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The first time Will kisses him, it happens with the hesitance of a confession.

Not drunk. Not impulsive.

Worse.

Deliberate.

Hannibal knows Will has chosen it before their mouths ever meet.

There is no accident to shelter him. No wine, no stumble of proximity, no plausible misunderstanding to which either of them might retreat afterward. Will leans toward him across the piano bench with visible intention, thinking too much even now, as if desire were a mechanism he might disassemble quickly enough to survive.

Hannibal’s hand remains resting against the keys.

He watches the last opportunity for retreat pass across Will’s face. The minute tightening at his jaw. The flicker of self-preservation in his eyes. That familiar instinct to vanish before wanting can become evidence.

Will refuses it.

Then he kisses him.

For one suspended second, Hannibal does nothing except receive the fact of it.

Will’s mouth is warmer than anticipated, softer too, though there is nothing soft in the tension that holds him together. He kisses with the grave concentration of a man crossing unstable ground, every part of him braced for consequence and moving forward anyway.

It is not practiced. It is not careless.

It is worse than either.

It is sincere.

Hannibal turns toward him, one hand leaving the keys to settle along the side of Will’s throat. He feels the response before he can fully catalogue it: the slight break in Will’s breathing, the involuntary lean into contact, the shock of wanting finding itself answered.

A quiet sound escapes Will.

The sound seems to surprise them both.

There, Hannibal thinks.

Years of fascination narrow into something immediate and visceral. Will Graham, who has made an art of withdrawal, shifts closer as though drawn by gravity, one hand catching at Hannibal’s sleeve with more need than decision. His restraint does not disappear so much as fail. First the hand, then the angle of his body, then the mouth opening beneath Hannibal’s with a hunger too earnest to disguise.

Hannibal deepens the kiss carefully. Will answers as if care itself is nearly unbearable.

His hand tightens in the fabric of Hannibal’s sleeve. His breath breaks again, quieter this time, and the small defeat of it moves through Hannibal with an acuity that borders on pain. Will wants him. He wants with the whole undisciplined honesty of a man who has spent too long denying himself and has found, too late, that denial has not made him any less susceptible.

Hannibal’s thumb passes once beneath his jaw.

Will shivers.

He tries to conceal it, of course. The attempt is almost immediate and entirely unsuccessful. His body has betrayed him before his pride can intervene, and the humiliation of that betrayal begins to gather even while he is still kissing Hannibal.

That is when Hannibal understands.

This is not innocence. 

Will has never been innocent. 

It is unfamiliarity.

The lack is subtler and far more affecting: the absence of practiced ease where there should have been instinct, the tiny delay before he touches back, the way every contact seems to arrive in him separately, requiring translation before pleasure can be allowed to exist. Want has outrun experience. Worse, it has outrun Will’s capacity to hide how much he is feeling.

Hannibal slows, only slightly, but Will feels it.

His lips falter against Hannibal’s. His hand loosens at Hannibal’s sleeve, then curls again as if unable to decide whether to hold on or apologize for holding at all. When Hannibal draws back, he does so only far enough to see him properly.

Will is flushed in the low light, pupils dark, lips parted from kissing. Beautiful, frankly, in a devastating way. But his face has already begun to change. Hannibal sees the pleasure receding behind calculation, the mind rushing in to interpret what the body cannot bear to leave unexplained.

“You needn’t rush this with me,” Hannibal says.

The words are gentle. They are also wrong. 

Not in meaning. In timing.

Will’s color deepens sharply. He looks away, and the motion is so minute that another man might miss the violence of it. One moment his hand is still on Hannibal’s sleeve, the next it has withdrawn, fingers closing uselessly against his own knee.

“Oh,” Will says.

The single syllable contains an entire retreat.

A pause follows.

Then, quieter, “Sorry.”

Hannibal feels displeasure move through him, cold and precise.

“There is nothing to apologize for.”

Will nods without looking at him. It is a terrible little gesture, obedient only in appearance. Inwardly, he has gone elsewhere. Hannibal can see it in the careful angle of his shoulders, the sudden economy of his expression, the way he has begun making himself less present while still sitting inches away.

The conversation resumes after that because both of them are skilled enough to permit it. Hannibal plays another piece. Will listens. They speak of the case, of Jack, of some triviality Hannibal forgets almost as soon as it passes between them. The room remains elegant around them, lamplit and orderly, but something living has recoiled from the air.

Later, when Hannibal walks him toward the door, Will hesitates beneath the warm spill of the entryway light.

For one moment, the possibility returns. Will’s eyes lift to his mouth. Only briefly. So briefly that he may think he has hidden it. His hand tightens at his side, then releases. Hannibal waits, offering silence instead of pressure.

This, too, is a kind of restraint. This, too, fails him, though. 

Will’s face closes with painful discipline.

“Goodnight,” he says.

Then he leaves.

Hannibal remains in the doorway, watching him descend the front steps and disappear into the dark. The night receives him without ceremony. A car door opens, closes. The engine turns over. Headlights sweep once across the drive before vanishing.

Inside, the house is warm. The piano waits behind him with one note unresolved beneath the memory of his hand.

Hannibal closes the door slowly.

He has the distinct and unfamiliar sense that he has mishandled something delicate.

***

The second time takes longer.

Not for lack of opportunity; Will continues coming to him. He lingers after appointments, accepts dinner when offered, remains in Hannibal’s rooms with the strange, restless obedience of a man who has decided proximity is safer than admitting what proximity does to him.

But he does not touch Hannibal again.

The absence is not dramatic. That only makes it worse.

Will has never been careless with touch. Hannibal had noticed that about him long before either of them had made the mistake of honesty. He kept most people at a distance so consistent it became invisible to them, a polite geometry of turned shoulders, angled chairs, half-steps backward, hands kept busy with glasses or papers or the frayed cuffs of his sleeves.

Jack entered Will’s space as if space were a fiction invented by weaker men. Will endured it by going elsewhere behind his eyes.

Alana was different.

Will allowed her nearer because she asked without asking. Because she paused before placing a hand on his arm. Because her concern approached him slowly enough that his body could recognize it before defending against it. Even then, his permission had limits, but Hannibal had watched him make room for her with a care that was almost tender in itself.

With Hannibal, it had been something else entirely.

Will had crossed the distance first.

He had leaned across the piano bench with the whole visible strain of choosing. He had pressed his lips to Hannibal’s, his hand to Hannibal’s sleeve, his throat beneath Hannibal’s palm. He had allowed nearness where he permitted practically no one, and now, with painful discipline, he had taken it back.

Hannibal had been returned to the public side of the boundary. That becomes impossible to ignore.

Will has always been a creature of near movements. A glance held a moment past comfort. A shoulder angled toward escape while the rest of him stays. A hand hovering at the edge of contact before thought catches up with impulse and kills it. Hannibal knows the grammar of him well enough to read the omissions.

Now, every omission is deliberate.

He looks at Hannibal’s mouth three times during dinner the following Friday and corrects himself each time. The corrections are more revealing than the glances. They expose the labor of restraint, a discipline too new to be elegant, a self-denial carried out with the concentration of punishment.

By the time they move to the sitting room, Hannibal has grown tired of watching him refuse himself.

Low music threads through the room. Will sits at the opposite end of the sofa with one ankle crossed over his knee, a glass of wine balanced in one hand, posture arranged into an approximation of ease. It is not convincing. Nothing about Will is careless tonight except the performance.

Hannibal sets his own glass aside.

“Come here,” he says.

Will looks over at once. There is wariness first, then something more fragile beneath it. Hope, perhaps, though Will handles hope as if it were contraband. His fingers tighten around the glass before he places it on the table with unnecessary precision.

He shifts closer.

Careful, still. Too careful.

Hannibal reaches for him before Will can decide where to put himself. His hand settles along the side of Will’s throat, thumb resting just beneath the line of his jaw. The contact alters him instantly. His breath shortens. His pupils widen. Some practiced expression loses its footing and leaves him exposed for half a second.

Such responsiveness.

Such terrible restraint around it.

Hannibal kisses him. Gently, at first. He intends to remain gentle.

The intention lasts only until Will makes a small noise, helpless and bordering on angry in its surprise. It passes through Hannibal’s composure like a blade.

Will gives in by increments. First the hand at Hannibal’s shoulder. Then the lean of his body. Then the kiss itself, opening under Hannibal’s with a hunger that seems to frighten him even as he follows it. He is not tentative, now, in the way he was the first time. He is worse.

He is trying to be brave.

Hannibal can feel the effort in every movement.

Will presses too hard, then corrects. Touches too cautiously, then overreaches. His body answers before his pride permits it, and each answer humiliates him even as he wants more. There is no practiced seduction in him, no polished sequence of invitation and retreat. Only concentration, appetite, and the mortal fear of doing something wrong where Hannibal can see it.

Hannibal draws him nearer.

Will comes willingly. Too willingly.

The movement brings him nearly across Hannibal’s lap, one knee braced awkwardly against the cushion, one hand fisted in Hannibal’s jacket as if the fabric is the only fixed point in the room. He realizes the intimacy of the position a second too late. His body locks around the awareness.

Hannibal stops moving, but does not withdraw, only waits. 

His hand leaves Will’s throat only to settle at his jaw, touch light enough to refuse ownership, steady enough to offer permission. Will’s eyes open. They are dark and unfocused, his lips softened from kissing, color high along his cheekbones.

“You may breathe,” Hannibal murmurs.

Will exhales, too strained to be amusement.

“I am.”

“Poorly.”

A faint glare surfaces through the disarray. 

Hannibal recognizes the refuge of it with something close to fondness.

Irritation is easier ground for Will than tenderness. It gives him a shape to inhabit, a familiar weapon to hold between himself and embarrassment.

Then Will kisses him again.

This time, frustration sharpens the wanting. His mouth catches against Hannibal’s with less grace and more insistence, as though annoyed by his own transparency and determined to master it through force. Hannibal lets him have the clumsiness for a moment. Lets him press too hard. Lets him learn the angle, correct the pressure, discover that he is neither being mocked nor dismissed.

Will’s hand moves from Hannibal’s shoulder to the column of his neck.

The touch is uncertain, almost investigative. His thumb rests against Hannibal’s pulse, and something in him quiets around the discovery of life beneath his hand. The intimacy of it affects him more deeply than the kiss. Hannibal sees the realization pass through his face: Hannibal is not merely observing him. Hannibal is there, warm and responsive beneath his fingers.

For one brief moment, Will believes his wanting is answered.

The beauty of that belief is nearly intolerable.

Hannibal turns into the touch and kisses him more slowly.

Will follows.

That is the danger. Will responds exquisitely to being guided. Not corrected. Not commanded. Shown. His body loosens in increments under Hannibal’s hands, still tense at the edges but less defended now, his kiss softening as he stops anticipating each movement and begins to trust the next one will be given to him.

Hannibal’s hand slides over his back.

Will presses closer with a broken inhale.

It would be easy to take too much from him.

The thought arrives and with it comes restraint. Will is open in a way that is not innocence, not submission, but something more volatile: desire sharpened by uncertainty, trust offered before it has learned how to protect itself. He would follow too quickly now. He would call it choice. It would even be true.

Only not true enough.

Hannibal slows the kiss.

He softens it first, making tenderness of what had begun to gather heat. His hand steadies at the center of Will’s back. He brushes one last kiss at the corner of Will’s lips before he draws back enough to place space between appetite and action.

Will follows him half an inch before he catches himself. The aborted movement wounds more than a plea would have.

Confusion reaches his face first. Shame follows, swift and disciplined. Then his expression closes, not all at once, but in pieces: jaw setting, eyes lowering, shoulders held too carefully beneath Hannibal’s hand.

Hannibal feels it happen: the private radius that had briefly opened around them contracts, and he finds himself placed outside it again, among the others: safe at a distance, tolerable when contained, dangerous if allowed too near.

“You are tired,” Hannibal says quietly.

It is true.

It is also insufficient.

Will’s gaze flicks toward him and away. “That’s one word for it.”

His voice is steadier than his breathing.

“You needn’t prove anything to me tonight.”

The words are meant as mercy.

Will hears judgment.

Hannibal knows it as soon as the sentence leaves him. Something shuts behind Will’s eyes. An injury, nearly invisible. 

“I wasn’t,” Will says.

Too quickly.

“No?”

Will looks down at the space between them. His hand, which had been resting at Hannibal’s neck only moments ago, now braces against the sofa cushion as if he needs an anchor that is not Hannibal.

“I—no.”

The lie is poor. It has no ambition beyond survival.

Hannibal lets it live.

“Come back,” he says.

Will’s jaw tightens. “I’m right here.”

“You are sitting here, yes.”

That brings his eyes up, sharper now. Anger suits him better than shame. It gives the wound a more acceptable shape.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Will says.

Hannibal looks at him for a long moment.

There are honest answers. None of them would help.

“I want you to sleep.”

The effect is quietly disastrous.

Will’s face does not change enough for accusation. That is the trouble with him. His worst injuries rarely announce themselves. They arrange him. His jaw settles, his shoulders draw inward by a fraction, and the last visible trace of the man who had been warm and trembling in Hannibal’s arms disappears behind composure.

Sleep, then.

As though nothing has happened. As though Hannibal had not been holding him, kissing him, wanting him badly enough that restraint had become its own form of violence.

Will removes himself from Hannibal’s hands with painful care.

“Right,” he says.

Hannibal allows him to stand because forcing him to remain would only confirm the wrong fear. The absence of his weight is immediate. Will collects himself piece by piece: shoes, coat, breath, expression. Hannibal watches the transformation with displeasure. A body that had leaned into his touch becomes impersonal again. A face softened by desire returns to its practiced blankness.

“You needn’t leave,” Hannibal says.

Will pauses with one hand already on his coat.

The room remains warm behind him, lamplit and unchanged in its vulgar indifference.

“I should.”

“No,” Hannibal says. “You should not.”

Will’s fingers tighten once in the fabric. “I’ll see you at my appointment.”

Of course.

A retreat into structure. Schedule. Role. The sterile mercy of names they can survive.

Hannibal rises but does not cross the distance between them. Will is too taut for pursuit. Too exposed. Any reassurance made too explicit would become material for later self-dissections, something to turn over in private until even kindness revealed an edge.

“Will.”

He stops.

Hannibal wants to say: I stopped because I wanted you too much to be careless. 

He wants to say: please understand, my restraint is not refusal. 

He wants to say: do not make my patience into evidence against yourself.

Instead, he offers the smallest thing that will not frighten him further.

“Drive carefully.”

Will blinks.

The simplicity of it disarms him. For one second something naked moves through his face, too quick to name and too honest to ignore.

Then it is gone. He nods once and leaves.

Hannibal follows only as far as the doorway. Will does not look back as he descends the steps. Does not pause beside the car. Does not offer either of them another chance to repair what has already begun to deform between them.

Only the engine turning over.

Only the headlights sliding briefly across the windows before vanishing down the drive.

Hannibal remains in the doorway after he has gone.

Inside, the music continues, absurdly composed.

He lifts two fingers to his mouth, not sentimentally, but with a kind of clinical reverence, as if sensation might still be examined.

Will had wanted him. That much was beyond question.

He had wanted with the fragile architecture of his composure trembling under the force of it, and Hannibal had stopped because restraint seemed the only honorable shape for appetite to take.

Now, standing in the cooling doorway, he considers that Will may not know what kindness looks like when it is not leaving.

The thought displeases him.

Mostly because it has arrived too late.

****

Will returns three nights later with a bottle of wine and the expression of a man determined not to have a history.

Hannibal notices both before he opens the door fully.

The wine is unnecessary. Will knows enough of Hannibal’s cellar to understand that. It is not a gift so much as an occupation for his hands, a socially acceptable object to hold between himself and the threshold. His thumb worries the edge of the label. His gaze moves past Hannibal into the warm interior of the house and only then returns to his face.

“Thought I’d bring something,” Will says.

His tone is almost casual. Almost.

“How thoughtful,” Hannibal says, and steps aside.

Will enters with the particular restraint of someone performing ease from memory.

The evening arranges itself around them with unnatural politeness. Dinner is excellent. Of course. Conversation is better than it has any right to be. Will speaks of Jack, of Alana, of the dogs tearing open a bag of feed that morning and eating like condemned men before he caught them. He is dry, present, occasionally funny.

He is also very carefully not looking at Hannibal’s mouth.

That, more than the earlier glances ever could, gives him away.

The last time, Will had looked too often and corrected himself with visible effort. Tonight, he has overcorrected into discipline. His attention remains on Hannibal’s eyes, his glass, his hands when Hannibal gestures with a knife or reaches for the wine. Never lower. Never long enough to reveal appetite.

It is an extraordinary performance, in the sense that a poorly concealed weapon is extraordinary.

Hannibal lets it continue through dessert.

Afterward, they move to the sitting room. Will chooses the same end of the sofa he had occupied before the last misunderstanding, as though the repetition might revise the outcome. Hannibal sees the decision in it: the attempted casualness, the self-punishing symmetry.

He chooses to sit beside him instead of across from him, refusing to play along. 

Will’s body registers the change before his face permits it. His shoulder stiffens, his fingers adjust around the stem of his glass, and then he reaches for composure with visible irritation, as if betrayed by his own nervous system.

Hannibal allows the silence to gather.

The fire moves softly in the hearth. Outside, night presses against the windows. Will’s profile holds in amber light, severe and beautiful and overmanaged, his mouth set as though restraint has become something physical between his teeth.

“Will.”

His fingers tighten slightly around the glass.

“Hm?”

A poor imitation of ease.

Hannibal takes the glass from his hand and sets it on the table. Will lets him.

It is the first honest thing he has done all evening.

Hannibal turns toward him, slowly enough that every movement announces itself before it arrives. Will watches him despite himself, eyes darkening with recognition and something that would have looked like dread in anyone less hungry.

It is not dread.

It is hope, ashamed of its own persistence.

Hannibal lifts a hand to his face and touches him first with two fingers along the edge of his jaw.

Will’s breathing changes.There is no concealing that. Not from Hannibal nor from himself.

“You have been avoiding this,” Hannibal says.

Will’s expression tightens. “Have I?”

“Mmm,” he hums in affirmation. 

The answer leaves no room for argument.

A faint, humorless breath leaves Will. “Maybe I was being polite.”

“Were you?”

Frustration moves through his expression, quick and bright. Hannibal is almost relieved to see it. Anger is one of Will’s more reliable forms of honesty.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Will says.

“At present?”

Will looks wary.

“At present,” Hannibal says, “I would like to kiss you.”

The simplicity of it wounds him somehow.

Color rises along Will’s throat. His lips part, then press together again, as if his body has answered before his pride can decide whether permission is safe.

“You can,” he says.

It is not quite an invitation. It is too close to surrender for that.

Hannibal kisses him before Will can turn the words into another defense.

For the first few seconds, Will only receives it. That alone nearly undoes him.

Then his hands move, abrupt and uncertain, one catching at Hannibal’s sleeve, the other landing at his shoulder with too much force. Eager. Clumsy. Immediate. He kisses back with the terrible responsiveness Hannibal remembers, but something has changed beneath it now.

There is calculation threaded through the wanting.

Will is trying to do it correctly.

The attempt is painful in its transparency. He anticipates rather than follows, presses closer before understanding where the movement is going, makes intensity stand in for certainty. His body has become a thesis he is determined to prove by force.

Hannibal’s fondness borders on agonizing.

So is his concern.

He eases back by a fraction, mouth lingering at the corner of Will’s before he withdraws enough to look at him.

Will freezes. The old wound opens before Hannibal has spoken.

Hannibal keeps his hand at Will’s face. “Slower.”

The word has the wrong effect.

Of course it does.

Will’s expression closes with such speed that Hannibal feels a sharp, private irritation at the inadequacy of language itself.

“Right,” Will says.

“Will—”

“No, I know.” He pulls back enough that Hannibal’s hand falls from his jaw. “Sorry.”

There is the apology again.

Smaller this time.

Worse.

Hannibal’s gaze sharpens. “You are apologizing for wanting me.”

A brittle laugh leaves Will under his breath. “That’s not what I’m apologizing for.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Will looks at him, and for one dangerous second the answer all but shows itself.

Then he swallows it, shrugs, “Getting ahead of myself, I guess.”

Hannibal hears the substitution.

‘Misreading you.’

‘Coming on too strong.’

‘Thinking I was allowed to want what you had only tolerated.’

He shifts closer, deliberately reclaiming the small distance Will has tried to create.

“You have not gotten ahead of anything.”

Will’s gaze drops to Hannibal’s mouth despite all his discipline. The look is quick, involuntary, devastating.

There is desire still and the fear wrapped tightly around it.

Hannibal touches Will’s wrist where it rests between them on the sofa, thumb passing once over the fragile inner skin. Will’s pulse leaps beneath him.

“You respond so beautifully,” Hannibal says, because it is true, and because truth, when offered precisely enough, may sometimes do what reassurance cannot.

Will goes motionless.

For a moment, Hannibal thinks he has reached him.

Then Will’s mouth curves in something too fragile and too bitter to be a smile.

“Beautifully?”

The word is close to casual.

The wrongness of it enters the room like cold air.

Will seems to regret the question as soon as it leaves him. His eyes drop. His weight shifts, already calculating retreat.

Hannibal does not let the movement complete itself.

He keeps his hand around Will’s wrist, not tightly, only enough to make the leaving conscious. His thumb passes again over the place where Will’s pulse is betraying him.

“You know,” Hannibal begins softly.

Will looks up. The syllables unsettle him more than elaboration would have.

Hannibal turns Will’s wrist carefully in his hand, exposing the inner side to the firelight. The gesture is intimate enough to feel ceremonial, though he does nothing more than rest his thumb against the vulnerable skin there.

“I did not choose the word carelessly.”

Will exhales through his nose, nearly controlled. “You rarely do.”

“Never with you.”

Will looks at him unwillingly, affected despite the guard he has placed around himself, and Hannibal lifts his hand to press a kiss to the inside of his wrist.

Will’s breath catches.

There.

The sound again, faint and helpless and immediately resented. Hannibal feels him try to master it, feels the architecture of him resisting the indignity of being so easily moved.

He kisses him there again.

Slower.

Will’s fingers flex, then curl against Hannibal’s palm as if they have forgotten how to be anything but held.

“Hannibal—”

This time his name carries warning, embarrassment, and want in nearly equal measure.

Hannibal looks up at him from the lowered angle.

Will’s face is flushed now, his control visibly eroding. He has not pulled away. That matters. His body remains turned toward Hannibal despite the guarded set of his mouth, despite the wariness in his eyes. All of him arranged in contradiction.

Wanting to be spared.

Wanting not to be.

Hannibal releases his wrist only to place Will’s hand against his own chest.

Will freezes more sharply this time. Beneath his palm, Hannibal’s heart is steady but not untouched. Alive under fabric and bone. Responsive. Present.

Will looks down at his own hand as though it has been placed on an altar.

“You are not the only one affected,” Hannibal says.

Will swallows.

His fingers press once, barely perceptible, into Hannibal’s shirt.

It is not enough.

It is everything.

Hannibal leans in slowly enough that Will could stop him and kisses the corner of his mouth, a restrained contact that makes Will’s eyes close in visible frustration, as though restraint itself has become an ache.

His hand remains against Hannibal’s chest.

For a while, he treats the contact like something merely permitted. Then, finally, he begins to want from it.

His fingers curl.

Hannibal kisses him properly.

Will answers with an immediacy that borders on relief. He opens for Hannibal with a short, unguarded breath, his hand tightening in the front of Hannibal’s shirt. His other hand rises to Hannibal’s shoulder, then higher, hesitating only a moment before finding the back of his neck.

That touch is different.

Less careful.

Hannibal draws him closer by the waist.

Will comes without resistance, shifting toward him in one unsteady movement that brings his knee onto the sofa between them. He seems to realize the position only after his body has chosen it. For one brief second, awareness threatens to undo him.

Hannibal does not move away.

He steadies him there.

His hand flattens slowly against Will’s back, drawing him nearer until the remaining space between them becomes almost theoretical. Will’s breath breaks again, rougher this time, and his forehead dips against Hannibal’s for half a second before he kisses him with sudden, startled hunger.

Ah.

Hannibal feels it.

The instant Will believes him.

Not fully, but enough for the body to trust what the mind has been resisting.

Enough that Will presses closer, fingers gripping Hannibal’s collar, knee sliding more firmly between them as he finds balance. The movement is awkward and eager and devastatingly sincere. Hannibal adjusts beneath him, guiding without forcing, giving Will places to put his hands and angles to follow, the quiet assurance of his body meeting him without retreat.

Will responds beautifully.

Too beautifully.

Every touch becomes a question he is desperate to answer correctly. His hand moves over Hannibal’s shoulder, down the line of his arm, back again, mapping what he is allowed to reach for. When Hannibal’s mouth moves to his jaw, Will goes briefly rigid before melting into the contact with a breath so soft it almost escapes notice.

Hannibal hears it. He also feels the shame that follows, the reflexive attempt to close around evidence already given. So he kisses the place beneath Will’s jaw again.

Deliberately.

Will’s hand tightens hard at his shoulder.

“Hannibal,” he says, thinly.

Neither protest nor surrender.

Hannibal lifts his head.

Will looks overwhelmed by wanting and furious that it shows. The color has spread down his throat above the open collar of his shirt. His eyes are bright, unfocused in the low light, mouth parted from kissing, hair disordered by Hannibal’s hand.

Hannibal finds him nearly unbearable.

“Again?” he asks quietly.

Will stares at him.

The question seems to unmake some last guarded part of him. Permission, explicit and gentle, offered without mockery. Without impatience. Without surprise at how affected he is.

Will nods hesitantly. 

Hannibal kisses him there again, along the sensitive line beneath his jaw, and Will’s breath gives way.

The sound is more open this time. Still restrained, still half-swallowed, but unmistakable.

Hannibal feels his own composure thin in response.

He brings both hands to Will now, one at his back and one at his hip, anchoring him with unmistakable intent. Will’s body answers before his mind can interfere, shifting closer until he is nearly across Hannibal’s lap, close enough that the possibility of it burns through them both.

Will seems to feel the change at the same time Hannibal does.

His breathing turns shallow.

His hand slides from Hannibal’s shoulder to the side of his throat, thumb brushing over his pulse with that strange, reverent focus. He looks at the place he is touching as if confirming that Hannibal’s body has evidence too, that this is not something he has invented from loneliness and heat and wishful thinking.

Hannibal lets him feel it.

Lets the proof live beneath Will’s palm.

Then he turns his face and kisses the inside of Will’s wrist again while holding his gaze.

Will’s eyes close.

Not from embarrassment this time, but from the sheer force of it.

When Hannibal draws him in again, Will follows with less hesitation. His body has begun to learn the grammar of this wanting, not fluently or smoothly, but with a concentration that feels close to devotional. He lets Hannibal guide him closer. Lets his knees shift. Lets his weight settle more fully against Hannibal’s thighs.

The sofa creaks faintly beneath them.

Will hears it and flushes darker.

Hannibal kisses him before shame can gather.

This time, Will does not simply answer. He reaches.

Both hands now. One at Hannibal’s face, one in his hair, tentative for only a moment before need overtakes caution. He touches like he is trying to understand the shape of permission through his palms. Hannibal’s breath leaves him in a low vibration before he can stop himself. 

Will stops, then he looks at him.

And there it is again, bright and devastating.

Belief.

Will hears the sound Hannibal makes and believes, for one fragile moment, that he is wanted without condition.

The change in him is immediate. He kisses Hannibal with a sudden, aching confidence, pressing close enough that Hannibal’s hand tightens at his back to steady him. His mouth moves with less fear now, less thought, the little broken noises he keeps trying to bury becoming harder to hide as Hannibal’s hands move over him with measured, consuming care.

It would be easy.

Terribly easy.

Will is open to him now in a way more dangerous than innocence. Trust under pressure. Want sharpened by insecurity. A desperate willingness to follow wherever Hannibal leads because stopping would feel too much like being left behind.

That recognition arrives with cold precision.

And with it, restraint.

Hannibal slows.

He does not make the mistake sharply. He softens the kiss first, drawing it down from hunger into tenderness by careful degrees. His hand moves from Will’s hip to the center of his back, then higher, smoothing once between his shoulder blades. He keeps Will close, forehead resting briefly against his temple, mouth brushing a final kiss near the corner of his lips.

Will mistakes tenderness for diminishment.

Hannibal feels the misunderstanding enter him before it reaches his face. His breathing changes, not calming but sharpening, as if some quiet, panicked part of him has understood gentleness as the beginning of withdrawal and decided to outrun it.

Before Hannibal can speak, Will kisses him again.

Harder this time. All but wounded in its urgency.

His hand slides from Hannibal’s shoulder to the open line of his collar, fingers catching at the first button with haste enough to make him uncoordinated. The fabric pulls beneath his hand. Will notices, flushes, and forces himself past the embarrassment rather than retreat from it.

The determination nearly undoes Hannibal.

“Will,” he murmurs against his mouth.

Will answers by kissing along his jaw.

It is fervent and imprecise, each contact landing like an argument he is trying to make with his body because he cannot bear to make it aloud. His fingers move again at Hannibal’s shirt, more intent than skill.

The first button slips free.

Hannibal’s breath stills.

Will feels it.

For one bright, terrible second, Will believes he has done something right.

He leans into that belief with a helpless noise, one hand lifting into Hannibal’s hair and tightening there before thought can refine it. The tug is not hard. It is barely controlled at all. A raw thing. Instinctive and startlingly intimate.

Hannibal’s eyes close.

“Beloved,” he says softly.

The word leaves him before wisdom can contain it.

Will goes motionless for half a heartbeat.

Then the sound he makes is something resembling pain. 

Not a laugh. Not a sob. Something caught between astonishment and hunger, as if tenderness has struck a place desire alone could not reach. His mouth finds Hannibal’s throat again, eager and reverent, and his hand slips beneath the loosened edge of Hannibal’s collar as though warmth itself might prove the truth of what Hannibal has called him.

Hannibal lets him have two seconds more than he should.

Perhaps three.

Enough to feel Will trying to make himself brave through touch. Enough to feel the tremor in his fingers. Enough to understand that Will is no longer simply wanting him.

He is pleading.

Perhaps not for more, precisely. For confirmation, proof that he has not misunderstood.

For evidence strong enough to survive his own doubt.

The realization cuts through Hannibal with surgical clarity.

He draws back. Gently, but unmistakably.

Will’s mouth leaves his throat. His hand remains caught in Hannibal’s shirt, one button undone beneath his fingers, the next half-fumbled and forgotten.

The hope is still on his face when the hurt arrives.

That is the worst of it.

“Will,” Hannibal says, low and careful.

Will looks down at the open button.

His face goes red.

Not the earlier flush of wanting. Something harsher.

“I—Sorry,” he says.

The apology is quiet enough to be nearly missed.

Hannibal does not miss it.

Will pulls his hand back. Hannibal lets him because holding him there now would make the shame worse. Will retreats from his lap with exquisite care, every movement controlled, precise, miserable. His body turns away, rebuilding distance with the dignity of someone trying not to look injured.

“Sorry,” he breathes again. Then, quieter, “I—uh—I misread that.”

His voice is steady. Cruelly steady.

“You did not,” Hannibal says.

A humorless huff leaves Will. “Hannibal.”

His name carries warning again, but no heat. Only exhaustion. Only the beginning of retreat.

Hannibal touches the back of Will’s hand where it has curled into the sofa.

Will allows it but for a second, then removes himself from it.

The refusal is soft. It wounds anyway.

“I should go,” Will says.

“You need not,” Hannibal implores, struck by the repetition of their position, of their conversation. 

“I do,” Will insists. 

He stands before Hannibal can answer, and the absence of his weight leaves the room strangely cold. He does not look at Hannibal as he straightens his shirt, then his jacket, though nothing about him is truly disordered except what Hannibal has done to him and what Will now believes he did to himself.

At the door, Hannibal says his name again.

Will stops, but does not turn fully.

“I stopped because you were frightened.”

Will’s jaw tightens.

For a moment, neither of them breathes.

Then Will says, very quietly, “I wasn’t frightened of you.”

No.

Hannibal knows that.

That has never been the problem.

Will leaves before either of them can name what he was frightened of.

****

For several seconds after the door closes, Hannibal remains where he is, listening to the sound of Will’s car retreating down the drive.

The house settles around him. A soft click from the kitchen. The fire beginning to consume itself. Music still playing somewhere behind him, elegant and useless, continuing as though the room has not been altered beyond recognition.

Hannibal exhales slowly. It does not steady him as much as he would prefer.

He has done nothing wrong.

The thought arrives with clarity and irritates him at once.

He had been careful. Patient. Attentive to each change in Will as it moved beneath his hands. He had stopped when the wanting in him sharpened into something too unsteady to be safely followed. He had recognized fear beneath desire and refused to exploit it, even with Will’s imploring mouth at his throat, even with his insistent fingers in Hannibal’s hair, even after that fragile, undone noise he had made at ‘beloved’.

Hannibal closes his eyes. The memory is not helpful.

Desire, denied with purpose, does not become less desire. It becomes concentration.

He returns to the sitting room and lifts a hand toward the open button of his shirt, then stops.

The gap in the fabric is slight. Hardly disorder at all. A small exposure at the throat where Will’s fingers had worked with more urgency than skill, where his hand had trembled before retreating as if the touch had become evidence against him.

Hannibal leaves it undone.

Not sentimentally. He has little use for sentiment divorced from appetite.

As a record. A reminder of Will’s hands, awkward and needful at his collar. A reminder that Will had reached for him with the desperate sincerity of a man trying to make desire legible before it could be refused.

On the table, Will’s wine glass remains nearly untouched. An occupation for his hands. A pretext. Evidence of how badly he had needed something to hold.

Hannibal looks at it for a long moment.

The realization comes without drama, which makes it more severe.

It was not the glass Will had wanted.

The glass had simply been available. Acceptable. An object that could be gripped without consequence, worried at the stem, turned slowly between nervous fingers. Something to occupy the body when desire had nowhere permissible to go.

Will had wanted to hold Hannibal.

Not elegantly or even seductively. Perhaps not even consciously enough to confess it to himself. But his hands had been restless all evening because they had already known what his mouth could not ask for. They had wanted Hannibal’s sleeve, his collar, his warmth beneath a touch. They had wanted nearness made tangible. Proof in fabric and skin that wanting did not have to end in humiliation.

Hannibal understands this while standing over the abandoned glass. The object had survived what Will could not.

He carries it to the kitchen.There is comfort in sequence. Plates rinsed. Knives washed by hand. Crystal dried with linen. The remaining sauce cooled and stored. Counters restored to their proper state.

Order returns; satisfaction does not.

He retrieves his phone. He expects no answer. This does not prevent the silence from displeasing him.

The call rings until it diverts. Hannibal listens to the beginning of Will’s recorded voice and ends the call before the message can complete itself.

For a moment, he considers leaving one.

He does not.

Will would listen too many times. He would dissect tone, pace, omission. He would make a courtroom of every pause.

Hannibal sends only:

You arrived home safely?

The message remains unanswered.

He sets the phone down.

Then, after three minutes, picks it up again.

Nothing.

By midnight, irritation has become something colder.

Will has a talent for withdrawal that borders on cruelty, made more effective by the fact that he rarely intends it as such. He disappears into himself first, then into distance, leaving others to determine whether they are being punished or simply abandoned to their own limitations.

Hannibal understands the behavior. He has studied it across from him in his office again and again: Will retreating behind dry humor after describing pain as if it belonged to someone else; Will turning discomfort into sarcasm because the alternative would require admitting vulnerability; Will offering silence with enough precision to make it resemble choice.

Tonight, however, he has no interest in being made audience to it.

At one thirty-seven, Hannibal accepts that sleep will not come.

The house has become too occupied by absence.

His office will be quieter. Less intimate. Less saturated with the evening’s mistakes. There is work waiting there, papers he has no intention of reading and notes he may pretend to revise until morning makes distance appear more rational.

He takes his coat from the hall.

The drive is empty enough to be cleansing. Baltimore at that hour has a stripped quality Hannibal has always appreciated, architecture without performance, streets emptied of their daytime insistence. By the time he reaches his office, the sharpest edge of frustration has settled into something more usable.

He lets himself in through the private entrance.

The building is dark except for the security light near the stairwell and the faint glow that spills in from the street. Hannibal does not turn on the overheads. He knows the room well enough without them.

He locks the door behind him, then stops.

Stillness meets him. Not emptiness.

At first, Hannibal does not name the difference. The office is dark, the furniture arranged exactly as he left it, the shelves rising into their upper shadows with familiar severity. The air holds the usual notes of the room: old paper, polished wood, leather warmed and cooled too many times by lamplight and absence.

Beneath it, something else.

Faint.

Human.

Hannibal pauses with one hand resting lightly on the back of the chair.

It is not the scent of an intruder. Nothing sharp enough for that. No adrenaline made careless. No unfamiliar cologne. No damp wool from a stranger’s coat moving too quickly through his space.

This is subtler.

Salt at the edges. Skin warmed and then chilled. A trace of night air threaded through fabric. And beneath that, unmistakably, something Hannibal has carried with him from his own house in spite of the distance.

Will.

The recognition does not arrive as surprise so much as a slow tightening of every faculty.

Hannibal remains motionless.

His first thought is not satisfaction, nor even relief. It is the immediate, cold awareness that Will has been here long enough for the room to betray him.

He looks toward the chair across from his desk. Empty.

The sofa. Empty.

The lower corners of the room where a frightened man might sit if he wished to be found without admitting it. Nothing.

Hannibal’s gaze lifts.

The balcony waits above him, nearly indistinguishable from the dark.

Of course.

Not the chair. Too exposed.

Not the sofa. Too intimate.

The balcony.

High, dim, enclosed by books. Near enough to Hannibal’s space to be a confession, far enough above the room to preserve the illusion of distance.

The choice is almost painfully articulate.

“Will,” he says.

No answer.

Only the smallest alteration in the dark above. Not movement, precisely. 

Hannibal’s eyes adjust. A shoulder first, drawn high beneath a twisted coat. Then the pale line of one hand curled around the opposite sleeve. Then the shape of him in the far corner where the shelves meet the wall, folded low and tight as if height itself were not enough distance and he had needed to become smaller besides.

For several seconds, Hannibal says nothing.

Relief arrives then. Fierce enough to offend him.

It is followed nearly immediately by irritation, sharper and more controlled. Not at Will. At the hours between the unanswered call and this moment. At the thought of Will driving here alone with that particular expression arranged across his face. At the image of him climbing into the balcony like a wounded animal returning to a place it had once decided was safe.

At himself, too, though he does not yet linger there.

He removes his coat slowly and lays it over the back of the chair.

Will does not move.

Hannibal crosses to the desk and switches on only the small lamp and the office warms.

Above him, Will remains in shadow.

“I called you,” Hannibal says.

“I know.”

That lands with a quiet sting.

Hannibal looks up at him. “You chose not to answer.”

Will’s mouth shifts faintly. “That usually is how not answering works.”

It appears again: the dry edge, thin as paper tonight.

Hannibal almost smiles. Almost.

“You came here instead.”

Will does not respond.

“Why?”

For a long moment, Hannibal thinks Will will not answer that either.

Then, very quietly, “I didn’t know where else to go.”

The sentence enters him with more force than it should. He had not known where else to go, so he came to Hannibal.

To the office, not the house.

To the balcony, not the chair across from him.

To a place close enough to be found, yet high enough to remain unreachable.

Hannibal looks toward the ladder.

“May I come up?”

Will turns his head slightly. The question itself appears to disturb him. As well it should. Hannibal has never asked permission to enter his own balcony. Tonight, though, he does.

Will swallows. Hannibal sees the movement even in the dim light.

“I don’t care.”

“Will?”

A pause.

Then, barely audible: “Fine.”

Hannibal climbs slowly and stops with his head level to the balcony floor rather than entering the space at once. Will is closer now, worse in the lamplight. His coat is still on, though one sleeve has ridden up his wrist. His knees are drawn close to his chest, shoulders tight beneath the dark fabric, one hand locked around the opposite sleeve as if holding himself in place by force.

His face is turned partly away.

Hannibal can see the redness around his eyes anyway. He says nothing about it.

“May I sit beside you?” he asks.

Will’s mouth moves faintly. “It’s your office.”

Hannibal waits. Will closes his eyes for a moment, as if the restraint itself is untenable, but he shifts one knee inward by perhaps an inch. Permission, grudging and insufficient.

Hannibal accepts it.

He climbs the last few rungs and settles beside him in the narrow space, not close enough to touch. The balcony is not built for distance. Even with care, his shoulder remains only inches from Will’s. Will stares straight ahead at the dark spines of books.

“You chose an interesting refuge,” Hannibal says.

“Yeah,” Will says. “I’m aware.”

The self-loathing beneath the words is thinly covered.

Hannibal turns toward him more fully. “Are you?”

Will looks at him then. Really looks. The lamplight from below catches beneath his lashes, making his eyes appear darker, fever-bright and raw with unslept thought. There is anger in them, but not enough to protect him. Humiliation too, and something worse than either. Hope, nearly ruined by its own persistence.

“I know what it looks like,” Will says.

“What does it look like?”

A muscle shifts in his jaw. “Pathetic.”

Hannibal feels something in him go very still.

“No.”

Will’s eyes flicker.

Hannibal’s voice lowers. “Not pathetic.”

Will looks away, but too late. The contradiction has already reached him.

A humorless huff leaves him, barely a laugh at all. “Right.”

The word means to dismiss. It has no strength.

Hannibal lets it fall between them and fail.

“You came here rather than home,” he says.

Will shrugs one shoulder, “My house is cold.”

“You have blankets.”

“I have dogs too.” A pause, then, flatter, “Very advanced technology.”

Of course. 

The sarcasm arrives with its structure intact and its purpose exposed. A fine, dry blade laid between them because embarrassment has begun to press too close. Will’s anger often announces itself this way, dressed as wit before it can be mistaken for pain.

Hannibal nearly smiles.

“And still,” he says.

Will’s jaw tightens. For a moment, Hannibal thinks he will deflect again. 

Then Will looks down at his own hands, still locked around his sleeves, and says, “I can try other people.”

For a moment, Hannibal has no immediate answer.

The sentence is plain enough to seem harmless, which makes it worse. Will does not look at him. His eyes remain fixed on his own hands, as though the words have come from somewhere in his body and he is waiting to see what they will become.

Other people.

Hannibal feels the phrase enter him first as offense, then as alarm. He is careful not to let either show. Will is watching without looking. Hannibal knows that. Every sense in him is turned outward from the tight little cage of his body, listening for disgust, refusal, correction, some change in the air that will tell him the damage has finally made itself visible.

Hannibal gives him none of those things. He folds his own hands loosely over one knee.

“Why would you want to do that?”

Will’s mouth tightens.

“I didn’t say I wanted to.”

“No,” Hannibal says. “You said you could.”

The distinction lands poorly.

Will’s mouth tightens, not with disagreement exactly, but with the frustration of having chosen the wrong words and knowing no better ones will come easily.

“That’s what I mean.”

“It is not.”

Will looks at him then, sharp and exhausted. “You don’t know what I mean.”

“Then tell me.”

An incredulous breath leaves him, “I could get better,” he says.

Hannibal remains still.

“At what?”

Will’s fingers tighten around his sleeve.

“This.”

The word is too minute for what it contains.

Hannibal hears the effort beneath it. The humiliation of it. 

“This…” Hannibal repeats.

Will’s jaw works once.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes,” Hannibal says. “But I would like to know that you know what you mean.”

That nearly makes Will laugh. Or flinch. With him, the distinction is not always large.

“God, you’re impossible.”

“Occasionally.”

Will presses the heel of one hand briefly against his eye, then drops it again, angry with the gesture as soon as it happens.

“I mean experience,” he says, and the word comes out flat, stripped of whatever shame he can manage to remove from it. “Maybe if I had more of it, this wouldn’t be so—so obvious.”

Hannibal’s attention sharpens. “What would be less obvious?”

Will looks at him then, and for one second all the anger drains out of his face, leaving only exhaustion and a terrible, helpless honesty.

“That there’s something wrong with me.”

Hannibal goes very still.

Will looks away, as though the confession has burned the air between them.

“There is nothing wrong with you.”

“Don’t.”

The word is immediate. Almost violent.

Hannibal allows the interruption only because Will’s breathing has changed.

Will swallows and continues before Hannibal can speak again, faster now, the words beginning to trip over one another with the urgency of something long rehearsed and still unbearable to say aloud.

“You know what I’m like. You know more than most people. You know what happens when somebody gets too close, or touches me wrong, or waits for me to respond like a normal person and I can’t do it fast enough. You know I don’t always know what I want until it’s already too much, and then it’s too late because they’re frustrated and I’m frustrated and everything feels—” He stops, jaw flexing once. “Everything feels like my body has made a fool of me.”

Hannibal does not move. He remembers. Of course he remembers.

Will in the chair below them months earlier, speaking with forced detachment about intimacy as if describing a mechanical fault. A woman’s hand on his stomach becoming unbearable after he had wanted it there. A kiss becoming pressure. Pressure becoming expectation. Expectation becoming pain, or near enough to pain that the distinction had seemed academic. The peculiar shame of wanting and recoiling from the same touch. The uglier shame of watching someone else’s patience thin in real time.

He had not said all of it at once. Will never did. He had offered fragments. 

‘Sometimes I don’t know how to catch up to my own body.’

Hannibal had remembered that too. He remembers now with a precision that feels like punishment.

“If you’d just give me time,” Will says.

Hannibal looks at him.

Will’s hands tighten again, knuckles pale against his sleeves.

“Time,” Hannibal repeats.

“A little.” Will’s voice catches on the humility of it, and that seems to humiliate him further. “Just a little. I could figure some of it out. I could come back better.”

Hannibal’s hands remain folded because if he moves too soon, he will move too much.

“Better how?”

Will gives a small, desperate plea. “Don’t make me say it like that.”

“How?”

Will looks at him then, eyes bright, miserable, angry at being cornered by his own proposition.

“I don’t know,” he says, and the answer comes too quickly to be true. “Just less—”

He stops, remains there for half a second, the rest of the sentence caught somewhere he cannot reach without humiliating himself further.

Then his face changes, the anger leaves so suddenly that what remains is worse.

“Was it really so bad?”

Hannibal goes still. Will’s gaze drops and his throat works as he gets the words out. 

“Was I…” His throat works. “Was I that bad?” The question is so small. 

Hannibal’s eyes pull up to Will’s face sharply in time to catch the crestfallen expression that has settled into his features, all the fight having left him suddenly. Hannibal cannot speak for a moment.

Will mistakes the silence. His face closes, and Hannibal catches the faint salt of tears as he turns farther toward the shelves as if he can still preserve some final scrap of dignity by looking away.

Hannibal lets out a breath.

“Will,” he says on a breath. 

Will laughs then. It’s almost hysterical, and gone as quickly as it comes.

“So yes then, huh?” He bites his lip so hard Hannibal worries he will split it.

“No.”

The word is quiet, but it has lost every trace of gentleness.

Will’s laugh breaks apart.

“Please, don’t.”

“You ask me and then forbid the answer?”

Will looks away, jaw tight, eyes wet and furious with it. “I know what happened.”

“You know what you suffered through afterward. That is not the same.” he pauses for a moment, tilting toward Will, “You think I stopped because you made yourself undesirable.”

Will closes his eyes. The wound opens in the silence.

“You think,” Hannibal continues, voice lower now, “that I recognized your inexperience, your uncertainty, the particular ways your body struggles to bear what it wants, and found them disappointing?”

Will says nothing.

“I stopped because I wanted you too much.”

Will’s eyes open. The words strike him before belief can.

Hannibal does not soften them.

“I stopped because you were in my lap with your hand in my hair and your mouth at my throat, trying so desperately to be brave that you would have followed anything I asked of you. I stopped because you were no longer only wanting me. You were trying to prove you were allowed to.”

Will’s breathing catches.

“Hannibal—”

“No. You will hear this.”

The command lands between them, sudden and unmistakable. Hannibal’s hand flexes once against his own knee. He wants to touch him. He wants it with such violence that stillness becomes nearly offensive.

“You were not bad,” he says. “You were devastating.”

Will’s face twists faintly.

“I was clumsy.”

“Yes.”

Will flinches.

Hannibal’s voice lowers. “And I wanted your clumsiness. I wanted your hands at my collar when they trembled. I wanted the way you reached before you knew what to do with reaching. I wanted every unguarded sound you tried to bury against my mouth. I wanted the want in you before you had made it graceful enough to feel safe.”

Will stares at him.

Tears brim bright in his eyes now, but he seems too stunned to hide them.

“You think experience would improve this?” Hannibal says, and something dark enters his voice despite his effort to contain it. “You think I would prefer you practiced into fluency by strangers who have not earned the first inch of you?”

Will’s mouth parts, yet nothing comes out.

“Do not mistake me,” Hannibal says. “I am not horrified because you are inexperienced.”

His composure thins.

“I am horrified because you would give yourself to people you do not want, people who would grow impatient with you, who would touch what they had no patience to understand, and call that improvement.”

Will’s face crumples for half a second before anger rushes in to cover it. “I don’t know what else to do.”

The admission comes out heartbroken. Hannibal’s expression changes.

“You let me want you.”

Will’s laugh is broken. “That’s not a plan.”

Hannibal looks at him for a moment.

Then he rises.

The balcony gives him little room to do it gracefully, but grace is not the point now. Will watches him with suspicion at once, eyes still too bright, body folded tight in the corner as though the shelves themselves might keep him from being seen.

Hannibal offers his hand.

“Come down.”

Will looks at the offered hand, then at him.

For a moment, Hannibal thinks he will refuse on principle. “I can climb down a ladder.”

“Yes.”

Hannibal does not withdraw his hand.

Will stares at it a second longer, then, with visible reluctance, he takes it. His fingers are cold.

Will unfolds slowly. The movement is awkward after so long in the corner, knees stiff. 

Halfway down, he hesitates.

Hannibal does not look up too sharply. He waits.

Will exhales through his nose and descends the last few rungs with careful, resentful dignity.

When his feet touch the floor, he releases Hannibal’s hand as though remembering too late that he has been holding it.

Hannibal lets him.

The office seems larger around them now, colder after the enclosed dark of the balcony. Will stands at the foot of the ladder, eyes lowered, coat still on, one hand hovering near the cuff of his sleeve before he catches himself and drops it.

“Your coat,” Hannibal says.

Will glances at him.

“Observation or instruction?”

“Both.”

Will looks away, but after a moment he shrugs out of the coat. The movement is careful, overmanaged, dignity pieced together one motion at a time. Hannibal takes it from him and lays it across the back of the chair.

When he turns back, Will has not moved.

He looks terribly exposed without the coat. Less hidden. The lamplight catches the damp shine still gathered at his eyes and the tired set of his mouth.

Hannibal steps toward him.

Not quickly.

Will does not retreat, but his attention sharpens. The whole of him becomes aware of the distance closing, breath held at the edge of the body.

“You called it ‘not a plan’,” Hannibal says.

Will’s gaze lifts.

Hannibal stops just before him.

“But it is the only plan I will permit.”

The words settle in the quiet office with the force of something irrevocable.

Will’s expression changes.

The wound opens again before anger can cover it.

“But… you keep stopping,” he says. Will’s voice is rougher now, stripped of the balcony’s thin protection. “You keep pulling away from me.”

There is no wit in it. No defense.

Hannibal moves then. Slowly enough for Will to refuse. Clearly enough that he cannot misunderstand.

One step. Then another.

Will’s back meets the wall with a soft, final sound. Not forced, but given every second to turn away and choosing, with visible terror, not to.

Hannibal lifts one hand and places it against the wall beside Will’s head. He does not touch him yet. 

“Would you like me to stop?”

Will’s breath catches hard. His eyes fly to Hannibal’s face. For one suspended second, he looks almost frightened by the question, not because he does not know the answer, but because he does. Because the answer is too immediate, too naked, too utterly without dignity.

“No.”

Hannibal’s gaze does not move from his.

Will swallows, and the first answer seems to break something in him open.

“No,” he says again, more urgently. “No, I don’t want you to stop.”

His hand remains braced against the wall beside Will’s head as the other rises to his face. Will watches it, but does not move away.

Hannibal adjusts the frames first, pushing them gently up the bridge of his nose. A small correction. 

Will shudders.

“Should I stop, Will?” Hannibal asks.

Will swallows. “N-no.”

The answer is quiet, but immediate.

Good.

Hannibal lets the backs of his knuckles pass along Will’s jaw. Will’s eyes close before he can stop them. His face tilts by the slightest degree into the touch.

There.

That is what Hannibal has wanted.

Not a performance. Not fluency. This.

Will, allowing. Will, wanting with enough rough honesty to make grace irrelevant.

Hannibal drags his hand lower, fingertips tracing the warm line of his throat. Will’s pulse leaps beneath him. His breath leaves him in a broken little plea that makes Hannibal’s own restraint go thin at the edges.

He has wanted this too badly.

He has wanted it through every pause, every retreat, every careful denial of his own appetite. Hannibal lowers his voice near Will’s ear.

“Tell me if you want me to stop.”

Will’s fingers catch at the front of his shirt.

“I don’t.”

The words are barely steady, but they are enough.

Hannibal’s hand moves to Will’s open collar. The first button is already undone, a remnant of Will’s earlier attempt, that trembling proof he had mistaken for failure. Hannibal rests his fingers there for half a breath.

Then he opens the second. Will inhales sharply and Hannibal pauses.

Will’s grip tightens in his shirt.

“Don’t,” Will says, and then, frantic at the possible misunderstanding, “don’t stop.”

Hannibal smiles against his temple. He parts the fabric with care and the hollow of Will’s collarbone appears in the lamplight.

Hannibal touches him there.

Will makes another sound, softer this time, almost wounded by pleasure, and Hannibal’s hand against the wall tightens.

“So beautiful,” Hannibal murmurs.

Will shakes his head once, but weakly.

Hannibal does not argue with him. He answers against the newly bared skin instead. The first kiss lands just below the collarbone.

Will goes utterly still.

Then his whole body seems to remember itself at once. His hands clutch at Hannibal’s shirt, stumbling and desperate, pulling him nearer without coordination or apology. Hannibal lets himself be pulled. Lets Will feel that he can affect him. Lets the closeness answer what words have failed to mend.

He kisses Will again, slower now, open enough that Will’s breath breaks above him.

This is not correction, it is appetite, finally given a shape Will can feel.

Hannibal lifts his head only far enough to look at him. Will is flushed, wet-eyed, undone. His glasses sit slightly crooked despite Hannibal’s earlier correction. His breathing has not steadied. His hands are still fisted in Hannibal’s shirt as if holding on has become the only coherent thing left in him.

Hannibal reaches up and touches the frame again, setting it right with unbearable gentleness.

Will lets out a short, cracked laugh.

The noise nearly breaks him.

“There you are,” Hannibal says.

Will’s face twists. Hannibal kisses him then.

Not carefully enough to be mistaken for withdrawal. Not roughly enough to frighten him. Certainly. Deeply. With the hunger he has been made civilized for too long.

Will answers at once. Awkwardly. Beautifully.

He opens beneath Hannibal with no practiced elegance, only need. His hands slide from Hannibal’s shirt to his shoulders, then back again, as if he cannot decide where he is allowed to touch and is slowly beginning to understand the answer may be anywhere.

Hannibal presses him more fully into the wall and a choked groan is pulled from Will’s lips.

Hannibal breaks the kiss just enough to ask, “Good?”

Will’s eyes are dark and unfocused.

“Yes.”

A breath.

“Please.”

The word is nearly too much.

Hannibal’s forehead rests briefly against his.

“Again,” he says.

Will understands.

His fingers tighten.

“Please.”

Hannibal kisses him again, and this time he does not pull away to soften the wanting. He lets Will feel it. The press of his body. The hand at his throat. The kiss pressed at his jaw, then lower, returning to the exposed line of his collarbone because Will had answered there so beautifully.

Because Hannibal wants to.

Because Will wants him to.

Because both of them have spent too long mistaking restraint for the only safe language of desire.

Will trembles beneath him, but he does not retreat.

When Hannibal’s mouth moves against his throat, Will’s hands lift into his hair with a helplessness that feels almost reverent.

“Hannibal,” he breathes.

“Mmm.”

Hannibal gives him another kiss, another point of contact, another small mercy made of hunger. Will receives each one like something he has been starving for and did not believe would be placed into his hands. Hannibal feels the understanding arrive in him. Belief comes to him in fragments, reluctant and easily startled, but it is there now beneath Hannibal’s hands. A slight, trembling thing.

Hannibal intends to feed it.

His fingers return to Will’s shirt.

This time, he does not pause at the second button.

Will watches him, breath caught, eyes wide and wet behind his glasses as Hannibal opens the next button, then the next. Each one gives with a quiet sound. Each one exposes more of him to the lamplight, throat to collarbone, collarbone to the vulnerable line of his chest.

Will’s hands tighten in Hannibal’s shirt.

“Hannibal,” he breathes.

“Yes,” Hannibal says.

The answer is a vow.

He lowers his mouth to the hollow beneath Will’s throat and kisses him there with deliberate tenderness. Will shudders. Hannibal feels it under his mouth, feels the effort Will makes not to fold beneath the sensation, not to apologize for needing it.

He kisses lower.

Again.

A slow descent made of mouth and breath and the faintest scrape of teeth, each contact chosen with care and hunger in equal measure, no longer distant enough to be mistaken for restraint.

Will’s head tips back against the wall. A raspy little noise leaves him, small and broken and beautiful.

Hannibal’s hand flattens against his side, holding him there.

“Ah, there,” Hannibal murmurs against his skin. “Don’t hide that from me.”

Will’s breath catches.

Hannibal looks up at him. His mouth is still against Will’s ribs when he speaks, the words placed directly into the heat of him.

“I want your hunger.” Will’s eyes close. “I want your desperation. I want your hands before you know where to put them.” Hannibal presses another kiss lower, mouth lingering against warm skin. “I want you before you have time to hide what wanting me does to you.”

Will’s fingers move into his hair, lacking gentleness or finesse. They catch there with the same helpless sincerity that had undone him in the sitting room.

Hannibal’s composure thins beneath the touch.

Good.

He drags his teeth, barely, along the line of exposed skin and feels Will’s whole body answer.

“I will not share this with strangers,” Hannibal says.

The words come darker than he intends. He does not regret them.

Will’s eyes open, startled and shining.

Hannibal rises just enough to look at him, one hand still spread against his bare chest, thumb moving slowly over the place where his heart is racing.

“You will not take this hunger to someone who cannot recognize it.” His voice lowers. “You will not give your uncertainty to hands that would mistake it for inconvenience. You will not become ‘practiced’ for me by surviving someone else.”

Will’s mouth trembles.

“I don’t want them,” he says.

The words are barely audible. Hannibal’s gaze drops to his mouth, then returns to his eyes.

“I know.”

He kisses him again, not on the mouth, but over the quick, living pulse at his throat.

“I want it all mine,” Hannibal says softly. “Your wanting. Your fear of wanting. Your clumsy hands. Your beautiful, terrible honesty. Every sound you try to swallow before I can hear it.”

Will makes another fractured noise then, exactly as if the words have pulled it from him.

Hannibal smiles against his skin.

“There,” he whispers. “Mine.”

Will’s knees seem to weaken.

Hannibal presses him more securely to the wall, body close now, warm and unmistakably present. Will’s hands clutch at him, and this time Hannibal does not soften the contact into something safer than it is. He lets the wanting have weight.

He worships him downward with slow, precise attention, mouth moving over each newly bared inch as if Will is not a problem to be solved, but an altar Hannibal has been too disciplined to kneel before until now.

Will breathes his name again. It is no longer protest. No longer warning. It is need, frightened by its own answer.

Hannibal lifts his head.

“Tell me,” he says.

Will looks ruined by the request.

“I want you,” Will says, close to voiceless.

Hannibal’s hand tightens at his waist.

Again, he almost says.

But he does not ask for performance. Not now. Instead, he kisses the words into Will’s skin, once, twice, lower again.

“I know,” Hannibal murmurs. “And I want you wanting.”

Will’s eyes close.

“I want you desperate.”

Another kiss.

“I want you undone.”

A careful drag of teeth, just enough to make Will’s breath break.

“I want you exactly as you are.”

Will’s hands pull at him then, urgent and unpracticed, and Hannibal goes willingly. He lets himself be drawn up, lets Will’s mouth find his with a need so bare, it is almost painful.

This time, Hannibal does not retreat from it.

He meets him. Certain. Hungry. Reverent.

He shifts, pressing a thigh between Will’s, firm and deliberate, giving him something solid to seek.

Will’s breath breaks at once.

His body goes rigid around the sensation, startled by its own understanding, and then his hips shift into it before shame can catch up. Only once. Barely.

Hannibal feels the helplessness of it like heat beneath his hand.

Will makes a little, mortified sound, and Hannibal swallows it with his mouth before it can become an apology. His hand leaves Will’s hip only long enough to catch both of Will’s wrists and lift them above his head, pinning them there against the wall with careful force.

Will goes open beneath him.

Shirt loose. Throat bared. Hands emptied of anything to hide behind.

For one suspended second, he only stares at Hannibal, breathing hard, as if waiting to learn whether exposure is the same as danger.

Hannibal’s other hand rises to his throat gently, claiming.

His palm settles there with exquisite restraint, thumb beneath Will’s jaw, fingers curved around the vulnerable line of him. Will’s pulse leaps beneath his touch. Hannibal feels it answer him, quick and frightened and wanting, and something in his own civility begins to come apart.

“Oh, there you go,” Hannibal breathes into his skin.

Will shudders.

Hannibal hums into the kiss, low and pleased, and it ruins him more thoroughly than praise. Will’s wrists flex once in Hannibal’s grip. His hips search into the pressure again, hungry enough to finally outrun humiliation.

Hannibal holds him there — wrists above his head, throat beneath his hand, body caught between the wall and the firm line of Hannibal’s thigh.

He gives Will no room to mistake this for distance.

Will makes another sound, softer this time, almost broken by relief. Hannibal kisses it from him, pressing closer, guiding the movement with his body rather than instruction. Will follows with helpless honesty, bearing down into the pressure, then faltering when pleasure shows too plainly on his face.

Hannibal’s hand tightens at his throat by the slightest degree, just enough to anchor.

“No,” he murmurs. “Do not leave me now.”

Will’s eyes flutter open. Unfocused. Desperate.

“Hannibal—”

The rest fails.

Hannibal kisses beneath his ear, dragging his mouth slowly over heated skin before his breath cools the path. Will writhes once beneath him, wrists pulling uselessly against Hannibal’s hold, hips seeking again into the pressure as if his body has found an answer the mind can no longer bear to name.

“Oh, please,” Will says. Then again, quieter, “Please.”

The repetition nearly undoes him.

Hannibal knows this territory in Will. Knows how quickly sensation can become too much, how easily desire can turn crowded beneath the wrong hands. He remembers every careful, ashamed thing Will has ever told him about unfamiliar touch.

So he does not give him unfamiliar hands.

He gives him his own. A wall at his back. Wrists held safely above him. A thigh between his. A hand at his throat, steady and warm, keeping him present when words begin to fail.

Will’s head tips back, jaw slack around another broken plea. 

“Pl-please, please—”

The second plea breaks apart.

Hannibal tightens his hold on Will’s wrists and kisses the ruined noises from him, swallowing it down as Will moves under him, frantic and pliant, climbing higher with every careful press.

Then Will grinds down into the pressure.

Once.

Thoughtless and shaking.

The motion tears through Hannibal.

Crude only because it is honest. Beautiful because it is honest. Will is past the dignity of pretending his body does not know what it wants, and shame flashes across his face before the movement has even finished.

Hannibal does not allow it to take him.

His thumb strokes once beneath Will’s jaw.

“Again, darling,”

Will obeys without meaning to with a trembling sob that Hannibal catches against lips and teeth. His wrists flex helplessly above him, fingers curling around nothing, his whole body trembling between restraint and the terrible relief of being guided through it.

“Look at me,” Hannibal says.

Will tries.

His eyes open, wet and unfocused, struggling toward Hannibal’s gaze, but they fall instead to his mouth. Fix there. Stay there helplessly. Hannibal smiles against him.

“Good.”

Will shudders violently.

The praise breaks over him harder than Hannibal expects.

His body bucks once into the pressure, helpless and overtaken, his mouth falling open against Hannibal’s as his breath fractures into small, mewling sounds and Hannibal catches each one. Keeps Will pinned there through it, wrists held safely above him, hand warm at his throat, thigh steady between his own.

He does not pull away.

He does not soften it into absence.

He holds Will through the crest of it, through the shaking, through the frantic little movements that follow even after his body has begun to come down. Will trembles against him, eyes glassy behind his glasses, lips parted, throat fluttering beneath Hannibal’s hand.

Beautiful. Devastating.

His.

Only when the worst of the trembling aftershocks pass does Hannibal loosen his grip.

Slowly.

First the hand at Will’s throat, gentling into a touch at his jaw. Then the hold at his wrists, easing them down from above his head with care. Will’s arms lower heavily, uncertainly, as if he has forgotten what to do with them now that they have been returned to him.

Hannibal catches one of his hands and places it against his own chest.

“Here,” he murmurs. “Feel this.”

Will does not answer.

He only stands there, breathing unevenly, palm spread over Hannibal’s heart while it beats far too hard beneath his shirt.

Good.

Let him feel that, too.

Hannibal cups the side of his face, thumb brushing once beneath his eye where the tears have gathered. Will’s lashes flutter. His mouth moves around a word that does not come.

Hannibal does not require it.

“It’s alright, shhh, it’s alright,” he says softly.

Will makes a faint sound, wounded and boneless.

Hannibal kisses his temple. Then the corner of his eye. Then the damp track along his cheek, each touch slow and undemanding now, less hunger than worship after the fact.

“You did beautifully,” he murmurs.

Will’s face tightens faintly, as if praise is still too much to hold.

Hannibal smooths a hand down his side, anchoring rather than asking.

“No apologies,” he says. “Not for that.”

Will’s fingers curl weakly in Hannibal’s shirt in answer. Hannibal covers that hand with his own and presses it more firmly to his chest.

“Mmm,” he hums. “Just like this.”

Will exhales, trembling, and some final guarded thing in him loosens.

Hannibal adjusts Will’s glasses again with absurd tenderness, straightening what the force of his own wanting had displaced. The domesticity of it makes Will’s lips tremble.

Hannibal kisses him there too.

“I wanted that,” Hannibal says, close enough for Will to feel every word. “I wanted you exactly like that.”

Will’s eyes close.

Hannibal gathers him in carefully, one hand at the back of his neck, the other low at his waist, letting Will fold forward into him. After a moment, Will’s forehead drops to Hannibal’s shoulder.

His hands find the open front of Hannibal’s shirt and hold there.

Hannibal’s eyes close.

For the first time all night, Will is not reaching for proof.

He is only holding on.

Hannibal feels the difference instantly. The hands in his shirt are weak now, no longer desperate enough to bruise fabric, but unwilling to let go. Will’s forehead rests against his shoulder, his breathing warm and uneven through the open place at Hannibal’s throat.

Will shudders, his mouth brushing Hannibal’s skin as he turns his face inward, not quite a kiss. More animal than that. More honest. He nuzzles into the side of Hannibal’s neck with a soft, ruined noise, as though he is trying to hide there and answer him at once.

Hannibal closes his eyes.

No argument could have satisfied him as much.

“Good,” he murmurs.

Will lets out a faint mewl against his throat.

Hannibal’s hand settles more firmly between his shoulder blades. “Still with me?”

There’s a pause, but Will nods. Barely.

His forehead drags against Hannibal’s skin with the motion, glasses catching lightly at the edge of his collar. Hannibal reaches up and removes them before they can bother him, folding them with one hand and setting them on the desk without looking away from him.

Will huffs something that might have been a laugh if he had more of himself available for it.

The sound pleases him. Hannibal presses his mouth to Will’s hair.

“Can you speak?”

Will is still for a moment. Then, against Hannibal’s neck, he shakes his head.

“That’s alright, darling. There is no need.”

Will’s fingers curl again in his shirt and Hannibal feels the quiet gratitude of it. He turns his face into Will’s hair and breathes him in. Salt. Warm skin. The last trace of cold from the balcony. The faint, intimate evidence of tears.

“Are you frightened?”

Will shakes his head, then hesitates. Hannibal feels the correction before it comes. A small nod follows.

Yes, then, Hannibal understands. A little.

Hannibal’s hand stills at the back of his neck, thumb moving once beneath the curl of his hair.

“Of me?”

Will answers quickly this time. A sharper shake of his head. No. 

“Good,” Hannibal whispers.

Will exhales into him, and the breath seems to take more of the trembling with it.

They stand that way for a while.

The office remains dim around them, the lamp burning low on the desk, the chair across from it empty and irrelevant. Will’s shirt is still open beneath Hannibal’s hand. Hannibal’s own remains undone where Will had left it. Neither of them repairs the disorder.

Not yet.

Hannibal has no wish to.

Will shifts after several minutes, not away, only enough to press his face more fully into the hollow beneath Hannibal’s jaw. His mouth grazes skin again. Another almost-kiss. Another soft, wordless apology or request or thanks. He may not know which.

Hannibal does not require him to know.

He cups the back of Will’s head and holds him there. Turns his head and kisses the side of Will’s face, just above the jaw. Will stills beneath it, then tips toward him by a fraction. A choice so small another man might miss it entirely. Hannibal does not.

He kisses him again. Will makes a soft sound and nuzzles closer, his hands sliding from Hannibal’s shirt to his waist, holding there with tentative pressure.

Hannibal understands.

“I have you,” he says.

His answer is a tentative nod against Hannibal’s throat.

Hannibal closes both arms around him then, fully enough that there can be no confusion in it. Will folds into the embrace by degrees, still trembling, still quiet, but no longer fighting the shape of being held.

After a while, Will’s hand shifts at Hannibal’s waist. A faint tug.

Hannibal looks down. Will does not lift his head, but his fingers pull once, weakly, toward himself. Closer.

Hannibal obeys.

The sound Will makes then is nearly inaudible.

Contentment, perhaps. Or exhaustion.

Hannibal presses a kiss to Will’s temple.

“Yes,” he murmurs. “I know.”

Will nods once against him.

This time, he does not seem to know what he is agreeing to.

It does not matter.

Hannibal will remember for both of them.