Work Text:
Missing the hospital is a new feeling.
Will shuffled inpatient off the first three ( four ) times easily. The first time he was young and the knife had just managed not to mangle the spread of nerves twining down from his neck to shoulder. The second time, fevered certainty and the ashy taste of Georgia Madchen’s final moments sat burning on his tongue and clicked in soft, phantom hoofbeats dogging his steps. The third time, he’d had bigger things to worry about—trembling cold from all the blood spun in and out of him and wrestling with the definitely-mangled span of his other shoulder, but clear-eyed for the first time in months. The fourth time had been the sinister boredom of Chilton’s care, more prison than hospital; certainly no love lost there.
There seems to be lots of love lost this time, a flood of it, a bloodshed of it.
But what Will figures he really misses, as he nearly literally drags himself into his bed with its messy sheets that he hasn’t been able to change in days, are the monitors. It’s absurd to mourn the lunchroom noise of indicators blipping off-time, the snarls of wires attached to him at the most inconvenient points, the charming little clicks and chirps of the PCA pump under the attention of his thumb. And he doesn’t mourn that, the mechanical pulse of the hospital, the electronic pitch and sigh of dozens of ICU rooms identical to his beeping and whirring out of sync. He misses knowing what he’s supposed to feel, charted there in screens and sine waves and blinking lights.
Heart-rate up? That’s why you feel anxious, about to crawl right out of your skin.
Blood pressure down? That’s what the silver flickers in your vision mean, along with the sinking feeling that the bed is rushing up to catch you.
Nutrient bag running low and NG tube chafing against chapped mucus membranes? That’s really why you feel like you’re going to throw up so much that you eventually turn yourself inside out and let anyone who’s ever wondered why you are what you are finally see that, on the inside, you’re just as soft, red, and weeping as anyone else.
All those little boxes were so much more real than the lead weight of whatever feeling actually settled low in him, inscrutable and slow like other heavy-metal poisons.
As it is, Will gingerly slides himself down into bed with nothing but his pills and the graveyard stillness of his Virginia house holding a funeral for his fitful rest and feels out the edges of his dry eyes. He wants to cry but nothing ever comes of it, stinging-eyed in the middle of the night when he’s supposed to be sleeping, not poorly shuffling his palms over his stomach like he can keep things out or in.
Unlike him, the agents outside his hospital room had been more worried about keeping things out than in . Will Graham was something of a hero, despite his checkered history and black-box-redacted body splashed all over Tattlecrime. You could probably sue her for that, said the FBI lawyers and the agents who came to take his statements. We all know that’s only half the story, said Chilton, smug, fingers delicately smoothing the butcher-paper wrap of cheerfully macabre lace-puffed carnations and wine-dark lilies. Pretty damn accurate, up to and including the attempted entrapment, supposed Kade Prurnell, pinched-mouthed when she finally visited to inform him how that particular bit of the truth had unraveled when Hannibal had earnestly tried to kill four people and nearly succeeded on all counts.
Not me , Will has to keep reminding himself, running anxious fingers over bandages to check for wet spots giving way to antlers molting bloody velvet. They won’t be there, but he checks anyway. I had to know. I had to keep feeling it.
He couldn’t stomach any of it—not Prurnell, not Chilton, not careful evisceration. Nothing more than clear liquids and ice chips and recycled, sterile air cracking open dry little fissures inside his nose. Now, he stomachs what he can. He chews dry toast to a miserable, sopping sludge so that it doesn’t rip his internal sutures clear through his intestine. He minds his ostomy scar, the newest of the bunch that sits higher than his steady-handed, gifted one. It stings like a hot poker, blinding solar flares of sudden pain every time he tries to pat it down between dressing changes. He walks slowly and sits on the porch with cups of broth from wax-paper boxes and tries not to think about dry-drowning, tarry blood filling his lungs or how to tell Abigail when he sees her next that only one of them was cut to survive.
Will’s learning how to live again after being gutted. He supposes that, wherever he is, Hannibal is too.
He rolls over too fast, mussing covers, and retches into the tupperware sitting on the ground beside the bed. It’s not productive, in all senses of the word, just leaves him with a curdled mouth and tearing agony from ribs on down. He inches himself onto his back again, mouth working around mostly soundless wheezing, and scrapes around on the bedside table to find his painkillers.
Exhaustion wages a brutal war of attrition, and despite the muffled silence and the stale pulls of his own breath, Will sleeps.
A weight settling down at his side minutes or hours later, pulling the thin blankets taut, startles him awake. Will blinks sleep from his eyes, expecting Abigail, hands waxen white in the moonlight, folded in her lap or twitching over the column of her bandaged throat.
It’s not Abigail.
Hannibal Lecter sits on the edge of his bed, one hand smoothing wrinkles from the sheets, and gazes down at the blue moonlight striped across the bed as if wondering whether he could brush the creases from it just the same. He looks mild and pleased, even if a little clotted cut splits the edge of his lower lip and the skin just underneath on his jaw is mottled puffy pink and furious red. They sit alongside older bruises, still sickly green and yellow and not quite faded—evidence that Jack Crawford has good aim and a mean swing.
Will swallows, still perched on the blade edge of sleep. He blinks again and the image stings, smears. Hannibal stays.
“This is a dream,” Will rasps. He hasn’t spoken out loud in days; bile makes a ruin of the throat and back teeth, but he doesn’t care how rough his voice sounds. It’s not like there’s anyone here to listen but the walls and the empty dog beds.
Hannibal doesn’t lift his gaze from the sheets and the hand there pressed up onto fingertips, but his mouth quirks into something fond. “Do you dream about me, Will?”
“Sometimes. I dream things that aren’t real and some that are, what could’ve been and what I think I remember.” Will watches him, pulse picking up speed and moisture evaporating from his mouth. The whole swath of his belly aches fitfully, a gut-punch of a good morning even though it’s still solid black out his window, porchlights cold and unlit. “I guess that makes them all nightmares, but I’m not sure they were ever anything else.”
Hannibal hums, very quiet and considerate. His palm flattens and smooths again, this time up and over the crest of Will’s leg to settle just above his knee. Will’s thigh twitches at the closeness, the warmth, the bare brush of a thumb. Abigail doesn’t touch him because then neither of them can keep pretending that she didn’t suffocate on blood and inevitability in that stainless, stately kitchen. This is different.
He dares to steal a glance at the alarm clock on his bedside. The numbers change, one blue minute passing to the next and Will doesn’t blink. Not a dream, not a hallucination, just the hand impossibly heavy on his skin like it’s made of denser stuff than bone and fine-threaded muscle and rushing capillaries.
This is happening.
Will wonders, sick with a sharp lurch of panic, if Hannibal will press any further, tracing the superficial band of thick muscle stretched from teardrop kneecap to arched sweep of pelvis. He doesn’t know if that’s a choice cut or just something to thread two fingers beneath and slide up and down to feel it tug.
“Your nightmares,” guesses Hannibal. “They all end badly?”
Dread is a pooling, quicksand thing and Will’s heart seizes with it. Deer in headlights freeze, blinded by a quirk of anatomy, not fear, until everything adjusts to let the light in. Will has had weeks and it’s still not enough for the spots in his eyes to clear, to process anything but soft bland food, to decide how he feels. Years of police work, multiple times fighting for his life—it all dissolves and he’s just pale and bony and shivery under a single thin sheet that’s more a formality keeping the sore point of history between them out of sight than true armor.
“They end,” Will says, each word dropped with finality like a stone into water, and all he has to do is wait until Hannibal feels the ripples. “That’s more than I can say for what I find when I open my eyes. Everything else has unfinished edges, threads left to pull.”
“Pulling them comes naturally, not to mention following them to their logical ends,” Hannibal says, serious but very gentle, no different than when he’d told Abigail to come to him. No different than close your eyes and wade . Will nearly chokes hearing it, remembering it, bile burning his throat. Because it’s honest; it’s very Hannibal, down to the marrow. “And you are so very good at it.”
Will blinks and tears his gaze to the ceiling. If Hannibal moves or vanishes while he’s not watching, so be it.
I need to be sure of what I’m seeing, of you, of me, before I tug at the strings you left, not for them or anyone else, but me. I don’t know if I want to. I haven’t decided. It’s too soon—it’s too—it’s—
“Is that supposed to be flattering?” He shuts his eyes and breathes out long, like a smoker, unsure if it comes out steady. Terror blurs in his veins, cotton-smothered, muffled but thrumming just under his skin. “I can’t imagine you’re here to ask for forgiveness.”
Hannibal makes a low noise that sounds as sinkingly warm as his palm feels. “Because I apologize sparingly?”
“Because you already asked. Once is enough,” Will says, low, voice breaking halfway through where it’s most fragile. He shakes his head, but all he gets is vaguely woozy and his anxious heart kicks up again. “An apology is different than asking for forgiveness.”
“The first works best with reciprocity, but can go without.”
The bed shifts and the insistence of Hannibal’s hand disappears. Will’s eyes snap open. He has to watch; he has to see what’s going to happen before it does, but all he sees is Hannibal shifting gingerly to the floor, balanced on a knee. Will sees the flat of the palm coming but flinches back too late to stop Hannibal from cupping his jaw. Phantom rain patters against his forehead, beading in lashes and beard and wets his hair flat to his skull.
“The second,” adds Hannibal, considering thumb now rasping over stubble, “always takes two.”
His other hand.
Will hasn’t marked it.
Hannibal’s fingers tighten, clamp, hold. Will barely sees that other hand emerge from somewhere at Hannibal’s side until plastic presses against one of his nostrils. A flash of heat spurts up his nose and he chokes when it drips down into his throat, searing. Hannibal holds his jaw tight and fast, thumb soothing all the while.
Will swallows and Hannibal breathes, soft and open-mouthed and pleased, and loosens his hold. He tucks tight, tiny flyaway curls back behind Will’s ear before easing back.
“There,” he whispers, almost conspiratorial, tired edges of his eyes crinkling, “give that a moment.”
Will drifts onto his back, down against his thin pillow, wanting to say why, why did you run and where did you go and you killed her, you killed her and left me alive, you bastard. But his tongue burns and his throat sears and he can’t cough up anything coherent after all.
The world softens, diffuse light and liquid shadow, but doesn’t fade. Hannibal quietly busies himself, moving in and out of Will’s lolling sight, leaning over to set something heavy down somewhere on Will’s other side, reaching to spread and tidy when his mouth pulls unhappily. This is hardly walking willingly into the knife, knowing something terrible is going to happen—Will knows it anyway, but his panic feels blunted, his lungs easing under the grip of whatever drips down his throat, limbs syrup slow.
Hannibal jostles him, a hand sliding under his head and back to gently prop him up. The covers strip back and Will jerks away after the sudden cold has already prickled over his skin. He blinks, heavy and slick, and stares down the spread of his chest and stomach to see Hannibal nudging his thighs apart to settle between them. Will’s brows pull; it takes ages for them to furrow all the way together and by that point, Hannibal has laid a curious hand on the oblique planes of either thigh. Will’s muscles twitch, obedient if leisurely in their startle.
It feels like the lurid glimpse of Hannibal’s soft, pink tongue just before he closed his teeth to mill down songbird bones, like careful attention to washing knuckles scoured black and blue and red on someone else’s skull, like something Will has never thought to imagine.
Eyes lidded, he imagines it now—Hannibal pressing him out, wider, open, going and going until he can split up the middle, too. Maybe Hannibal would tend Will’s face between his hands as he did it, delicate and cradling and skimming over the sharp arc of cheekbones while imagining the fine openwork spread of bone lurking deep behind them.
Drawn and quartered, Will thinks dully. A punishment for spectacle, not taste, but he figures he’s not good to eat anyway. Gut-shots spoil the whole carcass.
Will wets his bottom lip. “Not going to reassure me that it’ll be over soon?”
He’s trembling, a fine shiver, and he can’t seem to stop. Hannibal blinks up at him from so far away, down an eternity stretch of bare bed and bare-skinned legs, the dark material of his sleeves cuffed crisp at his elbows. He reaches up to drag his knuckles down the side of Will’s face, smelling cold-dry and stinging: ethanol and antiseptic and hospital. Will—aching for some small box or sticky-fingered lead to tell him how to feel as Hannibal’s drug works him over—has to catch himself before he turns his cheek into it.
The hooked knife doesn’t come, though the ripping of it and the cradling afterward replay in sickening clarity between each dragging blink of Will’s lids.
“One of the first things a physician learns is the danger of making promises.” Hannibal tucks away a smile and rucks Will’s t-shirt up efficiently, baring a peek of hip and the block of bandaging from his navel to where his ribs stretch the widest. “I can’t reassure you, but I can tell you that what I gave you is as much for your sake as mine.”
Will swallows; it scalds. The thought to run, run fast, run now cracks through his molasses dread but skirts away, runny egg sieving through sluggish fingers.
He could fight. Last time, he didn’t. Last time, he lowered the gun. This time, with his rifle and the shotgun he leant Alana both sealed away in FBI evidence, he would only have his hands. The hands that Hannibal has been admiring all throughout whatever he’s been doing, naked and raw in his attention in a way Will has rarely been privy to without having to look close. Hannibal wants and he’s keeping the door of it cracked open.
Will curls his fingers, bracing nails into his palms.
Hannibal reaches out of sight, then returns with a set of blocky silver scissors, stainless and cold against Will’s stomach as the bandages fall away in tidy snips.
Will watches, chin gently shaking back and forth. “No, no, no —”
The bandages keep going. Hannibal’s lips part, a slow exhale, as he bares the sickly white of Will’s stomach, ignoring the neat stripe of the ostomy scar healing flat and proper. His eyes burn instead over the wrinkled, pulpy ridges strapped down by a tiny line of dark blue stitches and the thin, darker glimpse of tissue between them.
“Certainly there are no more secrets between us,” Hannibal murmurs, the edge of his memorable mouth twitching, wry, then darkening, plagued by something complicated.
Dissatisfaction, maybe. Not sadness, because most of that lives behind the sheen of his eyes and deep in his voice, scraping his vocal cords and making his swallows sharp.
Will knows it firsthand and wishes he didn’t.
“Spilled your guts and then mine for the trouble?” he says, just as quiet, a bit slack around the mouth. It’s the drugs, not sadness, even though his sadness doesn’t play hide-and-seek. Will was a sad-mouthed little kid that grew up into a sad-mouthed adult who learned to scowl if only to distract from all that latent grief. “You left so much on that damn kitchen floor.”
Hannibal bends down to get a closer look, the outline of him just a bowed silvering head and dark shoulders, a supplicant at prayer. A sudden flush strikes Will, dizzy and overwhelming at the impossible shape Hannibal makes over him. His stomach clenches savagely as more strangled nausea flares to match the heat crawling up his neck. Hannibal doesn’t touch, arms braced far on either side of Will’s waist. Breath—humid, close, and hot—ghosts across the damp, narrow fissure in Will’s skin.
The words are just as hot, close. “Only what I meant to.”
Will wants to laugh, hissing and solvent-bitter, but it would hurt. He lets it die in his chest, a choking rumble. “You left more than that.”
A quiet hum and the bowed head shifts away before Will can catch the cut of Hannibal’s glance. Then a telltale sound, elastic and teeth-aching, and Will knows what’s coming even before Hannibal ducks back into his line of sight.
“There are feelings and moments that reach beyond ourselves, beyond what we can control or predict. Or negotiate,” he says with the flex of one blue nitrile glove and then the other, powdery and shocking in what little light there is.
Will feels ill and full-up, wondering how many people have seen this exact picture just before they die—Hannibal Lecter, blue-handed, the whittling strength of uneven teeth kept carefully behind an amused mouth, because not even impending death qualifies a stranger for a reason, for Hannibal to let all of himself be seen.
“Are you here to take yours back?” asks Will.
And he knows as he says it that it’s not the same at all. Hannibal’s gloved fingers speak to care and consideration and besides, Will has already seen so, so much. Will’s throat burns and he wants it to be the same and he doesn’t. It’s been months of being ridden hard and put away wet and he doesn’t want to know any more than his ground-down body, soul, mind already do. He doesn’t but he must know the rest.
Must know, want to know. They’re the same once the blood is rinsed away.
Will’s eyes ache.
Hannibal gives him a secret smile and an even more private sigh and rips open a packet with a soft paper crunch. “I’m here to give today, not to take. I can do that, on occasion.”
The daub stick he pulls from the package shines darkly and goes on bile brown in a cold ring across Will’s stomach, over the girdle of stitching. Will jerks an arm, slow and involuntary, but Hannibal snaps out a hand and cuffs his wrist tight, steadily crushing it into the bedsheets. All Will can do is pant harshly against the chill; he can’t say don’t, please, don’t because last time his arm was oily with blood, tar-hot on clammy skin and Hannibal had— Hannibal had—
Hannibal smooths a thumb over the edge of the wound, moonlight catching in his lashes, a scatter of pale light. Will goes rigid and bites away a pained, breathless sound. Hannibal makes a considering one and presses down a little harder. A rubbery neoprene fingertip catches at the edge of the sutured slit on the way down, smearing a clean line through the yellow-brown disinfectant he laid down so diligently. The ridged flesh pulls, tugs, stretches, and strains the stitches.
Will drags a knee up in protest, but he barely has the strength to dig it into Hannibal’s side. All his muscles shiver, jelly and slack, nerves pulsing scattershot and slow enough that Hannibal just tuts gently and nudges his leg back down.
“For your sake and mine, remember?” he breathes, eyes flicking to Will’s face just long enough to sear, vivid. “Perhaps something to help you relax.”
Will shakes his head but Hannibal leans over, unbothered, and retrieves a syringe. The first shallow slide of it at the very edge of the wound lances white hot. The heat spreads, pools, and Will grinds his teeth through a deep grunt of pain each time Hannibal slips out then in again. Half of the wound dissolves into foggy numbness and the other half burns bee-sting warm.
Hannibal’s grip on his wrist loosens and a thumb rubs small, intent circles into the jutting bone of his wrist. Worrying, soothing, polishing, and Will feels it like he’s been robbed. He can’t hold any more of Hannibal’s gifts; they press out from his guts in velvet and bone and stomach acid and he’s all full up.
Curious fingers skirt the mouth of the gash, spreading it open until the thread strains and tugs. Will twitches rhythmically into the insistence, all muffled tugging of muscle and skin, pain a muddled memory. Hannibal pulls and stretches, fingertips pressing sticky and sweating to Will’s half-numb stomach, and stretches and pulls and pulls.
Will groans, low and hazy. Hannibal stills, pointer and ring fingers pulled taut apart. Translucent skin shivers between them, a straining seam. Gently, Hannibal dips middle finger down, sliding whisper-soft and damp over the ridge of each tidy stitch. He stares up the length of quivering stomach and rucked shirt to catch Will’s lidded gaze, expression savagely intent. The edge of his lower lip gleams in the half-light, glossy wet where his tongue brushed over it.
What big eyes, what sharp teeth, what strange desire and sadness you have all tangled together, thinks Will, thoughts slipping past him fleeting and insubstantial, bonfire sparks and dust, particle matter from a bygone blast floating gently back to earth.
He twitches at the tooth-tugging pulls of Hannibal carefully snipping stitches and again at the full swipe of two fingers along the center of the wound. Yolky-soft, like Will’s not fully done all the way through, pink and still cold no matter the sear. Hannibal leans into a single fingertip, the blunt edge of a trimmed nail sharp even through the nitrile, chalky and blue as an autopsy. He watches the give of the fragile tissue, gaze searing and rendered nearly arterial-blood black.
Will grabs him, clutches at Hannibal’s wrist, squeezing the rubbery lip where the glove has curled in on itself. Hannibal breathes out, a gentle sigh, and eases up. Will can’t stop the sheer yearning that bleeds into him—Hannibal wants to be touched more than he wants to touch. Anything, a startled reaction or the crack of knuckles on bone or the gentle attentiveness Will only ever gives to the dogs, as long as it’s Will, as long as it’s Will’s hands and grip and rough skin against him. It should make Will relieved that there’s something Hannibal wants— wanted —wants from him more than violence.
“You left us to die,” Will says in a stumble, words rushing together, and feels nothing but welling, unaccountable sadness. “That won’t change.”
Maybe at some point no and stop would’ve kept that curved little knife from Abigail Hobbs’ neck or Hannibal’s grasping fingers away from the translucent of new skin carving through Will’s middle. Maybe there was a point when no and stop would’ve weighed just as heavy in Hannibal’s hand, back when Will’s mouth tasted of earthy lamb and red wine and the certainty that Hannibal needed to go out with a bang and a bloody end.
Hannibal’s expression twitches briefly, pained, as he loosens Will’s grip. Will knows what’s coming before he even sees the shine of the metal in the dark because Hannibal isn’t one to push forward, brutal and breaking with blunt hands when something sharp and clean will do. He looks fraying at the edges, like he needs , the way he looked that night, that damn night, that damn kitchen —
“You’re going to feel this,” Hannibal says and presses the scalpel down.
Will parts soft and tender under even hands and gentle force. His lips part like he should scream but the searing pain never comes, dulled to pressure and the dragging, burning persistence of a pulled muscle. Whatever Hannibal shot into him was enough to keep him from thrashing, but not enough to dull him all the way.
Of course. Will Graham always has to keep feeling it.
Blood fountains to the surface and Hannibal tidies it with neat squares of gauze. It spots pastel blue in glossy pats but he seems unbothered. Will moans around the guttering insistence of foggy pain, beating in time with his heart. This man cupped the filmy wrenching of Cassie Boyle’s lungs just tight enough as he excised them, as they spasmed around the death rattle she likely hadn’t been conscious for. Will doesn’t know how long it’ll take him to finally go limp and dreamless or if he’ll wake up afterward.
Hannibal’s gaze is coal-bright, expression so split open it’s almost obscene, stripped and vulnerable in its nakedness, and Will should look away. He doesn’t. He shakes and gasps and stares into the corona of flickering silver around Hannibal’s face. A finger traces feather light over the parted lips of the wound that flinches in time with Will’s breath.
Hannibal sighs, long and satisfied. He presses and the tip of his finger slides inside.
Will feels the intrusion of it, the push of it sliding slickly in and out, further and further until the knuckle disappears entirely. He can imagine what it must be like inside him, a reverent touch, but the blankness of sensation startles him even through the lidocaine-dulled ache that pulses at the rim where he’s newly carved open.
The back of Hannibal’s hand brushes against his cheek. Tears blur Will’s vision and his throat squeezes tight and tighter. Hannibal isn’t here, inside him, to change anything. The press of the pen against the page leaves ghosted marks, indelible, but they can be overwritten. The paper knows the shapes originally pressed into it, but it knows the truth of fresh ink, the intent of the earnest hand.
These are Hannibal’s hands as earnest as they can be.
“The internal sutures are holding well,” breathes Hannibal, sounding on very shaky ground himself, though he hardly looks it at all. How unlike him, how different from the man who clamped a renal artery one-handed in the back of an ambulance. How different from the man who calmly sealed a dying girl’s spluttering neck between strong palms. How different, like there’s cracks in the window of himself and the light still comes in. “I must commend your surgeon.”
How different, when it matters.
This isn’t what happens to dinner, to the centerpiece of the meal. Will isn’t going to end up skewered between fork and knife, but urged between relentless fingers and the questionably-soft expanse of his own mattress.
“Now,” he says and with a humid slide, pulls his finger free. Something slippery in Will heaves, shivers and twitches, exposed to the cold in ways viscera shouldn’t be. Hannibal presses a gauze pad over it, wet and warm. “Let’s see the rest.”
The light still comes in.
And, after dry weeks and days of thick throats and burning eyes, the dam breaks.
Will weeps, shoulders shuddering and eyes salty-wet. He sobs like he’s going to be sick and Hannibal murmurs softly, things that make no sense, as scissors snip and more faraway agony struggles to make itself legible through the anger and barren misery exorcizing its way down Will’s face, lips, down his jaw and throat.
Will chokes out sounds that might be words, senselessly begging don’t and no and stop, please even though he knows they’ll all fall as fast and useless as his tears. One, two, three fingers disappear into him and there’s no thick washes of blood this time. There’s only the shifting, intimate and foreign, and the crying he can’t seem to stop.
A fourth finger, long and prodding, slips past the scar edges and Will hiccups, bucks up.
A bare palm surges into his vision, naked in its lines and sudden paleness, and presses warm over his mouth. Hannibal clasps tight, muffling Will’s broken sobs, as he shifts his four glistening fingers deeper to make room for the broad push of knuckles. Will tastes the warm saltiness of Hannibal’s skin, bitter and chalky from the gloves, as he pants. It feels more like a kiss, wet and tongue.
And Priam says, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son, thinks Will, bleary and bereft. He has no son, but there were children that would’ve been his and these hands wrung life out of them both and all Will can do is sob as Hannibal surely strokes along his large intestine, thumb smoothing over the open seams of stomach where Will can feel more than pressure.
Eventually, that thumb disappears inside him, too.
Will stares up at Hannibal, blinking him into watery clarity, and watches the catch of his chest, the high color in his face. The table has been set and Will has been spread out, but he’s not fit to eat. Not because of the split gut or the smell of antiseptic on his skin.
He twitches his hands back to life, bones sore and cracking when he unclenches his fists from the sheets. Hannibal watches the movement of it, calculating and lips parted with slow breaths, but his mouth presses shut when Will touches him. Lean fingers, strong but aching, grasp the intruding arm just above where the wrist disappears.
Hannibal lets out a small breath and peels his hand from Will’s mouth to wipe away the tears instead. Will’s face feels like a ruin, hot all the way down his neck, nose running, and he struggles down air through a wetly rasping mouth. Hannibal brackets him on all sides, hand slipped so full inside him that the persistent heaviness feels like it could nudge its way through his chest to cup a palm over his heart.
“Is this what it could’ve been?” manages Will, wishing he could cover himself. It’s far too late for that, but he feels chilled and gaping and shivery with the pain lurking behind ebbing analgesics.
Hannibal’s eyes are glossy in their own right, hair soft and mussed across his forehead. “Perhaps.”
Will shudders and catches his breath when the full-body shake reaches his split-open stomach. He furiously blinks away another swell of wetness from his lashes but the tears come anyway. It seems impossible that there could be any more, that he hasn’t dripped out nearly all of himself by now. He doesn’t want there to be anything left; he’s given the man above, around, and inside him so much already. Hannibal shifts and the press of him does too, a push against fascia and omentum that Will’s felt before in a dream or a hallucination of a kiss that blots out into the white shine of tines.
He says, “Give me something I can understand.”
Hannibal’s mouth slips into an unhappy little curve. “There’s nothing you can’t understand, Will.”
Will laughs, just a hitch of breath and a shaky rasp of salt-wet throat. “Then give me something that shows you understand.”
Hannibal slides easily into the not-quite-happy, not-quite-sad consideration of pressed lips and gently crinkled eyes. It almost glosses as seriousness, as concentration, but Will sees the whiteboard blankness it hides, even with all the corners tucked in hospital-tight. A hand brushes up against him, nitrile stickiness catching the little hairs of his belly. Will’s brows furrow and he tries to shuffle himself up to see. Hannibal clicks his tongue softly and the gloved hand pushes down against his hipbone in response.
It doesn’t take long for him to catch up. Hannibal’s touch dips lower, towards where Will’s body betrays its blur of confusion and sensation and the warmth of a body pressed close to his. Adrenaline must shunt blood somewhere. Hannibal slips his hand fully into Will’s shorts and cups his half-hard cock. Will’s eyes flutter, sharp and involuntary at the touch.
Will grates out a response, barely words, more a shattering groan in the fragile silence. He lets out a ragged sigh—relief, fear, relief —when Hannibal lets him go. But Hannibal only brings his palm to his mouth and licks it from heel to fingertips, unhurried. Will swallows his startled sound when the damp hand closes around him again.
Hannibal stares down at him, dark and lurid, lidded and frighteningly honest. Will shakes his head in tiny jerks, trying to pay attention to where Hannibal’s hand is sunken into him and where his other moves obscenely under wash-worn cotton. Dizziness grips him just as sudden and persistent as Hannibal does and all he can do is pant rhythmically into each quickening pull.
All Will gets from Hannibal is a soft, satisfied noise when he slows to feel out the weight and slick head of Will’s cock. He shifts until he can lean closer, shifting his hand to stay inside Will and holding him fast, close enough to swallow Will’s open-mouthed quiet moans if he wanted. Will cranes his neck, uncertain, as Hannibal’s cheek rasps against his own. Hannibal breathes hot into the sweat-tight little curls he favored earlier and returns to working Will with determination. The heat of his gaze burns Will sidelong, ember-warm and bleeding out of him the same way Will’s tears did, all carving heatmaps down his cheeks.
Will can only twitch his hips helplessly into the rigorous pace, can only think about how he’s going to make a wreck of himself, how Hannibal is going to make a ruin of the muscles that haven’t yet come all the way back together. How they’re going to make a mess of each other, tangled and wrist-deep, as Hannibal drags his mouth across Will’s cheekbone and Will can only think, searing, is this what it could’ve been, is this it, is—
Orgasm is always a violence in one way or another, stealing through the body and seizing anything it can find. This time, it seizes Will, scorched earth—the hot splash of come and the clench of his insides spasming around too much space. Hannibal sighs, wet and heavy, easing each pull of Will’s cock as they both shudder down. Will gasps as searing pleasure splits into pain, just trying to remember how to breathe in the buzzing onslaught of endorphins and a rush of what feels like blood pooling wet in his heaving stomach.
Hannibal pulls back and slips his hand, pearlescent and sticky, from Will’s underwear. Will and his stomach gape up at Hannibal, but all he does is run his tongue through Will’s come like he must, lids nearly fully drawn over his eyes.
Has it always been like this? Will wants to pant as he watches Hannibal taste, single-minded and vulgar the way the pink point of his tongue catches each fingertip. Was I not paying close enough attention?
Will asked to be given something; he supposes he was, even if it wasn’t what he wanted, what he actually needed. Stay, is all he can think instead, frantic and murky with encroaching shock. He can’t seem to make his mouth work. Just stay with me this time.
Hannibal catches Will’s left wrist with the hand that had been on his cock, now damp and licked-plate clean, and braces.
He pulls the other sleekly, nauseously up and out of Will. The sensation, easing of such strange pressure, pries a moan from him as Hannibal wetly removes himself, wrist, knuckles, fingers. It nearly drowns out the subvocal noise that slips from Hannibal’s mouth, curled like he’s been hurt or ravaged by an orgasm himself. Maybe he has—Will can’t tell with exhaustion rushing up to catch him.
“Perhaps a bit forward,” Hannibal murmurs as he catches his breath. “Was that what you wanted from me, Will?”
Will wheezes, feels the world sliding out from under him. He can’t move. His stomach feels like a slack maw, a burial pit, a yawning void. He can’t seem to stop shaking, flush with sudden cold, pulse thudding and frantic.
“Apologies,” murmurs Hannibal, rearranging Will’s limp arm so his palm faces the ceiling. Disappointment hangs heavy in his expression, but it’s quickly polished away when Hannibal catches Will’s gaze. “Shock can be rather overwhelming.”
Will blinks, slow, fuzzy. Clammy gloves, new and fresh, press a large gauze pad to his stomach and fold his hands over them like a churchyard saint. Will blinks hard enough to focus, but the world turns filmy, wetness slipping down from the corner of his eyes.
The tears and the moonlight blur Hannibal to a stained-glass figure, backlit and misty and all fine-point angles. Will doesn’t think he’s actually sorry. It doesn’t matter; it feels nice to slide back to the comfort of practical touch, the roll and coax of a vein, the rubbery snap of a tourniquet. He can pretend. They both can.
Will doesn’t even flinch at the bite of the needle. He doesn’t feel it, only the pull of Hannibal’s fingers returning to his hair. He doesn’t know if Hannibal is unhappy with the way the wispy curls at his ears lie, unruly and damp with sweat. Maybe he’s simply tugging them around his fingers, admiring their softness up close instead of from the safety of imagination.
Will lets his head loll gently into Hannibal’s grasp, and slides away.
— — —
In the end, it’s the dawn and the stale air in his cotton mouth that wakes Will.
If he doesn’t open his eyes, he can pretend he’s back in the hospital, being tended to the way the familiar sensation of new stitches and morphine-dulled pain demand. If he doesn’t look, he doesn’t have to see if he’s arrayed on his own sheets like a feast, or worse, just gently tucked into bed.
The problem with being Will Graham is that he always has to look, eventually.
Every cell in his body protests sitting up. He convinces himself the whole way that he can bite his lip bloody and hold back any incoming breakdowns long enough to get up and piss or heave into the sink. Will doesn’t expect to find Hannibal watching him from the high-backed tan chair dragged to the end of the bed, dissatisfaction lurking in the line of his mouth. It’s hard to say which is more unexpected—the unhappiness or the fact that multiple outstanding warrants and approaching daylight haven’t chased him out.
Will’s phone is missing from the side table. It doesn’t matter—there’s no one to call.
“You never did say what you did with the teacups after you smashed them," Will says, hoarse. "Can’t leave them on the kitchen floor. Can’t sweep them into the trash, because then you’ll never know if they put themselves back together when you’re not looking.”
“The act of observation affects the outcome, if physicists are to be believed,” Hannibal says.
Will works his jaw, skin still tender where Hannibal’s face scoured his. “Doesn’t change the fact that the teacup still has to break.”
He pushes his sheets away and shoves himself to his feet. Standing is so much worse, but he has to get up. He has to walk, make himself eat, change bandages, make sure Hannibal hasn’t left a housewarming present waiting to go septic inside him. Observed or not, he’s somehow found himself in the same place.
Hannibal’s expression pinches. “I wouldn’t get up quite yet.”
“I don’t have anyone else,” Will says, exhaling sharply. He could, if Hannibal stayed, but it’s a ridiculous thought to entertain what with all the outstanding warrants and everything about the snarled thing that is himself and Hannibal Lecter. It’s a terrible thing to want; it sits shameful and stony in him anyway. “Should I be grateful you didn’t open my intestine back up, too?”
It’s a long trip to the end of the bed just to stand looking down at Hannibal like this sight isn’t unfathomably strange and doesn’t feel like gargling glass.
“That would’ve been unnecessary,” Hannibal answers. His mouth opens, a sliver, then closes again. He glances away. “You wanted me to give you something and I can’t help but feel that I guessed wrong. I know what it feels like to miscalculate, when it comes to you.”
Will sighs, tight and sharp. Of course—Hannibal can’t leave, not without knowing this. Not until he’s picked the marrow clean from every bone; waste not, want not. “I don’t think you know how to give anything that doesn’t also serve you.”
“Will—”
Will catches Hannibal’s mouth and bites. Hard, sudden, and even Hannibal with all his killer instincts goes rigid like any other scared animal. Will kneads his lower lip, scraping his teeth into the cut there, all iron and stale breath. He takes what he can—tasting, nipping, pushing forward until the mouth under his is swollen red and all the cuts are sure to throb. Only then does he kiss Hannibal, slow, pulling gently away before coming back again.
Will doesn’t stop or startle at the light touch to his side. He just grabs at it, steady and bruising, and directs. He’ll show Hannibal where to put his hands.