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The salt of the water stung Will’s sinuses, burned its way down his throat when he tried to gasp. He still felt like he was falling, but now he was also drowning. He opened his eyes and they stung too, but he could see the dark form of Hannibal above him, around him, sinking down with him. Hannibal’s eyes were looking back, like black holes in a galaxy. His hands had moved to grip Will’s throat. It was tender and condemning, loving and final. Water filled Will’s mouth, and then so did Hannibal’s tongue.
He drowned.
~
He woke gasping and choking, trying to swallow down the salt burn in his throat.
“You fainted, Will,” Hannibal’s voice said from somewhere nearby, and it sounded amused, fond. “How very damsel in distress of you.”
It was blood running down his throat. Not salt water. The stars in the night sky stared down at him from above, and firm paved ground lay beneath him, not ocean. His face and shoulder were flooded with agony.
Will turned his head and saw Hannibal standing hunched near the cliff’s edge, bare-chested and bloodied in the moonlight. There was a gentle clink of metal, a soft hiss of pain, and then Hannibal’s form loomed above him, blotting out the stars.
“Where’d your shirt go?” Will’s voice was fluid-logged and slurry. He was still struggling to pull his mind out of the dream, the fantasy, of going off the cliff. Of sinking under the water. Under Hannibal. He hadn’t. They hadn’t.
Hannibal smiled, a red-wet flash in the darkness, his partial nakedness making him seem all the more primal, predatory. He reached down to grasp Will’s good arm. “Put to better use,” he said, and pulled Will dizzyingly upright. Will saw that Hannibal had folded the shirt up in a compact square and strapped it to his stomach wound by cinching his dress belt around his waist. Dots of blood were beginning to seep through the fabric. It matched the blood streaking across Hannibal’s mouth. His mouth would taste of it, just as Will’s did.
It wasn’t just the fall or the drowning that was twisting in Will’s brain. It was the feel, the power of Hannibal’s kiss, phantom though it was. It had all felt so real, as real as standing on solid ground and grasping Hannibal’s arm did now.
“We must leave.”
Clinging to Hannibal’s bare skin made him think about drowning again, about Hannibal’s tongue in his mouth and how it had felt more invasive that the water in his lungs. But no, that was all wrong. He didn’t drown, they didn’t fall. He’d thought about killing Hannibal, but he’d never thought about kissing Hannibal, before they’d killed together.
The water, the drowning. The kiss. This could be the dream. It felt less real, less right, than falling off the cliff.
Hannibal’s hands were suddenly cupping Will’s face, making Will look at him. “Will. You’ve done so well tonight. Now we must go.”
Their faces were so close together he could smell the blood on Hannibal’s breath. It was at once intoxicating and repulsive, and so achingly similar to the dream still playing over in Will’s mind. Will knew what he had to do, then. To decide whether this was some kind of afterlife dreamstate, or reality. He reached up and cupped Hannibal’s blood-sticky cheek, drew him down so that his mouth covered Will’s own. Will felt Hannibal’s sharp intake of breath, a rare indication of surprise, and used that moment to invade Hannibal’s mouth just as had been done to him, underwater. Will was amazed to find that Hannibal allowed it, allowed Will to breach his defences so easily. That wasn’t like the dream at all. It occurred to him that perhaps Hannibal had done that all along with Will, made allowances, risks, that he otherwise wouldn’t have. It gave Will sense of power, not unlike killing the Great Red Dragon together had.
It didn’t feel like drowning, at all.