Chapter Text
Beverly tugs on Will’s arm as soon as the bouncer stamps the back of his hand with a purple insignia. They weave through the crowded club and make their way to a table near the stage where a few musicians are setting up. Alana suggested he come out tonight and see them play; they’re called Nemean Lion, and they’re apparently really successful. Will likes the blues, and he can tolerate the contemporary stuff if it’s good. They came highly recommended by Alana, so he’s giving them the benefit of the doubt.
He lets Beverly sit at the table and excuses himself to get them some drinks from the bar at the far end of the club. He buys two beers, and a dainty redhead accosts him before he can make his way back to Beverly.
She says, “I’ve seen you in the papers. Will Graham, right?”
Her demeanor is stern and official, though her brilliant blue eyes glint coyly in the low light cast from the back of the bar behind her.
“Yeah,” he says. He cautiously takes her hand when she extends it to him.
“My name is Freddie Lounds. If you ever want to talk about what happened to you, I’d love to get your story.”
He takes his hand away. He should have known.
“Oh, my God, another reporter already, Graham?”
Will turns in time to see Zeller before he slaps him on the back. Will huffs a sigh and lets himself be taken by the shoulder into the crowd of people. Freddie Lounds is calling after him saying, “You could tell everyone your side!”
He wants to go home. It’s bad enough he can’t teach again until his doctor gives him the say so, but the unrelenting press coverage is getting to be too much.
Price comes around his other side and jostles him with his elbow.
“I actually think she was just trying to hit on you.”
“Who was trying to hit on Will?” Beverly asks with too much interest. She takes the beer Will offers her.
“A reporter,” Zeller announces with his typical bravado.
Will smiles at the genuine disgust on Beverly’s face, subtle as it is. He laughs when she says, “If she was any good at her job, she’d know hitting on you wouldn’t do anything.”
“Jimmy, beer?” Zeller drums on Price’s shoulders, and Price nods.
About fifteen seconds after Zeller leaves the table, the lights go dim. Someone carrying a tray of glassware trips and the sound of breaking glass fills the brief bubble of silence. A few people clap. Someone in the dark yells, “Opa!”
Price snickers beside Beverly and says over the noise, “Twenty bucks says that was Zeller’s fault.”
“Not touching that,” Beverly chuckles, shaking her head.
Will takes the bet, feeling slightly better to be out of the house and in the company of good friends. A man on the stage taps the microphone to draw everyone’s attention away from the noisy shuffling of bussers in the dark. Will drinks his beer and looks at the spectacled man in the white jacket.
“You guys are a great crowd already, look at that.”
The same person from before yells, “Opa!”
“All right, well.” He tunes his guitar. He’s an older man, probably in his mid to late forties. “I’m Don. We’re Nemean Lion, and we’re just gonna get right into it.”
He strums a diminished chord, an E flat minor, and then jumps into song followed by a hail of drumbeats. Zeller comes back to the table and noisily sets his and Price’s beers down. He says, laughingly, “Jesus, did you see that guy take out the woman with the tray?”
Price swears and hands Will a twenty dollar bill across the table. Katz snaps her fingers and says, “Damn it.”
Zeller realizes they bet on him and makes a face at Price. He mutters, “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Will pockets the bill, attention pinging between the coaxing blues flooding off the stage, Zeller and Price’s hushed discussion on the blonde who lives in Zeller’s apartment complex, and the low rumbling din of background noise coming from the rest of the club.
He looks down at the five purple words that comprise the name of the establishment they’re currently sitting in. The end of the last word is slightly blurred, but it’s the same thing that’s on each of their coasters and on the wall behind the band in neon cursive script: La Fin Absolue du Monde.
It’s as good a name for a place like this as any. Most places these days feel like the end of the world to Will. Getting shot changed a lot about his worldview.
Will startles out of his sullen reverie when he hears a change in the music; a low, reedy note sustained and suspended in the din of the harmony battling the melody. The tenor ring of a saxophone drifts in between the two forces and eases, an entity completely removed from them, through the break in the song. He picks out a root, a perfect fourth, a perfect fifth, another root, and a minor seventh; the G minor pentatonic scale. Will’s eyes float up to the stage and scan from right to left for the player.
He sees him: a man probably similar in age to the band’s front man but with a sharper edge to him and an undercurrent of something wonderful and ragged in his playing. Extraordinary pain and longing twists into it, losing its fervor in the whirlwind of sound it breathes and dies within.
Will watches the man lick his lips and set his tongue beneath the saxophone reed, engrossed. He goes to set his beer on the table and misses the edge by about half an inch. It plummets to the floor before Will can do anything to stop it and flings brown glass and beer everywhere as it shatters.
Not sparing a thought to how ridiculous it looks, he jumps off his stool and plucks and the biggest pieces he can find scattered around the legs of Price’s chair. An employee sees him scrambling to collect the broken glass and swiftly intervenes. Will apologizes profusely and lets her take care of it from there. Embarrassed, he excuses himself and flees to the bar to buy another beer and a finger of whiskey. He doesn’t look up at the musicians on the stage, especially not at the saxophone player.
Will downs the shot the bartender pours for him and moves the beer in between his hands, cooling his warm palms on the droplets of perspiration. He turns when he hears his name. It’s Alana calling him.
“Will, there you are!”
“Here I am,” he says weakly, carefully nursing his beer.
“I wondered if you’d gotten in yet. They’re good, aren’t they?” She gestures at the band playing. There are five musicians total: the guitarist, a keyboardist, a drummer, a bassist, and the saxophone player. “They just got back from playing a show in New York.”
“Oh, have you seen them before?”
“Yeah, every time they come back to Maryland I come out to hear them play. I actually went to college with one of the members; their saxophone player, Hannibal Lecter.”
Hannibal Lecter.
“Right, yeah. He’s…” Will looks back at the stage and thinks the words fascinating, intriguing, different, stunning. What comes out of his mouth instead is, “He’s really good.”
Alana smiles, eyes on the set. She offers to introduce Will to the friends she came with so he won’t have to sit alone, but he points out Beverly, Zeller, and Price down by the stage, and she nods and throws a hug on him that is actually very welcome and comfortable.
“I’m glad you decided to come and see the band play tonight. This is the only set they’re playing while they’re in town.”
He hears a few other things in her concerned tone. He hears, I’m glad you chose to leave the house, I’m glad you’re not still bed-ridden or doped up on pain medication; he hears, I’ve been really worried about you, Will.
He won’t acknowledge it if Alana won’t. She knows just as well as he does that this isn’t the time or place to check up on his wellbeing. There will be a more appropriate time for it later, unfortunately.
Dreading that time, he asks, “Where are they headed next?”
“Atlanta, I think, or maybe Denver; they move around so much it’s hard to keep track.” She laughs at the emphatic drum solo and picks back up with, “You could ask them after the show.”
Will flounders for something to say, but Alana is watching the stage again. The pressure to come back with some kind of reply fades. She says she’ll let him get back to everyone else and saunters off to find her friends in the darkened club. Will slides off his stool and meanders back to the table in the darkness, holding the beer closely to his side.
He slips back into his seat. Katz nudges him with her elbow and raises an eyebrow. He just shrugs vaguely and gestures with his beer. He hopes it translates into something like, Everything’s fine. Don’t worry.
The band is still playing on the stage. Hannibal Lecter chimes in every few beats with his tenor, handling the lengthy periods of silence in between his phrases with grace and finesse. His saxophone is black with brassy, golden keys and intricate lettering engraved into the black. Will can’t read it from where he is, even when he takes his glasses out of his pocket and sets them on his face. The bright stage lighting helps some, but it’s too far away to make any kind of guess about what it might say.
When he comes to terms with the fact that he can’t read the foreign symbols embossing the shiny instrument, Will resigns himself to watching Hannibal Lecter’s hands. His fingers twitch around keys with precise dexterity, pinky stretching every so often to hit the low C.
The back of his right hand is tattooed in black ink; the inside of his left wrist is tattooed also. Will can’t tell what they are, but he stares at them anyway, appreciative of the way the tendons in Hannibal Lecter’s arms flex and shift beneath his skin with every note flawlessly captured from that other realm where music exists to be torn out of obscurity for a few moments in time.
“Hey, Will,” Price says over the applause, leaning over in his stool to talk more privately with him. “Anybody ever tell you that staring’s kind of rude?”
Will notes Price’s teasing, lopsided smile and tries to laugh to cover his embarrassment. He catches the tail end of the applause and claps along. Don chuckles into the microphone. He says, “Is it all right with everyone if we play a Stones cover?”
The people in the audience clap, and one woman, probably drunk, yells enthusiastically. He laughs and with no further ado, steps back from the microphone to face the drummer. He counts out four beats, and the opening licks to “Miss You” start playing in just the drums and the guitar. The keyboard cues in followed by the bass and eventually followed by Hannibal Lecter on his saxophone.
Will tries not to watch him, but he’s magnetic. He draws Will’s eyes to him as if with an invisible string. He dares to raise his eyes to the man’s face and feels the breath leave his lungs in the same instant that their eyes lock.
“I’ve been holding out so long. I’ve been sleeping all alone. Lord, I miss you,” Don croons into the microphone.
Will realizes he’s still staring back at Hannibal Lecter when the man rolls his shoulders slightly and bows his head forward to hit a higher note.
“Well, I’ve been haunted in my sleep. You’ve been starring in my dreams. Lord, I miss you.”
Hannibal Lecter hits a note, licks his lips, and hits another note. His eyes find Will’s once more, drawing the F sharp out. He has hair the color of sand and luminous brown eyes that look amber against the stage lights. Will bites his lip and loses his breath again. Hannibal Lecter looks away to make eye contact with Don who’s looking right back at him. They nod subtly to each other, and Hannibal takes off in a sultry, resonant solo.
Will sets his forearms on the table and watches, leaning in and leaning in until his back is a straight diagonal line poised over the table at an acute angle. Hannibal continues, one corner of his lip curving upward just slightly. He winks, looking right at Will, and finishes his complicated run of a minor scale.
Don sings, “I guess I’m lying to myself. It’s just you and no one else. Lord, I won’t miss you, child.”
Will grins through the lyrics and through the drums, and through his rest, Hannibal Lecter smiles back at him through the light screen separating them.
“You’ve been blotting out my mind; fooling on my time. No, I won’t miss you, baby, yeah.”
A series of notes leave Don’s guitar in rapid succession as he’s singing, “Lord, I miss you, child.”
Hannibal Lecter steps up to the mic stand beside Don, and they vocalize. Will watches them share a microphone; while they’re not laughing or even smiling anymore, they look like they’re having the time of their lives.
“Lord, I miss you, child.”
Hannibal Lecter paces back to his spot on the stage and plays along with the harmony, stealing the melody every few measures and earning a surprised glance from Don every time he does. They’ve played together long enough to know how to combat their sparring egos.
It doesn’t take a person with great observation skills to see that each of them has the presence and charisma of a leader; Will has great observation skills. He can see that Hannibal Lecter could head this band if he made up his mind to.
“Lord, I miss you, child.”
Don vocalizes with the help of the bassist and keyboardist now. Hannibal produces the same sounds they are with his saxophone. The song ends in a crescendo and an explosion of instruments playing through established chord progressions and scales. They cut off together, and the people jammed into the club roar their applause and cat calls. Will claps, though he feels too self-aware to yell his praise.
He watches Hannibal lift the strap holding his saxophone over his head and skip off backstage. Don sees him making a break for it and lets him go, opting to address the audience instead.
“I was right. You are a great crowd.”
The people cheer, and Will barely hears the voice behind him over their shouting. He feels a hand on his shoulder and turns, expecting Alana.
“You said it, they’re—Oh.”
“Oh,” Hannibal Lecter repeats, a soft smile stretching across his face. His eyes gloss over Will’s face. He says, “I believe that’s appropriate, yes.”
Will laughs his disbelief and blinks to reassume his concentration on something that isn’t Hannibal Lecter’s mouth. He clears his throat and introduces himself: “Will Graham.”
“Hannibal Lecter.”
They shake hands and linger a moment longer than perhaps they should. Will doesn’t want to let go. Hannibal is warm and glowing still from his time onstage. His energy is racked up to eleven. Will can feel it coursing through his fingers as if they’re still trying to tap out a song.
He hears someone whistling behind him and gives Zeller an icy glare over his shoulder.
“Would you like to go somewhere more private?” Hannibal asks when Will turns back to face him.
“Oh, um, sure. Yeah, that’d be…”
He stops talking when Hannibal’s lips part a ways and reveal his teeth as his smile grows just a little bit wider on his lips. As if knowing exactly what Will is reacting to, Hannibal catches his bottom lip with his teeth and holds, eyes probing and sparkling in the dim light of the club.
“Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m a man of wealth and taste.”
Will slides off the stool and follows Hannibal Lecter toward the back of the club, giving Beverly a panicked but excited look over his shoulder. She gives him two thumbs up and an ecstatic grin.
“I’ve been around for a long, long year; stole many a man’s soul and faith.”
They walk passed a mean-looking bouncer who smiles at Hannibal’s polite greeting and responds with a curt nod. The cool night air opens up around them, snuffing out the cacophony of the club as the door swings shut. Hannibal crouches down and places a rock in between the door and the frame to keep the door from locking behind them. Will can make out the lyrics, faint as they are: “Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.”
“So Nemean Lion,” Will says when they’ve been standing silently looking up at the starry sky for longer than feels comfortable. “Wasn’t that Heracles’ first labor?”
Hannibal looks at him, clearly surprised.
“It was, yes.”
“I took a class in college.” Will shrugs, offering a shy smile. He says, “People thought it was impossible to kill.”
“They did.”
“But Heracles strangled it to death.”
Hannibal sits down on the bottom step that feeds up from the back alley into La Fin Absolue du Monde. Will sits down next to him. He chances sitting closer than he normally would with someone he doesn’t know but leaves enough space for it to be comfortable.
“And skinned it with its own claws,” Hannibal adds.
“How did you pick it?”
“I also took a class in college,” Hannibal says, smiling.
Will laughs, forcing himself not to be lead down the path of incorrect assumptions. He says, “Is that also where you picked up the saxophone?”
“I was encouraged to learn the flute when I was a boy. As I got older, I found the saxophone appealed more to my interests. I pursued it as a teenager.”
“You play very well,” Will says quietly.
“Just call me Lucifer ‘cause I’m in need of some restraint.”
“Thank you, Will.”
Will feels his neck grow warm. He remembers he gave Hannibal his name.
They watch each other for a moment, and the muffled drums beat steadily through the door. He hears Don singing, “So if you meet me, have some courtesy, have some sympathy, have some taste. Use all your well-learned politesse or I’ll lay your soul to waste, yeah.”
Will sets his hand down beside him right on top of Hannibal’s and yanks his hand away like he’s been burned. Hannibal looks at him curiously, drawing his fingertips down the heel of Will’s hand, down his wrist, and around his forearm to stop at the bend in his elbow.
He tenses when he realizes Hannibal is leaning in. He gasps, “Don’t they need you back up there?”
“In the middle of a song, Will?”
“Please to meet you. Hope you guess my name.”
“Oh, I don’t—but…”
Hannibal’s breath ghosts across his mouth and down his chin. He smells like cherries.
“But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game. Mean it, baby; get down!”
His tongue presses against Will’s bottom lip, running along the seam and then across his upper lip. Will’s mouth drops open, and Hannibal kisses him, softly.
“Tell me, baby, what’s my name?”
Hannibal pulls back. Will makes himself open his eyes. He twists his fingers in Hannibal’s shirt where they migrated to his collar at some point when Hannibal kissed him.
“Tell me honey, can you guess my name?”
Will leans back into Hannibal’s space and licks Hannibal’s lip, mimicking Hannibal’s surface exploration of his mouth. His other hand creeps up to cradle the back of Hannibal’s head, and he presses his lips flush against Hannibal’s. Hannibal tilts his head to the side and presses another kiss onto Will’s lips. They go like that until Will parts his lips, taps Hannibal’s lip again with his tongue, and Hannibal opens his mouth, too.
“I tell you one time, you’re to blame.”
They’re full on making out in record time, Will sliding his hand under the back of Hannibal’s shirt just to feel his skin against his fingers and Hannibal squeezing the underside of Will’s thigh.
“Tell me, baby. What’s my name? Tell me, sweetie, what’s my name?”
“Will,” Hannibal whispers, running his fingers through Will’s hair and bending down to nip at his neck. “Come home with me.”
Will is nodding and mumbling something like, “Yes, of course, I want to, please. Christ, Hannibal.”
They sit there on the step kissing each other and moaning softly into the other’s mouth, hair, or skin. Will said he’d go home with him.
“Fuck, wow,” he hisses through his teeth when Hannibal bites his collar bone. “Okay, I’ll be right back. I need to…Yeah.”
He wobbles on his feet. Hannibal lets him pull open the heavy door and disappear back into the club. The audience erupts into a cheering frenzy when the song ends. Will works his way through the crowd and makes a beeline for the table where Beverly and Price are still sitting. Zeller probably left to get more drinks.
“Hey,” Will says, lightly tapping Beverly on the shoulder.
“Hey, yourself,” she laughs. “What did you and Hannibal get up to?”
“We were just…we were talking.”
“Uh huh.”
Her grin is ridiculous. He feels himself grinning, too, though, so he can’t really knock her for it. In fact, he suspects her grin might be a response to his.
“Well, I’m going to go.”
“With him? You’re going home with him?”
“Damn, Will. Nice work.” Price laughs, grabbing Will’s shoulder playfully.
“Thanks.”
“Oh, Will. I thought you would’ve left with that guy. I’ll be right back with another beer,” Zeller says, setting down the three beers he had cradled in his arms all the way back from the bar.
“No, Zeller, it’s fine. I’m not staying.” Will says, flat-out blushing at the devious smirk his words put on Zeller’s face. “Okay. I have to go. Good night, guys.”
“Night, Will,” Beverly says in a singsong voice.
Will rushes back outside, fully prepared to apologize for keeping Hannibal waiting. He finds him sitting right where he left him, smoking a cigarette. He turns when Will opens the door again and smiles. The burning need to apologize crumbles away.
“Shall we, Will?” Hannibal stubs out his cigarette and stands.
Will laughs, realizing he never quit grinning. He says, “Yeah, let’s go.”