Title: That Which Comes From the Chrysalis
Artist: Istillcantforgetyou
Tags: Blood, Blood Drinking, Language, Sexual Content, Night Terrors, Post-TWotL, Pre-TWotL, Manipulative Hannibal, Canon-divergent, Vampires, Vampire AU
Posting Date: November 25th
Summary: Hannibal doesn’t just coax out Will’s inner killer, he strips Will of his humanity. Literally. Will doesn’t know that–on top of being a cannibal and psychopath–Hannibal carries a rare strain of virus that, combined with an equally rare autosomal recessive disorder, gives Hannibal a penchant for blood. It also makes him a damn vampire. And now not only does Will need blood to survive, he needs Hannibal’s blood. *** Or: a canon-divergent vampire AU that spans the seasons with some post-S3 catamaran sailing, bloody love-making, and a decrepit Lecter estate.
Will hasn’t exactly been a good boy. Clever, or so he’s been told, but not good. And his moral compass isn’t the only aspect of his nature that’s had a few adjustments since his bygone days in Wolftrap.
It’s entropy. Not his design, not Hannibal’s. Just sheer fucking incident. Holes manifesting in the floor of the expanding universe that Will falls into. Or karma. Not the omnipotent judgment sort, just action and reaction.
Well. No holes this time. Just a tree. A real beech ov’a one (that’s just for you, Doctor) awaiting him since time immemorial. The only thing ordained by chaos since the first two molecules did the hanky-panky with their electrons. Adam and Atom. (Okay, you get two, that’s it.) Hannibal and Will. Hannibal, ever the catalyst to Will’s unstable element. Id: Wg, HAZARDOUS MATERIAL. And specious Hannibal, a natural gas. Gotta be, when you’re that full of shit.
But it doesn’t start with Hannibal. It starts with the Tree. Before the Tree, he still had an out. Before the fucking Tree, he was his own man. He was… well, still a man.
Will considers all this, all the minutiae that has to come together for this one moment to happen. And then, even then, it seems a lot more probable than Hannibal’s other secret. The one buried just under he’s eating them, because most people stop at that. No one, including Will, thinks to ask Well, what if we’re talking about a very explicit kind of cannibalism, folks? Homicide and cannibalism, never mind a laundry list of other transgressions, seems like enough.
With Hannibal’s flair for the dramatic and inability to half-ass anything, even his own provenance, Will shouldn’t be surprised. But he’s getting ahead of himself.
Will doesn’t know, not yet.
The only thing on his mind–except the demons squatting in the periphery of his conscious–is the first relationship he’s had since fate took a dump on his doorstep and christened it Hannibal Lecter. He should know that in all the multiverse there isn’t a parallel reality that exists in which he has anyone in his life that’s not Hannibal. Not peaceably.
But he doesn’t. Not an inkling, even when Hannibal’s existence creeps back into his life in the form of a lone letter in the mail, courtesy of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
It’s 9:00 PM, the night before the Tree happens, and Will is closing in on the bottom of a bottle, dogs scattered and snoozing at his feet. He holds the letter, unopened, in his hands. An anvil drops into the pit of his stomach as he pries the envelope open and reveals its contents.
The luxurious copperplate leaps off the page, and Hannibal’s sibilant voice eddies into his conscious, leaving an inexorable chill. Brief but floral. Pretentious. And, because he’s got Molly now and shouldn’t be keeping intimate letters from a psychopath, he burns it.
