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You regarded the gourmet with disdain before you met Hannibal Lecter. Now it makes you laugh to remember, a dry humorless scrape of a laugh from your throat, unclean and gristle-scoured.
It was because of your false assumption that there was something sugar coated about epicurean cooking, a denial that meat was flesh and flesh came from living things. A misunderstanding that designer food was all science and sauce and French absurdity, people sitting around a spectacularly set table chewing meat, (flesh, once living,) and calling it art, thinking it immaculate, thinking themselves somehow absolved from the banality of consuming a corpse. A corpse is still a corpse, no matter how lovely the garnish.
Your fisherman’s sensibilities prevent you from ever really stripping the brutality from meat. You know the sharp, biting sensation of scales sticking to puckered fingers too well, the slice of a gill, the blood that spills from the hook-wound as you pull it from flaky pink skin run through with veins of silver like ore in bedrock. You know all these things and have developed a resilience to them. You’ve killed your food, led it tenderly down the path from freshwater to dinner plate. You know there is no sugar coat, no cruelty-free, no beauty, no art. Just a corpse.
Your mistake was in thinking that cooking like Hannibal’s cooking somehow ignored this. Dressed death up so that it could be forgotten.Your mistake was in thinking that Hannibal Lecter had any interest in forgetting death.
It was the organ meat that changed your mind. Whenever Hannibal fed you, (and he did so at every opportunity, watching the the fork disappear into your mouth, studying the mechanical grind of your jaw like it was the thing that sated his hunger, rather than the food itself), the dishes so often contained offal. Heart, lungs, kidney, liver. Tissues soft and crumbly and muted, sea-bashed granite, parts of the body with steady, quiet, constant jobs. Purifying, pumping, breathing. There is no strain to the organ meat of a healthy animal, and you can taste the luxury in them as Hannibal watches you taste such luxury, the slightest smile, a catchlight in his otherwise black eyes.
---
You have idly thought, on more than one occasion, that Hannibal Lecter is the type of man who likely inspires attraction in everyone he interacts with, regardless of sexual preference, of logic, of practicality. He is the type of man who makes people powerless, and enjoys the powerlessness he inflicts. There is no other explanation for the way he makes your stomach turn when he rolls up his sleeves, the way you can recall in stark and technicolor detail every time he has ever touched you.
It is something in his chemistry, in yours. You’re powerless, you know that, so you simply cede to it. Accept with no real resistance or resentment that he is the exception to many of your former preferences. You enjoy his gourmet cooking, in a way you have never enjoyed gourmet cooking before. You are attracted to him, base and animal, in a way you have never been attracted to a man before.
It doesn’t matter why, it simply is. He jabs something into your guts. A long, elegant finger upon which he twists your intestines like a spit, drawing you out of yourself, changing your anatomy, shaping it so that your body fits neatly to accommodate his. At this point, if he were to withdraw, there would be a yawning vacancy, an emptiness so grave you may not ever find another invasion to occupy the space. So, as any host does when infected with a parasite, you adapt.
---
“You sure love the innards,” you tell him one time through a full mouth because you’re not at his dinner table so you don’t feel as if you have to award him courtesy, propriety. He’s brought you breakfast, herbed sweetbreads in a pastry crust, as delectable as you’ve ever tasted even though sweetbreads have always seemed too indulgent for you to really enjoy. You’re amused by the way he looks in your own humble home. So out of place, this elegant creature amid a seething pack of begging dogs, too-tall beneath the ceiling with its cracks and stains, the cobwebs in the corners you don’t sweep away because the spiders take care of your fly-problem. He sits upon serving you, and looks no less absurd curled at your table like a snake poised to strike.
“When prepared correctly, offal is blessed with a more subtle, nuanced flavor than the other major muscle groups,” Hannibal explains, dapping his lips with his own napkin. “I often prefer cooking organ meat when given the chance. It lends a sensitivity to the dish.”
“I noticed,” you say, swallowing. “I used to think fancy cooking was all about disguising the, uh, disgust of meat.” You accidentally smile, aware it comes across as more of a grimace. It’s how your smiles often look, like something inhuman trying to blend in with a species you do not actually belong to. You pause. “But I guess I was wrong.”
“I disguise nothing,” Hannibal offers after thoughtfully chewing and swallowing a bite. “Any embellishment I use is to bring out the flavor, to enhance what the meat truly is. Not to hide it.”
You nod, ducking out of his impossible scrutiny, the way he looks at you like he’s flaying the flesh from your bones, the way a psychiatrist looks at his most prized patient, the way a chef looks at his most prized pig. That smile again, skull-sick and reflexive, flickers across your mouth. “I guess that’s why your cooking doesn’t bother me,” you tell the table. “I never liked gourmet cooking, thought it was...arrogant, pretentious. But your food. I finally understand why cooking is considered an art.”
“I am honored to change such a complex mind, Will,” he tells you. As always, the way he says your name makes you skin crawl in a mess of visceral longing, inexplicable revulsion. And then that shift of your stomach like expansion over a vacancy, something strange, horrible, aching. Something akin to hunger.
---
One day you he takes you to a livestock auction in west Maryland. You expect to be nauseated if only by the absence of any active effort to obtain, animals lined up and paraded out on halters and leads, ready for the slaughter with no chase, no hunt, no trap, no hook. But Hannibal’s presence somehow imposes such things onto the scene, as if by refusing to disguise death he provides you with the whole picture, an imagined story where it takes more than money to acquire rare beasts.
It smells like fear and sweat and shit and straw, and it makes you oddly aroused to imagine the same scent, so heady and raw and dirty and organic, invading Hannibal’s nose, too. It makes you feel the same way to see him in a sweater rather than his usual suits, to see a strand of his carefully styled hair come undone and fall into his line of vision while he cooks. A smear of imperfection on an otherwise gloriously clean blanket of Virginia snow, a spot of blood, of filth. It feels like you are witnessing something private and unintended for you, something stolen. You shake your head in mild self-disgust when you realize that you want to steal things from Hannibal Lecter, your psychiatrist, your colleague, your friend.
Stepping carefully over still-steaming piles of manure he leads you to the horses, towards their gentle snuffling, their vast shifting muscles and coats like new pennies. “Cheval,” he says, gesturing, reaching for the massive head of some flint-black draft horse and stroking it gently between the eyes. You regard it warily, stunned by its mass, its power. “This is a Friesian, from the Netherlands, though most are German bred now. They are used for Dressage, primarily, very gentle,” he murmurs, eyes fixed on the eerie square pupils.
You watch him, watch the gentle sweep of his wide palms over hollows above the horses eyes, down the jut of bones in its muzzle. “Don’t some people eat horse meat?” you ask, wondering at his interest.
“In America, horses are used exclusively for sport and competition, under the guise of companionship,” Hannibal says, combing his fingers through the Friesian’s coarse black forelock. “It’s considered taboo to cook horse meat, yet perfectly acceptable to force young horses to race before their cannon bones have fully formed, resulting in frequent injury and premature death. Humanity is always finding inventive new ways to justify cruelty.”
You shove your hands in your pockets, eyes flickering over the milling cesspool of animals and their handlers, as dense as flies on something decayed. “There’s something unsettling to people about eating animals we consider pets. Death is inevitable, but consumption isn’t. We want to believe we’re... not that grotesque. However impractical.”
“The true error is in considering animals ‘pets’ at all,” Hannibal explains. “So very arrogant, to assume our power over a creature, or to assume their servitude and dependance upon us, while ignoring death and consumption as parts of that dynamic.”
“You’re um, talking to a guy with a pack of dogs at his house,” you remind him.
“And they are your friends, not your pets,” Hannibal looks over his shoulder at you, eyes glinting, palms open so that the massive horse can nuzzle at them, huffing hot, sweet breath. “You do not regard them as your possessions.”
“Yeah, I’m not your average dog owner, I don’t think. But I couldn’t brinf myself to eat dog meat, I am just as guilty of compartmentalizing,” you mumble, eyes falling upon a peculiar looking horse as you scan the crowd, eyes drawn to the strangeness of its body, tall and too-thin and shimmery like a mirage, like a horse fashioned from Mojave sand.
“The Akhal-Teke,” Hannibal says, following your gaze with his own, stepping away from the black horse to stand so very close behind you, so close you can feel the terrible heat of his breath beside your ear. “Also known as the Golden Horse, from Turkmenistan. Very rare and very beautiful.”
“It looks like it’s sick,” you observe, internally cringing at the painful jut of its ribs through that reflective bronze skin, its legs so fragile and breakable looking, its neck more like that of a swan that a horse. “Is it supposed to look like that?”
Hannibal nods. You can only see the motion in your periphery, the blurry half blindness outside the rim of your glasses. Your eyes are firmly locked ahead of you, for if you were to turn towards him you’d risk brushing your lips against the hollow of his cheek, fleeting, private, stolen touch. Your insides writhe and heat up to think about it, as if they were still live and held to an open flame. “Yes,” he answers. “In fact, that is a finest specimen I have seen in many years. They are quite unusual looking, fine-boned and delicate, though it is misleading as they are desert horses, known for their endurance, strength, and athleticism.”
“It just looks too thin,” you force out, making yourself step away from him, wrenching your bones from the magnetic draw of his flesh.
He nods, glancing sidelong at you with half a smile on his lips. “The Akhal-Teke is bred for sport and its exquisite beauty. It would be not only a shame to slaughter one for meat, but an unsatisfying meal. Some animals are better to admire, than to consume.”
The way he looks at you makes you feel like he regards you as one such animal, and your heart clenches up at this realization, keeps you rooted to the ground as he walks ahead of you, the cleanest creature at the livestock auction.
You think about him as you attempt to sleep that night, his fractal smiles and eyes like sinkholes. Then you fall away, drenched in sweat, thinking of cream-gold coats glinting in the Turkmenistan sun in a streak across the desert, following a trail of blood, led by a black and feathered stag forever just out of reach.
---
One time you drive from Wolf Trap to Hannibal’s office in a hail-storm, swerving so alarmingly so many times that you’re shocked you arrive at his doorstep still breathing, albeit sweat-and rain damp, sweltering with fever.
“Will,” he says, steering you inside, hands firm on your shoulders. “Please. Sit down. You’re not well.”
You don’t recall what happens directly afterward, the flickering of hospital-bright light and the steady thrum of something more reliable than your heartbeat, maybe. Minutes skidding by, or perhaps hours, until Hannibal is directly in front of you, his face inches away and his palms spread on either side of your face, its simultaneous flush and pallor. “Will,” his voice echoes.
You feel like that great black horse, head held steady by the renowned Dr. Lecter, safe and solid, thumbs at your cheek bones, fingers at your pulse. “Open your mouth,” he orders evenly, and you do so, you will do anything he tells you, as long as it either drowns or feeds this fire, the one you can no longer sustain at this particular intensity lest it leave you charred to ash.
Quickly and clinically he dips an index finger into the heat of your mouth, sweeping the inside of your cheek like he’s collecting DNA on a cotton swab to test in a gel electrophoresis. Your stomach plummets, your mouth wanting to close over his knuckle and suck him into you, taste the latex bite of rubber glove under his nail, the subtle, gamey flavor of offal. But you are too slack and pliant to act on such a whim, thank God, and instead he slides his finger easily from your mouth, nail shiny with your fever-spit.
He licks it off. Pushes his own finger into his own mouth, eyelids sweeping down and chin tilted up as if in exaltation, as if in prayer, as he sucks your saliva from his finger. You must be hallucinating so you close your eyes, guts roiling and clenching in hunger, hunger, yes, it’s hunger for sure this time, you know it. “Fever,” he says, voice disconnected and hazy as it floats to you across the Turkmenistan desert. “I will administer a slight sedative. Please take a deep breath, Will. You must relax.”
You taste latex, then kidney blood, then nothing at all.
---
You know what Hannibal is before you know what he is. There is an animal knowing deep inside you, a knowing like that in your dogs when they woof from their sleep, ears pricking up involuntarily at the snap of a twig outside, the crunch of snow beneath a stag’s hoof. A knowing from your dreams, a knowing so deep and terrible it is like the knowing of God.
You would know consciously if it weren’t for your other feelings surrounding Hannibal Lecter. If he were just your psychiatrist, just your colleague, just your friend, then maybe you would see it with something other than your hidden third eye, your wolf’s heart which beats harder in the presence of greatness, of terror. You would recognize he was not what he seems, you’d be able to align him with the other minds you force yourself to behold, the masks you must put on only to pry from your flesh with shaking fingers lest they grow permanently adhered to you. You would see him for what he is: another hole of madness into which you must not fall. The darkest, deepest, most alluring. A true psychopath you called him once, before you knew beyond the dog-knowing, the God-knowing.
However, you have already fallen into this hole of madness. You are handicapped by your attraction, by your intrigue, by the gaps in your clocks and the black folds of your fever. His seduction works on you in part because he wants it to, but also because there is a vast part of your diseased body which does not care, which wants to be seduced, which is tired of being condemned to eternal loneliness and recognized him as a potential end to that condemnation.
You know there is something wrong with Hannibal Lecter, something too good, too smooth, too dark. He is like offal. A meat so tender and so rich there must be something corrupt and immoral about it, something taboo, something which makes it dangerous. Your heart knows it, but your heart is also compromised. The same instinct in you which warns you of his horror is the same instinct that it drawn to it, a fish to a fly. Perhaps it is because you are the same. Perhaps it is because he is an artist and you are moved by his art, no matter how awful, no matter the offal.
You do not want to deconstruct Hannibal Lecter, not yet. You want to simply bask in the illusion of his safety, in the lie of his meals, so beautiful there cannot be something sinister cooked into them, even though there must be, because nothing which tastes this good can come without some kind of loss, struggle, sacrifice.
You know what he is before you know what he is. But you let it grow and fester and burn, blinded by your attraction to him. Because you, too, are a curious creature. Because he’s heated you up, made you soft and molten with fever so that he can blow glass, shape you into parisons of his own design, and it feels so good to be known, that you will allow it to change you, too.
---
Hate and love are not so dissimilar, and you realize this from behind the walls of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Upon discovering the extent of Hannibal’s horrible sway, you’re surprised to find that it doesn’t feel very different to see him as he is than it was to ache for who you thought he was. Everything makes sense, every piece eventually, painfully, messily falls into place. Locked away with a world of evidence stacked against you, you have so much time to think, to assemble. As you do so, you’re dismayed to realize how little actually changes.
You admit to yourself that you were probably falling in love with Hannibal Lecter before you discovered he was driving you insane. You were probably falling in love with him because he was writing that script for you, there is little other explanation for the way he occupied every waking thought and half-dream, no other excuse for the way your body seized up in his proximity, the way you idly and shamefully wanted to share every inch of your interior with him if only so he would do the same in exchange. The way you knew if he ever kissed you, you would have kissed back, choked yourself in your desperation to do so, to swallow him whole, to find answers, to name the antlers nicking the left ventricle of your heart.
When it was happening, you didn’t know it was happening. You couldn’t know anything, your mind was aflame and living felt like trying to hold a handful of black water in your hand while it slipped away, draining though cracks between your fingers. It was impossible to locate a thing like love in a mess like that, so it felt like something different. It felt like necessity, to drive an hour a half in hail storms to find Hannibal, to show up and crumple to your knees before him in desperate search of answers you felt only he could feed you. To hear things in his voice, to imagine him near you with a grip firm on your shoulder even when you were alone.
Now, with your ample time to think, you realize that if your face were a mask of a killer and you were trying it on in order to understand, you’d identify such a thing as love. You’d say it simply, he was in love with his psychiatrist. He was obbsessed with him, reliant on him. He didn’t commit these murders, he just was too blind to see who really committed them, because he was in love. He was tricked, duped, manipulated. You feel nothing as you accept this, sitting on the edge of your cot with your knees splayed and your forearms resting upon them, palms open skyward like you are half expecting something to fall into those empty fingers, a key to your own cell, an impossible shred of evidence to exonerate you.
Your interior is still narrated by Hannibal’s voice. Your flesh still feels shaped around Hannibal’s skeleton. You are still consumed and driven by feeling for him, though now it is the clean, pure rage of hate rather than the muddy insanity of fever-love, of infatuation, obsession.
If you were to somehow break out of this prison you’re not supposed to be in, you’d still end up on his doorstep, still fall to your knees, still seek him to seek answers. Though this time, you’d seek those answers by killing him. Sinking a hunting knife into his abdominal muscles, twisting his insides as he has twisted yours, gutting him as you have gutted so many fish, as he has gutted so many people, as he has gutted you with light, with fever. You would lick his blood from your fingers as he licked your spit from his, and that, even that, doesn’t feel that different from love.
---
The first time Hannibal kisses you, it’s to the cloying stench of ruptured horse guts stewing in a metallic soup, the blubbering of some lesser killer staggering on his knees, covered in horse shit, slick with horse blood. You suppose that is fitting. You suppose this is a natural place for this to take you, you suppose you were always supposed to end up here. Lips split beneath the devil’s teeth, gripping for him like you may drown in horse blood too, if it weren’t for the solidity of your creator. You shake and you shake, letting it happen, thinking that this is no different than killing for him, with him. No different than sharing his meat.
He makes a fist in your collar and seals your mouths, thumb pressed so firmly into your pulse you know he must feel how your heart speeds, how you give in, crumple against him around a shattered sob, reaching for him even though he has just robbed you of something that should have been yours. He has given you something else, a gift, a promise, a prayer. You kiss back, wondering idly if Jack has this in mind when he said lure him. . You wonder if it was what you had in mind, too.
He pulls away to knock Ingram out with the butt of the pistol he wrestled from your hand, and with a sick, solid thump a body crumples back to the barn floor like something disposable. Hannibal looks at you, eyes broken open in this way that you would have no other choice but to describe as tender. It is a more terrifying than the dead-fish blankness you see every other moment. His pupils are bright and reflective, the shine of polished obsidian, head tilted thoughtfully as he regards you, advancing on you, backing you up against the barn wall into which he slams you, broad palm holding you there by your throat, thigh rending yours apart and splitting you like a carcass after slaughter.
You let him. Let him tongue your lips apart and chew them until they bleed, let him thumb open your jaw so he can lick your teeth. You feel like a horse, a thin-boned Golden beast examined by a potential buyer as Hannibal thumbs over your molars, chokes you with his fingers, looks at you like he’s assessing a piece of meat at the butcher. “Exquisite,” he mumbles between kisses so rough they are less like kisses and more like being struck, ground to dust. He tastes like your blood, and you think that is fitting, too.
He rucks up your shirt, smears your shuddering abdominals with death, digs his nails into you and all you can think is deeper, as you grapple with him. Deeper, as you suck on his tongue and rut mindlessly against the thigh he’s splitting you with. And as he tightens the fist he has around your throat so tightly the world cuts out, the dead horse in its river of blood gives way to a shimmery white and you think, deeper. Please.
You come in your pants to the image of impaling Hannibal on a mounted stag’s head, the image of his blood spilling over your fist like holy water.
---
It gets harder and harder to discern what is your design, and what is his. You think often of that final day, when you lure him into Jack’s trap and end it all. But what if Hannibal has been an angler fish this whole time, attached to his own spectacularly glowing lure? What if you end up in his mouth, tripping after his brilliance, past caring that you are the one being swallowed after all? What then? Does it matter? You suspect it might not, not anymore.
You are splayed on his one thousand count Egyptian Cotton sheets, bathed in your own sweat and his saliva, for he has been at you for what feels like hours. Mapping your flesh with his teeth like you are something endlessly fascinating and worthy of discovery, littering you in spots of color he sucks into your flesh so decidedly, so pointedly, as if you are a dish to be savored. And this is where you are, but it is also where you want to be. Where you feel like the mask has finally been peeled, despite the trap you are supposedly setting, the lure you have supposedly fashioned from your own skin, your own hair, your own DNA.
It’s harder and harder to know what is your cover, and what is your design. What is his design. Moments like these you cannot care, it feels to good, too pure to be known like this, to be turned inside out and found beautiful. There is no inch of you he has not had his mouth on, no stone left uncovered, no part of your flesh left for yourself save for your offal, and you would give him that too, if you could, you would give him everything. Your design. His. It’s a shameful thing, but it’s true in moments like these, when your brain is all static and your body so throughly destroyed. You try and remind yourself of the game you are playing, but the lure is too brilliant, and he pulls you into such dark waters.
You’re bent in two, his firm hand holding you twisted and rift apart as he fucks you open with his tongue, driving into you tirelessly like this is what sex is supposed to be, the final act of consummation, the culmination of one’s desire for another. You feel split and liquid and broken, fisting in his sheets while he groans into you, feasting on your insides, your dirtiest recesses. You feel like he’s trying to eat you. You wonder if he is.
“Fuck,” you breathe, arching into him, thighs flexing and clenching involuntarily. “Don’t you get tired?”
“Never,” Hannibal breathes, withdrawing so he can use his lips to tease against your used, loosened ring of muscle, the tip of his tongue pushing inside you so easily. “But you surely must be.”
“I don’t know what I am,” you admit, mind a haze, voice so hoarse and cracked it is nearly unrecognizable. You’re so hard it aches and you shift your hips mindlessly into his Egyptian cotton, smearing yourself against it messily, gasping at the stinging perfection of it all.
“You are mine,” Hannibal says simply. And in that moment, you know it is true, the whole of you pulsing and throbbing in combined pain and awe. He licks up the length of your crack, then shifts so he can replace his tongue with two fingers, pushing them into your guts so easily it feels like you are made from flame-softened butter. Your body sucks him in past the second knuckle and you hiss at the strangeness, the nervy sensation of being invaded, persuaded, fashioned, fucked. “Mine alone,” he murmurs again, lips pressed to the wrecked hollow of your lower back. You nod into the sheets. Owned, sold, resigned, designed.
He raises himself above you, dripping sweat onto your spine and with your eyes shut tight you imagine it is his blood from a wound you carved into him, gutted like a trout. It makes your cock twitch to imagine this, to feel his fingers crooking against your walls as he feels your from the inside out. It reminds you of the way you feel inside the carcass of a fish, its slippery flesh, the holes of its gills and the hook through its lip. You imagine the vacancy, imagine him crawling inside. Imagine a corpse bisected in a maze of silver, the same even curls of his calligraphy cut into your skin.
Hannibal pulls you back with a fist in your hair and kisses you deep with a filthy tongue, salty and bitter with your own darkness. You suck it from him, alive with shame and hunger, with the terrible glory of being possessed, and realize you are already locked behind the teeth of the angler fish, already sliding like a stone down the slip of its throat, and all you can think is deeper.
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