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“Are you gay?”
Will breathes in, an imperceptible flare of his nostrils, and though he doesn’t meet Hannibal’s eyes, the shake of his head is confident. “No. No, I,” he gestures with the fingers of one hand, “I see minds, and the shape of someone’s heart before I see their gender, their body.”
Hannibal nods, translates, “You are drawn to their energy and personality before anything else. This could be why in the past your attractions have forgotten societal barriers, why they defy all logic.”
Will’s eyes flicker to Hannibal’s. “So there is something wrong with me.”
Hannibal blinks very slowly. “I didn’t say that. Society’s taboos are long standing, not absolute, and logic is subjective, whether you subscribe to Westermarck’s argument of reverse sexual imprinting or Freud’s Oedipus complex.”
Will’s fingers tap nervously against the arms of the chair, the clinical terminology evident striking into him like pins into a cushion. “Is this appropriate, Hannibal? This conversation? Shouldn’t I be going to a different psychiatrist if I want an analysis of my sexual development?”
Hannibal smiles, indulgent. “You’re not really my patient, Will.”
“But you are really very much someone I share a bed with,” Will says, his eyes on the floor, his voice soft. “I don’t know if I want to talk about this with you.”
“Who is better placed to understand you if not me?” Hannibal offers, then insists, "Humour me. We’ve already begun. Tell me about your father.” Will’s shoulders go stiff and he adds, “How much time you spent with him, how often you spent time with other adult figures, the general impression his parenting left on you.”
“You already know most of this.”
“Will. Please.”
Will sighs, sinking down in the seat. “I grew up lacking. My father spent his life fixing boat motors for the little money that could come home for rent. Something always changed, always became different; we always had to leave. I fed and clothed myself from a young age, learning that money was more important than dad helping me with math.”
“You don’t sound bitter.”
“I didn't hold a grudge against my father for trying to keep the two of us in a home. … I had few friends at school and none who I wanted to see outside of that… containment. There’s something to be said for schools; like boarding kennels. Some dogs might be smaller, scrappier, but in that environment we were as equal as we could get. If I saw the homes of my more affluent friends, or they came to the dilapidated little huts I called home… Adults? They were lacking more than our wealth. Teachers, other parents, they turned a blind eye to anything that made their lives difficult.”
“You were alone, more often than not. Despite his long working hours your father was still the person you saw the most often. He was the only person you saw during critical ages of sexual and emotional development.”
“He was there with a hand to my cheek when I had bad dreams.”
Hannibal nods. Each piece falls into place like strokes of paint from a brush; they shape and shade the picture of Will’s childhood, the lonely teenage boy with no outlet for his burgeoning hormones. He shifts, linking his fingers tidily in his lap, and bluntly requests, “Tell me when you first felt a sexual pull towards your father.”
Will dodges. Hannibal thought he might. “Tell me more about reverse sexual imprinting.”
“It is the hypothesis that when people are in close domestic proximity during critical years of their life, they become desensitised to sexual attraction. Would I be right in saying you had a nanny as a small child?”
“I - yes and no, I was cared for by a friend of the family, often. He couldn’t work and look after an infant.”
“Freud argued that because he had an erotic reaction to his mother at a young age that all males have an inbuilt desire to copulate with their mothers. Westermarck’s argument posits that because Freud had a wet-nurse, he never experienced the necessary bonding that would have prevented that.”
Will’s tapping his fingers on the arms again. Hannibal can see the gears turning and clicking in his head, groaning and straining as he recalls his childhood, his eyes flickering as he tries to place the exact moment that he wanted his father sexually, tries to process what could’ve caused such a thing. “You think that happened to me?”
“It’s quite possible.”
“My father was always there afterwards, though. Shouldn’t that have made it different? Tempered it?”
“I believe there are several contributing factors, Will.”
Will shrinks in on himself, his tone turning bitter. “Suggesting that my environment made me - want my father feels like rapists who try to say they did it because of childhood abuse, like a vicious circle.”
Hannibal tilts his head. “Do you feel that wrong? Like a rapist?”
Will’s eyes are wide and unhappy, his voice a tremble, scratching out between this teeth. “Aren’t they linked?”
“You mean incest and rape?” Hannibal is keen to not let Will internalise what they’re talking about, to not cover it with airs and graces and make it vague and unassuming. “Sometimes. Society would have us think that always. Society has trained us, you, to believe that incest is a violation much like that of rape. It isn’t, Will. You are more normal than you believe.”
Hannibal watches the lump in Will's throat bob tightly, a painful swallow before an audible inhale, and Will says softly, “When I was younger. In our first house - it was one of the nicer quarters of Louisiana, with houses pressed up like the kindest claustrophobia and neighbours talking over fences like they’d known each other forever, it was - a nice place,” he scratches his stubble thoughtfully, “one of those places with a real sense of community. I think the family friends I stayed with had known my mother. They’d gone to high school together, or something… I think they pitied my father. Pitied the child their friend left behind.
“When I still regularly went to their house - I spent a lot of time playing with their own children. I was not comfortable even as a child, you can imagine, I couldn’t really keep pace with their energy and noise, but I always remember…” He trails off, as if considering the relevance of what he’s going to say. Hannibal raises his eyebrows patiently. “They convinced me to play ‘house’ with them. Pretend tea in empty plastic cups, by the swings in their back yard. They didn’t really like me, so I was just a guest. A daughter and son played, ma and pa.”
There was some irony in that which is not lost on Hannibal. Or Will, for that matter, he thinks. He watches the unhappy twist of Will’s mouth before he continued. “It was mom’s job to pour tea for dad. He would say, ‘thank you!’ and pucker up his mouth and she’d give him a kiss. They were imitating their own parents, of course. I always remembered that, since I never saw what it was like myself."
Hannibal nods. “You felt in some capacity as you grew up that you were fulfilling the role of a wife. Doing the laundry, doing the dishes, making supper.” Will inclines his head, acknowledgement.
“When I was fifteen, sixteen… everyone at that school was having sex, kissing in hallways, boasting about conquests like sex was a prize, a reward, a right for only the privileged, beautiful few. I wasn’t having sex with anybody. Neither was my father. He didn’t have the right of a wife to do that for him.”
In so few words, Hannibal could see so many of the cracks and flaws of society laid bare. It left a bad taste in his mouth to see how much of the world’s state had warped the way Will looked at things. At the same time he was thankful; Will was sinking deeper into his grasp with each confession. It was beautiful to see Will opened up, with all his admissions, the weight of guilt he had carried since youth tumbling off his tongue and out his lips.
“Was there a catalyst where you realised you wanted your father sexually? An event, a moment?”
Will shakes his head. “It was less like a sudden break in the clouds and more like… a leak in the ceiling, filling the room, until,” his breath catches, “all I could think about was what it would be like to kiss him, to, to be touched.” A pause. A whisper. “I was so ashamed. I am ashamed.” He covers his mouth with his fingers, speaking through them like it would filter his words, make them less potent.
“It must have been difficult,” Hannibal placates. “Not only were you experiencing feelings considered taboo, but the awakening of your sexuality at the same time - your capacity to be attracted to any gender - would have made you very confused.”
“Confused,” Will repeats, nods. Tears are pricking at the corners of his eyes, fearful, but he blinks them away in the next instant.
“You mentioned your father soothing away your nightmares.”
“It was the only time he was ever really affectionate.”
“Tell me.”
“I had night terrors sometimes. I was capable of hurting myself if there was no one there to stop me. I shouted, sometimes. I always woke up with him there, kneeling on the bed I’d had since I was six, touching my face and arms and trying to convince me I was safe.”
“This was arousing for you?”
Hannibal knew Will wouldn’t like it being phrased like that, and sure enough he flinches, shifting unhappily in his seat. Then he admits, “Not at first. Then one night I woke up and he was pinning my wrists down, trying to stop me from hitting him. I could feel…” Will hesitates. “He has, he had callouses from his work. I could feel the tough skin, my pulse hammering under my skin against the press of his thumbs, and he was looming over me in the dark.”
Hannibal uncrosses his legs, leaning forward with interest, tilting his head in an affectionate manner to listen, and then he says, “Are you aware that you still enjoy having your wrists pinned above your head?”
Will was not aware. Or if he was he didn’t want to think about it. He reacts immediately, fiercely shaking his head, limbs jittering, hands jumping around as he searches for some kind of mental defence. He breathes between shaky laughter, his voice turning blunt, a fast-rising wall: “This is why I didn’t want to talk to you about this. I don’t think about my father when we’re fucking, Hannibal.”
Will rarely spoke so vulgarly, hiding behind purple words and metaphors, preferring that if he had to be blunt he would be somehow poetic about it, the inner working of his mind feeding out like literature. Hannibal has to take a moment of his own to process it, and gently tells him, “I didn’t think you did. You have internalised so much fear and guilt over this that now you are in a relationship - now that we are in a relationship - you believe that you are still broken. I know you don’t look to me and see your father, Will, but I know that this still affects you deeply.”
Will calms with each sentence, his chest expanding and shrinking as he takes his breathing down, brings it back to something a little more like a normal rate. Hannibal knows there is something lurking beneath the stress, something more than just the immoral desires of a teenage boy. He prompts gently: “What happened?”
“I kissed him.” There’s a dull edge to Will’s voice. Hannibal recognises it as the voice he uses when he’s teaching. It’s the voice he uses when he wants to emotionally detach. “I did something wrong, I don’t remember what. He was yelling and for once in my life I was yelling back, and he grabbed me, and said, ‘William’ - he was the only person who called me that, only when he was angry, and I was so… confused, between nightmares, because of school, because of what I wanted, and I kissed him, the way I’d seen people kiss in the movies.”
Hannibal finds it hard to suppress how impressed he is. Some small part of him marvels at the fact he somehow, against all odds, found this magnificent creature, this mess of principles and considerations. “How did he react?”
“At first he didn’t,” Will says, shrugging and leaning back, sighing. “I think I frightened him, or startled him. He let me kiss him, just for a moment, and I thought what would happen next would be from the movies, too.”
“It wasn’t.”
“He pushed me off him and told me to get the bus to school. Then he left. I didn’t see him for three days. I think he avoided coming home until I was asleep.”
“Was he still present to comfort your nightmares?”
“Never in the same way. He touched me like I had something contagious - only as much as he had to.”
“You never got him holding you down against your mattress again. Never saw the large shape of him over you again, never felt the intimate reminder of how strong he was, the power he had over you.”
Will was very still. “Please don’t talk about it like that. You make it sound…” He trails off, shaking his head. “Don’t talk about it like that.”
Hannibal can feel the nexus approaching. There was always an end game here, in making Will pull apart the scarring covering years of shame and secrets. “You say you don’t think about your father when we are in bed together. Perhaps you should.”
The reaction is, of course, incredulity. “Excuse me?”
Hannibal tugs at his cuffs, brushes imaginary dust from the thighs of his trousers, leaning back as he tells Will, “I can assure you that you are normal. We have all had sexual feelings deemed inappropriate by society. Society has a way of damning the things it does not understand. It refuses to see the ways in which a young, lonely boy would want to seek comfort in the arms of his father. I see the ways. And I know that when you suppress emotions it is little better than a shallow grave for them.”
Will nods, understanding but not seeing. Hannibal clears his throat. “I care about you, Will. I’m also older than you; and stronger. Is it so hard to see me as your father?”
Will shakes his head fervently again. “Don’t twist this, us, not us.”
“I want you to be free of the pain this causes you. What did you want him to do, after you kissed him?”
“I wanted him. I just - I wanted him to touch me.” Will’s eyes were a little far-off, and he sounds a little as though he can’t hear himself, an abundantly sexual confession: “I wanted to make him come."
Hannibal takes a breath. He imagines the stance of a boatyard mechanic, a Louisiana native. He imagines the loving but distant manner of parenting that Will’s father surely had, and then he says, “You may find this vulgar, unpleasant, even ridiculous at first, but do this for me, Will: pretend I am him.”
Will looks at him sharply, suspicious, doubtful.
Hannibal stares right back. “I’m waiting, William.”
There it is. Something shifts behind Will’s eyes, and after a long, painful stretch of silence, he stands up, and approaches Hannibal warily. He moves like a nervous animal, slow and quick all at once, rushing in to press his mouth against Hannibal’s. Hannibal lets it linger until he can almost hear the spark of Will’s nerves, then kisses him back, opening his mouth up to welcome Will closer.
The effect of reciprocation is immediate; it must feel heady for Will, whose eyes are closed, clearly trying so hard to imagine - it must be potent, to get what he’s wanted after so long, even if it’s only a shade of it. Will shakes as he contemplates his desires and then submits to them, sitting himself across Hannibal’s lap, leaving their kiss to nuzzle and mouth at the skin of Hannibal’s throat.
Hannibal breathes in, leaning back and staying still, only moving to accommodate Will’s movements; any hint of resistance now and Will would snap back out of it, unable to return to the role he was slipping into. Will grinds down, long slow rolls of his hips, working them both up, and then he stills, leaning back from Hannibal, his hands pressing fingertips into his shoulders. He blinks like he’s not quite sure where he is. “Touch,” he hesitates, then says, “Touch my mouth.”
Hannibal lifts a hand and cups Will’s jaw. He doesn’t miss the shaky inhale, the way Will holds his breath, and then he rubs a thumb over Will’s wet lower lip, smoothing it across his cheek afterwards. Will’s eyes flutter closed, and stricken with the impulse to get a reaction, Hannibal rolls his hips up, making sure Will can feel that he’s hard, that he wants him.
Will exhales, pushing down eagerly in response, eyes still shut when he murmurs, “Dad” and then when Hannibal grabs his hips he slumps forward, breathing heavily into the crook of Hannibal’s neck and shoulder. He’s falling into the memories of a teenager but with the body, mind and whims of an adult; as a result in the next moment he’s groaning, “Fuck me, please”, expressing all the desire that he would have struggled with when he was sixteen.
Hannibal is willing but struck with a momentary dilemma; if he were to do this properly, he’d need to leave Will for a moment, or take him through to the bedroom where he has lubricant and condoms. They haven’t quite reached the point where they forego either of those; the first more out of necessity, but with due diligence, there’s ways around it… and in there, Hannibal finds his solution. He can’t break the spell so to speak now that they’re into it, so Hannibal adapts, and thinks on what Will would be wanting his father to do: He would want his father to work him open, slowly, a finger at a time with spit and long work, so that Will could then sink down on his cock, taking it all in, inch by inch.
So that’s what Hannibal does. He slurs endearments to get Will to move enough so that he can take his jeans and boxers off, turns casually wetting his fingers in his mouth into a show and then sinks one deeply into Will, making his breath hitch. Hannibal works carefully. One by one, up to three, by which point Will is shaking slightly, rocking back to meet each long slide of Hannibal's fingers. Hannibal’s arousal is sustained by this but Will’s not quite hard anymore. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t pay his cock any attention, not right now. There are more important things. Will’ll get to come, he’ll make sure of it, but he’s going to fuck him first.
It’s what Will's father would’ve done.
By the time he’s done stretching Will open, he’s hard enough that he can slip into Will’s desire for a passionate, wanting encounter without any real exertion on his part; he undoes his pants and frees his cock, spitting into his hand and running it across the length of his cock, trying to afford them both what readiness he might given that they’re lacking any proper tools.
Will catches his wrist suddenly, pulling Hannibal’s hand off his cock. Hannibal relaxes, leans back into the chair, watching with earnest interest as Will uses both his hands on him. Hannibal can see the element of fantasy here. Will is not a small man by any means, has always had hands a touch too large for him; like paws, but they’re delicate, in a roughed up way - and his hands have probably never been small, not even when he was sixteen and craving affection, yet Will uses his hands like one hand wouldn’t be enough, couldn’t possibly be enough.
When he’s done touching Hannibal, with a fascinated air, stroking up and down his cock, he wets his palms to stroke down and then is hunching forward, making the moves with breathless anticipation. Hannibal takes his hips, steadies him, and there it is; Will seats himself down slowly on Hannibal’s cock, and lets out a long moan that sounds somewhere between pained and relieved.
Will’s knees are pressed awkwardly into the corners of the chair, either side of Hannibal’s hips, and his fingers clamour for purchase now he doesn’t have a use for them, pressing into the lines of Hannibal’s shoulders and then wrapping around him. There’s little space between them as Will surges forward for the intimacy he has been craving so long; although this is far from their first time together, it feels appropriately new, appropriately skewed. They are not, after all, Hannibal Lecter, psychiatrist and Will Graham, teacher - he is Will’s father, older, muscles stretched to exhaustion from working the boat yards and Will is just a schoolboy, lonely and yearning and not quite sure what to do.
Hannibal has the intuition and experience for the both of them, since Will has currently shut his own away. He keeps his hands firmly on Will’s hips, his thumbs pressing into the space above the slight jut of bone, and after gifting him with a kiss he begins to thrust in earnest. It’s a movement not made easy by the constraints of their position, but oh it’s slow and deep, and Will’s breath hitches each time, until he’s eagerly rocking back, taking the reins for himself.
Hannibal takes the opportunity to move his hands, sliding one around to the small of Will’s back and the other he brings down to wrap around Will’s cock, encouraging him to get hard again; Will’s cheeks are starting to go pink as he does, stop-start breath turning into drawn out moans as he fucks himself back on Hannibal’s cock and eagerly pushes his own into Hannibal’s hand.
“Good boy,” Hannibal says softly, and Will’s groan is loud and shaky as he rolls his hips down hard.
A moan is forced out of Hannibal in turn and he pulls Will forward, taking control back to fuck him as hard as he can like this. Will puts his face into Hannibal’s neck and Hannibal can feel the inhale, and with another shuddering, desperate noise, Will says, “Daddy.”
He’s quiet and sparing at first, but with each thrust, each way that Hannibal dragged his hands against Will’s skin - over his hips, his cock, his ass - and each receptive noise Hannibal makes, it becomes a litany, breathless, whimpering repetitions of “Daddy, oh, dad, fuck” and squirming, pushing back, and Hannibal knows, instinctively, he won’t have a chance to pull out, and that Will won’t let him, either. He wants this all too much, his daddy fucking him, coming inside him, laying a mark on him like no one else can.
Hannibal thinks of Will at sixteen, all skin and bone and awkward hard ons, thinks about what a wasted chance his father had, to hold him down and fuck him into the mattress. He should’ve done it. The sins of the father are now the opportunities of Hannibal, though, so he’s grateful, as he takes a handful of Will’s hair and kisses him hard. He whispers, “William” against his mouth, with the authority of the desperate, broken man his father would’ve been, using his full name not because he’s angry at Will but because he’s furious at himself for giving in, for fucking his boy, for it feeling so good.
It’s another whimper, another roll down of Will’s hips, Will says “Daddy” again and then Hannibal grunts and pulls Will’s hips down, keeping their bodies flush as he comes, groaning as he does.
Will pants, fingers squeezing hard against Hannibal’s shoulders. His eyes are shocked wide, and before any lull in the moment can detatch Will from the experience, Hannibal puts a hand around his cock and kisses him, jerking him off, wanting to pull him over the edge as fast as possible. Hannibal can tell he’s almost there already, can tell that making Hannibal come like that did wonders for how turned on he was.
It takes a few whispered platitudes, calling him “my boy”, a promise that he loves him, some half-hearted thrusts where Hannibal’s cock is still in him - and Will comes with a strangled whimper.
Will is very silent when he eventually climbs off Hannibal’s lap, legs shaking, come spattered on his shirt, shifting uncomfortably with each step towards his underwear and jeans. Will looks at Hannibal with an eye that is wary and says, “That was strange."
“You may not feel that way yet but I think this was helpful,” Hannibal answers, wiping his hands off with a tissue from the side table and tucking himself back into his clothes.
Will’s voice is strained. “I hope you’re right.”
Hannibal smiles, firm and encouraging, and Will darts his eyes away, ashamed. Hannibal can see he’s made something misshapen of him, and feels proud, to fix and twist him in one fell swoop.
He can tell it this happen again.
Maybe not soon, but eventually: Will will crawl into his bed, begging for another exercise in releasing all that pent up, wrong desire. And Hannibal will be there. The only one he trusts.