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On nights when he woke drenched in sweat, disoriented, Will recalled only the tone and flavor of his dreams, not the substance. Clinging to him thick, heavy as syrup, and sweet: dreams of transformation, dreams of annihilation, dreams of being unmade.
He did not know what it meant, or what he should do about it. Only that he was by some definition, in some diagnostic criteria, unwell.
But even back then, there was a primal part of him that somehow grasped that those dreams were connected to Dr. Lecter. That sensed, as if by instinct, in the hairs of his arms and the valving of his pulse, that if annihilation was what he dreamt of, then Hannibal was the one who could give it to him.
∽
Hannibal had cooked him breakfast. Brought it personally to his door, which Will opened sleep-hazy and half-dressed, as though their relationship had been something quite other than what it was. Abnormal, the quick, sharp thing inside his mind told him; boundaries was another word it offered; then boyfriend. He felt a sudden urge to laugh — he felt unmoored, afraid.
Hannibal stepped inside Will’s home, neatly groomed, impeccably dressed, alien amid the dimly lit shabbiness of the living room. As out of place as an aristocrat, or a mythical creature clothed in human skin. And Will could not help feeling that he had admitted something dangerous into his life.
Nevertheless he let the scene play out, following the movements, the stilted rhythms of social conversation. Hannibal was polite, analytic. This was a professional visit, Will gathered. An effort to build rapport. It meant a more familiar danger, then: he was already being treated as the patient. He was annoyed, defensive — and for a moment, he felt almost reassured.
But then he watched the facade, cold and calm, break for just a moment, as Hannibal said it — Jack's fragile teacup, brought out for only the most special guests — watched something else emerge from behind that mask. Amused, mischievous, cunning, so damn pleased.
And even as an instinctual part of him roused to attention, thrummed with dread, Will could not help himself — he was elated to see it. To have that confidential smile turned on to him, to be the recipient of that searching gaze. He laughed out loud, with plain, unfeigned delight.
It was not as though he had missed the meaning. The way Hannibal had named him as the object, the thing to be made use of, handled, passed between hands. It was flirtatious, yes — it was teasing, wry, affectionate — it was an assertion of power.
There was something else, too. Will found himself thinking, as fluid as his mind supplying the end of a half-spoken sentence: He wants someday to be the guest I am brought out for.
The thought did not make sense, exactly — not yet. It was impossible to follow through to its logical conclusion, too many of the necessary terms still missing — more sensation, at that point, than coherent idea. But there it was.
He does not want to win me, or woo me, Will thought. He wants, someday, for me to serve myself up to him.
∽
This, then, was the first time that he knew: He sat opposite Hannibal in his office. He presented a riddle, asked Hannibal to guess what he had felt in that moment. What he’d felt as he squeezed the trigger, as his bullet ripped through Hobbs’s flannel, muscle, bone. What he’d felt as he watched Hobbs slump to the floor and the life ebb from him.
And Hannibal had answered: You felt like God dropping the roof on a church of Sunday worshippers. You felt powerful.
There had been glimmerings, before. Hannibal haunting through the Hobbs house a few steps behind, cool and steady, not a strand of hair out of place, as though no part of that savage scene touched him. Hannibal straight-faced and untrembling as his hand clasped over Abigail’s slashed throat.
But this, maybe, was the first time that Will knew. Because if Hannibal could read that thought, the worst thought, out of the inside of him, as clearly as though it had been written on the page, if Hannibal could calmly give name to the most monstrous part of him — then what?
Will was not used to being seen. His relationships with others were predicated on the particular ways in which each had chosen to unsee him. Alana, as a wounded animal in need of care; Jack, as a leashed dog, recalcitrant but obedient. Each, in its own way, missing the essential.
This, with Hannibal, was something different. Will felt denuded, exposed — exhilarated. And he felt like he had once more glimpsed the mask slip, just slightly, from Dr. Lecter’s face.
Because the peculiar talent of Will’s mind was that it understood monsters. And he had always known that it made him, in some sense, a monster as well.
So if Hannibal understood him, then what did that make Hannibal?
∽
Knowing did not save him. He hardly expected it to. Allowing it to go on too long, seeing too much, pretending to Jack that he saw less than he did. Feeling out the contours of his own awful curiosity, like palpating the edges of a wound. Wishing, more than anything, to be wrong.
But he had not understood, then, that he was gambling with Abigail's life, as well as his own. And he paid for that mistake.
In the nightmare fog of the weeks that followed, Will was reminded of those folk stories which teach the dangers of trifling with monsters in human skin. Which teach that there are certain violences one only suffers by inviting them in. A victim-blaming admonition, maybe; but a lesson, too, in all the forces that might lure a person toward self-destruction.
Curiosity, certainly. Sympathy, too. Even love.
Because Hannibal had hurt Will in exactly the places that Will had opened the door to him. He had nurtured their disfigured little found family, the bond of standing in as Abigail's surrogate parents, exactly long enough to rip it away. Weaponized the trust built through self-disclosure, turned intimacy into his most potent poison. Don’t lie to me, Will had begged, and felt the ground open beneath him as Hannibal lied anyway. Soft-spoken, persuasive, as gentle as a viper filling its prey with venom.
But it was not quite right either, Will decided, to think of himself as prey. Because his role in Hannibal's design was not to die — that had never been his purpose. His purpose was to bear witness.
Will understood, then, that Hannibal had chosen him for this: a moment of recognition. Circumstances arranged so that there might be a beat when their eyes would meet across the room, and the rest of the world would fall away. A salutation. A meet-cute. An unmasking.
It was cruelty, yes. But it was also disclosure. An invitation, in return. A door left open, in the hopes that Will would step through.
∽
In the long weeks of solitude that made up his life in a cell, Will no longer wondered about Hannibal. He understood him well enough. This was, after all, the thing his mind was trained to do, when deprived of hope or denial: to see others with clarity, to sense the architecture of desire that underlay action, like bonework beneath the skin. Hannibal saw the world that way, too — their talents were not dissimilar — only Hannibal’s interests were more sculptural. He saw the pieces that could be carved off.
Will’s own desires had always been more of a mystery to him. That light only pointed outward, not in. He was too filled up with other people’s wants, felt at moments that he overflowed with them, leaked them from his pores. Because what difference was there, really, between understanding a feeling, and feeling it?
But now, in the clarity afforded by isolation, he was learning, every day, new things about himself.
He had been Hannibal’s victim, once. He began to wonder: What else might I be to him?
His hunter? He could not deny there was something calming in the thought, almost warm. His murderer? And there he surprised himself, because the image was clear, hot, consuming. A rare pleasure: the sensation of wanting something, selfishly and viscerally, only for himself.
He found an opportunity, and made an attempt. Less pleasure in it than he had hoped, because it was not his own hands that closed around Hannibal’s throat. But there was delight, still, in giving his instructions to the orderly, describing exactly how he should kill him. Satisfaction, in imagining the work of his noose.
Yet when Hannibal came to him again after that, throat terribly bruised, but alive — warm, extant, flesh and blood despite everything — Will learned another curious thing.
He learned that he was relieved. That he did not want Hannibal to die.
∽
Was it strange that things felt more honest between them, after that? More intimate? An exchange of wounds, of betrayals, as shy and solemn as lovers sliding rings onto one another's fingers.
There was no denying that Will had spoken more of his own truth to Hannibal than to any other person in his life. And he was certain he had glimpsed more of Hannibal's truth, as well — even as Hannibal lied to him, constantly and savagely. Lied to him like breathing, and less with the intent that any particular lie be believed than to create a disorienting effect around him, to instill doubt, to control —
It was not as if Will failed to recognize what this was. He was no stranger to abuse or manipulation, he knew the oppressive application of power when he saw it. It was a textbook dynamic — one, if he were being honest, that he had recognized for a long time.
Still, he was surprised to hear himself say it aloud, to hear how simple it sounded, and how sad: You don't want me to have anything but you.
Did it matter, Will asked himself later, if the unspoken end to that sentence called up less anger in him than he expected, and more pity? You don’t want me to have anything but you — because you don’t have anything but me.
Did it matter if he suspected that Hannibal's goal was not really to isolate or control him, but only to watch him squirm and struggle against that control? Not to pin him down, but to force him to prove that he could not be pinned?
A game, like everything else with Hannibal — an experiment. Play. With all the give-and-take, the affection, the childlike delight and malice that word entailed.
The answer, of course, was no. None of that mattered. It was no safer, for all that, to allow Hannibal to live, to speak with him, to coax his confidences from him. It was no less deadly, to want him.
∽
Will still dreamt, occasionally, of killing Hannibal. But he dreamt of other things as well. The unexpected warmth of him when he stepped inside your space, though he always looked as though he'd been carved out of ice. The things one might taste inside his mouth: clean things, mineral things, like wine, or marrow, or raw blood. The sibilant sound of cord chafing his wrists, turning back his throat, making him gasp for air —
Will woke from one such dream to find himself hard. It was not a surprise, after everything. He understood himself well enough by this point. He was no longer capable of being surprised by the things his body asked from him.
It didn't have to mean anything, he thought. A quick, furtive hand, holding the image as clear and constant in his mind as possible. Letting that familiar, cloying flavor of repulsion mixed with desire carry him to his finish.
But he couldn't entirely silence the thought: If that was what his body wanted, then why shouldn't he reach out and take it?
And a second thought followed, colder, more cunning: It might even work. It might lure Hannibal into letting down his guard, tipping his hand.
Will remembered his conversation with Jack: The right bait. You hook him, I'll land him. He had done worse things, certainly, for the sake of snaring Hannibal. If he would not be forgiven, if there was no going back for him, no repairing the things he had broken, then why not ruin himself with this, as well?
They had come so close, already -- moments when they walked up to the precipice, but did not step over. Hannibal drawing close behind him in his office, reaching a hand forward to brush against his waist. Hannibal cradling his face and studying his mouth with that strange intensity of interest, somewhere between the academic and the carnivorous.
What if Will had only leaned into his touch a little more — what if he turned his mouth against that palm, or took that hand and guided it around him — some small act of daring, of agency, of power? Would Hannibal be amused? Would he be impressed?
How far would Hannibal let him go before stopping him? Will remembered the delicious anticipation, holding his pistol on the social worker as the man crawled helpless on his knees beside the horse’s hollowed chest. He could have pulled the trigger — he could have finished it sooner — but instead he lingered. Felt the want pouring into him, the relief of wanting, so powerful that his hands shook and his breaths came shallow.
And then, just as he had been prepared to do it, Hannibal’s hand had settled over the hammer of the pistol, quick as lightning but so, so calm. Like a deus ex machina, like a guardian angel descending from the sky to save him from himself. To save him from the thing he wanted more than anything.
An act of mercy? No — or not only that. A game of withholding, of denial — Not yet, sweet one, not until I say. At my word, on my pace. I will tell you when —
If Will reached for him — if he tried — would Hannibal save him from that, as well? Or would he, finally, give him permission to tip over the edge?
Will’s orgasm crept over him slow and burning, like a fever, and when it was done he felt hollow, almost pure.
∽
Their trajectories were set. Too much had happened that could not be undone. They careened forward on momentum alone, each arcing along their path, toward inevitable collision.
Eventually, Will knew, he would be faced with a choice. But when it came to that, what would he choose?
There was no question that, if he had been given a choice from the start, he would have saved Abigail. Even now, he bargained for her in his thoughts. Turn back time, he begged. Let me try again. Undo this, and everything else I will accept.
But Abigail was dead. And the thing Will should want now — the sane thing — was to save himself. Even if it meant killing Hannibal.
He did sometimes wonder, though, if it was too late for that. If the two of them were too alike, too entangled, too mirrored. If their guilt was too shared — common property, like the furniture of a divorcing couple. Impossible to say, anymore, what, really, was whose.
If he was honest with himself, the thing he wished for now, more than anything, was to save them both. The idea still ignited a fragile little flame of hope inside him. A belief in everything that was beautiful within each of them. An unreasoning faith in the promise of an uncertain future, in all of the possibilities the wide world might afford them. Maybe anything can be redeemed, given time, he prayed. Maybe anyone is worth saving. Even him. Even me.
But he suspected, more and more, that he would never be given that choice. That the true answer was that he would save neither of them.
Still, when it came down to it, wouldn't that be a relief, as well? To step out, finally, from behind his own mask. To return in kind the gift that Hannibal had given him, the only one that mattered — the gift of letting another human being know him.
When he imagined it, it was an act of love. Not a sacrifice, no, to share in Hannibal's fate — only an opportunity for Will to speak his own nature honestly into the world. To crawl free from his skin and become something new. To participate as an agent in his own unmaking.
And when the moment came, wouldn't that feel like an admission, a confession, a consummation?
Wouldn't it feel like being granted, finally, release — like tipping over the edge together, and falling?