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Will's erratic, faltering heartbeat fell into an uneasy duet with his feet as they threw themselves into the steps leading to Hannibal's door.
He could feel his thready, damp pulse seeping its way through his clammy fingertips and palms. He hoped that they didn't stain the woodwork as he knocked on the door. Far too loudly, he realised after the clumsy sounds had dispersed into the night air of a neighbourhood more refined than his entire life.
When the handle first turned downwards, there was a moment when Will was able to remain suspended in the belief that nothing was wrong, that this would be the boat in the centre of the maelstrom that even his house in Wolf Trap couldn't be for him right now.
But then, with the soft click of a handle disengaging, everything fell to pieces and the boat was rendered into soaking, splintered detritus.
Light, bright and sparkling, spilt from the door and pooled around the tall, elegant frame of Hannibal Lecter, dressed in a dinner jacket of such deep red that it almost registered as black from Will's darkened side of the door.
A jacket that was so clearly for entertaining that the sudden rush of blood to Will's face made him feel queasy.
“Will.” Hannibal's voice rose smoothly above the tinkling, crystal-glass laughter drifting from behind him. Cutting through the delicate tapping of silver against porcelain plates.
The doctor's voice was warm and soft, eyebrows raised ever so slightly in an expression that is nothing more than vaguely pleased, and it makes Will feel sick and weak.
Because Hannibal is nothing if not the gracious host ('you gotta be more considerate, son'), but on anyone else this open expression would instead be lost-for-words surprise, and it makes Will want to -
It makes him want to cry and shout.
Very unreasonably, it makes him want to stand on Hannibal's porch and ball his fists up and cry and shout at the man.
“Please, come in Will,” Hannibal holds out an arm for him, not reaching, not grabbing, but coaxing, inviting. He turns his body aside slightly in the doorway, letting more of the fizzing light spill out into Will's half of the doorway, over Will's face.
He flinches. It hurts his eyes. Twice, Hannibal's fingers twitch inwards ever so slightly, a tiny movement of encouragement matched by the gentle smile lingering in his eyes.
Will flinches from that too, but the muscles in his legs haven't quite worked up the nerve to do anything in the direction of real movement.
He wants to turn away, put all of this at his back and make it that much easier to walk away from.
But he is rooted to the spot, his legs creaking and aching as they seem to have calcified with their angry, fearful stiffness. He is standing, sweating miserably into his clothes which itch where they stick to his clammy skin. It's like his frustration and humiliation are trying to escape the body that refuses to move, but all they've succeeded in doing is making him wallow in them.
Making him feel like a foolish child who has been so desperately trying to play with the grown-ups, so painfully earnest in his desire to become one of them, to be accepted, that he has failed to realise that he is a distraction, an amusement for slow days at best.
Looking at the familiar patience that settles in the lines of Hannibal's face, he is the child that has only just realised that the adults have things to do. They have business to attend to, people to see.
Hannibal has an entire life outside of him that needs to keep turning, that is far more important than the small, charming little distractions that he is capable of providing.
Will isn't sure whether it is the realisation itself, or the humiliation of not coming to it sooner, which hurts more.
He knows that it will be a lot easier once he makes that first, painfully embarrassing about-turn. The one that will shield his eyes, but will make it so awfully obvious that he has been stupid, that he has finally realised how stupid he has been, and in some ways Will thinks it would almost be less disgustingly embarrassing to stand here and continue on with his absurd insistence that he belongs, rather than to turn and let everyone see his retreating, defeated back.
There is a lot to be said for stubborn, furious denial of facts. It's comforting, in its own way.
“Will. It's quite alright,” Hannibal's voice is a low and calming rumble as he moves out of the doorway to stand closer to Will. “It is a small gathering, and all in attendance are professionals with commitments to see to in the morning. I doubt that anyone will stay beyond another hour, perhaps two.”
It is so blatantly placating, and hits all the sore, intended marks which drink it up like rainwater, and Will wants to scream at Hannibal for watering those dry, poisonous places inside him.
Scream at him to stop, please, please stop humouring him, stop looking at him and stop knowing.
Instead, he lets himself take the hand that Hannibal has offered for a second time, squeezes it a lot harder than necessary, crushing and deliberately digging his nails in and glaring up at Hannibal as they make their way inside.
If you ever stop, I will take everything you have until there is only me left.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Will rubs a gentle, unsteady finger across the grain of Hannibal's table – polished to a perfection so bright it is like looking into an aubern mirror. He's desperately feeling for some kind of snag or splinter. Any imperfection in the perfect pool upon which the plates seem to float, because he is not entirely sure whether this is real.
He sits near the head of the table, the interloper placed at Hannibal's right hand like a pebble set into a crown.
He sees only flat, grey faces staring at him from above glistering necklines and finely tailored waists. They have no discernible features that he could recall later, but rather a formless unity that stares without eyes. Will feels their bitten-off questions wriggle from between their carefully constructed lips and all the way under and into his nostrils, filling his lungs and choking him.
He hunches his shoulders against their slithering, ugly gazes, and not for the first time in his life he understands just why his father had favoured the belt as much as he had.
Because he does not wish to hide from their eyes.
He only wished to hide his own from theirs. From his.
Because he is not the interloper here, and he wants to cut these people down to just the right size for making him feel like one.
For looking at him with sympathy, as if he has been relegated to Hannibal's side out of pity and necessity.
Silly Will, always the stranger trying to fit in wherever he can, wherever he sees the smallest space. Oh well, pull up a chair and let him sit, he's here now. Might as well let him stay.
Disgusting little cuckoo.
He wants to throw the dazzling silverware into those hurtful, intrusive faces, and he wants to scream as he drives them all from the house.
He is here because he is meant to be. He is here because he is Hannibal's guest. Hannibal's friend.
He is meant to be here at this right hand.
He wants to grab precariously-arranged hair, and shake delicate, flimsy little necks until they threaten to snap. Wants to swallow their questions, crush them between his teeth and spit them back, acidic and bitter in their faces.
Why are you here? Do you sit in his office between the times when the night shift and the day shift swap their stories?
Do you sit in his office some days, saying nothing, simply breathing in and out, for hours at a time when everything feels like it will fall apart and cut you on its way down?
No.
You wait for office hours to be given to you.
You linger for months on a waiting list that never bears fruit.
You must wait.
I belong here.
Will is vaguely aware that people are trying to make gentle and light-footed conversation around him and at him. Asking about how he and Hannibal knew each other.
His eyes dart helplessly towards the doctor as it is all he can do to keep his lips from curling back at such awful, prying questions.
This isn't for them.
They aren't for other people. Only each other, and Will is aware of the fact that he is sitting at an angle in his chair, pointed as far outwards and away from the table as he can get, hunched over like a gutted beast, cradling this precious and wounded thing to his chest because it must never be seen by anyone else.
If they see it, they might want it. And Will has never been good at sharing and he refuses to start now.
Hannibal merely offers one of his sanguine and easy smiles, rests his hand on the back of Will's chair as he softly charms a satisfying answer from nothing.
“Ours is a field with a limited pool of resources for clients to draw from.” In reality, this means nothing and the man has said startlingly little, but it seems to settle the brightness in curious eyes. “We often find ourselves moving within the same circles.”
Will has to fight the urge to allow his head to rest against Hannibal's belly, so close as it is with the man standing so obligingly tilted towards Will's own strange angle.
Somehow he manages to make it look so utterly natural. A man halted en route to the kitchen, nothing worth seeing or questioning further.
Will's arm twitches abortively when the air at his side cools, Hannibal having satisfied his guests' curiosity enough to continue towards the kitchen unhindered.
“Have you been to many of Hannibal's parties before?”
Will forces his eyes away from the spitefully empty doorway to the kitchen, registers just enough detail to make it seem as though he is paying attention.
He is aware of thick, impossibly smooth sheets of blonde hair and bright lips that frame the ugly question.
Will wants to bite them off and throw them tearfully at Hannibal's feet, ask him to make them quiet.
Then he blinks the sweat from his eyes, remembers that his name is Will Graham, and promptly feels like he wants to expel his rotting insides. Copiously and obnoxiously enough to clear a radius for himself.
Preferably one that forces all these clean, glimmering people with the grey faces and the red lips to find safe harbour somewhere – anywhere – outside Hannibal's house.
“No,” he manages to spit out, and it must not be one of those things that sounds worse in the speaker's mind than to anyone hearing it, because all the faces twitch towards him at once, and the red lips contract and recoil.
“Yes.” They're staring at him and he so wishes he could stop himself. “We don't...do things like that. We just talk.”
He wants to rip words of the right magnitude out of his throat, wants to bash his head against the lovely, flawless table and send them spilling out over the spotless plates, because the ones that he had couldn't honour anything they had.
But he is just lucid enough to realise that this might not be the best course of action, and so he is stuck with these stunted, meagre words that force everyone to see what a petty, jealous and possessive little child he really is.
A nasty, greedy child.
That's the thing with hungry children, Will remembers. Put something they want in front of them, and they will grab fistfuls of it in both hands and keep forcing it into their mouths until they choke.
Or perhaps that was just greedy, dirty little Will Graham.
Whenever he had wanted something, he had to take it, knowing it would never be offered.
But he knew what happened when his little treasures were discovered. And so he had learnt.
Eat them all immediately. Love them, consume them without pause. Hide the evidence, nobody must ever know what you want from life.
You might be forced, by a well-meaning and work-roughened hand, to give it all back.
Hannibal emerges from the kitchen, small silver plates balanced on his arms, his hands. Will stares at him and his fingers seize and the skin along the back of his thighs stings.
He can hear the man describing the dish in warm, low tones, but the words are meaningless and lost to him. The vibration wends its way around the table, curling around Will's shoulders before moving on to drape around the bent necks of the other guests, and he hates Hannibal for allowing other people to share in it.
When he sets a dish down in front of Will, carefully leaning over his shoulder, the surprising warmth from beneath his immaculate suit jacket brushing against Will's ear, Will shifts in his chair slightly and stamps on Hannibal's foot, grinding his heel into the spotless patent leather.
“Hannibal, you must share your secret with us,” one of the grey-voices tinkles across the table while the monstrous individual at Will's side continues to smile placidly at the speaker. He holds their gaze with such utter steadiness that Will wants to scream and throw things at the ridiculous interloper until Hannibal is forced to turn that unerring solidity back to him.
“How on earth do you find time to lavish on all your creations?”
The corner of Hannibal's mouth quirks in a manner that is so typically Hannibal that for one second a shrill bolt of panic lances through Will and he thinks that his legs might actually be numb. That he might think that he's forcing his foot down onto Hannibal's toes with every ounce of strength he has, but in actual fact there is nothing happening below his waist.
He looks down. Twists his his foot and feels the grinding of bone.
He glowers up at Hannibal, has the overwhelming urge to spit in his face (again, you disgusting little boy), to grab at his hair with both hands and scream and yell until Hannibal gets rid of all the flat, staring faces.
“I assure you, Ms Hendricks, I have no more time available to me than the next man,” Hannibal graciously dips his head, laying a hand lightly on the back of Will's chair and straightening, “I find that it is when life is loud and full of chaos that one is most inclined to make time for the things that they love.”
Hannibal resettles his hand softly on the back of Will's neck as he straightens, his thumb stroking downwards, once, as he swiftly and silently extricates his foot from underneath Will's own.
Will only just manages to stab his fork into the pulpy fruit-flesh which is perfectly balanced atop one of the cubes on his plate, instead of grabbing at Hannibal's retreating back with both hands. He watches the man circle the table, placing desert and smooth, calm regard at each place that was not Will's, and Will has to bite down hard to trap the ridiculous and ugly sounds that are fighting for space in the air.
Has to close his eyes tightly and remember the bite of leather into his flesh. Try to conjure up his father's voice, force it to bend and fit around the shape of Hannibal, because he cannot be this boy again.
You have to learn to share, Will.
“You know, Mr Graham, I don't think I've ever seen anyone eat petit fours like that.” The voice chimes gently across the table like a broken bauble, ever-so-polite as Will would expect from one of Hannibal's friends, and it makes the blood rush to his face so quickly that Will thinks for a moment that his skin might be peeling and burning.
He clenches his incriminating fork tighter in his hand.
“Is it a southern thing?”
The food in front of him no longer smells of the curious and beautifully blended spices and brush strokes of Hannibal's kitchen. The perfectly constructed pieces in front of him suddenly reek of the reconstituted, subsidised tang that had followed Will down hundreds of ever-changing school hallways.
He swallows down bile with difficulty, his throat clogged with the taste of a time when his accent had been as sticky as his fingers. He had thought – had so hoped – that he had grown out of everything that seemed to be leaking from his pores tonight.
He shifts in his chair, afraid suddenly that he will find that he has soaked Hannibal's beautiful furniture with something dark and putrid.
Will truly wishes that he would pass out, or at least gain the courage to make his shame-addled legs gather enough strength to walk himself out of Hannibal's house, because he cannot duck his head low enough to hide his pulsing, red face from those now turned in his direction.
He inches his head towards the large, dark-clad presence lingering at the corner of his eye, then immediately wants his face to slide off his bones, his eyes to shutter permanently closed.
Either that, or to gouge out the eyes of Hannibal's guests. To take away their hurtful, impetuous sight.
To teach them better than to have the nerve to come here and see.
To desperately try to teach them to see something other than little Willy Graham, unable to bear up under the simplest of questions, searching for a man to stand in the way of the softest, gentlest blows which still somehow rocked his crooked little body.
Daddy's boy, they had all whispered, and Willy had never known whether it made him want to laugh or cry until he stopped wanting to do much worse things.
“On the contrary, Ms Gonzalez,” Hannibal's interjection is smooth and as close to playful as the man gets. Frivolous and warm, telling of an edge that would slice your feet to ribbons if you made the foolish choice to walk it.
Silk wrapped loosely around a blade. You could still see the steel glinting underneath. It had always been beautiful to Will.
Utterly charming in a way that he could never hope to be – the mechanics were lost on him, like trying to scrabble purchase on a riverbank, but only managing to grab handfuls of silty mush, sliding out of his hands and leaving him to sink back under the overwhelming babble of voices getting lost amongst each other.
“Although petit fours are traditionally eaten without utensils, it has become established practice to embellish them with as much artistic flair as possible. To such an extent that it has become quite acceptable, even proper, to utilise knives and forks to aid in their...deconstruction.” Hannibal paused delicately before placing his verbal garnish, eyebrow raised and gently amused smile crinkling the corner of his mouth purely for his guests' benefit.
Warm and filmy laughter rippled around the table, all attention helplessly and utterly fixed on Hannibal, and Will feels as though he has surfaced from the heavy current to find someone standing on that slippery, crumbling bank, offering a hand down to him.
It is a feeling Will is entirely unaccustomed to. It feels like someone finally laughing with him.
And yet there is an unbearable snag in his chest, tugging at him, pulling at him viciously and with barbed points, urging him to render the others in the circle blind, deaf and dumb.
Hannibal's easy charm appears to Will now as a double-edged sword. He can feel it, cutting into his raw, pink flesh as he sees all the people seated around him gazing at the man as if he might at any moment impart some kind of wisdom that would ward off pain and suffering for the lifetime of any who heard his voice.
Will didn't like it. It felt far too much like sharing.
And for hungry little boys and girls the world over, sharing half of something meant being left with almost nothing.
And it didn't seem to matter how many years passed, nor how respectable his salary grew, he had never quite been able to shrug that particular shroud from his shoulders.
In fact, the more he found himself wanting something, the tighter he could feel himself drawing it across himself.
“However, I must ask you to forgive me, Will.” Will's head jolts upwards so fast that it chokes the reflexive and bitter snarl of refusal back down his throat. “Your plate appears to be missing something.”
Will sees one of Hannibal's large, surprisingly work-roughened hands reaching down to grasp his plate. To take it away. To come so close to Will, without intending to so much as graze against his skin. To take what it has given and then simply disappear.
To leave him empty and sour-stomached in the midst of all these awful, hungry new faces with which he has just discovered he has to compete.
Will stabs his fork into the back of Hannibal's hand as hard as he possibly can.
In the next few seconds, there are roughly a dozen primate-sounds that crash against Will's senses, and not one of them comes from Hannibal.
The man himself remains standing at Will's side, arm outstretched and held perfectly still, allowing Will to do as he pleases. As if Will had any particular grand design beyond making it all his.
Will's fist is clenched, frozen around the fork that is still embedded in Hannibal's hand, unable to move as the hot swell of vicious satisfaction thrums through him, victory drawn from Hannibal's skin, up through the glinting conducting rod of the fork, to trip and sizzle across Will's own horror-slick skin.
He tilts his head up to glare directly at Hannibal's gaze, the sickly sweet pleasure of free-range, anger making the eye contact the easiest he has ever made.
Let Hannibal see it all. He's so keen to reassure Will that the hot, wet and coppery breaths that swirl in his mind are beautiful instead of rancid, ugly things. Well, then let him see them. Let him feel them.
Let him feel the rotting breath cloud over his eyes. Let him feel Will's overwhelming desire to hurt everyone at the table, for no other reason than that Hannibal had dared to share his time with them.
For no other reason than, when Hannibal looked at them, when he listened attentively to their words and paused, allowed himself time to truly consider them and form a response....he was not doing those things with Will.
Let Hannibal see that this is what Will chases away when he refuses to allow people to meet his eyes.
His life has been a constant game of shoving and pushing and jabbing the malformed, jealous, and monstrously greedy little boy out of the centre of his eyes.
His empathy might chafe and tear at him when he allows himself to look both at and through others, but it is that little boy who will gorge at the wounds and tear them open, and Will is just so tired of pretending that he doesn't exist that it is a selfish, dirty pleasure to be able to look up at Hannibal and allow that boy centre-stage.
It is like jumping from a cliff's edge of everything he has known when he sees that Hannibal knows that boy's face already.
The greeting in warm, crinkled eyes is so devastatingly complete that Will feels his eyelids twitch in the very real threat of passing out. The last and hopelessly empty defence against it all.
Hannibal's other hand reaches out, strokes Will's matted, unkempt hair gently.
“You are quite right, Will,” he intones quietly, the painfully tender smile searing into Will's skin. “My apologies, that was unaccountably rude of me.”
The noise and anxious fluttering hurts his ears and makes his eyes water, but he refuses to look away from Hannibal, to stop his glaring. Doesn't think he would be physically capable of it even if he wanted to.
Which he doesn't.
Because damn right Hannibal has been rude, and Will wants him to know it. Wants him to see as well as feel how much he has hurt Will.
He has shared them with others, when they have no place being shared. He has shown Will what he has, what he could have, but he has had the audacity, the gut-wrenching cruelty to inflict this vision upon Will where others could see.
They are not for them. The others.
They belong here, alone with each other in this swell of useless, fearful prey-noises.
Will scowls up at Hannibal, who continues to caress the thatch of unruly hair, utterly unconcerned by the metal that is being ground into his flesh.
“Your peers have bigger mouths and sharper teeth when you are a hungry child, do they not Will?”
Hannibal's words are as soft as the smile that graces the corner of his lips, the fullest and most openly prideful expression that Will has ever seen on the man.
He grinds the fork in harder and rams his head hard into Hannibal's belly. Leaves it resting there while the man lays a large hand on the nape of his neck.
He is vaguely aware of Hannibal's voice quieting, words not meant for him now floating harmlessly across his back. His voice blankets the flames of panic spreading across the table.
Will can hear him calming the woman who questioned his use of his cutlery, and he almost wants to laugh.
Hungry peers are no peers of his. Sharing is an enemy, a competitor to be dealt with at all costs.
And Will has always found that sharp, silver tines do a much better job of it than bony, purpled fingers.