Work Text:
It is a dream of Da Vinci's perfect man, the ratios proportionate and splayed, legs wide apart. A position of power, of vulnerability. The genitals right there, available to the world, curled and tucked quiet like a sleeping dog, hidden only by a modern crude cultural joke. There is no fear, no desire, no dream, in this effortlessly vulgar display. Just a man, spread-eagle, available to be judged. Objectified.
Hannibal watches Will.
He watches the quick fingers, the torn nails and the delicate wrist lines. Knuckles white against the stairwell railing, staring at him, waiting for him. He watches the eyes and the breathing - Will breathes like the deer he dreams of, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He cannot settle upon one thing, and those eyes that stray, they stray to books, to titles, to pieces of paper, to anything except that which is settled in front of him.
This is not his favourite version of Will.
It is the panicked, nightmare-ridden, stag-haunted Will that comes to him in the middle of the day, gaunt and hopeless, that fills him with quiet delight. Post-traumatic stress disorder, he would write on a pad, if he bothered to take such notes. A man slowly being eaten alive by his own demons.
A man vulgar and open, and so close to the edge. So perfect, so proportionate, and so easily destroyed by one, simple, mathematical error.
Will is no perfect man. His ratios are unstable, his tempo off; eyes averted, uncomfortable. Hungry.
Hannibal understands hunger.
---
They sit at the dim table in the kitchen, afternoon light flickering through the trees. Shadows pass over Will's face, halfway catching on his glasses. They finished the food some minutes ago but Hannibal refuses to acknowledge this, slowly sipping his coffee.
Tiny droplets of condensation litter the Formica table-top, and Will pushes them about with the tip of one finger. "It's the stags I mind most," he says, and it is out of nowhere, but Hannibal understands. Sometimes nightmares come from the silence.
"The raven-feathered stags we have discussed, from your nightmares?"
"Sometimes they show up in the middle of the day, too." This admission earns Hannibal a sideways glance, flat gaze and troubled thoughts. "Does that make me more or less insane?"
The press of Hannibal's lips, fine and finite, details just what he thinks of that hideous word. "Insanity, Will, is a term we use on the inelegant."
He did always like to make his manipulations transparent.
---
It is the stretch of skin from Will's kneecap to his inner thigh that surprises Hannibal most, when he first kneels before it. It is a pale, finely-haired expanse, well-muscled and sleek. None of this is much beyond the expected. Will takes far better care of his body than he does his mind.
But his flesh.
It trembles when touched.
Will, the perfect man, the unstable ratio, is all half-choked words and garbled instructions that Hannibal never accedes to. He is taking his time with this project. He finds the skin and strokes, and every little flutter of the pulse, tremulous and close to the surface - a little bird's heart that flutters furiously.
In every arch and heave of his chest, Will begs for flight.
---
The weather is shifting through the leaves; yellows turning to reds turning to browns, while the light patterns winter in the near future. Everything is pale and golden, this evening. Hannibal stands at the front gate to the house, letting the last of the day's air filter through him. Shorter daylight hours meant nothing to his habits, but they did increase his workload, and more and more he was finding his private practice troubled by the wanderings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The irony and delight of their presence, however, did much to make up for their annoyance .
"Dr. Lecter." Jack's face was pulled tight, pinched with the hours and the thoughts and the draining weeks of this lifestyle. And maybe concern, for a man. For their mutual friend, as inappropriate as the title may have been to them both. "Will is asking for you. He appears to be having an anxiety attack."
Hannibal pressed his lips together, nodded. His Will did not succumb so easily to the waking destructions of the mind.
But as the door to the bedroom clicked shut, as the lock turned discretely, Will was huddled in the corner, his head in his hands, brown hair curled sweaty in between gripping fingers.
"William. Tell me what you see."
And it came, after a thousand heartbeats, and a dozen expelled breaths. "... you."
---
On the settee in the main room, Will tucks back into Hannibal as comfortably as he can. He has removed his glasses so that he can't see - doesn't have to think, won't think, can't - and is allowing Hannibal to run those curious fingers once again over lines and forms that only he can see.
One day, Hannibal knows, the agent will put it together. The patterns he traces, and the meaning behind them.
The knives he is planning to use.
The sedatives resting in his bathroom cupboard in a little white container.
The pet names, the little puns.
"Mon amuse-bouche," he whispered, as he carefully bit his teeth into Will's ear. A smile, a moan, and a shifting, pale body underneath his own.
---
Will's fingers scrabbled back, little clicking noises against the wall as he was lifted to his feet by his throat. His eyes were blown, black as sin, lashes fluttering. Hannibal held him there, stuck against the wall, the throat constricting and choking under his tight hands.
Hannibal waited.
William would never see how beautiful he was like this. His hair, rumpled, slicked back in tight curls from his face, his glasses askew and smudged. The colour had fled his face with the first clutch of Hannibal's grip, and left him weak and trembling. But it was more than that. It was the look in his face. The trust. Still, always, the trust.
"Pl- ease."
Hannibal eased, and he carefully let Will slide down until his feet were resting back against the blue commercial carpeting of the office supply room.
"You love them," the agent wheezed, touching his fingers to his throat. "You hate them so much you love them. For everything they are not. You... you revel in their flaws." Those eyes, searching, lifted to his, and the bruised throat, welts already rising, contracted. "I... I want you to love me like that."
Hannibal's breath hitched, and his hand slammed back into Will's throat. "Say it again."
Will grabbed at his shirt, scrambling at the buttons, tearing into them, his shaking useless with fine movements, until he could pull his shirt apart, bearing a pale chest half-obstructed by a garish blue tie. "Where? Where would you make the first cut? Tell me." His chest heaved. "Tell me!"
Hannibal's fingers slid down, slowly, across the lines, to a section right underneath Will's left ribcage. "There."
A small, keening noise, and suddenly Will's arms were wrapped around Hannibal's shoulders, and they were kissing - hungry, fighting, Will biting into Hannibal and leaving bloody teethmarks across their bruised lips, while fingers turned to claws and raked across expensive suits. "I saw," Will gasped, in between shifting, when he was still trying to pull Hannibal in closer, when he was trying to lift his hips up to grind, when he was almost writhing with the need and hurt and want of it all, "I saw what you saw, I saw how you saw them, I saw the hate, and oh god - " Hannibal's hands bruised the words out of him, and their mouths leaked harsh breathing into the spaces between tearing kisses.
"Oh, god."
---
Hannibal's sketches lack the passion necessary, he knows, to be truly beautiful. They are technically perfect. They contain all the requirements for perfection. But they are lacking, just like he, is often, lacking, that one last human component.
Hannibal does not sketch, when he is with Will.
He finds other ways to make art.