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let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held
- Dionne Brand
***
“I appreciate that this is difficult for you, Will,” Hannibal says from across the living room. There’s a faint rustle of papers. Will doesn’t need to turn around to know he’s inspecting the hospital reports. He must have rescued them from the trash. Will wishes he'd shredded them when he had the chance. “Mental illness is an explanation you have never embraced.”
He scrubs a hand down his face. “It’s not mental illness I have an issue with.”
“The notion of trauma, then? You still do not believe that what Jack subjects you to is no better than repeated abuse—“
“Would you stop?” Will hisses. He feels Hannibal’s eyebrows raise, a certain prickling racing across the back of his neck, warning and intense. He pays it no mind. “I just— I need to know I’m not crazy, Doctor Lecter. I need you to tell me that I’m not losing my mind.”
When Hannibal speaks it’s even and measured, devoid of any indignation. Distantly Will’s thankful one of them has an emotional capacity greater than a teaspoon. “The very fact that you fear insanity is in itself proof of the contrary. Insane people do not worry whether or not they’re sane, what is in their minds is as real to them as you are.”
Will grins, bitter and self-deprecating. “Yeah, well. I’m beginning to wonder.”
The chaise creaks as Hannibal sits beside him. Will resists the urge to lean against him. Instead, he takes a gulp of his whiskey, the good stuff Hannibal usually keeps under his desk for their sessions. It probably costs more than his utility bills. The firelight turns it to liquid gold.
“Have you ever heard of Alien Hand Syndrome, Doctor?”
“Through studies only.”
“That’s what this feels like. Like there’s two…versions of me, both of them pulling the reins at the same time. Like I’m split, somehow. Fractured. I do one thing and it does another.”
Hannibal watches him. Half of Will yearns to meet it, needs to meet it, needs to cling to it like a life raft in the sea. His gaze stays stuck stubbornly on the fire, like a moth beating itself against a bulb.
“Like your left hand undoing the buttons on your shirt just as fast as your right can fasten them.”
Will nods.
Lethargy has made his head heavy, the burn of the whiskey dousing the jagged underbite of fear. His face blinks up at him from the depths of his glass. Even rippled across the uneven surface he can see the shadows under his eyes, settled deep and dark like coal smudged across his skin. He feels drained, mostly. Drained and wrung dry, like an animal led to the slaughter, hung up and bled.
He downs the rest of his glass before he can drop it and risk staining Hannibal’s rug.
Suddenly he misses his dogs. He misses his students and the ease of a quiet life.
He misses himself.
Hannibal eases the empty glass from his trembling fingers. Will keeps his head bowed and turns his face out of Hannibal’s view.
“You are not crazy, Will,” he says around a sigh. “Trauma has altered your state of mind, but it has not made you crazy. Unbalanced, perhaps. But even the most skilled tightrope walker loses his footing occasionally.”
Will closes his eyes and ignores the way his voice cracks, “I’m so tired, Hannibal.”
Hannibal regards him. “You are still not sleeping.”
It’s not a question. Will doesn’t treat it as one. Just blinks down at his clasped hands, the small nicks running along his fingers from the kitchen knife. Even they aren’t stable enough to gut a fish anymore. He wonders how long it’ll take before he wakes up disorientated and alone only to find that his left hand has cut off his right entirely.
He squeezes his fingers against his palm before twitching each one slowly and deliberately just to prove that he still can, that this traitorous body still listens to him on occasion. It does little to soothe his nerves, that calamitous tide threatening the edge of his mind constantly.
“I tried some pills,” Will confesses eventually. He can feel Hannibal’s disapproval as clearly as he can feel the heat from the fire. He doesn’t tell him that it had taken five before his mind had started to wind down. Or that he’d woken up nine miles from home, barefoot and half-buried in the snow.
“A temporary fix to a chronic condition. You would not apply a bandaid to a broken bone, Will. The mind is no different.”
“Chronic,” Will quotes, laughing humourlessly. It sounds strangled, even to his own ears. “I think we’re well past chronic, Doctor. I’d wager we’re edging more and more towards ‘fatal’ every day.”
“Are you suicidal, Will?”
Christ.
“That’s a little direct for you, isn’t it Doctor Lecter? I thought you valued subtlety.”
“And I thought we were past formalities.”
Will smiles at the floor. His knuckles have gone white around the joints of his knees. His head feels like it’s splitting down the middle.
“I’m not suicidal, Hannibal,” he drawls deliberately, flicking his gaze up to Hannibal’s face. “I’m just…not opposed to the idea of death.”
“And what is it that death can offer you that life cannot?”
“Uh, peace, for a start,” he snaps, tongue sharpening itself against the whetstone of his fear. “Rest. Stability.”
Hannibal’s eyes glint in the fluttering light like red wine. Like blood. “I am no grim reaper, Will,” he says, the corner of his lips quirking slightly. “But perhaps I can offer you some of the things which you crave.”
Will’s words dry in his throat. He swallows reflexively and quells the sudden urge to dampen his lips.
Damn him.
Damn all of it.
His left-hand twitches around his knee, fingers fluttering with restless energy, with the urge to reach out and tug Hannibal forward by the collar. To capture his mouth and slit the throat of whatever tentative friendship had been blooming between them.
Except Hannibal makes the move for him. Not the one Will wants, mind. Not the one that had seared itself in his mind since that first day; the imagined heat of him, the weight, the scent of his cologne as he licks inside Will’s mouth. Instead, he lays a hand in the middle of Will’s back, a first step of a movement more than anything. The walk before the inevitable sprint.
Will does his best not to flinch. Not out of a lack of want, but out of a lack of ease. The most he’d been touched in months was when the nurse had helped him into his hospital gown, a sterile, clinical touch no more than a brush of his shoulder and a straightening of his collar.
Compared to that, Hannibal’s touch is bordering intimate, with long, nimble fingers splayed along his spine. Surgeon’s fingers. Musician’s fingers. Will wants to hold them, to reach across and take Hannibal’s other hand, drag his fingertips along Hannibal’s palm and map out the callouses, the scars, all the small little marks that make him human.
“You are not fond of touch,” Hannibal notes as Will twitches involuntarily.
Will snorts. “M’not used to it.”
Hannibal’s hand smooths down his spine, palm warm and broad. Will couldn’t stop the shiver if he tried.
“And this?” Hannibal asks, surprisingly gentle for all his usual clipped professionality. “Is this acceptable?”
“This your latest treatment plan, Doctor?” Will quips, unable to stop himself. Hannibal’s hand doesn’t stop in its motions. Will could weep from relief alone.
“You are rude when you’re scared, Will.”
Will smiles wryly and recalls the stretch of Jack’s voice around the same words earlier that week, the cold and the loaded disappointment. In Hannibal’s intonation, it’s soft, uttered more like a good-natured jest than any real criticism, warm and accepting.
Will sinks into it like stepping into a bath. “I’m rude all the time. My mood has nothing to do with it.”
Hannibal hums in agreement. “You are lucky it is endearing, most of the time. I am not always so forgiving.”
His hand wanders higher and sinks, slowly as to give fair warning, into Will’s hair. Will’s eyes flutter shut.
“Already making exceptions, Doctor?”
Hannibal’s fingers tug sharply at his hair in punishment, enough to jolt, not enough to hurt. They smooth the curls down a moment later, gentle fingers running across the skin in an almost apology.
“I’m afraid it’s one of many when it comes it to you, William.”
He starts when his face meets the firm warmth of Hannibal’s shoulder. Realises, belatedly, that at some point he must have shifted, leaned the dead weight of his body against Hannibal’s side. Embarrassment trickles lazily through him, rises as high as his cheeks before dying out in the wake of Hannibal’s fingers, weaving steady and meticulous patterns through his hair.
Suddenly and without warning, his left-hand curls around the broad slope of Hannibal’s back. Like the rest of him, it’s firm, deceptively muscular for a man of his age, and Will finds the smallest part of himself disappointed at the discovery. He had hoped that somewhere under the suits and the facades and the veiled metaphors there was some softness, a little give, maybe. Something he could press his fingers into, something that made Hannibal that little bit more real, that little bit more flawed.
Still. It’s more comfort than he’s been given in months. It’s more than he deserves when there’s still blood on his hands. Rivers of it. His mind chases itself in slick, frenzied spirals, not ever made of enough substance for him to grasp more than the shape of it. A fractal, winding down and down into itself. A torture wheel.
His chest cracks like it’s been placed in a vice; too much pressure, too little room. He swallows convulsively, throat fluttering around itself like a second heartbeat.
Hannibal’s palm dips to cup the back of his neck, thumb rubbing firm circles against the base of his skull.
He was doomed from the start.
Even as he tries to push Hannibal away he clings tighter, face tucked against the stiff cotton collar of his shirt. Cotton that’s rapidly growing damp, sticking to Hannibal’s skin in a thin, transparent layer like shedding skin. Absurdly he considers apologising. Hannibal hushes him before he gets the chance to even open his mouth.
His next exhale whistles through his chest only to be suffocated by the clench of his throat. His eyes burn, the dark absolute enough to see pinpoints of imagined light like stars against the black, constellations glistening like scabs.
“Do you trust me, Will?”
His lips brush Will’s head, a whisper of movement just above his ear. Will chases it, a small, choked noise lodged somewhere in his chest. Hannibal draws him closer still, pressed so tightly together that Will can picture clawing his way out of his body and right into Hannibal’s. Pictures making a home amongst his bones, bathing his sins in the tides of Hannibal’s blood. Surrounded and safe.
It’s started to feel like there isn’t a single part of him that Hannibal hasn’t laid claim to, hasn’t tied silk ribbon around and moored to his own body, as steady and constant as a harbour in a storm.
The words get stuck in his throat. He nods instead.
In reward Hannibal presses his lips firmly against Will’s scalp and holds him there, face half-buried in the wild expanse of Will’s hair, curled from the damp of the snow and curlier still from the dry heat of the fire.
“Then trust me when I say that it will be alright,” he murmurs, each word like a kiss against Will’s head. “There is nothing happening to you that you are not capable of overcoming.”
It’s too much. It’s all too much. His mind might as well be detached from him completely, a helium balloon held on by a fraying string. Sometimes he’s tempted to cut it himself and be done with it. Being insane would be preferable to this in-between, this constant limbo, never quite enough of anything; one foot in the door and the other out the window.
He’s too big for this body.
“I feel like I’m breaking apart. Like I’m spilling.”
“There is a Japanese art form,” Hannibal says and Will smiles despite himself, chokes around a sob that’s as much despair as it is amusement. “Kintsugi; the art of mending broken pottery with liquid gold with the concept that embracing flaws will only strengthen the original design.”
“I’m not a vase, Hannibal.”
“No,” Hannibal agrees, “you are far more precious than that.”
Will scoffs against him and stubbornly refuses to follow the thread unravelling from his mind down to his heart. Regardless, he lets Hannibal manoeuvre them backwards, pressed to the low back of the chaise. He has just enough coordination to toe-off his shoes and curl his feet up onto the soft velvet, Hannibal’s heart a steady rhythm under his right palm.
He can see it, almost. Visualise the strong muscle, whole and seamlessly connected. His own rabbits in his chest, slows only to lurch to a sprint a second later. Remembrance is more an open wound than a bruise. He can never quite resist plunging his fingers in and feeling for the shape of his instability, the gaping holes in his memory revealing nothing but exposed nerves and sinew.
Hannibal runs a gentle thumb across his cheek and gathers the moisture like it’s something precious. Will’s stomach curls around itself, slick and wanting.
“Know that you are safe here, Will. We may remain as long as you like.”
The prospect unfurls around him like fishing wire from a spool. He wonders if Hannibal would carry him to bed should he fall asleep, or whether he’d hold him the entire night and into the morning, arms clasped in a capable, protective hold. Wonders, too, how much his mercurial mind will let him remember.
“Better clear your calendar, Doctor.”
The hand draped across his shoulder rubs in large passes up and down his bicep. Will makes an effort to steady his breath.
“Consider it done,” Hannibal says, unfathomably pleased, and tucks the sharp edge of his smile into Will’s hair.