergoing its changes, by his design. Last night had been the first time he'd ever even considered actually mating with an Alpha, his hand straying often to his phone in contemplation of calling Josh, the newly transferred Agent who had been courting him for the past month. The man had been a perfect Gentleman towards him and wholly undemanding, unlike most Alphas, and Will had truly started to believe he might be capable of a real relationship. Maybe even a bonding in the fullness of time.
Truly it had been a bit of an idle fancy, the prospect of mating with an Alpha at last; a fantasy which would help his heat along. He had known in his heart of hearts that he wasn't ready for that.
The overwhelming scent of Hannibal, an Alpha who was clearly actually in rut, proved that. His body was tense, like a breath waiting to be exhaled, his hormones surging.
But everything was still confusing and his head was buzzing. "Why would you do that?" Will asked, plaintively.
"I find that I cannot conceal my nature to you any longer." He ran his finger across his upper lip to remove a line of perspiration gathered there; Will noticed then that his doctor looked quite unkempt, by his usual standards anyway. "It has been a tremendous struggle. Since the moment I met you, smelled you, I have been fighting myself. You call to me in a way I have never experienced before."
Will frowned deeply. He had always known Dr Lecter was an Alpha, and probably a thoroughbred one at that, but had seen nothing to indicate any sort of interest on his side (that was hardly unsurprising, given that he himself was not exactly a pedigree). Well, no interest save that one time he caught his friend scenting him as he approached a heat, but that had been easily shrugged off with a joke about his aftershave. It had seemed fairly meaningless at the time.
"Will, I need you to concentrate very hard on what I am saying. This is all going to be very difficult for you to accept, but it is vital."
Will tried to speak, but coughed instead. "Water?" he gasped, tongue now totally dry.
Lecter moved from his seat with grace, like a panther, and kneeled down beside Will. A glass of water had already been placed on the small table beside him, but his head had been too fuzzy to see it. The Doctor lifted it and tilted it against Will's lips, carefully, almost lovingly.
"Will," he muttered when the water was gone and looked up at him from a strange position of submission, "You have no idea how much I wish I could preserve you, just as you are now. I wish this didn't have to happen." The Doctor turned away from him but didn't make an effort to get off his knees. "But I know now the time has come. You must know the truth."
"Doct..."
"Please Will, call me Hannibal. We are friends, are we not?""
Some of the fuzz started to clear with the water and Will started to realise what was being said. Drugged? He had been drugged. By Dr Lecter - by Hannibal.
He found that had the subsequent presence of mind to try and get to his feet. Strangely, strong arms moved to help him, arms that made his guts twist with want and summoned an unconscious moan from deep down I'm his throat. Too close, the Alpha was too close, but he didn't know how to tell him to back off and let him be alone before he lost control of himself.
"I need to show you something," Hannibal told him.
"What?"
"The truth." Hannibal helped him to move across the darkened room to the slightly ajar door. "I always knew this day would come, but I had not planned for it to happen so soon."
As they reached the threshold, Will's world suddenly titled and spun and he was suddenly in Hannibal's arms, like an actress from the silver screen pulled closer by her hero. Lips which tasted of red wine and cinnamon pressed against his and he unwittingly opened for them. In the back of his mind, Will was screaming at himself to get free and pull away; the saliva of an Alpha in rut was filled with disarming ingredients, designed to trigger his heat and oestrus and prepare him to receive. Yet the sensation of warmth and sense of safety was intoxicating. Beyond the dimmest thought, he had always seen Hannibal as an untouchable thing, controlled and in such possession of his baser urges as to be basically asexual. It was in the back if his mind that the idea of an asexual Alpha was a ridiculous one, and that the good Doctor had to have private outlets for his needs, but he never really thought too far into it. It had seemed like such a moot point anyway, given his lack of interest. Seeming lack if interest.
The man drawing him into this paradise of hot wet tongues was not one he recognised from their time together. He had never suspected such passion, such primal power, such unbridled want, was hidden behind those expensive drycleaned suits and the foppish attention to detail.
"Do you know what it did to me," Hannibal growled into his mouth, a feral creature unleashed at last, "to smell an Alpha touching you, trying to claim you, imprinting on your skin, wanting to fuck you..."
Never, in a thousand years, would Will have suspected that hearing such a normally composed person say the word 'fuck' would be the trigger for his body to start to open up and grow wet inside. He keened at the unexpected sensation.
"Whatever the cost, I couldn't let that go on any further," Hannibal continued before pulling back to look Will in the eyes, in a way he usually couldn't abide. "You are my mate, Will. And you are my redemption. Your purity will cleanse me, just as it will damn me." His voice was growing distant, as though he was talking to himself.
In the throes of a hormone explosion, Will found it hard to track anything that was being said, but he nearly fainted as he felt Hannibal's large hand settle on the curve of his belly, as the therapist confessed, "I have been replacing your fertility control pills with placebos for some time."
"You...?" Will spluttered after a shocked pause, truly floored.
"That is why you became receptive to the advances of an inferior Alpha. That was not my intention, of course."
Before Will could ask for more specifics on what his intentions were, Hannibal guided him through into the dining room.
"And now, no more secrets," he said, almost mournfully.
Will span in, dizzily, and came to a halt at the end of the long table. He froze immediately and his brain struggled to make sense of what was now being presented to him.
The hollowed out corpse of Josh Jones was laid across the table, a bloody tableau. Internal organs had been placed around him on various platters, the cavity of his chest a gaping red hole. What was left of his face was twisted and mangled. His death had been painful and brutal, his body dishonoured and displayed like a bloody jigsaw puzzle, in jagged nonsense pieces.
Will slid to his knees and just stared as Hannibal walked over and stood beside the body on his table, presenting it with his hand.
"I am the Ripper you have been seeking."