Work Text:
Will looked up from the joint he was clamping. A woman stood in the doorway to his workshop, framed against the bright autumn sunlight.
“I’m Mischa Lecter,” she said. "I'm dropping off a chair. I called you earlier?”
"Yeah, one second.”
He wiped glue off of his hands and followed her outside. The chair stood on his gravel driveway, dressed in brown tweed and a yellow pocket square. Another suit lay across its back, this one gray plaid.
"The accessories are in that plastic bag," she said.
“Are you sure you want to do this with an actual suit?" Will asked. "It's not going to stand up to much wear. I could get upholstery fabric like this and cut it to fit. You'd never know the difference.”
She gave him a tight smile. “I don't sit on it, Mr. Graham. No one sits on it.”
Will scanned the edges of the chair, places where fabric came loose with time. He saw nothing. No sign of thinning where someone's weight might be expected to rest on the seat either.
"So you just like to change his clothes every so often," he said.
"It," she said firmly. “Yes, I arrange for it to have a new suit when I can. You said two weeks?”
He nodded, and she left without looking back.
"Well, let's get you inside," Will said. He laid the suit over his shoulder and picked up the chair with a grunt. "Christ, what did they build you out of, ironwood? You weigh a solid ton.”
He set the chair on top of his workbench and backed off to look it over. Whoever had put the last suit on it had done good work. It seemed a shame to wreck it, but a job was a job.
He started ripping out the double welt on the back, mostly hot glue with a few staples. It came off easily enough, but instead of the padding he expected, a layer of pale, soft leather lay under the fabric. Will ran his hand over it with a frown.
A few brown, blotchy stains sat just above one leg. Impossible to get out, probably, but then why keep the leather at all? He reached for a knife to cut along the seam, careful not to damage what lay beneath.
The blade turned on something hard just under the leather. It slipped sideways, caught against the stitching, and drove itself into the heel of his hand. He swore and clutched at the wound.
A minute or two of pressure with a tolerably clean rag told him that the bleeding wouldn't stop anytime soon. He headed for the house to get some ice, but Alana’s pickup truck came rumbling up his drive as he stepped out of the workshop. He lifted his non-bloody hand in greeting.
She hopped out and came toward him. "How's Buster?" she asked.
"Good. Doing fine. Better than me, actually.” He lifted the cloth away from his cut just enough to display the blood still oozing out of it.
"No," Alana said immediately.
"No what?”
"No, I'm not stitching you up again. I'm a vet, Will, not a doctor. Go to the hospital like everybody else.”
"It doesn't need stitches.”
"Are you sure? Let me see."
“Okay, Doc.”
She gave him a brief glare, but five minutes later she had him sitting down at his kitchen table and was sticking a bandage in place.
“What did you do to yourself anyway?”
"Workshop accident. The knife stuck on something.”
“Uh oh. Did you bleed on someone's grandfather’s antique?”
"Maybe, but not on the wood. Everything else is coming off anyway.”
She checked the bite on Buster’s side, healing well from a run in with a coyote last week, and told him about the horse she’d just been to see out at Jimmy Price's ranch. Will leaned back in his chair, half a mind on the horse’s abscessed tooth and the other half on the old brown stains he’d seen on the chair. He wondered how long it would take his blood to dry down to that color.
By the time she left, it was sunset. He cooked for himself and the dogs and decided that work could wait until morning.
*
He woke to darkness and the smell of wood smoke.
In less than two minutes, he was outside, barefoot, emptying one fire extinguisher and then another into the blazing interior of his workshop. The second one diminished the heat to a point where he could get inside with a garden hose.
He looked around, first at his tool rack and the more expensive wood stacked at the back of the room. Both were almost untouched. He closed his eyes briefly as some of the tension left his chest. Scorch marks climbed up the walls. Smoke had turned the ceiling to black and ash gray. Most of the fabric that had been left out was a dead loss, but it could be replaced.
Once he'd satisfied himself that there were no lingering pockets of heat waiting to bloom into flames again, he set the hose aside and tried to take stock. Of his four current projects, two were salvageable. One he would have to rebuild from scratch. The fourth was Jack and Bella's sofa, stored at the back until they could agree on a fabric. He moved closer, testing the floorboards as he went.
A groan from behind it made him pause and then hurry forward. A woman dressed all in black lay curled up against the wall. A can of kerosene sat next to her. She sat up as Will approached.
He watched her and said nothing.
"Well?” She coughed and shoved her hair back from her face. "No threats to call the police?”
"I don't read the paper that often," he said slowly. "But I remember a headline a while back. Meat Packing Millionaire Vanished. The picture showed Mason Verger’s sister and her girlfriend, unnamed, at the Verger estate. Mischa Lecter was the other woman in that photo.”
Margot got to her feet and steadied herself on the back of Jack and Bella's sofa. "I can pay for the damage. I’d like to keep this quiet.”
"I have insurance. Why did you try to incinerate your girlfriend's chair? It can't be that uncomfortable.”
She hesitated. "I could use a drink,” she said.
Ten minutes later they sat across from each other in Will's living room, each with a glass of scotch.
Margot nodded to his hand. "You tried to cut into it, didn't you?”
"I wanted to get the leather off.”
“You won't be able to.”
"I don't think it's going to fight back.”
She laughed and drained her glass. "It already has. Even Mischa’s afraid of that thing. She just won’t admit it.”
“Of the chair," Will said flatly.
"Pour me another," Margot said.
Will did, and she held it between her hands for a few seconds. "Do you remember another headline? The disappearance of Hannibal Lecter?”
"Related?"
“In more ways than one. Her brother. Mason murdered him. Flayed him and fed what was left to the pigs.”
Will thought of the fine, pale leather that covered the chair like a skin under its suit. “Flayed him,” he repeated.
"Exactly what you're thinking. His bones, too. That's why it's so heavy.”
"Why the hell did you keep it?”
She knocked back the second glass of scotch and looked past him, out the window. "It was Mason’s favorite. No one else was allowed to touch it. And then the accidents started.”
"What accidents?”
“The painter who smoked in the dining room and dropped his cigarette butts on the floor. We found him in the pond. Or there was Mason’s lawyer. Tried to grab Mischa’s ass right there in front of him— of it. We only found his foot. Fucking Gucci loafers.”
"Are you saying–– What are you saying?”
"I'm not saying anything. I'm telling you the facts. Here's another fact. The night he disappeared, Mason locked himself in his room with that chair. The door was still locked in the morning. The windows were locked. Every part of that house is alarmed. The police can’t figure out what could’ve happened to him.”
Will rubbed at his forehead. "What do you think happened? Just say it.”
"Hannibal always said that when it was feasible, one should always try to eat the rude. My brother certainly fit that description.”
Will stood and grabbed his hunting knife. "Come on.”
Margot trailed him out the door and toward workshop. "What are you doing?”
“Catching it by surprise.”
He walked in through the workshop door, into the overwhelming smell of smoke, came to a stop in front of the chair, and brought the knife down. He shoved it through the leather and ripped it open, down the back and across the seat.
Margot came to stand next to him, arms folded tight over her stomach. Will pulled away padding and shreds of leather. Bone and wood made up the support structure, bound together with what Will could only assume were strips of human skin.
In the center, where the springs should be, sat a pile of bones. Most were broken. Not just broken. Splintered and crushed. A skull sat in the center, surrounded by wisps of blond hair like a saint’s glory.
Will looked at Margot.
She shrugged. “Hannibal always wins in the end."