will grahamâs childhood is kind of the very stereotypical, perhaps a little southern gothic, gruff alcoholic dad dragging his scrawny boy who hates eye contact around town to town, strangers to everyone around them and gone before forming any connections to anybody, fixing boat motors to make a few quick bucks, never building enough expectations for other peopleâs care to feel abandoned by them and then you hear about hannibal lecterâs childhood and itâs like he lived in the song of ice and fire universe until about age 12.
the concept of a man relentlessly flirting with you wanting to fuck you and you killing him and turning him into a heartbroken love note for your ex⊠hannibal lecter is a teenage girl at heart
I kinda forget going to conventions is so different as an experience to americans and to ppl in other countries because im not gonna see a single actor. Im going there to buy porn anime art live in person and see other freak cosplayers and maybe some furries. like it really is so much more about community and the experience and the artist alley and buying used fandom shit from the pop up thrift shop and Iâve always preferred that to what Iâve seen of places like comic con or whatever like I could NOT meet my favorite actors.
I know this is probably a long shot, but while we're on wedding nights is there any chance you could give us the wedding night for Separately to a Wood? Thank you! (love your trello btw)
soooooo this is not that, this is a bit from the wedding planning phase, and also this ask is from 2018 and i am sorry
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Hannibal wanted a spring wedding.
"Thought you'd go for autumn. You know. Earth tones. Deer skulls. Chrysanthemums. Spring seems kinda cliche for you."
"Some things are cliche for a reason," Hannibal said, placidly continuing to chop chervil. "And you specifically requested no bones in regard to the wedding decor." He scooped up the pungent green pile between knife blade and hand and dropped them into the sauce that bubbled on Will's stove. "Chrysanthemums have their own particular beauty, but they are for the dead, not the living."
"So what do the living get?"
"Everything else. Set the table, please. This is nearly ready."
They ate spiced chicken stew with chervil, thyme, and apricots. It tasted like sunshine, like the memory of summer while snow lay thick outside and the year crept farther into darkness.
"Are there flowers that hold significance for you?" Hannibal asked.
The dogs had laid themselves out on the rug near the table. They didn't beg. Will wouldn't have tolerated it, but in any case they'd all learned that if they were patient Hannibal would have something for them when the humans were done eating. Will watched the snow fall outside, specks of white that blurred and vanished into the dark.
"Jasmine," he said. "Honeysuckle. Clover. Butterfly weed. Stuff that grew wild. Not really stuff you have at a wedding."
"We shall see what may be done," Hannibal said.
Will felt like he should argue or disclaim. Just get whatever. Get what you want. He'd never even thought he'd get married, let alone care about the flowers. Those were all summer flowers anyway, summer memories baked in the steam heat of his childhood. But he didn't quite say it. Instead, he said, "Where do you want to have the ceremony?"
"In the woods," Hannibal said promptly.
Will blinked. "The woods? Those woods?" He waved in the direction of forest behind the house.
"Indeed. Those woods. Your woods. Do you object?"
Will stared at him. He felt almost as poleaxed as when Hannibal had proposed. "I thought it would be aâa venue. I don't know. A golf club or something."
"I believe you would hate that. Wouldn't you?"
Will nodded slowly.
"And I asked myself what you would not hate."
Will tried to imagine their guests tramping out into the forest some wet spring day. It was the first thought he'd had about the actual event that had made him smile. "Who are you inviting?"
"The cream of Boston society," Hannibal said with the hint of a smile. "Of course. As well as Jack and Alana."
"You're going to get all your fancy opera friends to trek out in the woods?"
"It will do them good. And they will talk about it for years to come."
Will pictured the ruined leather loafs, the hems of dressed ragged and muddy. "Yeah, probably."
"And your guests?" Hannibal said.
"Beverly. I guess if I'm inviting her, and you're inviting Jack and Alana, we have to ask Price and Zeller too." He thought for a second. "That's it."
Hannibal nodded, as if there was nothing weird about having, maybe, one friend on planet Earth. Will still wasn't sure if Beverly counted. But he sort of hoped she did.
"Perhaps two dozen guests at the outside," Hannibal said. "A small ceremony in the woods, a reception at the house."
"It rains in the spring. Sometimes it snows."
"I am familiar with the local weather patterns."
"Wet leaves. Mud. Rain dripping down everyone's collar. Are we wearing suits? Do they go with hiking boots?"
Hannibal swirled his pinot around his wine glass and looked at Will over the top of it. "You dislike the idea?"
"I think it sounds pretty good."
"Then let me worry about the details."
Will did. Occasionally, Hannibal asked him questions. What were his preferences between this fabric and that, this color or that, how did he feel about a priest as an officiant.
That one made Will raise his eyebrows. "You want a priest? Hannibal Killing Must Feel Good to God Lecter? With your church collapse scrapbook?"
"It is not a scrapbook."
Hannibal had shown it to him one evening as they sat in front of the fire at Hannibal's place. They drank dessert wine from France and ate homemade tiramisu and paged through a leather bound volume that had been old before Hannibal was born. Each page had a different newspaper clipping, some with photos, some without. Many had handwritten notes, and Will had watched the penmanship evolve from a hasty scribble, almost feverish in its need to get the words written down, to a more controlled script, to the flowing elegance that Hannibal wrote with today. It was definitely a scrapbook.
"We're not religious," Will said. "I'm not. I've been assuming you're not." The church collapse thing pointed more to raised-Catholic-turned-atheist, although that didn't seem quite right for Hannibal either.
"I am not religious in the ordinary sense, no."
"Just in the church collapse scrapbook and priest at your gay wedding sense."
"I want God to see our union. And a priest as an officiant is more elegant."
And Will sure, "Okay, sure. I've got no problem with a priest." But as he lay in bed that night, those words came back to him. I want God to see our union. And he heard what Hannibal hadn't said: and know that He has failed.
ao3 user emungere kind of is the orpheus to my eurydice like yeah I guess Iâll read something Iâve never known myself to ever enjoy before, or click on a fic with the vaguest, most worrying tags with no assurance, walking blind because I know whatever they write, itâll be worth it.
in Finland, it is illegal to kill a bear when itâs hibernating. If you ask a hunter why that is, a number of them will tell you itâs wrong simply because it is the law, and they donât make a distinction between what is right, and what is legal. Most people like that are perfectly normal, decent and respectable people, just like the rest of us.
 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel⊠impolite? You canât fucking shoot a man when heâs sleeping, thatâs just fucking rude. Itâs just not the right thing to do.
 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldnât kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didnât kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.
 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.
 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally âselfâ. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.
 Oneâs waking soul is elsewhere when they sleep and dream. A bearâs soul is somewhere else when they are hibernating - there are two words for âhibernationâ in finnish, one of which is talviuni, âwinter sleepâ, and that is the one that bears have - and if you kill a sleeping bear, their soul is not in the body, it is still out there, and it can find you, and as a revenge for killing its body, Ghost Bear will kill your entire fucking family.
Started odd question, maybe, but I really enjoy how all your works are so plot- and progress-driven. How do you write with direction in that way, instead of lingering in a moment or a feeling without getting stuck there? Any tips?
I donât think thereâs anything wrong with lingering. Lingering is great. But if you feel stuck in a certain scene, consider it like this:
Stories are made up of two kinds of things. (Obviously an oversimplification, but hear me out.)
Stuff happening
Characters feeling some kind of way about it
In the Stuff Happening category, we got: landscapes existing, people getting murdered, pies baking, dogs barking, characters saying stuff, characters doing stuff, the scent of peaches, etc etc and so on.
The Characters Feeling Some Kind of Way category is just their reaction to the Stuff Happening, and, ideally, whatever it is theyâre feeling leads them to act, which then becomes Stuff Happening, which they and other characters can have feelings about and react to.
So if youâre writing a scene and you canât get out of it, what Stuff has recently happened? What is your character feeling about it and why? What does that lead them to do or say, and in what direction does that push them?
Because feelings almost always push us one way or another, so if a character is lingering in a feeling, they are probably going to come out the other side of it with some momentum. The stronger the feeling, the stronger the momentum.
It's one of the last few things we can have as a society that's free. You can engage, for free. People give you things (art, stories, etc), for free.
Don't buy into the consummerism just because it's everywhere else.
You don't have to consume everything you interact with. You don't have to use things, just because they exist.
You're allowed (still, for now), to have things that are enjoyable for free.
Do you realise how insane the world is? We don't have many places where we can just be, for free anymore, but ao3 is. Did you notice we don't have ads in ao3? We don't have pop ups? Where ELSE do we not have that?
Where else can you just go and not have to wait for a commercial to be over or for ads to be on the sidelines?
I don't think the younger people understand, but the whole of internet used to be like this. YouTubers would do Youtube for free, just because. You couldn't monetise your internet presence before.
Ao3 is like a little preserved corner of the internet where the old internet used to be, and it's being attacked by people who do not understand that free things are allowed to exist without judgment.
hotchreid boyfriends who argue over the tv because spencer needs to catch the next episode of star trek and aaron need to see the season finale of a cooking competition.
hotchreid boyfriends who crowd the bathroom, fighting for space, with aaron trying shave and spencer fixing his hair.
hotchreid boyfriends with aaron trying to keep the sock drawer organised by grouping the pairs together and spencer who can't have anything match.
hotchreid boyfriends with spencer who reads every draft of his papers out loud and aaron who lounges on the couch, tea in hand, listening to his arguments and helping him reconstruct them.
hotchreid boyfriends who lay awake at night whispering midnight thoughts about metaphysicality and the nature of the universe to each other.
hotchreid boyfriends with aaron coming home late from the office to find the kitchen smoking after one of spencer's physics magic experiments burning on the stove.
hotchreid boyfriends who laugh over silly science jokes, who debate what state of matter fire is, who spend their saturdays off browsing antique store, who snuggle on the couch watching old french films, who giggle endlessly, sway embraced to smooth jazz, who make pancakes for supper on friday nights, who have standing orders at the indian place down the street, who love each other so deeply it transcends the meta the physical and all of reality.
hotchreid boyfriends who treat each with gentleness, with kindness, sharing space, being goofy and silly and serious and loving.
just domestic hotchreid and all the sweet moments between them.
thinking about canon compliant gay aaron hotchner who's never given much thought to his sexuality beyond what he understands is expected of him. who builds his nuclear family as what he thinks it should be. who loves haley with his whole heart because she's lovely and sweet and funny but has never felt the rush of love morgan's always talking about in the bullpen. who's never understood what the big deal is with kissing and sex, who sees it more as a necessary part of physical affection that he does because he knows that he should. who, distantly, under all the walls he's built, knows that something is missing, that something's not right, but he just refuses to think about it.
gay aaron hotchner who feels guilty that he doesn't love haley like he thinks he should. who, over the years, can tell that there's something Wrong but his life is what it is and he can't change it. he doesn't want to. because he has haley and jack and a home and people who love him. and that should be enough. for everyone else it's a dream. but that closed, dying part of his heart aches and aches, slowly killing him.
gay aaron hotchner whose world crumbles after haley's death, the loss of his greatest friend, his wife, the partner he built this life with. gay aaron hotchner who puts everything into loving jack, into raising his son to be the kind and gentle person he is, never letting him see the pain he keeps locked in his heart.
gay aaron hotchner who works cases with homophobic causes that create unsubs or unsubs who take that hate into their own hands. who feels unparalleled rage at the injustice that innocent queer people face, the scorn and judgement society casts on them. but he never thinks of himself as one of them, he never lets his thoughts go there.
gay aaron hotchner who, when jack is with jess, goes on runs and likes the colour of the dog walker's hair at the park. who's eyes follow the backs of the swimmers at the gym before he catches himself. whose dry banter with the barista at the coffee shop verges on something heâs never done before.
gay aaron hotchner who's always understood attraction and beauty but as distant things. who's never let himself look twice at a man crossing the street. until one day, spencer comes into the office with a fresh hair cut and something about it peaks aaron's interest. his eyes follow the edge of his jaw, the curls collected on top, the length of his eyelashes, the bridge of his nose. it's the little things he sees and tries to ignore until he can't anymore. especially not with the way spencer looks at him.
gay aaron hotchner who kisses spencer in the carpark, an act he put no thought behind or else he'd second guess himself. a kiss that's soft and careful and tender, so heartbreaking he's breathless. a kiss that means something, that feels like something more. something he's been too afraid to let himself feel. and in that kiss, he can't hide from himself, can't deny the warmth in his chest, or the want on his lips to do it again. to chase something he'd spent his whole life running from.
