This is how I go

[rejectory]

Serendipitously eye-locked, he proposes,

’ The shop is closed. ‘

He and proprioception are so much so in agreement that recruiting Will’s self-indulgence of having drunk on a growling stomach—and Hannibal’s cruel deaf ear—is simply accepting an invitation extended already.

The result is a dancefloor accident. Hannibal crosses Will’s way or Will crosses Hannibal’s. Each time it should be harder to tell who does what to whom.

For Will.

His fingers, extending of the air of which molecules are clustered all around Will’s elbow, slide over its natural current. Will has fine knobs everywhere; elbows, throat, no doubt ankles, elegantly lean.

’ Follow me, please. ‘

[synallactic]

The upturn of his lips is morbidly involuntary in Hannibal's presence. Sometimes shedding the hardened skin, sometimes humbled by the otherworldly ease with which the world moves around him rather than him through it.

He blinks doe-eyed at the skin crawl revelation of near-touch, bracing for the impact of imminent revulsion and finds...none. Limbs still limber and loose do not shy away from possibility. He doesn't linger on it long. Doesn't want to. The churning in his gut tells him it's a good idea.

He does, however, pause in the threshold. The waiting room's on the other side, the entrance he uses as a patient too. Feels cavern wide the distance between here and there. Standing on a crumbling precipice looking back at where he's been births an irrationally unsettling feeling. Like something's changed but his finger's missing the mark up of what.

It's the wine talking. Not much of a drinker, slippery slope when alcoholism's in the blood. Dad had it, seemed complacent at the time. The older you get the more you understand. He was miserable if this was his escape.

Hannibal's a finger brush away when his vision turns motion-blur to meet him. Looks him up and down from brow to chin. He's a statue in a backdrop of a museum with all the unsettling grace of a long-dead artist's vision staring back at him.

Belatedly he understands the door can't close without him on the other side and he steps through to the hazy appreciation of taste beyond his understanding, only knowing that what he sees makes sweating palms drive against the inside of his jeans pockets.

Its another world here and he sticks out like a broken thumb in thick casting. He steps aside to wait.

[synallactic]

The meat looks how Cordell's cheek felt mulling over his tongue. Forgive him if he doesn't dig in right away. He could chalk it up to the elegance in the way Hannibal's fingers curl around a fork, knife as the oar leading fine minced chunks in from the tide of sunny side but he'd be half right.

More mesmerized by the hint of teeth beneath his lip as he takes his first bite. The pulse of muscle leaping between jaw and temple as he chews. The marinade of flavors settling over the flat of his tongue as he swallows.

Wondering too who the third guest is. If there is any at all. That's the brilliance of Hannibal's mask. They'll never know which of them swallowed his unfortunate victims. So to hell with it, all of them did. Lip half curls in amusement at the thought of the pale faced afficionados and their faux horror. Knowing damn well none of them hid their curiosity well enough.

Will catches his lips at the rim of his glass for show, wrapped around pristine crystal without the supplication of another drink which he takes now with an over exaggeration of forethought.

He's stopped asking who's on the menu and when, more interested in the basics of supposition and his peek behind the veil to tell him when its his turn to shell out some part of himself. Even more curious to see if he'll recognize it.

And what Hannibal's expressions will tell him then. Like what it's doing now. The meat wasn't personal, a source at best. Easier than going to the grocery store. The satisfaction is at his own cunning elevation of the dish. Who knows meat better than the butcher?

Would Hannibal celebrate every labored swallow, carve him slow till there's nothing left to keep alive? Slower than Gideon? Would it be a love letter like Bedelia? Could he stomach it at all.

He can hear the Tattlecrime bullshit headline of the day: They're On Their Honeymoon Now But Wait Till Desert.

That's right. Bâtard-Montrachet down the hatch.

First bite's the hardest to work through. Slimy, so raw it's still fighting to avoid his teeth, he chases it with a bite of bread and decides imitation is key. No one knows etiquette better than the host.

"Have you decided what our new lives are going to be? Can't play tourists forever."

[rejectory]

Forever, seemingly inexhaustible, gives license. To the lazy, to start tomorrow. To the self-purportedly tuned in to life, to fear.

And because the only counterpart to the magnitude of its abstractness is death, what better religious spintale to soothe a lifetime of waste with than a marriage of both,

the afterlife?

’ Still wanting to settle down, ‘ which Will has tried before to an amusingly disastrous outcome.

Settled means having reviled one’s nature per the community guidelines. The person, if person, with whom one chooses to undertake this mutual dissolution appears to be a crucial ingredient.

One’s worth is determined by one’s partner. We agree that there is nothing more to us than what we settle for.

Will’s ex-wife says nothing kind about him.

And so he of her, but because she thought she was choosing a bland equal. Will admits to his own momentary clinical derangement, then. Molly was a choice as unfortunate as her parents’ name-giving skills. She should be tonight’s amuse-bouche not just in spirit, and the very first bite of her should have made Will as sick as the next in-memoriam hundred Hannibal plans to forcefeed him.

Thoroughly rare are moments which couldn’t do with retrospective heightening in his care—a more tightly sculpted feature, a surgical tuck of the jowled contour of his... resentment.

Strange news. It’s beneath him to be in 'competition' with a half-formed being.

In his memory palace, without a red-nosed cupid to raise the archway as to give the ordinary an illusion of wings, this moment will nonetheless be the unkempt room it is now, and it’ll always open its door to him. His hand next to Will’s as it is now; his knee butting Will’s like two dogs after a long parting.

Will, who appears to have been struck by a thrilling image. He must think of it as jealousy; the tone, the offense. And that pleases him?

Down his torso, Hannibal’s seduced but discontent peer. He in plain view thinks on a kiss. Thinks, nostrils flaring, on love, on reopening Will’s belly scar and massaging the infinite cling film self-layers that make his peritoneum—if only to tap the negative space thinly walling it off from his genitalia. Their anniversary is coming up.

’ Why? ‘

A Knock taps on their ornate moment, and Hannibal never finds out.

He pauses at the audacity.

Thud.

He snaps a minimizing look—free advice—at the wardrobe, then ticks back to Will. Curiously.

THUD.

A beechwood boom to send a flock flapping. It could be misconstrued as the struggle of fists that he for a fact knows cannot be. He’d roped the wrists behind the back.

Another.

He stares measuredly through the iron bars of his annoyance.

It’s the head, of course. Well on its infliction of a concussion if continued. In calm half-jerks, Hannibal rolls each of his sleeves up.

Just as he stands, a man falls out of the wardrobe close to Will’s left, biblically exhausted by his own birth, in the fanciest stables of his travels, out of his mother cow, temple cracked like an egg.

[synallactic]

Hard to put words to the unreasonable, an explanation failing in its attempt to justify. Why? The sensible part of him is screaming. He knows how this will end, one way or the other, and just like the thing in its cheap bassinet in the NICU that he'd been, Hannibal will never die.

It's the beauty and terror of him.

Speaking of.

Did the convicted predator sprawling out of his coffin know on some primal level the lion's den he entered when he met the beast's gaze over his half eaten corpse of a life? Or that the batting of the lamb's lashes was the first step in an inevitably short dance?

He knows it now. And Will holds no sympathy for him, bracing against the grind of kintsugi bone as he reaches for the blessed medicine still too far to wrap his shaking fingers around.

Petulant, he takes another crisp oval of bread and its accoutrement to chew in the blissful shrill pitch nothingness that overrides what he's seeing. Disinterest in the man's battle for the pitiful thing he called a life.

You destroyed so many, he's going to revel in your undoing.

And rudeness in Hannibal's house earns no better treatment than the lowing cattle, you've interrupted a pleasant conversation, a lovely meal.

Half-dead eyes which can't determine if they want the numbing repetition of meaningless or the excitement of the veil lifting swivel to watch his companion rise. Catch on the spine tingling promise of rolled up sleeves and it isn't fear that makes his exhale quiver. His mouth water.

The half eaten bread settles back on his plate, chewing slows to a minimum. His tongue runs over a perfectly cubed piece of meat.

They need him as fresh as he can be, given that he's likely soiled himself, but the resentment bubbling in him turns on the irritation.

"I don't think he appreciated his accommodations." An aside, over his shoulder. "You should've stayed quiet."

[wisesnail]

And here's the final masked Will <:

I hope you like it 💙 Personally, I have a soft spot for will wearing the mask XD

Prints and other stuff on my Redbubble, TeePublic and Threadless

[rejectory]

Contrary to all, the barbed entryway to Will’s company is the path of least resistance. What the likes of Jack instinctually seek to raze and the likes of Alana both coddle and somehow medicate—the joint maxim of an aspiring girlfriend—, Will may think for the better.

Sparing, even. Smartly so. It has saved Hannibal clean-up. No one is barring his way.

On the very periphery, he has taken to flipping his planner shut and anything that has to do with documentation concerning one Franklyn Froideveaux. Not a hint of him deserves a foot in the door behind which this experience is being preserved.

With enough pause for his company to have dream-dipped, he re-threads the conversational needle. Like Will, he can fish.

’ Should you find the bed in your room unsatisfactory, I won’t keep you from the couch. ‘

After all, habits have lives multiple. They’re hard to kill.

Will insists on being a burden—to which in the wrong hands the weight is answerable and an impersonator, and his misinterpretable wording suggests he’s been enough times mistaken for one to be past caring. Hannibal almost believes it. He’s hard-pressed to humor it, however.

Only music could. He finds the crime scene in his study increasingly difficult to resist the longer Händel underpins it.

’ Would you like me to show you to it now? ‘

[synallactic]

His room.

Colloquially it should feel like a temporary designation. In Hannibal's voice it evokes a haunting.

A room prepared just for him in a palace as vast and grand as his office... Floating on the bobbing sea of wine oscillating between dream and the fine hard line of reality, he watches a surgeon's hand close the thin black leather planner with a satisfying press of crisp paper. He squints through the pleasure response creeping up the back of his neck, ignores the goosebumps raising along his arms.

It puts a period at the end of their session. Discussion of bisected bodies and morbid minds are tabled for the night and the oppression of it lifts from his shoulders. Strange how the switch flips and in the good Doctor's place stands Hannibal.

Nothing's changed. The suit's still unwrinkled, the tie's still hanging around his neck, a calm and quiet dignity in the square of his shoulders but the air is different. Palpable in a way that makes him swallow.

Nothing professional about the insect-on-a-board study he's conducting now.

"Please." He thumbs the stem of his glass before he rises, drifting languidly on fawn legs to the tray his glass came from, setting it down as gently as he can manage. It clinks against the metal harder than he anticipated and rings in his ears like judgement. Still has enough sense to know that an apology is laughable. You break it, you buy it. That's what dad always used to say. He learned at an early age not to touch delicate things. Learned a little too well not to touch at all.

"Should I wait in the waiting room? Let you close up shop?"

[paperlignes]

hannibal lecter and will graham, hannibal (2013-2015) / litany in which certain things are crossed out, richard siken (2005)

[huntd0wn]

hannibal nbc, mizumono // Anguish by August Friedrich Schenck

[rylandgrac]

HANNIBAL | 2013-2015 I let you know me. See me. I gave you a rare gift. But you didn't want it. Didn't I? — Hozier, Unknown/Nth

[tethered-heartstrings]

You and I have begun to blur. We're conjoined. Curious if either of us can survive separation.

[templeofapelles]

Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, Deer and Deer Hounds in a Mountain Torrent (detail), 1832

[bloodydancy]

Hannibal 2.03 Hassun | 2.12 Tome-wan | 3.08 The Great Red Dragon

[synallactic]

@inn0cencestrained from here

What have you heard? The question's perched there just under the tongue. In eyes that divert from the terror in hers. Accusatory, defensive, childlike sheepishness. Easier to hide from the outside world but she's not from the outside. She's got access to the inner things not even Bloom could pry from him.

"Shh, hey, take it easy. Breathe. EMT's coming look at me. You're gonna be okay." Blood flow's slowing to a trickle thats manageable, pressure's still on it just in case. He's fumbling over her clothes for signs she's taken another bullet somewhere else.

Dolarhyde fired at least three and he's a damn good shot. Didn't expect him to come out in the open like this, he likes his privacy. Did Hannibal....?

There's a graze through her jacket he trails back to skin and finds blood. Not enough to panic, enough to raise proverbial hackles. He's got plenty of scars, Gwen shouldn't have any.

"Shouldn't have been here." He bites, grits his teeth against the misplaced anger and apologizes half under his breath.

"I'm trying...to stop them. Stop him. He's..." Unstable, dangerous, something made of the darker stuff. He had a few years to clean it all out of his system, maybe that's why he's so jumpy. Like leaving a warm bed to step into a frozen lake.

His hand slips into hers and squeezes.

"Hold on, help's coming. Squeeze my hand if you can."

[rejectory]

He takes the flattery on his dimpling chin; it’s refreshing not to pretend humility. It’s a mask to take with lessers and, as any theater, takes a social commentary stab at stratum.

In theory.

’ He underestimated you. ‘

Better put, he overestimated himself.

But even now, be it for his Captor Crawford, Will resorts to empathy. Where else to, in his case? The sympathetic nervous system requires patterned spikes for equilibrium. Abusive ones cleverly touch immortality through it—Hannibal is rewiring Will’s into more productive: pair hunters.

’ Resentment has a dangerously variable latency period. It comes from perceived injustice and the longer it’s inert, the more radical the boiling point will be. ‘

The bottle of Montrachet retires to the true center of the table, two Wills’ torso lengths away. To soothe the loss:

’ And then it becomes something else altogether. ‘

Congratulations.

’ Bon appétit. ‘

He forks in. The sunny yolk in its dented bun of meat tears like blinding paint down its injured side. He boards two inches of steak tartare onto a palmboat of toast.

Watching Will’s slender gun wrist, the one that strains to strings on the job whether the job is fur-soaping or refashioning Francis Dolarhyde into a patty, Hannibal’s palate traps a crunch.

[synallactic]

The meat looks how Cordell's cheek felt mulling over his tongue. Forgive him if he doesn't dig in right away. He could chalk it up to the elegance in the way Hannibal's fingers curl around a fork, knife as the oar leading fine minced chunks in from the tide of sunny side but he'd be half right.

More mesmerized by the hint of teeth beneath his lip as he takes his first bite. The pulse of muscle leaping between jaw and temple as he chews. The marinade of flavors settling over the flat of his tongue as he swallows.

Wondering too who the third guest is. If there is any at all. That's the brilliance of Hannibal's mask. They'll never know which of them swallowed his unfortunate victims. So to hell with it, all of them did. Lip half curls in amusement at the thought of the pale faced afficionados and their faux horror. Knowing damn well none of them hid their curiosity well enough.

Will catches his lips at the rim of his glass for show, wrapped around pristine crystal without the supplication of another drink which he takes now with an over exaggeration of forethought.

He's stopped asking who's on the menu and when, more interested in the basics of supposition and his peek behind the veil to tell him when its his turn to shell out some part of himself. Even more curious to see if he'll recognize it.

And what Hannibal's expressions will tell him then. Like what it's doing now. The meat wasn't personal, a source at best. Easier than going to the grocery store. The satisfaction is at his own cunning elevation of the dish. Who knows meat better than the butcher?

Would Hannibal celebrate every labored swallow, carve him slow till there's nothing left to keep alive? Slower than Gideon? Would it be a love letter like Bedelia? Could he stomach it at all.

He can hear the Tattlecrime bullshit headline of the day: They're On Their Honeymoon Now But Wait Till Desert.

That's right. Bâtard-Montrachet down the hatch.

First bite's the hardest to work through. Slimy, so raw it's still fighting to avoid his teeth, he chases it with a bite of bread and decides imitation is key. No one knows etiquette better than the host.

"Have you decided what our new lives are going to be? Can't play tourists forever."

[rejectory]

@synallactic *

The most succinct self-summary of any of his patients. It would be the most winning one were Will aware of all of its flyaway-hair annotations and their eyesore Medusa frizz at the electricity of the moment.

Were Will aware of its happening at all. Hannibal’s finger fleetingly slips off the pulse of the professional and onto the trigger. Its little hammer stammers, double-tapping. He makes himself obvious in the naked fact that this is a still-respectful exhibition of the most fascinating animal he’s met.

If only Will knew how many of his faux predecessors had made it no further than the slaughter mat, he’d see the compliment.

’ Would you be you if you did? ‘

The lip of the bottle, against the lip of Will’s—Hannibal’s—glass, cuts a morning-clear sound. Needlessly; Hannibal is lucid to the point of cruelty. He lets one social beat float by and steps onto the oval shape of the next as if this dance amounts to more than construct.

It certainly does for him. It must to Will—his groin show is sociable, his talk creamy, near-loopy. His throat has the pink excess of being accepted. Happily so. His on-the-clock guard is comfortably down enough there by his collar. This is not Quantico Will. Neither is it Wolf Trap Will.

A new third.

It’s, of course, been decided since before Will’s hefty effort at joining in on the pretense of a fork in the road. Hannibal shines the illusion with slow-syllabled gusto:

’ If not for your peace of mind, then for mine. ‘

[synallactic]

Would you be you if you did?

Who he is feels...liquid. Poured into so many moulds there's less and less left of him on the return, things brought back with him. Hannibal's being polite. Thoughtful even. The resentment Jack's nestled in him bitters the wine but it goes down all the same.

He's lucky it's Hannibal, he knows it. Feels it in the creeping well of his mind when those fingers strum the fine strings of thought with just the right notes. Enough to evoke a memory of childhood nearly forgotten. Its there, maddeningly ever on-the-edge. Like it could be his but isn't. Someone else's story imparted over his own. Bleeding in around the edges.

He leans heavy with an emphasis on the study of the reflection of his own muted expression in the glass. Third one of the night. Should've stopped at two. Or better yet none. He'd be home in Wolf Trap by now, alone with his dogs. Winston'll take it hardest. Won't leave the front door till he hears the tires crunching snow.

"I don't like the cold, if its all the same to you. I don't mind the couch." He's smudged in around the edges in his comfortable stupor, eyes heavy with it, but his mind is ticking away. Curiosity piqued for curiosity's sake to witness the switch flipped. Doctor Lecter by day, who is Hannibal by night?

Seems like an intrusion into some secret he's not meant to know and he's adjacent to giddy with it.

[rejectory]

Would you prefer a gun is A knife is closest to a hand’s equal. Each equally so superfluous, that is, from respective spectral ends. One not enough intimate, the other overly so.

He won’t burden Will to pick and by it overload himself to one side. He’s already been, through suppression, displaying lateral limb issues. Opening him up would further imbalance him.

’ You should trust yourself as I trust you. ‘

He tucks Will into the table, the ripe and fine-swirled overview atop the crown of his head a visual meander and a caress outlined, and is the hour hand perpendicular to Will’s noon direction once he, too, sits.

’ Jack believed you needed to be kept on a leash, ‘ he unbeds Will’s hors d’oeuvre knife and fork, ’ as he saw fit and was surprised for his trouble what hunger had grown in someone for such a long time restrained. ‘

[synallactic]

The endgame being a hope and a prayer? Hannibal's taking his leap of faith. It's a sobering thought.

He goes for the wine first, sleeve brushing sleeve on the pass up that has hair standing at attention beneath the cloth, recoiling in self-abasement of longing.

"Jack never had the privilege of pack life." Whistle wet, he cradles the bowl of the glass between his fingers, letting warmth seep in deep and dull the ache rising from hip to shoulder.

"If I were to play the part of the Devil's advocate, he couldn't have known what it was he leashed." I didn't, Will adds in the quiet of implication. Not until you, his eyes say. There's that grey hair-width of a line he teeters on, wondering still if it lay dormant or if the transplant had been a success. Grown in the oceanic darkness that filled the void that is the good doctor.

"So it stands to reason he could never have understood the damage it does chaining one dog to watch the others eat and letting it loose in the aftermath when the food's gone down the gullet." He holds the next sip in the well of his tongue, exhaling through flared nostrils for the bouquet. When it goes down, it goes down warm.

"He was fostering resentment. And you were the first one to catch the scent."

[wosiwv]

This could have been the best post-credits scene...

(I cried a couple of times while I was drawing this haha)

[agathah]

Rescuing his man like he didn't just massacre an entire farm to get to him

[hughdancy-babyface]

"What a cunning boy you are."