Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

winged madness my madness
rips open the immensity
and the immensity rips me

I am alone
some blind men will read these lines
in never-ending tunnels

I am falling into the immensity
which falls into itself
it is blacker than my death

Excerpt from “The Archangelical” by Georges Bataille

Will Graham is never allowed to be alone again.

There is a camera trained on his cell at all times. It records every lap he paces around the cramped space, every frantic nighttime awakening, and yes, every shit he takes. Privacy is a dirty word at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and when Will speaks it aloud, he’s met with sad, pitying smiles: Oh, honey. Nobody told you?

He isn’t allowed to touch anything that isn’t made of plastic, plexiglass, or scratchy, thin fabric. If he were to reply to his fan mail, which he has no intention of doing, he would be forced to write his responses in crayon. Even the other prisoners get fragile little graphite sticks, but not Will. Will cannot be trusted with graphite, nor can he be trusted with his shoelaces, his glasses, or any number of other mundane things. His world becomes blurry.

It’s particularly obvious in the showers. There is an orderly, Ginger—that isn’t his name but it’s what everyone calls him—who escorts Will to the shower at every opportunity. He’s 6’4” and built like a freight train, and they call him Ginger because his hair is so red that it appears to be perpetually on fire. Ginger’s attentions began with a little manhandling and a snide remark about the size of Will’s penis. Will doesn’t complain when he locks the metal cuff too tightly onto his wrist before attaching it to the steel bar in the stall, allegedly installed to make the facility ADA compliant. Will doesn’t complain when he hears the same joke about cocktail wieners for the fifteenth time. He doesn’t complain; he embraces the blur when Ginger slams his face into the wall for an imagined slight.

Finally, Will snaps. Ginger aims the detachable shower head at his back and turns the heat so high that he will later receive a minor skin graft. It’s agony and humiliation and rage hotter than boiling water, and Will fucking loses it—he lunges for Ginger and sinks his teeth into his meaty shoulder and comes away with a great, bloody chunk and swallows. His teeth are so sharp they could slice through his tongue. For a few seconds, Will feels alive.

As punishment, they take his books and pens and glasses and shoelaces and everything else. Worse, they replace Ginger.

“I’m Matthew Brown,” his new orderly informs him, smile lean and ferrety. “It’s so good to finally meet you.”

“Big fan?” Will asks, not bothering to meet his eyes through the bars, due more to exhaustion than any real fear of empathizing with the man. He’s been getting better at turning that off.

“The biggest.”

“If you wrote and I didn’t answer, don’t take it personally,” he says. “I’m not allowed to have pens.”

“I know. They gave me a list. Three pages. It seems like there are quite a few things you aren’t allowed to have, Mr. Graham—or do you prefer Dr. Graham?”

“I’m not a doctor,” Will says dully.

“Not officially.” He steps closer to Will’s cage. “But I’ve seen your work. You might as well be. Really, you’ll have to walk me through it sometime.”

Now comes the same awful dilemma he faces whenever he meets someone new: is it better to argue his case and risk scorn, disbelief, and endless gaslighting, or to remain silent and risk a beating? He looks Matthew up and down. The man is fit, wiry, but there’s a softness to his eyes which Will rarely sees anymore. It’s deeper and more tender than pity. There is certainly a way to play this situation to his advantage, but Will is…so tired.

“Sorry, Matthew,” he says. “I think you’re looking for someone else.”

“Oh, but I’m looking for you, Mr. Graham. I’m looking right at you.”

“Might want to get your eyes checked,” he mutters, and part of him wonders if he’s provoking this man on purpose, if maybe there’s a sad, vicious little beast in the back of his head that thinks he might deserve another beating, whether or not Matthew’s accusations are true. “I know who the Ripper is,” Will says, bitter. “He’s not me. I’m not him.”

Matthew cocks his head. He’s so close to the bars that Will could lean forward and bite him, if he truly harbored those dark inclinations, which he does not. Ginger was a mistake. An impulse borne of pure rage and two months of everyone insisting that Will is a depraved cannibal. He was hurt an confused. He didn’t do it because he was hungry.

“You really think you know who he is,” Matthew repeats, disbelieving.

He turns toward the back wall of his cell and stands perfectly still, visually tracing the familiar cracks in the stone.

“No no—sorry, Mr. Graham, you’re not gonna get away with that. It’s shower time.”

Will considers arguing, but they always force him into the shower one way or another, so in the end he goes quietly. Matthew has a clear plastic mask which he’s required to strap to Will’s face, but he takes it off as soon as they reach the shower, murmuring, “This will be our little secret.”

The shower isn’t bad. Bordering on pleasant, even. Matthew cuffs him to the bar, but not so tightly that it bruises, and he sets the water to a comfortable temperature. He turns to the side so he can only see Will from the corner of his eye—enough to catch any sudden movements, but not so much that Will is robbed of all dignity. Will closes his eyes against the shampoo and can pretend, for a moment, that he’s at home.

Matthew breaks the illusion: “Who is he, Mr. Graham?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s already told everyone who will listen, only to find out that actually, most of them are not willing to listen. Not when he starts talking “crazy.” The information is out there, floating around Tattlecrime in condescending quotation marks. Matthew already knows.

“Mr. Graham,” Matthew says gently, “Il Monster has been dead for three years. The Ripper last killed in September.”

“Three years, now?”

“It’s March,” Matthew says.

Will frowns at the wall. He missed their anniversary.

“Is it true that the defendant had a personal relationship with this Il Monstro?”

“I met him once,” Will mutters.

“Graham,” the judge snaps, pompous wig bouncing atop his head. “We’ll have no more interruptions, unless you want to be held in contempt of court.”

Will seals his lips and slumps back in his chair, picking at a loose thread in his old suit. It’s his only suit. He hasn’t worn it since his father’s funeral, fourteen years ago, and although he knows it’s irrational, he can’t help but think that it still smells like whisky and embalming fluid.

“Prosecution, please repeat the question,” the judge prompts, though everyone heard it.

“Is it true that the defendant was in a relationship with Il Monstro?”

“They corresponded,” Jack says tersely, visibly disapproving of the change in wording. “They did so under my supervision, and only in the context of solving the Buffalo Bill case. Graham is right, they only met once.”

“The rest was done through seven phone calls and…” the prosecution’s smarmy lawyer glances at his notes. “Eight hundred and forty-six letters.” He purses his lips, restraining a smile. “All of those were written under your supervision?”

“No,” Jack admits.

As furious as he is at Jack, Will also feels bad for him. He isn’t here by choice. He’s been subpoenaed to testify, and Will has spoken to him a few times since he was incarcerated—Jack doesn’t believe he’s innocent, but he doesn’t believe Will was conscious, either. Unfortunately for him, Will has not plead unconsciousness.

“I’d like to draw the jury’s attention to exhibit F,” the lawyer says. He gestures to the projector screen. In the back of the court room, the audiovisual tech fumbles with his ridiculous powerpoint for a good forty-five seconds before the image appears.

It’s a scanned photocopy of their exchange. Two letters, side by side: Will’s messy scrawl beside Hannibal’s perfect cursive, bordering on calligraphy. The documents have been digitally highlighted, a thin film of piss-yellow overlaying key phrases.

“Emphasis mine,” the lawyer says. “Mr. Crawford, could you please read the exchange aloud?”

Beside him, Martha, the only non-FBI lawyer Will could afford, bites her lip and leans forward in her chair, an objection caught behind her teeth, but she relaxes after a moment. She’s fresh out of school. She’s forgotten some of the rules, or else hasn’t learned them yet, and she is miles away from her element. Though Will could have taken his pick of top-quality lawyers willing to make his defense pro bono just to cash in on the publicity, Martha is the only one who would let him plead innocent.

Jack sighs, looking older now than Will has ever seen him, and Will wonders if he’s really aged so much in the months since their last visit, or if it’s just the harsh interrogation light above the witness stand, submerging his eyes in shadow.

“Doctor Lecter,” he says, defeated, “I’ve been dreaming of you again. I imagine your office was situated in one of those ancient Florentine banquet halls, with the woodwork restored and the marble columns polished to a sheen. I’ve seen the photos of your office, but the image still sticks. It’s…” Jack pauses. Grimaces. The prosecutor urges him forward with a quick rolling motion of his hand. “It’s where I go when I feel lonely,” Jack says.

“Thank you,” the lawyer says, cutting him off. “And could you please read the response, beginning at the last paragraph?”

Jack’s eyes skim the document. He pushes his reading glasses up his nose, an unconscious tic which has very little to do with eyesight. Will, conversely, cannot see the document from where he sits, as he isn’t trusted with his own glasses even in court, but he remembers the exchange vividly. It was one of their more damning conversations.

“You understand better than any the obscene ecstasy of being fully witnessed,” he says, voice devoid of all inflection. “Dearest William, my perfect, darling boy, I cannot wait for your visit. I need you to witness my body as well as my mind. I suspect you will feel entirely engulfed by my presence. Yours until death and beyond—” Jack closes his eyes for a long moment, releases a shaky breath. “Yours until death and beyond, Hannibal.”

“Thank you.” The prosecution smirks. “That will be all.”

Will is naked, and Matthew is watching him, forgoing his dignity in favor of a new, shameless interest in Will’s body. “I didn’t know you were gay,” he says. “Never saw those letters before. Good job keeping them out of Lounds’s grimy hands.”

“I’m not gay,” Will says. “I was married.”

“Yeah, it’s called a beard.”

“I’m not gay,” he repeats. “Hannibal is gay. I rejected his advances every time.”

“That didn’t sound like rejection, in those letters.” When he glances over his shoulder, Matthew is staring unabashedly at his ass. “You said is. Like he’s still alive.”

Will doesn’t grace his impudence with an answer.

“He didn’t frame you, Mr. Graham. We all saw his corpse. The cops put fifteen bullets in him. Fifteen. He was dead before he hit the ground.” He lets out a little puff of air, amused, the ghost of a smile which Will refuses to turn around and witness. “You know, his little stunt, wearing the guard’s face—he could have done that at any time, but he did it while you were in Florence. I wonder, did he escape to kill you…”

He squeezes his eyes shut and forces himself to scrub the watery shampoo into his scalp.

“…Or to fuck you?”

“Fuck you,” Will spits, spinning around. Before he fully comprehends the implications of his actions, Will has dropped to the floor, cracking the joint of his thumb through the loose cuff, and his forearm is crushing Matthew’s throat, pinning him to the wall. Cooling water mists down on them. Their faces are inches apart. Matthew grins manically as he struggles to breathe in Will’s exhalations.

“Gonna bite me?” He croaks.

Will braces a hand on his forehead and slams him harder into the wall. Matthew laughs.

“Bite me, Doctor. I’m delicious.” The last word escapes as a soft hiss.

Will is soaked, frothy shampoo dripping into his eyes, burning them. His thumb might be broken. He’s pressed chest-to-chest, body-to-body with Matthew, which is exactly what Matthew wanted. Slowly, with great effort, he releases his grip.

Matthew hunches over and coughs while Will stands frozen, mind racing. What else can they take away from me? What privacy is left to invade? Maybe they’ll just hurt him. Hurt his case. This sure as hell won’t look good in court. Ginger did not look good in court.

“Not hungry? Shame. I know you’d love the way I taste,” Matthew rasps, straightening up. “Until then, I guess we’ll just have to let Dr. Chilton mediate our differences.” He takes a step forward. The damp print of Will’s body thins his uniform. Will takes a step back, into the spray. “Unless…” he grins, looking genuinely happy. Not teasing. “Unless you were flirting with me. Is that how you flirted with Il Monstro? If so, it’s no wonder he skinned a man’s face for you.”

Another step forward. Will’s back hits the wall. His heart pounds, screaming at him to fight, to flee, to fawn—only one of those options is remotely viable, but Will can’t bring himself to do it. To beg, apologize, play into Matthew’s strange, knobby hands. He stands as still as prey.

“I don’t mind,” Matthew says. They’re toe-to-toe now, and Matthew reaches up to caress his cheek. “I like a little blood in my wine, Doctor.”

He kisses Will. His mouth does, in fact, taste of blood, and Will’s is slack beneath it.

“They say you aren’t supposed to meet your idols,” he breathes against Will’s lips. “But I’m not disappointed in the slightest.”

Will doesn’t move. He stops breathing. Matthew’s hand trails down his chest, knuckles gently brushing against his limp cock, fingers twisting in his pubic hair. Inside, Will is screaming off, get off, don’t touch me—

“Turn around.”

He doesn’t move.

Matthew takes him gently by the shoulders and spins him around, and Will doesn’t know what to do so he just lets it happen, keeps his palms pressed against the tile as Matthew pumps the all-purpose soap onto his fingers and slips one into Will’s clenched hole, murmuring, “Relax, Doctor. I’ll take good care of you.”

“Don’t do this. You don’t—fuck.“ He finds his voice just in time to be cut off by a second finger jammed in beside the first. Matthew’s hot breath in his ear. No words, just a long, self-satisfied purr.

Will remains perfectly still and begs silently: make it stop make it stop please let me disappear.

A third finger. God, it hurts no matter how gently Matthew touches him; he can’t force himself to relax. He’s trapped. He’s trapped in this hospital and in this stall and in his own body, which feels far too small to fit the enormous terror brewing inside him. He knows what comes next. The slick sounds of Matthew stroking himself to hardness are audible over the shower, but only because they’re so close. If he screamed, who would hear him? Does he dare?

Make it stop make it stop make it stop.

The fat, blunt head of Matthew’s cock presses against his sphincter. He isn’t nearly loose enough to take it, and any preparation the fingers afforded him disappears with the next wave of panic, which locks up his muscles and throws away the key. He can’t relax even if he wants to, even though he knows that’s the only way to make penetration bearable. Molly put a finger in him, once, and Will physically leapt out of the bed.

Make it stop make it stop make it stop.

Nobody is coming to save him. He won’t scream. He can’t. Even if he did, who would come running?

“Shh shh shh,” Matthew coos. “Relax, Doctor. I’ll make it good for you.”

Will’s hands clench against the wall, nails digging into his palms. He bites his tongue as hard as possible to keep from speaking those words aloud: make it stop, please, please let me out. He doesn’t say them. His lips are sealed.

And yet, someone answers:

I can let you out if you can let me in.

He opens his eyes. Tile stares back at him. He thinks, who are you, and then he thinks he doesn’t fucking care and he opens his mouth and begs aloud, “Yes, yes, anything, please.”

Will is alone in his cell. He’s standing in the middle of the room, rod-straight, arms tense at his sides, facing the bars as though he’s expecting company. There is no clock in his cell, so he can’t tell how much time has passed. His hair is damp. It could be sweat, though. It could have been a horrible dream.

He consciously relaxes his posture and sits on the bed, face in his hands. He’s sore, and the bed is far from soft, but that isn’t proof. There is a horrific bite mark on the back of his left forearm, raised and angry red with flecks of blood where canines—likely his own—sunk into the flesh, but that isn’t proof, either.

“Will.”

His head snaps up. Beverly is peering at him from behind the manilla folder which she holds in front of the lower half of her face, hiding her shock.

“Will, what happened?” Her gaze falls on the bite mark, that meaningless distortion of meat and blood, as though she hasn’t spent a good quarter of her career writing up the forensic implications of biting in violent assault.

“I don’t know,” he says, honestly.

“You don’t know? Come here, Will. Let me see that.”

“What’s in the folder?” He asks.

“Will, come here.”

Will’s shoulders stiffen. He sits defiantly on the cot, knees pressed tight together, staring at the floor.

She sighs. “I can tell from here that it happened in the past hour. You might as well let me look.”

He stews for another moment, gazing at the angry red mark and the dark bruise blooming beneath. At last, he mutters, “Skin is a terrible medium for recording dental imprints.”

“I’m the one who told you that,” she says. “The pattern has way more to do with the way your body bruises than the shape of the teeth. I’m not trying to solve the mystery, Will. I want to see if you’re okay.”

Will narrows his eyes, doubtful, and once he’s sure she’s seen the expression, he reluctantly shuffles to the bars and holds up his arm, not daring to extend it through the gap. She peers at it, brushing her hair from her face as she stoops down to get a better look. She hovers the back of her hand over the wound, feeling the heat. “That could easily get infected,” she says, straightening up. “You need to talk to medical.”

He scoffs. “Medical doesn’t want to talk to me. When I had a third degree burn, getting them to care was like pulling teeth with my bare hands.”

Beverly grimaces. She’s one of the few people who knows what Ginger did to him, and Will suspects she had some hand in his convenient reassignment. If he’s only allowed to have one person on his side, which seems to be the case, Beverly Katz isn’t a bad choice.

“I’ll talk to medical,” she says. “Tell me what happened.”

“How long are you allowed to visit?”

She crosses her arms and glares at him.

“I don’t know what happened,” he says. “I was in the shower and then I was here, and my arm was like this.”

Her face pales. “You’re still losing time?”

“This is the first time in a while.”

“That’s even worse, Will. That means the infection could be back. We need to get you checked out as soon as we can.”

“It doesn’t matter if I’m crazy in prison,” he says. It comes out a little harsher than he intended, so he takes a slow breath and adds, “When they sentence me, I mean, they’re going to find me guilty. It will be easier if I’m crazy for that.”

She gives him a disappointed moue which says, in big capital letters, I’m going to tell them to order a brain scan, and you can’t stop me.

Will sighs, submitting to her unsolicited care, and extends his hand for the file. She passes it through the bars, no longer afraid of their brief moment of physical contact. He still hasn’t figured out whether she genuinely believes him or is just willing to consider the possibility that he’s telling the truth, but either way, it’s more than can be said for most.

He thumbs through the file. It contains a few dozen photographs of two couples: white, pretty young professionals. In each scene, the husband and wife face each other. They’ve been shot in the head and crudely sewn together, mouth to mouth, chest to chest, hip to hip. Their abdomens are split, spilling their viscera together in a soupy mess of blue and yellow and nauseating pink.

“Just the two?” He asks without looking up.

“For now. Still, definite pattern.”

He cocks his head. “Entry wounds are really high on the skull. Almost like…”

“One killer, two guns,” Beverly confirms.

“It was important that they died simultaneously.”

The first pair is lying side-by-side on their overstuffed marital bed, and Will it sitting at the foot of it, aching.

“Mr. and Mrs. Parker are not in love,” he says, tasting the bitter truth of the statement. “They have every reason to be in love. They come from similar backgrounds. They live comfortably. They have…a history, a long one. Maybe high-school sweethearts. They communicate, and they have their little rituals and their secret language, just like a loving couple should. But they aren’t in love.” He paces around the bed, watching their organs slurp back into their abdomens, their stitches unravel, the blood flow back into to their faces. “Something is…amis,” he says, “in the Parkers’ bedroom. That’s why I put them here, on the bed, where they make love.” Will sneers. “But they haven’t made anything here for a long, long time.”

They’re on their knees. Begging. Crying. Will kneels beside them and carefully balances his weight on the mattress. His twin pistols bracket their skulls. He watches their faces, watches their eyes meet, full of terror—and for all their forced, scripted communication, they say more to each other in that moment than they have in the past five years.

Will pulls the triggers.

“They were both in couples’ therapy,” he says, allowing the vision to fade away before opening his eyes. He passes her the file.

“We already tried that route,” she says. “Different therapists in different cities. The Parkers were doing Telehealth. They were busy people.”

“You’re looking for shared a colleague, then. Maybe a supervisor, or someone they both met at a conference. An expert in the field. This person was able to give advice on their most difficult cases,” Will says. “Definitely female. She’s married but lonely. She can’t divorce her husband. It would ruin her credibility as a couples’ therapist if she couldn’t make her own marriage work. She’s…jealous. She craves intimacy, but her idea of ‘intimacy’ has become twisted into something like…I don’t know. Coalescence. She doesn’t know what she wants or what it’s supposed to feel like. She hasn’t tasted it in so long.”

He takes a slow, shaky breath.

“She thought she was helping,” Will says.

“Don’t tell me she thought these were mercy killings.”

“These couples were perfect. They should have had perfect relationships, but they didn’t, and no amount of therapy worked. Hopeless cases. No matter what they tried, they just couldn’t connect.” He steadies himself again. His eyes feel hot and swollen. “But when she killed them, that last moment before they died, they looked into each other’s eyes and fell in love again.”

Beverly doesn’t say anything. Her eyes are fixed on a photograph of the Parkers’ shared intestines, decaying into each other.

“She brought them closer than she could bring any of her other clients. She merged them.” His voice cracks on the word merged, and it takes a moment to get it under control. “They never—in her thinking, at least—they never have to be alone again.”

After another long moment of silence, Beverly closes the file and slips it into her briefcase. “Thanks, Will,” she says.

“Any time.” The words are dull and bitter.

He turns to the wall and waits for Beverly to leave, but she lingers. He can feel her hot gaze on his bite mark. “I heard about the trial,” she says quietly. “I wasn’t there, but I read the transcript. You kept those letters out of the press for a long time.”

“I burned them,” Will says simply. She makes an inquisitive sound. “I burned my copies,” he amends. “When they tossed Hannibal’s cell, they found out he’d been writing duplicates. He wanted to keep our entire conversation so he could read it over.”

The image strikes him unbidden: Il Monstro perched on the luxurious cot his cooperation earned him, submersed in their exchange. A pang of grief grips them both.

“Will,” she says gently. “It’s not too late to withdraw your plea.”

“Good luck with your seamstress,” he says. Beverly takes her leave.

Matthew arrives to escort him to the medical bay. For a moment, Will is terrified—he knows what happened, and Will doesn’t want to—but then he’s joined by four more guards, three of whom he’s never met. The fourth is a stout, no-nonsense woman named Tamera, who Will is quite fond of, if only because she doesn’t touch him any more than necessary. He tosses around some quip about the entourage, but in the end, he’s too tired to say it. Tamera explains for him:

“Dr. Chilton has ordered a brain scan, and we don’t have imaging equipment here.”

Matthew smirks at him. A white bandage peeks out from the cuff of his jacket. “Time for a little field trip, Mr. Graham.”

They weld him to a glorified luggage cart with eight-point restraints. Matthew takes great pleasure in tightening his hip harness beyond the point of comfort, pulling the forest green of his jumpsuit obscenely tight against against his crotch. It compromises circulation in his legs and almost makes it look like he has an erection—he doesn’t, but that doesn’t stop Matthew from subtly palming his cock as he loads Will into the back of the transport van. Will doesn’t react. He thinks about the shower. About begging.

He’s hoping for a back entrance, but they wheel him directly through the ER waiting room, where bleeding patients take a break from their own trauma to snap pictures of Will’s, and through the double doors to neurology. At least nobody has alerted the press. The best Lounds will get is pixelated cameraphone shot, likely zoomed in on his crotch, emblazoned with the headline, Chesapeake Ripper: Bondage Enthusiast? If he’s lucky, they won’t run his face again.

The wizened doctor greets him, trying and failing to hide his nerves. “We’re looking for anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis,” he confirms, “but I’m going to do a full workup, just in case. Any questions before we get started?”

Will shakes his head. His legs are going numb.

“Good. So if you could just…” he gestures vaguely to Will’s armed escorts. “His, uh, board should fit in the machine, but you’ll need to take the mask off.”

They detach the wheeled base from his cart and tip him onto his back, lie him on the table. It’ll be a tight fit, but the neurologist assures them the machine will still work. Matthew is the one to unstrap his mask. As he does, he murmurs, “No more biting, Doctor. Got it?”

Will doesn’t answer. The neurologist pushes buttons. He smells plastic. His head slides into the cramped space, and, as always, he is trapped.

Panic flares through him like lightning, and he’s suddenly overcome by the urge to thrash, to scream, to run—of course he can’t; he can barely move his head. He’s encased in plastic, locked in by layers of leather and fabric and skin and flesh and the space inside him is so tiny, is shrinking by the moment, leaving his consciousness squeezed and compressed into the back of skull. Cornered. He needs to get out. He needs to get out, but he can’t find the words to ask and nobody will listen, and he is flooded with cold terror and the oppressive need for space, please, please—

“The only interesting finding is that you showed absolutely no activation in your right hemisphere, or if you did, it was too faint for our machines to pick up,” the neurologist is saying. He gestures to a series of heat-map scans on the wall, blue and orange with spots of blooming, bloodstained red. His brain looks like two jellybeans facing one another, one blue and one orange.

Will is upright. His mask is on his face. His heart is steady. A soft bandage has been taped over his bite wound.

“That’s unusual, but not pathological on its own,” the doctor continues. “The good news is that we found no signs of inflammation, so, no encephalitis. My best guess is that your brain was trying to compensate during the illness, and that lateralization—the asymmetrical activation pattern you’re seeing here—it stuck around even after the inflammation was gone, because it was working. In short, no cause for concern. Aside from the lost time, have you had any other symptoms?”

He searches for words. He knows what he wants to say, feels the answer conceptually, but can’t find the words to communicate it.

“Mr. Graham?”

“No.” He forces the single syllable from between his teeth, the meaning still attached only tangentially to the sound.

“No seizures, trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating…?”

“No.”

The doctor watches him for a moment, awaiting more detail, and then claps his hands and says, “Well, looks like you have a clean bill of health. Just make sure you keep an eye on that bite.”

They wheel him back through the waiting room. His legs have gone completely numb, not even sensate enough for pins and needles. It’s going to be hell when the straps come off. He’ll be lucky to get away without nerve damage. Not that it would matter if he lost the ability to walk. He has nowhere to go and, luckily for him, the fucking BSHCI is ADA compliant. Maybe they planned to cripple him all along.

Matthew sits in the back, talking at him. At some point during the short drive, Will regains the ability to form complete sentences, but he still doesn’t say any. Not even when Matthew gets close to his face and mutters, “Guess you’re out of excuses for those violent urges, Doctor.”

When they unstrap him, his legs buckle immediately and he flops onto the floor of the cell. A gun cocks behind him—one of the guards startled by the sudden motion—but he hears the sound of it slipping into its holster a moment later. Part of him wishes they’d shot him.

He lies awake in his cot that night, curling and uncurling his toes. No permanent damage, as far as he can tell, but his legs are still sore. All that for a glimpse of his cock. Fuck Matthew Brown and everything he stands for. Fuck Chilton and the BSHCI. Most importantly, fuck the man who put him here.

Fuck Hannibal Lecter for getting so close. Il Monstro for being so clever, for outsmarting the police and following Will back to the states. Fuck him for taking advantage, for framing him. For convincing everyone he couldn’t be responsible, since he was dead. Fuck him.

Rude, he thinks.

Except, he doesn’t think it. He hears it, echoing off the stone walls and emanating from some non-place inside him, from somewhere walled off and closed up which he can no longer reach. He stills. The ceiling is oppressively heavy.

Fuck you, Will mouths experimentally, the fury seeping out of him even as he speak.

I suppose that was always part of the endgame, the voice replies, sounding more concrete, if anything. Far less localized inside his own head; it emanates from the walls, the bars, the sheets beneath him.

He tries not to think. Listens for footsteps, for the buzz of a hidden speaker. Hears nothing but the echo of his own breath.

Don’t be shy, it says.

Will jerks, balling his fists in the sheets. His breath seizes in his diaphragm, a little pocket of himself trapped and squeezed and forced deeper, into an even smaller space. No, he thinks. No, I’m dreaming.

Would you like me to pinch you, darling?

I’m hallucinating, Will thinks. I’m losing my mind.

The voice takes on a smug cadence which is perfectly, horribly familiar: If you are, rest assured that your pathology is entirely your own, this time. Our brain scans were clean.

And Will seizes, twists himself in the sheets—our brain scans. Our scans were clean, oh God, this thing is inside him.

An astute observation, it says. And if you were to reexamine our last set of scans, you would find the same asymmetrical activation pattern, only masked by inflammation. I’ve been with you far longer than you know.

He shakes his head. “Be quiet,” he says aloud, barely above a whisper. “Leave me alone, please. I wanna go to sleep.”

As you wish, the voice replies.

But Will doesn’t sleep. He lies awake, staring at the ceiling with his senses on high alert. He flinches every time the wind whips past the building, and when the first drop of rain hits the distant glass of his tiny, barred window, he wraps the pillow around his head and bites the insides of his cheeks until they bleed. He’s overcome by the desire to swallow.

Will is allowed two days of blissful, tedious silence in which to dissociate, and then Dr. Chilton shows up for ‘therapy.’ What he does resembles the Spanish Inquisition more than it does a cognitive-behavioral manual, but Will is in no position to complain. The best he can do is shut his mouth. Chilton finds silence far more irritating than defiance. Defiance, at least, he can label as resistance and analyze to death—silence can be afforded no punishment, not without coming across as cruel and unreasonable, which would, in Chilton’s mind, destroy their rapport. The poor bastard genuinely thinks they have rapport.

“How are you feeling?” Chilton asks.

Will squints at him.

“I saw your brain scans,” he says, crossing his legs at the ankle. Like many men in his field, Dr. Chilton is homosexual, which goes some way in explaining how he keeps hiring guards who look at Will as though he’s a particularly juicy steak. The ratio of gay to straight men in forensic psychology is frankly baffling.

Will doesn’t say anything.

“I saw your scans,” he repeats. “They were normal.”

“They were unbalanced,” Will corrects, taking the bait. There is nothing normal about him, and no matter what they say, the illness was physiological. Not psychological. He is not a charismatic psychopath.

A smile tugs at Chilton’s lips. “You seem surprised by that.”

“Nobody is surprised by that. The doctor even had a neatly packaged explanation. Lateral compensation for my inflammatory illness.”

“Do you believe that?” Chilton asks. “Only your left hemisphere was active—the one responsible for reason, calculation, logic…nothing from the sensitive, empathetic right.”

“That’s not how it works, and you know it. You’re supposed to have a doctorate in this shit.”

“Even pop psychology must come from somewhere. There are correlations between each hemisphere and those specific functions, even if the reality of their lateralization is more complex.”

Will rolls his eyes and leans back against the wall, crossing his ankles to mirror Chilton’s posture. It’s more insult than ingratiation. “Is this what you came here to talk about?”

Chilton smiles again, but this one is thin and irritated. “I’m here to talk about your trial.”

“You’re my psychiatrist, not my lawyer.”

“I’ll be your psychiatrist for quite a long time if you continue to plead your innocence. Not that it’s any skin off my back,” he adds, raising his hands in defense. “The longer you stay, the better my book will be.”

“You aren’t writing a book about me. You need my written consent.”

“We’ll get there,” Chilton says easily. “In the mean time, I’d invite you to seriously consider replacing your lawyer. She was a disaster. Not that I can blame her—difficult to argue for your innocence in the face of evidence like that.”

Will grunts.

“Do you have a problem with the cameras, Will?”

He peers at Chilton through the corner of his eye, taking in the man’s inappropriate cheer, his perfectly coiffed hair.

“I ask because I heard you address them last night. You asked for some privacy. To sleep.”

Will scoffs. He doesn’t correct the egotistical leap of logic; Chilton naturally assumes that Will was talking to him, and that’s better than the alternative. “Nobody likes being watched,” he says.

“Exhibitionists,” Chilton says mildly.

“Not me.”

“Hm.” He scans Will up and down. People do that far too often, these days, and Will can’t help but wonder what they’re seeing that’s so goddamn interesting. “Perhaps if you were slightly more cooperative, there would be no need for such intensive monitoring. You’re right, Mr. Graham. Nobody deserves to be filmed on the toilet, and I would prefer not to subject you to such indignity.”

He remains silent. Whatever bargain Chilton is pushing, he’ll come out with it whether or not Will professes interest. Sure enough, he leans back in his chair for all of thirty seconds before continuing.

“If you were to sign off on the book, that would be a solid indication of your willingness to cooperate.”

Will says nothing.

“And if you were to share your letters with me, well.” He steeples his fingers and leans forward conspiratorially. “Perhaps they could be reinterpreted to cast you in a better light when the manuscript goes to press.”

“I don’t have them,” Will says. “Burned my copies. The other ones are all in evidence.”

Chilton’s smile falters almost imperceptibly. “It seems the good doctor made duplicates, then.”

“Mm. Seems that way.”

“He was quite enamored of you. I wonder why?”

Will shrugs.

“Perhaps he saw a little of himself in you, Mr. Graham.”

“I’m not signing off on the book,” Will says flatly. “Ever. So you can stop asking.”

Chilton sneers as though Will’s privacy, that slur, is a personal affront to him. “I think you’ll change your mind,” he says, standing.

“Great session,” Will calls after him. “I’m feeling better already.”

For a few days, Will thinks he might have gotten away with it. Nothing changes. It confirms his previous suspicions that there’s nothing left for them to take away from him, not without rousing regulatory scrutiny. Three days later, though, Matthew shows up to escort him to the showers. He wrinkles his nose dramatically. “Phew, Mr. Graham,” he says. “You stink.”

Will raises an eyebrow at the wall.

“Lucky for you, your shower privileges have been expanded. You’ve moved from twice weekly to the full seven-day package.” He grins. “Isn’t that wonderful? You must have reaaally impressed Dr. Chilton. You’ll have to tell me how you did it. I’ve been thinking about asking for a raise.”

Will bites back a retort: Tell him what you did to me. He’d double your salary.

Instead, he waits in silence while Matthew unlocks his cell and leads him to the shower, the only place they won’t be recorded. This room appears in his nightmares, sometimes, the white tile walls melting and dripping into a puddle on the floor, the water becoming magma.

“How’s the bite doing?” He asks conversationally, unbuttoning Will’s jumpsuit with brisk fingers. “Seems like somebody really did a number on you.”

And even though Will doesn’t want to ask, it might relieve some of the terror, so he asks. “Was it you?”

Matthew cocks his head. “It was you,” he says. “You don’t remember?”

Will shakes his head. Matthew looks genuinely disappointed.

“Well, I’ll do my best to make our time together more memorable,” he says. He unlocks Will’s cuffs, rolls his sleeves over them, and then re-locks them to the bar and pulls his pants down his legs. Will tries not to look down, but he can’t help the magnetic pull of his own flesh. It seems so foreign, now. He’s lost a lot of weight since he arrived.

“You wanna see mine? It’s a little nastier. It’ll scar,” Matthew says.

Will doesn’t look at him, but he catches the edge of the bandage again, stained coppery brown.

“Matthew,” he says, weighing the next words in his mouth. Matthew pauses as he tugs the jumpsuit over Will’s feet and looks up with genuine adoration, as though he’d lick Will’s shoes if only he were allowed to wear them.

“Yes, Doctor?” He prompts.

“I really don’t want to do this.”

Matthew’s adoration evaporates. He yanks the jumpsuit off and slides Will’s briefs down his thighs without tenderness, his gentle touch firming, growing teeth. “That’s not what you said last time.”

“What did I say last time?” He asks, against his better judgement.

Matthew sits back on his heels and puts on a breathy mockery of Will’s voice. “Please, Matthew, harder. Fuck me like you want to kill me.”

Will blanches at the thought. What the fuck was he doing while he was out? Even with Molly, even when he let her tie him up on their third anniversary, Will was always completely silent. He’s never been one for sweet nothings, let alone begging.

“You really don’t remember,” Matthew says, disbelief apparent in his voice. “Jesus, Graham. No wonder they ordered the brain scan.” He shakes his head. “It’s okay. We’ll try again.”

“I don’t want to try again,” Will says, even as Matthew herds him into the shower. He doesn’t touch the knob. They aren’t going to shower.

“We all need a little human touch,” he says. “We’re social animals, Doctor.”

“Stop calling me that.”

He spins Will around, their faces unpleasantly close. “Don’t play coy, Doctor. I know it gets you off.” Their lips touch. He hovers for a moment, hot breath in Will’s mouth, before plunging his tongue inside. Will is overcome by the carnal urge to bite, to consume.

Instead, he shoves Matthew off. Matthew flashes his teeth and shoves right back, pressing Will into the corner again. He latches onto Will’s neck and sucks, like he really thinks they’re playing some kind of twisted game. “Who—who told you that,” Will gasps, thinking, don’t say it was me, don’t say it was me. “Who told you—Matthew, stop. Who said I like when you call me—?”

Matthew slides down his chest, clawing at him, until he’s kneeling. He presses a hot, breathy kiss to the base of Will’s cock, looks up at him with those psychotic, fuck-me eyes and says, “You told me, Doctor.”

Then he takes Will’s cock into his mouth and swallows.

It isn’t awful, but it’s not good, either. He didn’t like it much when Molly did it—something about the wet sounds, the vulnerability, the constant worry about how he tastes; is he clean enough, is he big enough, is he allowed to move? Get hard, he chants. Get hard. Get hard, and it’ll end. He wonders if he could step on Matthew’s balls without getting his own bitten off. If that would buy him enough time to—to what? Run somewhere with cameras, maybe, where he can’t—

Would you like a little help?

He jerks. Matthew looks up at him, hopeful, and repeats whatever he just did with his tongue. Will’s eyes jerk around the room in search of the speaker, an invisible man who lives in the walls and the floor and their flesh, one he knows he will not find.

I’m happy to help, if you ask.

“Fuck,” Will half-sobs, causing Matthew to nestle into his pubic hair and swallow. He still isn’t hard. If he doesn’t get an erection in the next thirty seconds, Matthew is going to turn him toward the wall again, or he’ll push Will to his knees.

He imagines Molly. She’s safe: the soft curve of her hips, her soft hand on the back of his neck. Her slick, warm cunt—lights off, white noise of the ocean, no sight or sound. Only touch exists until the moment she pulls him close, presses her plush lips to the shell of his ear, and whispers, “Will, I can’t do this anymore. I still love you, and I know you were sick, but I just can’t—”

“No,” he gasps. Matthew pulls off immediately, leaving a thin string of saliva connecting his lips to the head of Will’s quickly softening cock.

“Something wrong?”

Will squeezes his eyes shut, and there’s the goddamn voice again, emanating from everywhere:

We can make a deal, if that would feel more fair.

“Ah,” Matthew says. “I know what you need.” He bares his teeth and slams his locks his jaw on Will’s inner thigh, biting until Will is sure he’s drawing blood, and Will lets out a long, pained groan.

I’ll take over from here, and in return, you agree to share a little space. Indulge me while I tear down some of those walls you’ve built. How does that sound?

Matthew bites again. His mouth is bloody. He sucks at the new wound, god, he’s drinking Will’s blood and Will is still soft and if he doesn’t get hard then Matthew is going to bite part of him off or turn him around and fuck him dry or force his cock down Will’s throat and he won’t be able to get away, and he won’t be able to live with himself when—

“Yes,” Will cries. “Please. Please just do it.”

Several things happen, then. The blood rushes to his cock so quickly that he nearly topples forward, dizzy. It springs up hard and heavy against Matthew’s cheek, and Matthew swallows it down an instant later. Will’s hips buck into him. That isn’t the part that scares him. What scares him is the alien feeling of internal expansion, of rushing forward and outward like matter from the Big Bang, and the cramped little space he inhabits is suddenly an entire planet, an ocean of vast darkness, a twisting, dangerous palace.

Will grabs fistfuls of Matthew’s hair and forces him down until he gags. He yanks his head back and pushes him down again in a punishing pace, until spit drips down his chin, until his joyous eyes are red and watering.

Except, Will doesn’t do any of that. He floats in the dark ocean and touches absolutely nothing as he rides the dull, distant pulses of ecstacy. His lips move.

“Is this what you need, Matthew?”

It’s his voice, but they aren’t his words. They echo through the darkness.

“You need to be used, don’t you, but not by—ah. Not by just anyone. It has to be me, doesn’t it, your idol. You want to worship me, Matthew, and that terrifies you.”

Matthew lets out a long, wet groan around his cock.

“Show me.”

Will is elsewhere, floating in amniotic fluid. The afterimages of Matthew’s swollen lips reach him through the darkness; he hears the wet, muffled sounds of Matthew’s throat. Hears that, and the horrible words clipping from his own mouth:

“You would do anything for me. I know you would. You’d kill for me if I asked—and you want me to ask, don’t you, darling? I can see how much that excites you. My little puppet.”

The pleasure arcs through him. No context, no fear—just that muffled sweetness in slow, endless, peaceful waves. He can see them faintly from above: Will’s stick limbs and mess of dark curls, Matthew pistoning up and down on his cock, the blinding white tile stretching upward to infinity. He sees the moment his body reaches orgasm, the way he grips Matthew’s head in both hands and holds him close. The careless grace with which he tosses the man to the side and turns on the water.

“Sit in the corner until I’m finished,” his body says. “Don’t you dare touch yourself.”

Matthew nods meekly and obeys.

Will can’t sleep. When he release his grip on his mind for even a second, the voice slinks in, all lean and tailored, like Eve’s deplorable serpent. He’s never been much for meditation—too twitchy to sit still, too anxious to still his mind for long—but he tries now, sitting cross-legged on his cot in the dim light. Never darkness. That would afford him too much privacy.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath into his diaphragm, holds it, and releases it slowly through his nose. Counts one. Deep breath in, hold it, release. Two. Will counts fifteen breaths before he hears laughter.

His eyes snap open. He can’t help it. Nothing darkens his door, of course, because this thing is not substantial enough to cast a shadow. It is the shadow.

I’m sorry to interrupt, it says.

Will doesn’t answer. Like Chilton, it will take any retort as a sign of emotional investment, and Will is not emotionally invested. He is not interested. He takes a deep breath and restarts the count. One.

I quite enjoy the extra room, don’t you? It asks. After being sectioned off for so long, it feels good to finally touch you.

You can’t touch me, Will thinks reflexively, breaking his concentration. He curses under his breath.

Oh, but I can, Will. I’m feeling stronger by the minute. Would you like me to show you?

He sucks in another breath, with building frustration. This one is a little too harsh, a little bit south of relaxing. Still, he counts it. Two.

The thing is silent for a few moments. He makes it to five before a ghastly sensation creeps down his neck. A hand, broader than his own, cradling him.

“Don’t do that,” he spits.

Careful, darling. Let’s stay quiet. We don’t want Dr. Chilton walking in on us.

Will grits his teeth, his exercise abandoned, and squirms under the thin, scratchy sheets. He wonders if they’re strong enough to hang himself—not that he’s explicitly planning to try, but it would be nice to have the option. With his luck, they’re probably designed to tear at the first suggestion of pressure.

You know I’d never let you do that, it says. Please consider me. You’re breathing for two, now.

Just to be contrary, Will conjures the image as vividly as he can: the sheet twisted into a rope around his neck, anchored to a high crossbar. His body slumped on the floor of the cell. His face tight and purple, eyes bulging. Even as he holds the image, a glossy black figure stoops down beside him and unwinds the rope. It gently cups his face and kisses his swollen, split lips, smooths a hand down his bare shoulder, drags its thumb across his—

“Fucking stop,” he growls.

Without warning, his teeth snap shut on his tongue, incisors digging deep into his own writhing flesh. He panics. Claws at his own face, shakes his head back and forth.

I told you to stay quiet.

Will nods frantically. After a moment, his jaw releases. He coughs and sputters and takes in deep lungfuls of stale air.

I don’t want to hurt you, Will. I’m trying to protect the both of us, but if I’m to do that, I need your cooperation.

He curls onto his side and presses the pillow over his face, though he knows it won’t help. The voice simply relocates itself to the pillow, vibrating it like a speaker, or maybe that’s just Will’s panicked sobbing.

Hush, darling. I’m sorry. I never meant to scare you.

Go away, Will begs, amplifying his internal voice as loud as he can. Go away, GO AWAY, LEAVE ME ALONE.

You don’t want to be alone, it says. We both know that. You’re like our seamstress, aren’t you? The ghost of a smile crosses Will’s lips, but it isn’t his expression. He neither initiates nor allows it, but still it happens. Aren’t you glad we can fall in love again and live to tell the tale?

I don’t love you, Will thinks. You can’t make me. Just leave.

The uncanny smile slips off his face. His body releases a deep, disappointed sigh. I thought you would be more grateful. I protected you from Matthew. You begged me to save you.

That was a mistake.

The voice is silent, but Will feels it shift inside him. It’s an alien sensation, sort of like imagining a motion without executing it. The thing leans back, rolls away its tension. Softens.

Please, Will thinks. Just let me sleep.

Very well. I suppose we’ll have plenty of time to talk later. I wish you all the best tomorrow—send Mr. Brown my regards.

Finally, it dissipates. Will feels empty, but when he closes his eyes and counts ten breaths, they flow easily into his vast interior and meet no further resistance. He counts seventeen before he slips into a dreamless sleep.

Beverly visits to update him on the Seamstress case—now bearing an official Tattlecrime moniker—and to wish him luck at his upcoming trial, which will continue in two days. Will was unaware. He rarely knows what day it is; nobody bothers to tell him except his lawyer, who doesn’t call as often as she should. As for the Seamstress, she’s killed another couple, this time two successful men in center city. Will has nothing new for her. He says he can’t help until they have a suspect or two, which he can likely confirm or deny. She says they’re trying, but that these therapists are a surprisingly close-knit bunch, and few of them are willing to point fingers. She asks him to reconsider his defense.

Matthew comes to take him to the showers, and this time the silence in the tile cell is painfully acute. He strips Will more carefully, this time, and presses tender kisses to his shoulder blades. Will lets it happen.

“You said you could make me kill for you,” Matthew breathes into the nape of his neck. The hard line of his erection drags against Will’s ass, jerking as he speaks. “Did you mean that? Will you?”

Will doesn’t answer. The disgust which Matthew’s heat conjures in him is a fluid thing, and he chases it around in circles, trying to time its ebb and flow.

Matthew slides down his back, licking and sucking all the way, and kneels and spreads Will’s ass with his thumbs, exposing his twitching hole. He feels warm breath. The flow swells inside him.

“Just tell me who,” Matthew says, directly into his asshole. Molly asked to try this, once, but Will vetoed it out of the gate.

“I’m not talking to you while you’re down there.”

He chuckles. A single, wet swipe of his tongue across Will’s hole makes his body seize like he’s touched a live wire, and then Matthew stands again and turns him around. His lips are glistening. “Just tell me what you need,” he says. His eyes glimmer in the harsh light of the stall. “Anything. I’ll do anything for you.”

It takes willpower to keep himself from grimacing. The words are more invasive than Matthew’s tongue. “You don’t have anything I need,” he says.

Matthew darts forward and tries to kiss him. Brief image off biting through his lip, filling his throat with hot blood—Will’s stoicism crumbles and he jerks away. “Don’t,” he says. “Your tongue was in my asshole.”

“Would you like me to put it back?”

“No.” The panic in his belly threatens to boil over, so he sidesteps Matthew’s caging presence, turns down the heat, lays the spoon across the top of the pot. Nobody is coming to save him. “I don’t want anything from you, Matthew. Not unless you can get me out of here.” He fakes a note of authority, attempting to mimic his past self, and adds, “If you need to get off so badly, you can do it in the corner while you watch me shower.”

His eyes widen. His head bounces up and down in a manic, adoring nod. That’s all it takes to corral him into Will’s previous trap in the corner, where he crouches, untucks himself, and gives his cock a few dry tugs. It really is that simple.

Will doesn’t dare look too long. He keeps his gaze fixed firmly on the wall ahead of him as he cleans himself, humming under his breath in attempt to block out the obscene sounds of Matthew’s self-pleasure. Matthew moans as he approaches orgasm. Will considers ordering him to shut up, but figures it’s best not to push his luck.

He is lying on his cot, as always. It might be mid-afternoon and he should have asked Matthew to bring him some books. Next time, maybe. There’s nothing to do unless he calls Chilton for conversation or opens letters from fans, neither of which is less painful than boredom. Instead, he lies on his cot and paints mental pictures of the Louisiana Bayou, where he is shorter and faster and fishing on his boat with the outbound motor, embraced and ensnared by the crushing humidity. The moisture isn’t so bad once you stop trying to fight it. There’s no point trying to stay clean in Louisiana, at least not with the lifestyle he and his father led together. Air conditioning exists to keep you from keeling over dead. It’s not there to keep you comfortable.

He peers off the edge of the boat, into the swampy water. There are alligators around these parts. He’s seen them sunning themselves in the reeds, so still that they could be carved from driftwood if not for their beady, rolling eyes. Every year, a few kids and a lot of dogs wander into the swamp and get snapped up in those powerful jaws. As a kid, Will always had a suspicion that the gators would be his end, too. It was the only cause of death which seemed remotely relevant at the time.

He shuffles around in the cooler and cracks a lukewarm beer. The ice has long since submitted to the heat, and Will does the same, lounging in the bottom of the boat, feet propped up on the edge. His fishing line is a glimmering string of spider silk connecting him to the swamp.

“You did well.”

The voice is localized. It seems to come from above him, but Will doesn’t open his eyes to find out whether or not he’s right about that. “If you’re wearing one of those suits, you’ll be dead of heat stroke in twenty minutes,” he mumbles.

It lets out an amused hum. “You could always turn down the thermostat, as it were.”

“No,” he says simply.

“You prefer to torture yourself?”

He wipes the back of his hand, the one with the beer, across his brow. He takes a sip. “Yeah,” he says.

“Ever the martyr, Will. Cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“Your face,” he corrects. “Hell, I’ll cut off my arms and legs too if that’s what it takes.” A hint of that southern drawl has crept into his voice, borne in on the waves of muggy condensation, the sulfurous swamp breezes.

“I am impressed by the longevity of your grudge, but I’m afraid it is misplaced. Hannibal Lecter has never lifted a finger to hurt you. He didn’t intend to do so when he escaped. You know this as well as I do.”

Will sighs and finally opens his eyes. The dim sun refracts through the fog and casts an ethereal glow across his already ethereal face. Even when he was alive, he looked like a corpse.

“Stop trying to convince me. It makes you sound like Chilton.”

A look of annoyance crosses the hallucination’s vague, ghostly features. It’s more annoyed to be compared to Chilton than accused of lying, Will knows, which is why he said it. Will adds, “Sit down. You stand like a butler.”

The figure unclasps its hands from behind its back and joins Will in the curve of the boat’s bottom, which is a little cramped with two. “You can be very belligerent,” it says.

“Take that suit off,” Will says, in lieu of a reply.

“I am not mandated to experience temperature in the realms of imagination, Will.”

He shrugs. Sips his beer. “Suit yourself.”

“We’ve gotten sidetracked,” it says, brushing its hair from its face. Whether or not the apparition is mandated to experience temperature, it can’t seem to keep its hair from sticking.

“I know you’ve asked me to leave you alone—already rescinding on your deal with the devil, I might add—but I wanted to tell you how proud I am. You used Matthew’s dedication to your acute advantage. Just as I would have done.”

Will does not accept the praise. Instead, he repeats the word devil and sips his beer. “Is that literal or figurative?” He asks.

“Interpret it how you like.”

He contemplates that for a moment. “Can the devil swim?”

“I don’t—”

Then Will upends the boat with a swift kick the hull, and they both splash into the warm, grimy water. He allows himself to sink down through the columns of greenish light, momentarily forgetting that he isn’t supposed to be able to breathe. The specter’s legs, now divested of their butler suit, kick until it breaches the surface. Will lets himself sink lower, watching his form fade as the darkness closes over him.

“Doctor?”

He shakes his head against the pillow and rolls away from the sound.

“Mr. Graham, you have a phone call.” The excitement in Matthew’s voice is unmistakable. He sounds like child urchin who’s just found out he’s going to be adopted. Not that Will knows anything about that. “Mr. Graham,” he says. “It’s your lawyer. You’ll want to take this.”

At last he sits up, rubbing his eyes with his fists, surprised to find them clean and dry, free of algae and other swamp debris. He snatches the phone from between the bars, sparing Matthew his hateful glare. “Hello?” He asks.

“Will,” his lawyer says. She sounds out of breath, as though she’s been running. “Will, there’s been a major development in your case. You’re going to like this.”

In truth, Will does not like the development. The development is murder, or, more specifically, murders, plural: the extravagant, sadistic execution of the judge, bailiff, and prosecuting attorney in his trial. The killer’s methods are unmistakable. It’s Il Monstro.

Except it isn’t. It’s Matthew, who seems quite pleased with himself, smiling and fawning as though he’s given Will a particularly intricate home-cooked meal rather than a sounder of expertly mutilated corpses. Will concedes, at least, that he’s been studying. Unfortunately, while he excelled in precision, he lacked foresight. His choice of victims necessitates a retrial, which isn’t easy to arrange when all involved fear for their lives. It takes an additional two months of bureaucracy to even set a date, and by that point, Will’s resolve is breaking. He isn’t sure how much longer he can keep Matthew happy.

The corner time trick works for a while, but Matthew tires of it soon enough. He starts stepping out of line, stepping into Will’s space, hoping for retribution. Will smacks and bites and shoves him away, but he knows that no amount of violence can truly satiate the man who invented the human skin blindfold. Matthew wants more. Camaraderie. Love, even. Will has never been able to fake that.

He talks Matthew off, riffing on the themes his hallucination fed him: worship, puppetry. He orders Matthew to lick and kiss his feet because he saw someone do it in porn once—a video he watched with Molly, another idea he vetoed—and because of the association with Jesus, idolatry, etc. He lets Matthew eat him out, but he cuts the act short when he starts enjoying it too much. He doesn’t let Matthew suck him off again. He can’t get it up. He thinks about biting, a lot, but he doesn’t do it.

Frankly, it’s a miracle that Will held out for two months, considering how horrible he is at…whatever they’re doing, and how awkward it feels, and how he can’t stand to talk to Matthew about their alleged dark desires for another goddamn second but he also can’t keep himself hard. Matthew needs one of those things, and soon, or else he’ll compromise Will’s freedom.

The silent threat smothers their every encounter, and his ghost is no help. Per Will’s request, he hasn’t shown his ghoulish face since the incident with the boat. Not even in Will’s nightmares.

He’s waiting for Will to ask politely.

Six days. The trial is in six days, and the tides of public opinion have turned—even Freddie Lounds has changed her tune regarding his innocence. Will should be able to last for six more sessions. It could be five, even, if they move him on the day before the trial.

Matthew smuggles in a thermos of champagne. “To celebrate,” he says, and asks where Will intends to flee once he’s released. Informs him that he, Matthew, has just received his passport in the mail. He never told Will he ordered himself a passport. Apparently, it was a given.

“Of course I did. You know, I’ve never left the country before, but I’m excited,” he says, leaning on Will’s shoulder as he swigs from the thermos. “I was thinking about Southeast Asia, maybe, unless you’ve already picked. I’ve heard the cops all take bribes.”

Will takes the thermos and drinks more than his fair share. This feeling can’t rightfully be called panic—his heart is steady, having grown accustomed Matthew’s presence and the horrible devotion in his eyes—but it retains a similar urgency, only dulled by exhaustion.

Matthew cranes his neck for a kiss, which Will provides, pushing down the craving it stirs in him. He tastes of champagne and nothing else.

“Will?”

“Hm?”

“What do you think of Southeast Asia?” He asks again. “I think we could live a good life there. We could get away with pretty much anything, if we’re careful.”

And Will can’t keep up the lie for even a moment longer. He closes his eyes.

Before he’s shaped the thought into a phrase, his ghost is already there, swirling through his veins and softening him in a way champagne never will. They understand, wordlessly, that there will be no rescinding the offer a second time. They share the thought like spit between mouths.

“You’ll leave the logistics to me,” Will says. His voice is smooth and assured, issuing spontaneously from his throat. “Trust that I’ll take care of you. I have several properties in several countries, and we will need to rotate among them to avoid staying in any one place too long.”

Matthew swoons into his arms, already rather buzzed, and Will cradles him like a child. He holds Matthew’s face in his hands and draws him close.

“If this is to work, I need you to be good for me,” he murmurs. “I need you to do everything I say. Can you do that for me?”

He nods dreamily.

“Good. Good boy,” Will’s mouth says. “When I’m released, wait for me. Give me your address. I’ll come.”

He rolls Matthew off and drops him on the floor. He’ll never get used to the sensation of his limbs moving without his conscious input, and he wanders again to the puppet metaphor, to his own overwrought variations on the theme: I can tug your strings every which way.

His body lands a swift kick to Matthew’s side, causing him to groan. “Up,” Will’s voice says. “On your hands and knees. Take your pants down.”

Trembling, frantic fingers undo his fly and yank them down below his ass. Will’s hands lower his briefs and free his half-hard cock, leaving it untouched to bob and drool onto the tile. He lifts Matthew’s hips higher and grinds his face into the ground. “Stay like that,” he says.

As he pumps his palm full of all-purpose soap, Will searches out the black water. He prefers it to watching, would rather cherish the sensations without context, but his interior has shifted like an Escher painting since the last time he visited. He wanders through long corridors of locked doors and priceless antique fantasies—objects he’s never seen before. Things he doesn’t think he could conjure from thin air.

In the shower stall, Will is kneeling behind Matthew and shoving two slick fingers into his ass, giving him only the most cursory preparation before stroking the rest of the soap along his own hard cock.

“Please,” Matthew keens as the head of Will’s cock presses against his opening. “Fuck me, Doctor, please—”

Will comes across a swimming pool. The water is black oil. The ceiling is a high arch, awash with three-dimensional frescoes: twisted scenes of war, destruction, chaos, like the personal chambers of Hell’s most important demons. The pool is flanked by columns as tall as redwood trees, marble so polished it appears to drip and undulate and reabsorb itself. This place is beautiful and grand, but it’s also lonely. He has the sense that nothing exists outside this palace, and that if he were to find a window and look down, he would see nothing but endless gray in every direction.

“Tell me how much you need it,” he growls, wrenching Matthew back by the hair. “How could such a lowly creature have any right to touch a god?”

“Please, I need it so bad, Doctor, I don’t—” He gasps, twisting in Will’s grip, trying to get his mouth on Will’s wrist, his fingers, to suckle any part of him in reach. “I don’t deserve you, I’m nothing, I’m worthless—but I’ll give you anything. I’ll do anything for you, please just. Please, please. I need your cock.”

Will shoves into him and plunges into the dark water.

The voices fade as he sinks deeper. The gripping heat is far away, in the surface world, and Will is safe and breathing in his cradle of darkness. His body is gone. It’s out there and he’s in here, and it’s so good to finally be rid of the horrible, needy thing.

“Oh my god,” Matthew gasps. “Oh, god.”

“Who’s your god? Tell me.”

“You,” he cries. “Oh, Will—” knocking his face into the wall, thighs trembling, knees slipping on the sweat-slick tile “—I love you. I’ll worship you, I want to do it for the rest of my life—”

“You’ll put no other god before me. Not the gods of hunger, nor of avarice, nor bloodlust.”

“Only you,” he sobs. “Only—”

Will allows himself to disperse into the viscous liquid around him, encasing each atom in a drop of oil. The pool ripples with nameless pleasure and satisfaction. An idea propagates like light through the lightless fluid, that he must have lived in this place before he was born. That nothing can hurt him here. That it is a privilege to return before death.

Little clumps of Matthew’s hair come away in his hand as he pulls back without releasing his grip. His head rebounds against the wall. Not hard enough to concuss him, but hard enough to make him spin. He grips both of Matthew’s skinny hips and pulls him back onto his lap, lifting him up and down the length of his shaft with inhuman strength. Strength which Will does not possess. Matthew cries out like he’s dying and Will shoves three fingers in his mouth and scratches down the back of his tongue. Will bites. His teeth are sharp. His mouth fills with blood.

The pool of ichor contracts, molecules drawing together and growing dense. Will becomes a solid. Becomes solid pleasure made manifest, shining onyx, coal, diamond.

“I’m going to come in you,” he growls. “Savor it. Savor the warmth of your God’s seed inside you. No mortal deserves this honor.”

Matthew doesn’t answer, only squeals and thrashes and presses his hot mouth to Will’s neck, sucking desperately.

The pool condenses into a single point and ricochets outward, filling the basin with unbearable ecstasy. If Will had a mouth, he would scream. Matthew’s scream is muffled in his palm.

He surfaces. He floats on his back and gazes up at the fresco, which now depicts cherubic figures flitting through a dusky sky.

There is an overwhelming temptation to stay floating on that pool of oil forever, to let the ghost take care of his body until the day it finally tastes fresh air again. He seriously considers it.

But that would make him no better than Matthew Brown, wouldn’t it, to indulge such eager and thoughtless submission. He only allows himself a few more moments of peace before surfacing a second time, into his dim cell. He wonders why his lungs burn, and then he remembers that he needs to breathe when he’s out here.

Feeling better?

Will stares dazedly at the plain stone above him, waiting for his autonomous functions to regain their autonomy.

I know it’s a difficult adjustment, but you don’t need to focus on breathing, the voice says. Let go. Trust your body to do the work.

With great reluctance, he releases the conscious monitoring of his breath. It stutters. Then, as the voice assured him, it finds a steady rhythm on its own.

What is that place? Will asks.

I don’t know, it answers, and Will knows it’s the truth. It’s where I go when I’m not in you. I’ve lived there for a long, long time.

It’s peaceful, Will says.

It is.

There’s the unspoken—unthought—suggestion of melancholy. That while it is peaceful, it is also entirely too still, and too grand, and too empty.

Are you going back? Will asks.

His mind is blissfully quiet for a moment; it’s a deeper, more pervasive silence than he’s ever achieved by meditating, approachable only through the precarious combination of Valium and whiskey. I would prefer not to, the voice replies at last.

Will smiles. It’s his own smile, initiated by him. Never thought someone would actually want to be inside my head. Not for the long term, anyway.

A warm sensation floods his limbs, edging on bliss, like his bones themselves are blushing. If you’ll allow it, I intend to keep you company indefinitely.

In the distance, someone clamors against the bars of their cell. Water drips from some invisible leak. He glances to the window to find that it’s raining. He doesn’t repeat the word indefinitely, not in language, but he holds it in his chest and turns it over several times, examining the way the light glints off of it and casts bright spots on the inside of his ribcage.

A lovely metaphor, the voice says.

Will grimaces. Tell me what you are.

The guards have to come to investigate his friend down the hall. They’re shouting at him, as if that’s going to calm him down.

From the invisible leak, a faint image drips through him. It’s a man’s face, familiar but abstracted, as though shattered and pieced together by a blind cubist painter. Some shards are from different images entirely: shards of marbled flesh, shards of longing, shards of earthy cologne. He barely gets a glimpse before the tapestry is snatched from his grip, crumpled up, discarded.

Are you…Will cuts the thought short, which is far more difficult than stifling spoken words, but still he manages not to think the name. He can’t. He can’t be wrong about this. Are you…him?

The voice gives him another moment of that gorgeous silence, but this time it’s tainted by a curl of fear in his belly. Will should feel more than a curl, he knows, at the prospect of losing his mind.

The voice answers carefully, and even as it negates the premise, Will becomes aware that it’s his voice. Not Will’s. Not an amalgamation of all the voices he’s heard previously—it’s him, unmistakable, with a lovely softness in the th sound and an ambiguously European cadence. The voice of a man who has travelled the world and never made his home anywhere. The voice says, Hannibal Lecter is dead, Will. I am absolutely sure of that.

The voice retreats. It accepts no further questions.

Will dreams of places he’s never been, of landscapes he’s never seen, and the characters in his dreams speak languages he can’t understand. He wakes to find his face streaked with tears.

He slips into the black water before Matthew even arrives at his cell. This instance is not as comforting as the last, namely because he has no say in when it happens—one moment he’s standing, craning his neck to find out whose footsteps are approaching down the long corridor, and the next he’s submerged, lungs full of sweet darkness. At first it feels like drowning. Then, slowly, the sensations begin to filter in: the soft caress of a hand on his face, the warmth engulfing his cock, an ambiguous and ungrounded pleasure which comes from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Will lets it take him.

Then he’s back in his cell, facing Fredrick Chilton. Chilton is grinning at him. He steps forward as if to shake Will’s hand but then thinks better of it and tucks the hand into the pocket of his dress pants, which is too shallow and not intended to hold something so large.

“It should be Tuesday at the latest,” he says.

Will is reeling. The rest of their conversation is inaccessible, lost in the swamp and grown over with reeds and sawgrass, a corpse far past bloated and now sinking, forgotten, into the mud.

Chilton is looking at him, expecting a response. Will can’t ask what they were just discussing, or else he risks cluing Chilton in that he dissociated through the entire exchange.

“And how…uh, who’s going to let me know about that?” Will asks, intentionally vague.

Chilton cocks his head. “Your bank, I assume. You should be out by then. And by the way, congratulations on getting away with it.”

“I didn’t get away with—”

He raises a finger to his lips and says, “Not to worry, Mr. Graham. We’ll work with our lawyers to ensure you won’t face legal repercussions—double jeopardy, and all that. It worked for OJ, and you’re bigger than OJ.”

Will restrains his scowl. It’s not aimed at Chilton, so Chilton doesn’t need to see it.

“You drive a hard bargain, Mr. Graham.” He grins. “We’ll talk soon.”

And Chilton disappears down the hallway.

Will sits on his cot, trying to piece things together. It’s evening. He’s lost an entire day. His hair is wet, meaning he actually showered, and the gauze over his bite mark is gone. He has no idea when that happened—could have been days ago; he hasn’t been paying attention—but the mark itself has faded to a dull, sickly yellow, speckled with faint splotches of purple where his teeth were sharpest. He isn’t sure how to tell whether or not he’s had sex recently. He considers cupping his balls to feel their weight, but that would look ridiculous on camera, and he probably couldn’t figure it out, anyway.

He made a bargain with Chilton, and he has no way of knowing what was said. He has no choice but to ask. What did you make me do?

The voice drifts toward him from a specific location this time, the far corner, but when he looks, nobody is there. I didn’t make you do anything. We are both free agents, are we not?

Hardly, Will thinks. You know what I fucking mean. What did you say to him?

As he told you, they won’t share any portion of your story which hasn’t already be resolved in court. You can’t be tried twice for the same crime.

What the hell did you say to him? He thinks, internally raising his voice.

I believe you will appreciate my answer more once you’re released, so I will withhold it until then.

“Fucker, you—NNG!” Will’s jaw clamps shut without warning, missing his tongue this time.

What did I tell you about speaking to me aloud?

He frantically grabs his own jaw and tries to pry it open, and when that doesn’t work, tries to force his fingers into his mouth. He stands, thrashing—and then his hands fall to his sides and he lies calmly on the bed. His jaw loosens, but he can’t speak. White-hot terror flashes through him, setting every nerve alight, and not an ounce is visible on his placid face.

How are you doing that? He screams internally. STOP. LET ME GO.

I told you, I’ve been feeling…energized, lately. I’m afraid I can’t release you until you agree to cooperate.

LET ME GO. GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HEAD.

Will, I need you to calm—

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU? His own internal voice drowns out the ghost, demon, hallucination—whatever the fuck it is, Will is louder. It tries to say something else, but Will is loud, and the only way to silence it is to scream and scream and scream. He can’t exhaust his vocal cords if he’s only screaming in his mind. He can do it forever. He will if he has to.

The other voice, sensing this, falls silent. It doesn’t release him, but it pulls the plug on his thoughts and lets them swirl down the drain, until the only thing left in Will is that hollow peace and the faintest hint of fear over the horizon, out of reach.

We’re going to breathe slowly, it says.

Will doesn’t want to breathe slowly. He wants to think. Wants to beg please let me think, but he can’t even form the words in his own head. He can barely hold onto the desire before it slips through his fingers. He’s clean and empty and full of animal terror.

He’s breathing slowly. They’re doing it together.

Very good, the voice croons. You’re doing so well.

A tiny whimper escapes Will’s lips. His fingers twitch. He clings to the sensation of voluntary movement, no matter how small.

I’m going to show you something. We’ll talk. Then I’m going to let you go. Is that alright?

Will is incapable of holding anything but affirmation in his mind.

Good. Close your eyes.

His eyes remain open. He blinks. He can control his own eyelids, which means the entity wants him to choose to close them. It’s giving him a chance to disobey. He contemplates this for a moment, though his thoughts are loose beyond all semblance of organization, and then he closes his eyes.

He is in a mental hospital, but it isn’t the BSHCI, and he isn’t in a cell. He’s sitting in a metal folding chair in the hallway, facing Hannibal Lecter’s glass cage. The man looks better than he remembers. His skin has a healthy glow and his eyes are bright; his hair is sleek and shiny—nothing like the dull, brittle mess he remembers. Instead of his jumpsuit, he wears a black three-piece suit with subtle iridescent pinstripes. He sits in an elegant armchair. They’re so close that they could touch, if not for the glass.

“I thought it might be easier to talk this way,” he says.

Will stands, shoving his chair out from under him. He’s thrilled to have control of his limbs again, but the joy is far outweighed by rage. “I’m not fucking talking to you,” he says, and stalks down the hall. He remembers this hall from his single visit, and everything is the same: the contrast of white drywall and ancient stone, the fluorescent lights, the string of empty cages between Hannibal and the door to the lower-security portion of the hospital. Once he’s out of sight, he jogs the rest of the way to the door. Shoves it open.

And there’s Hannibal, in his glass cage. There’s the folding chair.

Will runs. He runs to the door and barrels through it without stopping, and on the other side is Hannibal, the same hallway, the same door. He does this three more times, and every time he ends up back where he started. He tries to open his eyes. For all intents and purposes, they’re already open. He squeezes them shut and opens them again, and there’s Hannibal Fucking Lecter waiting patiently in his armchair.

Will walks halfway down the hall, until he’s out of view, and sits against the bars of an empty cell, drawing his knees to his chest.

“Are you finished?”

The voice is right behind him. He spins around and finds that the bars have turned to glass. That Hannibal’s cell is behind him, now, and he’s waiting in his armchair, foot tapping gently on the stone.

“I—” he chokes back a sob. “I don’t like this. I want to go back to normal.”

“You weren’t faring well on your own,” Hannibal says. “We would have received the death penalty had I not intervened.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t want to be crazy.”

“And you aren’t. The concept of insanity is culturally bound, regardless.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Perhaps this will mean something to you, then. Do you know how to perform a pneumonectomy?”

He blinks tears from his imaginary eyes and shakes his imaginary head again, staring at the wall, which doesn’t fucking exist. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“You do, when you aren’t panicking. It’s the medical term for surgical removal of the lungs, and the answer is no—you do not know how to perform one. And yet you did it. On Cassie Boyle.”

Will turns around. Hannibal is leaning forward in his chair, smiling conspiratorially. “No,” he breathes.

“Yes.”

“But I—I couldn’t have. I wasn’t losing time.”

“That depends on your definition of ‘lost time.’ You didn’t lose your sense of internal continuity, no, but consider those hours you spend each day enacting predefined routines—feeding your dogs, cooking your meals, cutting firewood. Can you truly claim that those hours are yours? How would you know if you imagined them?”

“I’d know,” he says immediately. “I’d know. I mean, if I hallucinated feeding the dogs, they wouldn’t get fed, and they’d let me know.”

“And you’re telling me you’ve never had a mental slip? You never once believed you fed them only to find their bowls in the dishwasher, still empty?”

Will is quiet.

“The encephalitis made things easier, but it was nothing more than a convenient coincidence. Perhaps the result of running too many mental processes at once, on inadequate sleep—it takes a significant amount of energy to support a personality.”

He reads the implication in Hannibal’s eyes.

“The Ripper killed his first victim only three months after Il Monstro’s death, Will. Isn’t the timing convenient as well?”

“Yes, because he was the Ripper.”

“You’re telling me that Hannibal Lecter escaped from this cell—” he gestures grandly to their surroundings “—was shot fifteen times by the police, autopsied, and cremated. You believe that his brain was removed for dissection, the news of his death spread around the globe, and then he stood up, brushed himself off, and fled to America—a country with some of the most stringent border security in the world, I’ll remind you—to frame you for murder.” Hannibal leans back and steeples his fingers. “Which is more likely, Will? The above scenario, or one in which you dissociate and commit the crimes yourself?”

“He had a body double,” Will mutters.

“Mm. And I suppose he had a brain double, as well.”

“Hannibal,” he pleads.

“Does it comfort you to think of me as Hannibal Lecter?” He asks. “A man who loved you so fiercely that he wormed his way inside your head?”

Will isn’t sure how to respond to that, so he keeps his imaginary mouth closed.

“Perhaps it will also comfort you to know that I’ve been with him since childhood. He discovered very early on that it was both easy and enjoyable to submit to me completely, even to the point of self-annihilation. That little boy from Lithuania has been dead for decades,” he says. “Meaning that I am the man with whom you corresponded. I’m the man you love.”

“I don’t love you,” he says softly.

Hannibal Lecter smiles.

“You will.”