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The deep, steady pulse of a fresh wound dragged Will back into consciousness. He immediately felt an unnatural weight around the site of the pain, then gasped, hard, as the rest of his body woke up and sent new, intense ripples and waves of overwhelming pain up into his skull.
His immediate response was to sit up, look at his body and identify what hurt and how to make it stop. The response was swiftly halted by the weight, a hand pressing a thick bandage down on his collarbone. He shut his eyes, tight, and his mind cleared enough to realize that there was no one source for the pain; his whole body ached. It felt like one giant open wound, and he couldn’t stop the whimper as the hand increased its pressure.
“William.”
That voice. Will could feel the man next to him now, could see him clearly if he looked.
Hannibal.
The hand let up on his shoulder, taking the bandage away from the wound and leaving it stinging against the open air. Will opened his eyes to watch the arm retreat, putting the bloody bandage down on the bed between them. Hannibal was staring at down at him, barely dressed in a thin shirt and half-buttoned trousers. He looked strange – casual but no less imposing, expression fixed in a hard mask that Will didn’t care to read. He tapped a finger against Will’s bare chest, and Will felt another rush of pain from the contact. He was disoriented, drowsy, confused, and he hurt so much. His head pounded fiercely and he watched as Hannibal straightened himself out, eyes flickering down Will’s body in what might have been disgust but could have been something else.
"Go." Hannibal pointed with sharp fingers to the bathroom door. "Clean yourself up."
Something in the hard lines of his body forced Will to his feet, using strength he didn’t think he had to blindly follow Hannibal's command. He stumbled to the bathroom on unsteady legs, trembling from the cool air in the room or the cold gaze of Hannibal's eyes on him. Soft, naked, vulnerable, his mind supplied before he reached the bathroom and shut the door behind him.
Even when he wasn't with Hannibal, he could still feel his presence. There was something dark and suffocating creeping through his mind, covering everything in a thick fog. His heart strained against his chest and his fingernails dug into his palms as he caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink.
His mouth was bright red. Blood, his own blood smeared across his face, stemming from the deep cut on his lip, pushed up to the dark circles round his eyes and down to the heavy, hand-shaped bruises around his neck. His breath came in shaky gasps as he looked further down, taking in the blood trickling down his chest, the web of bruises round his wrists, the scrape of fingernails down his sides, the precise cuts littering his body, each spilling out more of the red liquid and staining his skin.
He took in the hard, predatory bite marks on his shoulders, his ribs, his jutting hipbones. The semen drying on his thighs and stomach.
The first thing he did was vomit.
---
Will took his time in the bathroom, catching his breath and working to shut out the overwhelming pain and ache from every mark on his body. He used an old washcloth to wipe at the blood, the soft fabric running red and coppery. He cleaned his face first, if only to stop the panic from bubbling over whenever he saw his reflection. He wiped in smooth motions, around his eyes and down the curve of his jaw, the blood smearing and fading like face paint. The cut on his lip refused to stop bleeding, so he pulled it into his mouth and licked it gently, cautiously, trying not to think too hard about the metallic taste on his tongue.
The other cuts were easier to deal with, most relatively shallow and already drying themselves out, the blood flow slowing and stopping when he dabbed at them. After tending to the ones he could easily reach, he rinsed out his cloth and set about cleaning the worst of the bite marks. There was a deep one on his collarbone, black and purple blossoming around the indents and blood still slowly trickling from the puncture. He hissed as the cloth touched the still too tender wound, but the pain ebbed away with prolonged contact, and he finished cleaning out the site to little more than a dull throbbing. The bites lower down were less painful, more superficial and barely bleeding. They too were wiped clean with mechanical efficiency.
The semen was harder to clean up. Will wasn't squeamish about blood; blood was his job. He saw it all the time at crime scenes, flecks of it across pale furniture, puddles of it under mutilated bodies, streaks of it smeared onto the walls by desperate hands. Blood invaded his dreams, soaked and saturated through his mind and twisted everything into pulsing nightmares. He felt it run through his fingers after a difficult day, the knife placed carefully on the counter and the cuts just deep enough for the light-headed rush he needed to clear the cold, perverse images from his psyche, satisfy the bloodlust aching under his skin.
Will was desensitized to blood, but semen was another matter entirely. It was sticky and crude and filthy, it made his skin crawl and his face flush. He avoided it as much as he could, rare masturbation done with copious amounts of tissue, swift and neat with as little mess as possible. He had never dealt with it like this before, sticking between his thighs and dribbling down from the puddle on his stomach. The knowledge that some of it wasn't his own almost pushed Will over the edge, breath shallow and vision clouding at the onset of a panic attack. He retched emptily into the sink before tackling the mess. His hands shook as he cleared up the semen, obsessively rinsing and re-rinsing the cloth between each swipe over his thighs, trying desperately to focus on the clean patches of skin, not what was covering the rest of it.
With the mess all dealt with, Will gripped knuckle white on the sink and glanced at himself in the mirror. The bruises around his neck had darkened already, fringed with yellow and green along the lines of Hannibal's fingers, and the cut on his lip was tentatively starting to heal. Blood had dripped once more from the bite mark on his shoulder, easily fixed with a gentle wipe of his thumb. The other cuts remained clear, but they stung and throbbed, and he could feel several more burning down his back that he couldn't see and couldn't reach.
He felt weak and tired. The night had left him shattered and crumbling against his bathroom sink, knees trembling with the effort of keeping him upright. The idea of leaving the room and having to face Hannibal drenched him in a shock of sharp, icy terror, and the panic attack he felt coming on came back in full force. He clawed at the sink to keep his balance, mind filling with the image of Hannibal in his room, Hannibal lying in his bed, Hannibal running his hands over Will's body and digging his nails in, Hannibal tying Will's hands up over his head and dragging the knife over his skin, Hannibal smirking down at him, cold black light shimmering in his eyes, Hannibal sinking his face into Will's neck and luxuriously lapping up the blood and tears streaking Will's cheeks...
He snapped out of the memories when his legs gave out and he fell gracelessly to the floor, head bouncing off the wall behind him with a dull thud. None of that seemed to register as he desperately curled himself up, resting his forehead on his knees and taking deep breaths to control the wrenching fear inside him.
When he finally left the bathroom, Hannibal was gone.
---
For the next few days, Will didn’t leave the house.
He avoided work, ignored calls, kept the curtains closed when people rang his doorbell. Every day, he played Jack's messages on his answer phone. They ranged from irritated to worried, angry to pleading. At midnight on the second day he was deeply uncharacteristic, begging Will to come to the latest crime scene, continue working on his case. Will erased them all without a second thought.
Hannibal didn't try to reach him. Will kept his eyes on his cell phone, waiting with anticipation, or dread, for Hannibal's name to flicker up instead of Jack's. After the third day he gave up hope and childishly buried the phone in the depths of his freezer.
He hadn't been sleeping in his bed. His skin quivered and burnt whenever he entered the room, the prospect of sleeping in that bed made him cringe and lock up. Dangerous, shuddering images of that night crept to the front of his mind when he saw the still-rumpled sheets, the stale smell of sex permeating the room, then the blinds fluttered down behind his eyes and forced him back out of the bedroom every time. He dug around in cupboards and closets, dragging out a spare blanket and an old pillow. He took them into the front room, as far away from his bedroom as he could get, and settled down every night with his dogs.
The dogs were warm, safe, and unwaveringly loving. They gathered around him, followed him around the house, licked at the cuts on his arms and whined softly when he sank too far back into his head. They felt his fear and echoed it back with sad eyes and heavy heads in his lap. They let him cling to them at night, lying patiently by him as he worked through his nightmares, more pervasive and terrifying than ever nowadays.
He barely slept, never ate, washed compulsively every few hours to clean off the new blood and the old blood and the feel of him against his skin. He scrubbed himself red raw one day, reopening all the wounds but it was at least on his own terms. He spent most of his time sitting, lying, trying to fight back the exhaustion and struggle through whatever was keeping him like this. Whatever it was that wouldn’t let him go.
The doorbell rang at six in the evening on the fourth day, and the dogs all jumped up, ears flat against their heads and maintained a low, rumbling growl at whoever had come to visit. Will knew all too well who it would be. He brushed his hands over the nearest dogs as he stood, hushing them gently. The doorbell rang again, patiently, and Will knew exactly what was going to happen.
He opened the door and let Hannibal back in.