Chapter Text
A spark of pleasure courses through him when he thinks about Hannibal’s hands: wide on his skin, palms hard from the rough work his perverse artistic whims demand, their seeking fingertips’ first caresses hidden in broken memories of narcotic dissociation and induced seizures.
He understands they could share a joy separate from the murderous joy they’ve lived together this far. It could be his or Hannibal’s skin penetration-charged with electricity and not the broken skin of a freely bleeding victim.
Easiest to imagine himself in a familiar situation: poised over Hannibal’s large body, grasping him as he presses himself to the vulnerable mouth closed over the heat of his partner and in. Not impossible to imagine wanting his own body to part to an intrusion that seems, from a man who creates poetry with the delicate incisions of scalpels on the yielding bodies of captive others, too crude.
Will’s fantasies of touch and penetration come unanticipated as he moves through life beside the man he freely consumed who’s saturated his mind so completely that he can walk the halls of Hannibal’s memory palace.
He’ll watch his friend knife in hand carving meat into forms that, after the application of heat, will sustain them and thinks suddenly of long fingers pushing inside his body. Into his mouth. Into his ass. It provokes the contradictory urge to push open Hannibal’s legs or part the generous cheeks of the impenitent murderer’s ass under his hands and push up hard and close.
A heated moment. Will’s imagination kindled, then searing, as Hannibal walks shirtless from the bathroom, hair thick on his chest in a still-unfamiliar way. Will wants to rake his fingers through it while he’s moving over that heavier body or Hannibal’s moving inside him.
“You know I’d deny you nothing,” Hannibal says as Will drinks from his bare skin.
Hannibal means he’ll give himself every pleasure. He craves sensation and no sensual thing Will could demand from him would be a sacrifice.
Will declines to answer.
Later, when he’s alone, he strokes his cock in the dark lying on his side and imagines Hannibal hot at his back, the blunt head of his cock pushing between his cheeks to press into a tight, welcoming hole that so far has only known a woman’s fingers. His wife of two years pressing herself inside him while he thrust his orgasm into the wet of her eager mouth.
Molly had been the longest relationship of his life. Most of him wants this unconsummated thing with his closest friend, a man who loves him with inhuman passion and who long ago insinuated himself inside him with words and with needles and with intentional negligence toward the conflagration in his mind, to last until the end.
Another part of him still wants to inflict that end, vengeful fantasies of mutilation and asphyxiation never far from memories of betrayal.
The abusive physical violations aren’t what provokes rage in him, the clammy rage he feels when he remembers being handed bodily over to the state, the jealous rage he feels when he thinks of Hannibal seeking other bodies and never his to satisfy himself in the time since he met him.
“What’s it like to have sex with a food animal?” Will asks deadpan over dinner as the tines of his fork slide into flesh made soft on the burning eye of a stove.
“Inveterately perverse. I don’t share Francis Dolarhyde’s fascination with dead flesh, but I know two separate uses for the flesh passing under my hands,” Hannibal says. “Is passing through my lips a part of your fantasies, Will?
Will laughs.
“Yeah, no. No, it isn’t.”
He thinks about it. Being flensed and processed under Hannibal’s knives, tenderized and salted in his kitchen, politely severed into small pieces on a plate and swallowed into his body. The scar on his forehead feels tight.
“No,” he reiterates. “Why? Is it part of yours?”
Hannibal smiles, smug.
“I wouldn’t waste you on three fleeting inches of pleasure.”
Heat on his skin, Will pushes Hannibal’s victim onto his own waiting tongue, savors and swallows.
“Anymore,” he corrects.
“Anymore.”
He knows why he’s waiting. Hannibal has gifted him the confidence to pursue his own pleasure in the company of another body in more than a shy and halting way that dissolves into passion before he conceals all of himself and pushes a partner away. But every time he’s grown more intimate with Hannibal it’s come with pain.
He doesn’t know how Hannibal would hurt him, how he would wound himself. Only to expect it. Because Abigail was buried by the state. Because he found Bedelia with a ring the size of Texas instead of his sought after friend in their Florence apartments. Because he met a woman he fit comfortably together with without the passion he shares with Hannibal and suffered an endless succession of images of her murder at his hands at the same time he watched himself destroying lives to sate his own vanity, wild with the desire to possess the free mind of a man whose liberty from any companionship but his he already stole.
/Tell me, Will, what more can I give you than my every waking moment — and my unconditional surrender on my knees in the dirt in the cold?/
The Hannibal in his mind, his own internal narrator since the cannibal insinuated himself under his skin with more than needles years ago. As true to life as the flesh and blood man.
“When I see vulnerable, scared things I want to protect them. I want to crush you. Because you’re still arrogant. Maybe I have to forgive that,” he says out loud.
Hannibal sits still at his harpsichord, his hands poised fingers curled in the air.
“You achieve gratification when your victims are lifeless bodies. You’ve continuously positioned yourself to satisfy yourself with me and left a trail of failed consummations. I’m stubbornly vital. You may always hate that.”
Will shuts his eyes and lets the inception of the music penetrate and fill him, bright notes with an energy as lively as the prey he lives close beside but hasn’t savaged.
He breathes in against the pain of a loss he’s failed to realize and resolves himself on a lesser pleasure. Grants himself permission to allow those hands next on his naked skin.
He wouldn’t waste Hannibal on his solitary, fleeting pleasure.
Anymore.