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Will tried to force his mind to nothingness as Hannibal guided him towards the Bentley.
The hand that Will wanted to grab and twist and crush was firmly, awfully gently, resting on his lower back, so safely out of his reach that it made everything down to his fingernails ache with fury.
The icy breeze was still sharp and biting enough to keep his temper reigned, the snapping and snarling choked back by the sensory memory of sharp, stinging welts that used to ache just as deeply, no matter which lake the wind had whipped across. They had always managed to find him and dig into the most raw and unguarded gaps in his skin.
For just a moment, his lips seized in a stunted snarl as he felt Hannibal's warmth close beside him.
Too close, not close enough.
Too close if the other man ever wants to be able to walk away from Will and forget him. Too close if Hannibal's future plans include going anywhere that Will can't follow, and surviving to offer stunted, pathetically deformed apologies.
Not quite close enough for Will to grab him and gouge his marks into the other's skin. To clutch with teeth and nails, to hold and shake until something breaks.
Not quite close enough to grab the soft, smooth leather of his belt and tear it off, taking as much torn material as he could with it.
The buckle, not usually visible beneath the waistcoat, glinted maliciously in the sun. It hurt Will's eyes, and part of him is screaming for his body to do what it knows is right. To throw the older man to the ground. To grab clumps of his hair and pull. To fling the dead-snake weight of the thing to the ground and scream nonsense not-words into Hannibal's horrifyingly open and even face.
The feeling of memories and desire crawling over his skin make him want to slither out of it. He's just so fucking tired, he's dirty and tacky with the grime of today and of days long since past, he's been defeated and so utterly stymied by the calm, quiet presence beside him, who so easily took Will's pilfered victory from slack hands and he's still so goddamn angry.
And if he won't be allowed to soothe himself in his usual manner – and how much does that chafe, boy? How much does it pinch and blister to know that you've let someone see that you can't be trusted, that you need leashing. How does it feel to know that you let someone see what you have to do in order to not fall apart at your rotting seams?
Will forces air through his nose, flings his head away from Hannibal.
If he won't be allowed to comfort himself, then he is going to need to find a dark, very quiet, very small space where nobody will find him. Where he can lie so still and so quiet and simply let the anger flood every particle of his being, where he will try to imagine that it is only akin to slipping into a warm bath.
Where he will try to ride it out in peace and silence.
He needs that.
“I know.” The words are soft and barely pierce the black, buzzing swarm that is making its bitter sickness in his chest. “Stay with me for just a moment longer, Will.”
And no, really. He seriously fucking needs that quiet place, because if he has to move a single step further there will not be a choice anymore, and his body will quite simply stop waiting for permission and seek to satisfy all those crowing, baying needs.
The muffled click of the car door opening doesn't truly register with him, nor does the slight downward pressure of the hand on his back, urging him into the cool leather of the seat.
What does register, however, is the bone-bright flash of that hand as it withdraws from his shoulder, and the itching, leeching of warmth and space that it leaves on his skin.
It feels like punishment and being abandoned to the elements, and Will isn't sure whether it is that or simple opportunity that has him lunging, teeth bared and snapping as the hand passes by his face.
And Hannibal, that bastard, doesn't even have the decency to flinch. The only concession he makes is to calmly move his hand over and out of Will's bite radius, coming to rest briefly on top of his head instead.
“There will be other victories, Will.” The hand smooths firmly over his hair once, before withdrawing, and Will wants to slam the door shut, trap it there.
Hannibal leans down, his voice soft and respectful of the very little distance between his gentle eyes and Will's brittle refusal to meet them.
“You have surrendered nothing here today. You have lost nothing of yourself. You are whole, and complete. There is nothing else that I would wish for you, there is nothing in you that is lacking.”
Will's head whips around so quickly that he can almost hear some small, hollowed-out bones inside himself splintering.
But whatever is breaking inside him is nothing compared to the acid-sting in his eyes which he absolutely cannot and will not and must not allow to mark his face. The black swarm inside of him is vomiting up such a bitter and burning honey that he is practically blinded by it.
His chest convulses and his tongue feels like it will burn away to nothing as he spits as violently as he can in Hannibal's face.
This man has rendered him a weak and mewling, impotent thing. This man is gently, lovingly taking great handfuls of his insides and dragging them up through his throat, dumping them onto the ground to glisten in the harsh, watery sunlight.
So Will spits. He spits and hopes that Hannibal will finally see something that doesn't please him in the viscous mess he has dredged from Will's empty spaces.
Hannibal merely turns his face ever so slightly to one side, calm and collected and with not so much as a tightening of the mouth.
Will hates him for it.
Will hates him for the burn in his eyes which will not go away, and for once he forces them to remain where they are, staring directly into the quiet eyes before him. Hoping that seeing a film of disgust and contempt stain those lenses will be enough to finally make his brain realise that this is not a good place to hang a star.
“You are perfectly fine, Will.” He cringes from the feather-light stroke of that hushed and calming certainty. “You will not shatter, and we will not cease to be.”
A small pause during which Will wants to die as he hears his own heaving, disgusting breaths cloud the pristine air.
One of his childhood neighbours had owned a horse that used to do the same thing. An ex-racer. It used to pound its hooves into the ground, churning up soil and stone with earth-shattering furor, until rivulets of sweat cut steaming lines down its powerful, heaving body. Its eyes would roll white in its wildly tossing head, and breath would pour from flaring nostrils in angry, silvery plumes
Will had been terrified to live so close, had cried the day they left.
He tries to hold his breath, to stop the awful sounds. Hannibal cants his head, leans a little closer so that he can murmur the words gently into their shared space.
“This will ebb and flow, pass and come again.” Hannibal's voice presses heavy and warm against his chest. A large hand rests lightly on the back of his neck, unmoving, providing pressure and little else. “It is only anger, nothing more.”
It feels steady and so achingly good that everything inside Will wants to try its utmost to rail and struggle against it, to make every effort to throw it off.
“Fuck you.”
And Will is so extraordinarily angry that the only response is a soft smile, a small nod and the gentle snick of the car door closing.
**************************************
Hannibal doesn't try to talk to him once they get on the road, and Will is absurdly grateful for that, and resentful of the fact.
Hannibal also doesn't try to hide the fact that he has selected a soft and easy piece of classical music, lowered the volume and adjusted the heating, all in a very careful and deliberate effort to make things more bearable for Will's raw senses.
He had settled himself into the driver's seat, and without an iota of embarrassment or awkwardness – and Will hates him with a searing intensity for having the audacity to simply choose not to feel anything as frail or human as awkwardness - had moved his hands around the console.
He hadn't hurried, or tried to conceal any of his movements as agents of his own whims in an effort to coddle Will from his own pointless shame, and once again Will hated this man for so easily denying him his rage. For the ease with which he could throw comfort like a blanket around Will's shoulders, banking the fires that were trying to turn his insides out.
As a child, he had grown used to being the small and fearful one with the little stick-arms and legs. He had grown used to the stares and the too-loud whispering and the small radius of emptiness around him, which he used to tell himself was just personal space. He had grown used to these cold, gnawing things that were so familiar that they were comforting. Because these things had never changed.
Their house, their neighbours, the cramped corridors of his school - everything that he always had just enough time to come to think of as home – all these things inevitably came to pass by in the blur of a car window, and would make way for such startling newness that it made Will want to scream and hold his breath all at once.
And even when these things all shifted and changed overnight, those stares, those whispers – from adults, mostly, and Will had only realised how bitterly disappointed his ten-year-old self had had a right to be once he had turned thirty - and that bubble of nothingness that surrounded him.
These things always remained the same.
And they had battered his paper-skin and toothpick bones until they had so thoroughly exhausted him that he wanted to crawl into a space meant only for sleeping and just....exist there until it was over.
And when he had first started to feel the slow and crawling anger, that too had exhausted him.
But he had soon realised that, whenever he allowed those pointed, dripping little branches to twist around inside of him and fill him up, there was a certain freedom to be found.
He had been able to achieve things – have things, take things, because hunger doesn't just go away with pleasant thoughts – that he would never have been able to do with only emptiness in his stomach for company.
And people still stared, still whispered. But they had done it far, far away from him.
It was the first time in his life that he had felt powerful.
And for the first time in his life, this man was slowly but surely easing some of that power off his bent and crooked shoulders.
Never discarding it or dismissing it, but instead smoothing his hands over it, making it lie flat and easy within Will. Making it a much better fit, flattening the prongs that had previously caught and pricked at Will's soft insides.
Making space for other things.
Warm, soft and light things which got caught on the edge of Will's lips as he tried to name them. Things that were so greedily accepted by Will's new-found empty spaces that it was almost as if there had been puzzle-gaps already there, waiting for Hannibal to come along and slot the right shapes in.
And dear god he desperately needed to get rid of this man, because he wanted nothing more than for this to continue.
*************
Will wasn't sure how long they had been driving when he realised that it wouldn't be enough, this warm and gently swaying nest.
His breathing had begun to slow at first, and at any other time, Will thinks that he would probably have allowed himself to be soothed by it all.
But he's too tense, too far gone, he feels like he's dangling over a cliff edge that he desperately wants to fall from, but his instincts to claw his way back up, to ignore what is waiting patiently for him below, are too well-practiced.
Because what if there is nothing waiting for him below but icy, dark water and nothingness? When he glances down, he sees the hands break from the waves, reaching out, ready to greet him as he tumbles.
But perhaps those hands are not the promises that they appear to be. Perhaps they are merely a flicker of perverse interest, a reflection of the moon in dark waters. Something that will shiver and disperse as soon as his weight hits them.
Something that will not guide him through the mirror-stars in the inky water. Something that will let him sink quietly into it.
Will wants those hands to be real. He wants to take them and dig his own fingers in, squeeze and crush until they should break and crumble. He wants to feel them squeeze back. He wants to feel the crushing pain of reciprocity until he is sure that they will not simply slip away.
He wants to be sure that he can have them. Keep them.
“Pull over,” he spits from between protective teeth. He resents the easy acquiescence that is the only response to his rudeness.
He needs something, anything else from this man that will make Will see. See that he will be nothing that he promises and everything that Will has already seen in pale reflections across childhood faces.
He wants the sharp and acrid tang of being right, before he allows those hands to take his weight.
He wants the dull blow of thwarted expectation to impact on his skin, because that blow easily glances off the puckered skin of scarring.
That pain is always far preferable to the new nerves. The ones that he knows are waiting to be felt in the spaces that loss, real loss, pierces.
The soft blinking of the indicator as Hannibal honours Will's request seems to mock his rapidly beating heart. The low and reassuring thrum of the engine dies quietly and suddenly, and Will is forced to listen to his own breaths.
He cannot allow himself to sit passively and let those hands touch him, stroke him, soothe what grows inside him.
He won't be tricked. He won't be fooled, nor lulled into giving away anything more than a pathetic, sun-bleached bag of jelly candies.
He won't allow it.
He glares up at Hannibal, who has come to the passenger side door to hold it open for him, inviting him out into the lay-by where his Bentley shines like something impatient to be on its way.
He ignores the hand held out for him, knocks it away while he clambers from the car.
Hannibal stands placidly off to the side, content to give Will space.
A little bubble of it. That old radius of nothing, back again like the old friend who knows who you were before you moved out of that stifling town with the tyre fires constantly raging. The friend who had known you when you had only ever dreamed of getting up, getting out, getting anywhere.
The old friend who had known what a pathetic, squalling creature Will had been before he had made it all the way to the FBI. Come to ask him who the hell he thought he was.
Will's stomach clenches and threatens to contract and squeeze the snaggle-toothed shapes of all those ugly memories of space-bubbles up through his guts.
Up into his throat and all the way to his mouth, threatening to leak from behind his grinding teeth in the shape of unwanted, fearful words.
Little bubbles had followed him throughout his whole life. Surrounded him as a child in a way that Will had always tried to bend into a comfort.
He had thought that if he took it with his hands and twisted and ripped, he could transform it from a punishing, prickling cloth into something warm and comforting. Something that would swaddle him and him alone, protect him against the others who would throw stones from afar, never getting too close.
But it had always been one of Will's biggest failures.
He could coax his anger into a protective and shining armour around himself, but he had never been able to weave the bubbles in the same fashion.
He had never wanted to pop them. The potential for people to come closer, to throw their stones harder, had always opened up beneath him like a yawning maw, and he had never once wanted to look into the belly of that beast.
He tries to drag in a deep breath, but it gets caught in the rage that sits heavy and slimy in his chest like infection. His body lurches as it takes a rabid, abortive step in Hannibal's direction, like it knew just what to do if only his mind would just let go.
Except he can't. He cannot, but Hannibal's eyes are refusing to leave his own and it would be so easy to let him have this. To let him take without being tested.
“Are you angry because I have touched you?”
Will's choked, wet snarl almost drowns out the awful, sullied words that absolutely must not come out of Hannibal's mouth.
“Or because I will not do so again without your permission?”
When Will launches himself at Hannibal this time, he is silent. His body throws itself across that plagued, oily little bubble, and when Will sinks his teeth into the juncture of the man's shoulder and neck, it feels a lot like being caught by one who has seen the rocks lurking beneath the surface of the waves.
For long moments, Will hears nothing but his own raging breath breaking frantically against the sensations that threaten to overwhelm him; Hannibal's warmth, the sound of his steady, soft breathing.
The taste of his clothes as Will bites down hard, harder, as hard as his aching jaw can possibly manage and it's still not enough.
Will becomes only vaguely aware of the shorter portions of Hannibal's perfectly slicked and razored hair prickling against his temple.
Of the surprising softness of his perfectly smooth-shaven cheek and neck, contrasting with the even more surprising but painfully delightful hardness and strength of the muscle under Will's teeth. He could feel it, feel the density and the power lurking there, even beneath the expensive and meticulously-cut fabric.
And then there is the fact that Hannibal's smell is filling his rapidly-flaring nostrils. Seeping inside of him, stroking all the torn and damaged parts.
It's beyond anything that Will could put into words at this moment, for fear that it would shatter if Will spoke them too loudly. Perhaps in ten years, he would be able to whisper them without such terror, but he has little confidence in whispers either.
It is shockingly, devastatingly intimate, and the tears that run over Will's cheek to mingle with the spit and mucus do nothing to dilute the purity of this moment.
Hannibal remains unmoved by Will's own sweating, trembling frenzy. His arms come firmly and surely around Will's body, holding him closer, utterly unconcerned at the teeth trying their utmost to become a new part of him.
“Nothing has broken you, Will.” He doesn't whisper, and Will is grateful for it. It is soft, conciliatory, and blazing with an affection and regard that should have scared Will but instead made him bite harder.
Hannibal lifts a hand to cradle his head.
“It has left you with pain, and what you have done with that pain is beautiful.” Hannibal angles his head, so that he can speak the words into Will's ear, the motion brushing Hannibal's cheek delicately against his own.
And the gesture is so like a nuzzle that Will feels compelled to lock his jaw and fist the material of Hannibal's coat so tightly that he hears the fabric strain. The corner of Hannibal's lips press against Will's head as if to taste the secrets there.
“You're a remarkable boy, Will.” The doting words could well be the last thing that Will hears, and he would not go to his death unhappy.
But for the first time in what feels like years, there is a hard, tiny core within himself that tightens and begins to glow with heat.
It is the urge to fight. To argue with what might be handed to him with the end of his life, to tear and claw and grunt, slavering with the effort to reject such an offer.
And as that core flexes long-forgotten sinews, Will's only thought is that they will be here, in this cold, damp lay-by, for as long as his teeth and grasping hands can hold them here.
Because it is so incredibly hard to have anything. Rare to get it, hard to keep it.
And this is a damn slippery planet, so Will has every intention of holding on until the day comes when he has to let go of something.
And he knows then that whatever he has to loosen his grip on, it won't be Hannibal. It will be whatever tenuous, shaky hold he still has on the world that drifts above the surface of the water.