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It was a Friday night and the rain was pitter-pattering down on their little tin roof, where Will attended his weekly drama classes. This was a relatively new hobby that he had picked up shortly after being put on medical leave due to the Garret Jacob Hobbs incident. Alana Bloom had been the one to suggest it: "It’d be good for you to get out of the house once in a while, Will," she coaxed, "Meet some new people."
And so he found himself standing in a semi-circle around their acting teacher Mr Gregor, who clapped his hands for silence. "We will begin with a simple exercise," Gregor cast his eyes around the room for a guinea pig, and landed on - "Will! You’ll be our volunteer. Come stand in the middle, and everyone else," here, he twirled his finger around in a circle. "Good, good! Today we'll be working on your improv skills. One person at a time, you'll come into the circle and enact your scene with Will here. Once your time is up, the next person steps in, mimicking the physical position of the last person, and making that scene their own. Everyone gets one prop from the box!"
Acting really wasn't so difficult, Will mused, as the other students lined up in preparation and one began to engage in a scene with him. He had been a police officer in his past life, eons ago. There wasn't much difference between a poker player, an actor and a police officer, his old partner used to say. The difference was that only one of those was licensed to hold a gun.
"Freeze!" At Mr Gregor's directive Julia left the circle, leaving behind a statue-like Will at the receiving end of a handful of work papers, held up to his forehead in admonishment; She had created a scene about getting demoted. Will looked to the next person in the circle - Hannibal Lecter, he recalled. The man was a psychiatrist from high society, Alana's past mentor from whom she had heard about this class. He was dressed sharply in a maroon and grey chequered three-piece suit, complete with a pocket square and a paisley tie. On any other man it would have made them look a regular clown at the circus, but on Dr Lecter, it only aided him in commanding the room.
Dr Lecter steps into the circle with two neat steps and draws a gun. The plastic weapon was a mockery of the real thing, and yet, Will still found himself flinching backwards in surprise. Conditioning, he supposed. It was never a pleasant experience, staring down the muzzle of a pistol. (It helped, that the thing was modeled off a Glock 22 .40 caliber, the same gun the BPD had been using since '01)
"Forgive me, Will" Hannibal whispered in his foreign lisp, countenance soft and contrite. "But I find I have very little patience for misdemeanors," The man wet his lips and made a subtle grimace that expressed itself through his upper lip, all the louder for its contrast to his usual stoic poker face. Suddenly his head twitched to the side, eyes all alight. Will waited with stiffened lungs, captivated by something he couldn’t explain. There was an almost inhumane energy to Hannibal - as if there was a beast stalking around inside his body, phasing in and out of the paper-thin prison walls that was the man's skin. The fingers wrapped around the toy gun lowered, brushing down the bridge of Will’s nose, his lips, his neck, and lower still. Hannibal’s eyes were sparked by mischief, the corner of his lips expressing his delight. His actions held the room in one invisible gasp of breath, his ever-reaching influence touching every beating heart in that small tin house on the hill.
"I am, however, amenable to punishment.” Tongue in cheek, the gun dropped from Will’s navel to hover millimeters away from his clothed cock. Will dropped to his knees so fast it was as if someone had taken a baseball bat to his knees, and he pressed his forehead to the pistol, his imagination settling behind his eyes and giving him a scene of heavy metal up against a sheen of cold sweat. Will, heady and electrified, blinked up through his eyelashes, and gazed at Hannibal.
Maroon eyes were blown wide, hungry and wild; stark in their epiphany of understanding:
I see you; and you - you can see me. I know what you are, Hannibal Lecter, Will expressed through the tilt of his eyes, I know and am not afraid. Rather, I find myself intrigued.