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i. present
Will Graham is a glory in blood.
Hannibal looks on, enraptured, as he kicks a man to the ground and swiftly sprouts a knife through shoulder blades, then sets upon another without pause. Will’s red teeth are bared, almost animalistic, and he dances as he fights, ducking and jabbing with precise, brutal efficiency. He has always carried a subtle power in his lean frame, Hannibal thinks, but only recently has he learned to truly wield it, tethered by neither fear nor compassion.
To Hannibal’s mild chagrin, he is unable to shake the buzzing awareness that his current surroundings are far from a museum’s tranquil corridors — no matter how undeniable the beauty before him. There is no space with which to distance himself from the art. Here, now, the danger is as real as it can ever be.
The stink of engine grease curls into his nostrils, and his body acts on instinct.
Hannibal drops to the ground, feels foul air rush over him. His attacker is wearing a pair of sandals that perfectly expose his bony heels, and Hannibal quickly severs his Achilles tendons, one right after the other. For a moment, the man flails, teetering like a tower before he slips in his own pooling blood. He crumples to the ground with a hoarse shout.
Hannibal wipes his scalpel on the fallen man’s shirt. He’s still gasping for air, clinging to life, and it’ll be a while until he bleeds out — long enough for Hannibal to have his fun. Hopefully, Will’s compassion will swing to his side today.
There is only one attacker left whose neck Hannibal snaps with a sharp, practiced motion, and then it is quiet again. Will spits on the ground and turns to face him.
”This wasn’t what I had in mind,” he says, studying their carnage.
”Both of us knew they were coming, Will.”
“Not today. Not here.”
Hannibal raises his brows. “Yet we are intact.”
All he receives in response is a hum, superficially thoughtful. It is clear that some unwelcome notion has spread its soiled fingers through Will’s head, but for once, no easy label rises to Hannibal’s awareness.
“It’s not just now, is it?” he prompts. “Like a latent infection, distress suffuses you.”
”I told you. I was hoping for a peaceful evening.”
”Tell me the truth, Will.”
“I am.”
”Will.”
Will huffs a breath, almost petulant. ”They found us in our home. Our home. I detest this, the running and the hiding. We should be the predators, Hannibal, not the prey.”
The spoken sentiment isn’t unshared, but Hannibal is beginning to sense another concealed within the tenuous fibers of Will’s tone. He recognizes that quaver from the screams that ring like music through his mind.
“It’s only natural to fear an inevitable end,” says Hannibal.
His perception is right, as always. He can see it in the near-imperceptible tick of Will’s jaw, his spine’s subtle elongation.
“Then you aren’t natural,” Will deflects. It is a little sloppy, Hannibal thinks.
”On the contrary. The rest of the world does not take part in humanity’s existential dread. We are alone in this aspect and all the more unnatural for it."
“You’re contradicting yourself.”
Hannibal sighs and begins applying himself to the laborious task of folding and wrapping the bodies for transport to the shed. Their survivor has begun to sniffle, and he briefly contemplates killing the man out of sheer annoyance, but he has never been one to succumb to hasty gratification and so he merely holds the man’s pulse point until his limbs go slack.
”Do you no longer have patience for paradoxes?” Hannibal says. “I find them to be quite wonderful. Nature’s delicate poetry.”
”You find everything to be quite wonderful. I could stick a chainsaw up your ass and still you would bathe in tearful poetics.”
“Will, I would much prefer if you don’t ‘stick a chainsaw up my ass.’”
Will’s mouth twitches. “You know, Hannibal, sometimes I really don’t like you.”
“I don’t think I could stop liking you,” Hannibal says sincerely. “Now if you could pass me the rope and bonesaw, please.”
Will obliges, but his hesitation is sketched out in each stilted movement.
“Are we going to have time? They know where we are, and they won’t be far behind their attack dogs.”
“I will not turn away a feast that comes knocking on my door,” says Hannibal.
At the forefront of his mind, he has already begun sifting through recipes and pairing wines. As he rolls each body onto the sheets that Will has baptized their ‘murder tarps,’ he leans closer than necessary, searching beneath the familiar copperish tang and day-old dirt for sweet harbingers of disease.
The organs of interest are, for the most part, surprisingly unafflicted. He considers suggesting a stew, perhaps, just one course. More to Will’s tastes than his own. Thus far, his culinary olive branches have never failed to soothe Will’s moods — though he still is not entirely sure this quarrel has become dramatic enough to warrant a concession.
”Be reasonable,” presses Will. “We have a day, a few at most. We should plan. Leave soon.”
“I have never been particularly concerned with reason.”
Will crouches down to help him, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “You went uncaught for a very long time, Hannibal. Reason wasn’t your priority, but it was certainly a consideration.”
Not untrue, he supposes. He can be profoundly sane. When he so wishes.
”Life’s dry schematics can be a distraction from its pleasures,” Hannibal says. “‘Happy is he who comes to know the hinges of nature, who tramples all fear and relentless fate, and the roar of Death’s insatiable waters.’”
“Yeah, well. Easier said than done.” Will loops a knot, then stops abruptly. He twists to meet Hannibal’s eyes. “You’re not wrong, Hannibal. I am afraid of losing what we have.”
While Hannibal finds that he’s perfectly capable of disassembling and scrutinizing Will’s current frame of mind, he struggles to drive himself to empathy. He manages, of course, but the emotion he receives — fear’s shrouded glimmer — has arrived from the ocean floor, distorted by light and logic. It tangles with his brain’s own thicket.
He considers Will’s question, so real and bright that he surprises himself by regarding its implicit nature. I’m afraid. Are you?
Somehow, a simple ‘no’ does not quite adhere to the stringent standards he keeps for his language.
“An incredibly unpleasant concept that contains all the elements of irrevocable tragedy,” says Hannibal. “It’s… not inconceivable that what I feel may be christened ‘fear.’”
“But you’re happy,” Will says. “Even now.”
“Always, Will.”
“Even without me,” he murmurs.
To an outsider not yet consumed by their shared maw, free from the dark pit of their conjoined stomach, Will could have sounded captious, even hostile. But they have long since transcended petty insecurities and accusations. Will is extending a prompt and an invitation, not a challenge.
“Your absence will be my own,” says Hannibal. “Like a row of matches catching flame.”
He finishes shrouding the body and hoists the dead man into his arms. Once they finish relocating the bodies, only the survivor will remain to be dealt with.
ii. past
Hannibal slowly unzips the woman’s chest. Her screams vibrate between molecules of air, held aloft like tangible matter while he reaches for the sternal saw and prepares to delve beneath yellow skin and fat. After plucking the pertinent medical diagrams from a barren, fresco-lined hallway that is still under construction, Hannibal first peels apart her breastbone and then divides her pericardium with unparalleled precision, slitting open the membrane and staring, transfixed, as pinkish muscle comes pulsing into sight.
As he works, she whimpers, clearly trying not to look down. There is a particular horror associated with seeing one’s own organs, he muses. A ragged bit of tissue protrudes slightly from the wall of her chest, and he slices it away, annoyed. The thrilling scent of fear saturates the room.
For a moment, he pauses so that he can watch her heart quiver and pump in the open air. The woman’s eyes are rolling back. Perhaps he should have administered more anesthesia.
“Shhh,” he urges and caresses her forehead, wiping away the sweat. “You won’t feel pain for much longer. I’m going to cut out your heart now.”
More screams, hoarse and vicious. War cries. How easy it is to undo humanity’s exalted veil of culture — all it takes is two hands and one scalpel.
His one scalpel finds the pericardium again, this time to widen its tear. Clinically, surgically, doing as little harm as possible, Hannibal severs the points at which the translucent membrane holds the heart in place, and, stretched tight, it leaps apart like a popped balloon. Last are the irreparable — the aorta and the venae cavae and the pulmonary vein and artery — because he wants to keep her alive for as long as possible, and she will die in seconds once her major vessels are cut.
She does. She dies in less than a second, as her chest fountains blood from a wet gap instead of a heart. The symbol is not quite intentional, but he finds that he likes it that way. The best symbols spring naturally from the womb of the artist.
He climbs to his feet and notes idly that his breath has not begun to race.
Below him, the girl’s limbs sprawl through her own pooling blood, long and white. Her innocence has not maddened him in the way that it must have affronted God for Him to place Hannibal in her path, but it nonetheless provides a compelling composition. Smiling softly, he slips effortlessly into the vivid, ephemeral realm of allegory and sees an ancient marble statue — fat, bone and muscle strung together in perfect anatomic harmony. He sees the masterpiece topple in slow motion, haloed by the sun as an invading army raises its swords in triumph like a single thousand-limbed beast. Concepts like frail and delicate enter his mind. He sees a swan’s wing underfoot, a tabletop diorama.
Hannibal closes his eyes and moves his hands with the music like a conductor. His mind takes him further.
He is alone on the mountain peak, and from all around him, clouds undulate into the gray distance as if he is treading alone on the boundless sea. Wisps of fog fill in the gaps, cloak him from insignificant rows of civilization that he glimpses only in feeble flashes. In the corners of his vision, nascent green-dipped branches sway as the singer’s voice swells, rolls higher, climbs into the heavens. He is among the heavens. He is Hercules on the pyre, Bellerophon with a fly-swatter.
He laughs at himself, at his own sharp wit. With a sudden, overwhelming clarity that nearly makes him tremble, he realizes that he is so very lucky to be who he is, Count Hannibal Lecter the Eighth who read Euclid at six and understood every word.
I think I am falling in love, he thinks.
His capacity to comprehend is not to be underestimated, but in this moment, he holds no empathy for existential despair. Bleakness is contradictory, apathy intolerable. Love, art, beauty, emotion, humanity — to be discovered anywhere. Dispassion must be punished. How could anyone worry? Discontent is a laughable concept.
His heart is ripe and lush.
He has been crying for a while now. He tastes his fingers, blood and tears coalesced, his and the woman’s. He wishes he had a name for her because at this time, she has perhaps become the most important person in his life.
The bare sketch of a memory peeks into a corner of his mind: Lady Murasaki, beautiful and wise beyond anyone’s years as she sinks softly to the ground, pink blood-flecked lips, a radiant smile. For a scant moment, he feels her absence beside him, that magnetic emptiness that reels him in by his very nature.
This stasis, his perpetual catharsis, threatens to slip from his grasp like a fish writhing in his bare hands. But his willpower has always been insurmountable — he is Count Hannibal Lecter the Eighth, after all — and so the void is gone with his next breath.
i. present
When the dead man’s eyes blink open, the first thing he says is, “Please.”
Most likely, that is, if Hannibal’s lengthy resumé is to be referenced. Their prisoner’s lips twitch rather than move, and Hannibal imagines that he can see the pancuronium infiltrating his bloodstream, halting his movements.
“He would have sold us to the slaughterhouse,” Hannibal reminds Will, just in case.
“I know.”
And that is all there is to be said.
Will, hungry more for blood than cruelty, lingers to the side as he lets Hannibal play. When the time comes, he will join the savagery, but for now he only passes the scalpel and clamps and sutures into Hannibal’s outstretched palms.
Hannibal keeps the man alive as he removes both kidneys, pretending along the way that he is Doctor Lecter at twelve in the morning in the operation theatre, concealing excitement as he asks his assistant to please hand him the needle. The muscle relaxant forbids any resistance from their quarry, but he can still feel the full agony of each incision, each subcutaneous prod. As he whimpers and sweats beneath Hannibal’s gloved hands, a raw, primal power courses through Hannibal’s limbs, and his five senses flare so suddenly and magnificently that he briefly wonders whether all the muted years before now have been a dream.
Time will never be able to touch this thrill.
Blood, warm and slick on his gloves. Will’s hot breath on his neck. Even years after the Red Dragon’s death, it is strange to hold complete awareness of another presence while he tortures and kills and register no alarm, no disdain. Their shared exaltation has only swollen his own tenfold — if he were not an exception to virtually every rule applicable to humanity, he would be quivering with exhilaration.
Hannibal gingerly places the organs in an opaque storage bin. No need for a vacuum seal; the kitchen will be their next stop.
Wordlessly, he offers Will his scalpel, and when the other man makes no motion to take it, he says: “Do you feel like making mercy today, Will?”
Will laughs dryly, surveying Hannibal’s work.
“I’m not sure there’s any room left for mercy.”
“Then this poor man’s death is no different from his torture. I could continue for quite some time, if you’d like.”
“Not what I said,” Will says, faux-annoyed. “Give me that.”
Will steps forward and Hannibal observes, enthralled, as he swiftly slits their victim’s throat.
The movement is smooth, easy, but in that casualness Hannibal discerns the culmination of years and murders past. Hobbs, Tier, the Dragon, dozens of bodies stretching forward and backward in time. His or Will’s, there’s no difference anymore, no meaningful distinction.
He is no longer alone on the mountaintop, he thinks.
Will, Will Graham. Two short syllables coming together in his mind to form a seamless, liquid cadence. Will Graham turns to face him, arms and face painted red, and silently they begin enacting routines that he knows will never fade in brilliance or meaning despite their monotony.
Side by side, they finish disassembling the wasted meat, and then they clean together, just the two of them and a tall bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
They move to the kitchen beneath the fading orange-pink glow of the sun. Hannibal mentally extracts a time-tested recipe for ‘steak’-and-kidney pudding, and in an inspired flourish, he decides to add oysters to the mix — in part to ‘spice up’ the recipe, as they say, and in part so that he has a defensible cause for shooting a suggestive wink in Will’s direction. The meat of the recipe — at that, he smirks to himself — will need to be finished in the morning, but there is plenty of preparation with which to occupy himself as Will packs. This relocation is to be their fifth, and as tedious as the process can be, he has taught himself to enjoy this new, ever-fluid existence. He will only ever require a single constant, after all.
Will fills the space beside him, real and unyielding. Not a word has passed between them for hours, but Hannibal cannot help but think that words have never been enough for them anyway. Neither sufficient nor necessary.
He flips on Handel’s Giulio Caesare, for old times’ sake. As the first few chords steadily expand through the air, Will glances up, meeting his eyes. Hannibal smiles back.
Softly humming along, he lets himself meander down the halls of his past: late nights at the Baltimore opera, high society dinners, highway murders. And then, further still, to the less-visited memories no longer in English but French, Italian, Japanese. Pazzi. Murasaki. The music grounds him. Mischa.
He extends his thoughts, and with them, his hand. After a short pause, Will takes it.
Hannibal pulls him close until their chests are nearly touching. It is hardly a slow-dancing song, but at this moment, his delicate sense of culture has begun to fracture, and through the cracks he can only glimpse Will, Will, Will. He supposes that an exception may be made.
For minutes upon minutes that bleed seamlessly into the next, they sway more than dance, languid and leaderless. A step forward, a step back, orange lamplight making bright twin scythes in Will’s eyes. There is a speck of blood on Will’s eyelid that the washcloth missed.
Hannibal closes his eyes and feels — hot breath ghosting over his nose, Will’s warm, solid weight against his own. For most of his existence, he has considered true companionship to be an impossibility: a lovely concept, an inviable ideal, perhaps even all the more beautiful for its unattainability. How narrow-minded that conviction is, he can finally recognize. Eden is here with the living.
“What is it?” Will murmurs. “I can hear you thinking.”
Will’s hand curves perfectly around his waist as if they are two figures carved from the same stone. “No thoughts. Sights, sounds, that prodigious storm we call passion.”
“Hmm. What do you see, then?”
Hannibal leans in, closer, until he could flick out his tongue to taste Will’s lips. He does, of course, because the thought is not one to be ignored.
Will makes a frustrated noise — Hannibal has not answered him, after all — but still, he melts into the kiss. Wine, sharp blood in his mouth, a heady mixture. Will nips on his bottom lip, and it occurs to Hannibal that if they continue like this, the food will burn.
He breaks away, instantly mourning the separation, and stops Will with a finger when he chases his mouth. A pink flush is blossoming across Will’s golden skin. His tongue flits out, grazing Hannibal’s fingertip.
“I see paradise,” Hannibal says, so quietly that he can hardly hear his own voice.
Maybe he will let the food burn.