Archive of Our Own

Hannibal had been kind enough to give him back the key to his home. That's the first thought that enters Will's mind as he reaches for the lamp in the darkness and watches another hand pull the chain. The kind doctor's face smiles down at him, and his next thought is halo effect. It's a term from the stage, from cinema, and it strikes Will as both oddly fitting in its origin, yet entirely uncharacteristic in execution.

'Hello, Will.' Hannibal says, perched in a chair Will is certain belongs in his front room. The dogs are quiet; they haven't been disturbed. 'I heard you hadn't been sleeping.'

'From whom,' Will questions, throwing one arm over his eyes. 'Jack?'

'Jack Crawford and I have held discussions concerning you, yes,' Hannibal admits. 'But I am not here because your master sent me.'

'Jack isn't my master,' Will retorts, shifting on the pillow.

'And yet he holds your leash, isn't that true?' Hannibal sits back in the chair, his body posture open, welcoming discussion. 'He thinks to train you, as you have so carefully trained your strays.'

'If I've trained them so well,' Will begins, and then sits up with a quickness, a scene of bedlam and horror fixed in his mind. Hannibal can see it reflected in the way his eyes leap to the doorway, and leans forward, pressing a soothing hand against his chest.

'No, Will,' Hannibal reassures him. 'I have not harmed your dogs. Why would you think such a thing?' Will turns again, this time to look at the man sitting opposite, and Hannibal allows him to see.

'No, of course not,' Will answers, the words sounding elongated, almost like notes pinging against the silence of the room. 'You didn't come for them.'

'Correct,' Hannibal answers, with an approving nod. His hand hasn't moved, and strangely, Will finds that he doesn't want to remove it. Not yet. Hannibal's smile grows by minute fractions as he allows the contact to linger. 'Tell me, Will,' he asks, tilting his head away from the light. 'What is it that I have come here for at such a late hour?'

Will glances at the clock, but it's turned away, the reliable, pixellated face hidden from view. He swallows around the words in his throat. 'You came for me.'

'I've always found you to be a particularly quick study,' Hannibal replies, moving to sit beside him on the bed. He's not wearing a suit jacket or tie, and Will can't seem to reconcile the Hannibal in his bedroom with the man he knows as both professional partner and unexpected foil. His vest is impeccable, a tiny houndsteeth print in red and burnished gold, paired with a lighter yellow oxford beneath, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He is regal; a visitation in this tiny, wooden space filled with the unresolved and the unendurable.

Will hears the clacking of hooves from the next room, imagines the creak of a floorboard and the steady exhalation of breath. It's cold tonight, even inside, but he is warm. One more paradox Will knows he won't solve in time for it to matter.

Hannibal's hand lingers over his heart, feels the rising tempo with a look of serene contemplation. Will feels the strings of the overworked muscles begin to unwind, hears the beats as if played on a harpsichord. He can feel the pulse beneath Hannibal's skin, can almost see the veins of his hands illuminated to better illustrate the subtle counterpoint.

His hand gives up the harmonic almost reluctantly, shifting across the fabric of Will's t-shirt to feel the thin, tender skin below his throat. 'Did you know that the third chakra is believed to facilitate communication?' The doctor asks, and Will shakes his head. The stag in the next room shuffles and shifts, scraping its antlers along the wall.

'Pseudoscience,' Will scoffs. 'Worse than that; magical realism.'

'Without a doubt,' Hannibal replies. 'But hasn't the same accusation been frequently leveled at your particular gift, and even at my own chosen profession? And are we not both exceedingly good at what we do?'

'They're nothing alike,' Will argues, the words pressing outward against Hannibal's searching fingers. 'I perceive, I reconstruct. People come to you to be broken down into their component pieces, deconstructed. You dissect.'

'And yet both our methods are entirely dependent upon perception, which is well known to be subjective.' Hannibal's fingers brush upward against Will's throat, and he fights the urge to lean into the touch. It should be unwanted, a secondary invasion after the first, more direct penetration into his home. His safety. The stag's head fills the doorway, snuffling at the ground. Will doesn't ask either to leave.

'Despite the inability to separate yourself from your subject, and thereby becoming entirely objective,' Hannibal continues, his thumb pressing against the pulse point. 'You allow yourself to be used as an instrument, a tool. A bit unscientific, wouldn't you say?'

'Better to be limitedly useful than to be someone's eleventh hour parlor trick.' Will answers, glancing back and forth between Hannibal's roaming gaze and the fixed stare of the beast now blocking his only path of retreat.

'Is that how you see yourself, Will?' Hannibal asks. 'As the stage magician, conjuring helpful illusions from your cabinet of curiosities?'

'How do you see me?' Will counters, turning the question around. 'Am I still the mongoose? Another weapon in your arsenal you can train to bite, and then poison when it begins to bore you?'

Hannibal's posture stiffens, going very still as the stag rustles, pawing at the threshold. 'I assure you,' he clarifies. 'I do not find you boring, not in the least.' The moment drags out, Hannibal's fingers rising to roam broadly across Will's neck, stroking the thin layer of stubble beneath his chin. Will raises his eyes, feels the pulse of direct contact stir the air as if by a single strike against a timpano. A resounding beat, and then stillness.

'Tell me, Will.' Hannibal questions, his fingers settling in at the base of Will's throat. 'Why did you allow the stag into your home?'

The question stirs up a strange buzzing in Will's mind; he'd never shared his persistent hallucination with the doctor. Will feels his mouth answer anyway, and in the answering, proves the point. 'I didn't have a choice.'

'Ah, but there is always a choice.' Hannibal corrects him with a slight smile. 'There is always a singular moment when you can pull yourself safely back from the precipice, having gazed into the abyss.'

'Nietzsche?' Will asks with more than a touch of scorn. 'Isn't that a bit obvious for you, doctor?'

Hannibal's fingers begin to close around Will's throat, a hint of pressure that to someone else might have gone unnoticed in favor of the conversation. But Will is not someone else, and he feels the change like a shift in the earth's rotation. 'Forgive me for being gauche,' Hannibal apologizes, his grip again strengthening, 'but the comparison seemed apt.'

'It's an incorrect metaphor.' Will retorts, swallowing against the restriction, but not objecting. 'Unlike you, I don't have the luxury of passive observation. My fear doesn't stem from some abstract concept of evil.'

'Then what does frighten you, dear Will?' Hannibal asks, betraying no hint of surprise at Will's passivity in the face of malign intent. 'What is this nameless, formless thing that keeps you from sleep?'

'That's it precisely,' Will answers, focusing his gaze intently on Hannibal's forearm, watching the musculature shift ever so slightly beneath the skin. 'The fear that I'm not afraid of the abyss because I'm already a part of it.'

'You are both Theseus and the Labyrinth,' Hannibal muses, bearing down with greater pressure as Will's eyes begin to blink rapidly. 'What a curious conundrum.'

'The best way out is always through,' Will mutters, realizing that he can no longer turn his head. Hannibal pushes him back until he rests once again on the pillow, that bold, strong hand still wrapped around his throat.

'Frost,' the doctor muses. 'Maladroit, if effective. Do you mean to suggest that you need to be kept, Will?' Hannibal's eyes rake down his body, and from this position, flat on his back, the beast and the man appear to merge, a full display of antlers crowning a more or less human face. His left hand squeezes hard below Will's larynx, his right hand pressing down against Will's chest. Hannibal feels the rhythm of Will's heart increase, then slowly work back down as he maintains the position.

'Aren't I already?' Will gasps out around the pressure, feeling Hannibal's thumb and forefinger digging deep into the skin to compress his carotid arteries. He feels as though he should be doing something else, something more than prolonging a dialogue that borders on the ridiculous, but he can't quite grasp what that might be. Submission, at this point, was always inevitable.

'Ah,' Hannibal exhales with great pleasure. 'Now you see, we understand one another perfectly. You are not a curiosity to be treasured and locked away, nor are you a tool to be cast aside when your edge has been blunted by inept hands.'

'And I'm safe in yours?' Will asks hoarsely, his chest rising as he struggles to take in a breath against superior force.

'Do you feel unsafe, Will?' Hannibal asks, moving his hand up above the hyoid bone, to better control the flow of oxygen through his fingers.

'Yes,' Will admits, his heartbeat slowing as the world slips and shifts around him. 'But that's not what I need from you,' he manages, one or two words slipping past his lips at a time.

'Agreed. I never promised safety,' Hannibal reminds him. 'Only to keep a firm hand on the reins, no matter the road.'

Will's hands begin to tingle, a flicker of sensation starting at the fingertips and progressing up through his forearms. His vision begins to blur, and still the doctor's grip intensifies, apply force at specific, predictable intervals before easing up and allowing him to receive less than half the air he needs. Will's hips buck up repeatedly without his permission; if he hadn't been hard in his boxers before, he certainly is now. Medically, scientifically, he understands the mechanism. Para-mortem priapism; angel lust, to the crude.

Hannibal's fingers skate across his skin, as if playing a well-known composition on an unfamiliar instrument. They shift and glide, never lingering in one spot long enough to leave a bruise. 'I can only make you one promise, Will,' Hannibal advises, pausing for a rest in the notation. 'And that is to keep you sharp.'

He punctuates the statement with a keen and vigorous squeeze, Will's thorax seizing painfully beneath the doctor's hand. Will's mind contracts and expands, the air shimmers and he sees himself walking toward the stag, placing one hand on its muzzle. His fingers encounters a fine, downy coat of black feathers instead of the hair he expected, and Will's neurons misfire. Huginn, they offer. Muninn.

'I thought you didn't like to be psychoanalyzed,' Hannibal admonishes gently, watching the motion of Will's hips against the straining tension in the air. His hand slides down from Will's chest and pushes firmly against his hips, stopping their motion.

'This isn't exactly psychoanalysis,' Will gasps out, his back arching where all other avenues of motion are claimed by the doctor's hands. Hannibal shifts sideways, leaning over Will's body to press a firm hand at the base of his cock. Will bites his lip, watching Hannibal's face slide deeper into shadow. He rolls his hips up against that hand, steadily locked in place, a bulwark against further contact.

'You know you have to work for therapy to be effective,' Hannibal adds with a touch of malice, and though his face remains hidden, Will can hear the smirk through the darkness between them.

'This isn't therapy, doctor,' Will grunts out, his own words echoing in his ears. The world begins to go red at the edges, the shadows in the room acquiring form and substance around them. He closes his eyes and gives in, groaning when Hannibal moves either hand just a fraction of an inch. A forest grows up around them, he can hear the black wind singing in the trees.

'What would you call this then,' Hannibal asks, stroking a single finger up Will's cock from base to tip and lingering there, impossibly still. Will's arms are too numb to fight back, fists clenching uselessly at his sides. His eyes pop open, straining the boundaries of their sockets as Hannibal's fingers once more release and clamp back down. Will's breath hitches in his chest, gets tangled in his throat and the world begins to swim, dissolving into a thousand shattered fragments of light.

'Conditioning,' he speaks aloud into an empty room, the first rays of sunlight filtering in through the open window like a bell against his skin. His fist is wrapped tight around his own cock, already sticky and wet and his left hand moves to his neck, as if following an unseen puppeteer. He squeezes the pulse points beneath his jaw hard, feels a slight restriction, but nothing more. His throat feels raw and bruised, like tenderized meat beneath his fingers and a few quick strokes below the waist see the rest finished.

Will falls back against a pile of pillows, reeling from exhaustion and the dull, tepid reality of morning. He rides out the waves of muscles spasming again and again, arching his neck to better feel the strain. He draws in a deep breath, watches his chest rise and fall for several long moments before allowing himself to believe the motion under his own control. Will rolls over, bleary-eyed, to check the time and sees that it's after 6:00, the bold green numbers unchanged and large enough to read without his glasses. The bedside lamp flickers above the clock, its small gold chain swinging in the early breeze. He reaches out to tug it on, to stabilize the intermediary state, and the bulb goes dim instead.

Will closes his eyes and sees a snake, wrapped hot and fierce around his neck, squeezing and shifting against sensitive skin. He strokes one hand along its scales, knowing that with quick efficiency of motion he could snap its spine, but not before it struck. He chooses to let it lie, until it proves itself too dangerous to linger, or until he has to sleep again.