Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

(You don’t know the first time you felt the cool itch of it under your skin. There is no catalyst. There is no purpose other than matter’s senseless stumbling through space. There is no reason for anything to exist - someday it just suddenly does, and gathers itself into something that can be named.)

—

 "A reservoir?" Will asks, rubbing at his arms. 

"A reservoir," says the counselor, a kind faced woman with a shrewd pair of hands. "For other people. A conduit of power, an exceptionally large one."

Will is twelve the first time he hears this - not yet a man, but old enough to have people joke that he is. He is in eighth grade, a little young for high school, a little too old for the saccharine guidance of the school district's advisor who waves dowsing rods and a branch of star anise with red buds for eyes. The fennel stink of it wrinkles his nose. 

(You want to go home. You want to pretend you know nothing of the sixth grader who brushes your shoulder and presents as a fey other for the first time, nor that she cleaves a utility pole in two with bright red lightning when she stands away. That is the side flash - not you, but it, a victim of your center of gravity, and you want to go home before anything else attracts your charge. You don't want them to try to explain why it happens, or what must happens next, because you are twelve, and bodies of water at that age should have no depth.)

"Are you able to control that?" asks the police academy recruiter ten years later, not kindly, but with just as clever hands.

They turn Will's application on the table, pointer finger unshakably centered on the checkmark next to "Wyrd?" It looks like a typo instead of a designation. In some ways it is. 

"I do my best," Will says, hands pulled into his lap, worrying the edge of a tidy collared shirt.

—

Will does that exactly - his best. For as long as the New Orleans police department can shake it out of him, and as far from the sight of the other things that can see what falls out when they do.

It's as good a city as someone like him can hope for, steeped in the unusual force of older things. The heavy bend of the Mississippi River draws things ever downwards to the equator's magnetic pull. Sediment, decay, the otherworld particles of matter that shock like static in winter, and Will, flinching away from how all of it sticks to him.

Accidents happen insofar as any natural dispersion of energy is an accident. He is forgiven them, looking very watery and thin in the dress blues of his uniform at each scene when they do, because he is good at his job. 

(Once you touch a mother in sympathy for her son's death and sleep falls heavy on her as nights do to the east. "Get some rest," is all you tell her. "Things look their worst in the dark.")

(Once you sink into a confession, sitting adjacent to your perpetrator and all of his unspoken words spilling from your mouth - the location of the weapon, the cause of death, things that will uncover the evidence that is hidden. The perpetrator looks sick, like you ripped the tongue from his mouth and grafted it to your own, and now it is two-pronged and hissing his secrets. Next to you, the head of the department slaps you on the shoulder with a grin. None of your rambling is admissible in court, but the things you find afterwards using it will.)

(Only once, you are taken by surprise by someone that doesn't know you, but knows *of* you and what you are. It's never been a secret per se, but neither has it been advertised. The man is sorcerous, with a blackened iron knife and thin fingers that dig into your shoulder and grab at the bones and marrow-deep energy inside them as roots cling to a lake's edge and drink it up until you feel drained. You feel small again, blood pumping red and spidery behind your closed eyes. You think you weakly shrink away from sulfur smoke of spellwork and whatever the man thought to do with your power never becomes clear, because your partner knows of you too, and has sense to shoot until you are loose again, and your insides churn and settle into stillness, and your uniform is as red as the back of your eyelids had been. “You’re safe,” he tells you while you’re still wiping viscera from your mouth, with the back of your equally sullied hand.)

Will's accidents are forgiven, because they are marketable. Closure rates are important for funding. The illusion of safety is important for public trust - illusion, because Will can’t stop the things from happening, only say how they’ve deposed themselves, but that’s enough for most. 

This is how he finds himself lent out from precinct, to county, to state. Will Graham, the odd officer that hits his mark not with a gun but the warping of reality that coats him like paint ( blood ), occasionally chipping-dripping off to leave wyrdness behind.

"We'd like to borrow him," says the city-county-state, and one day, the FBI. 

"I have something for him," says Agent Crawford to his superior, Will sitting to the side and ignored. "A team in need of that skill."

"Not a skill," Will replies quietly, depths rippling unseen, but disturbed.

—

The wheels of the airplane lift from the tarmac, pulling away from the heavy air of the gulf. Will imagines the condensation pulling at the slats and flaps of the wings, metal smooth and oily as a gull. The ailerons tremble under the force of wind and cloud, and flex their hydraulics and cables as runners would splay their toes, preparing to escape. 

“All migrating birds are other,” says an older gentleman sitting next to Will, easing into his seat when the cabin levels out into humming smoothness. “Did you know that? Extra proteins in their eyes to see the magnetosphere. I always feel a bit like one when I fly.”

“Wouldn’t that make them just wyrd, not other?” Will asks mildly. “Assuming that seeing wavelengths makes them magical instead of evolutionarily adapted to migrate with the axis tilt.”

“Isn’t that the creator’s design?” the older gentleman shrugs, frustrated with this line of questioning. 

(You feel the edges of his mind and see it - a magazine article, rendered into digestible pieces of information for people who know nothing of ornithology, and geomagnetism, and what is a quantifiable sum of wryrdness and who decides what that should be. Something that delights him with graphs and data sheets, to be shared with a grandchild as a sign of god, or a lunch group as a sign of how well read he is, and not to be vivisected by sad men out of their dress blues and unable to hide from gravity’s roaring beneath the wings.)   

“Of a kind,” Will says politely, and asks where he’s going to avoid seeing any further inside.  

Sometimes Will thinks he should be able to see the otherness up here too, like in the river, but the kind that lives here comes in ungovernable waves. Maybe that’s what the birds see after all. Maybe that’s what lifts the plane, more than the thin quivering sheets of folded metal - the stratosphere’s insistence that Will goes from one place to another, until such a time that it decides where he belongs, in accordance to the liquid folding metal in the earth. 

The flight attendant offers him a ginger ale. Will watches the long banks of white below them, eyes fixated on their tops, listening to the drink fizz and seeing nothing.   

—

Jack Crawford’s something is much like all the other something’s Will investigates. That is disappointing on first glance. 

(That is a relief on second.)

"Miriam Lass has been missing for two months now," says the sweet face of Doctor Alana Bloom. Will calls it sweet because it is perfect in its heart shape, framing the pink smile of her toothy mouth. He calls it toothy because they are very white even if they are not very large. There is something uncanny to her, as though she’s a room hiding an extra corner. It’s a lovely room, but nonetheless wrong. 

An actual fey other, he surmises. Maybe a generation removed from its original source, but close enough to retain the beguiling strangeness. A proper inheritor of sorcery. 

He keeps a small distance between them. 

"She was set to serve as expert testimony to a recent case," says Agent Beverly Katz. Agent Katz is not other, but skilled in harnessing its promise anyway, with dark eyes that perceive a lot more than scattered light, her gaze made of two glinting chips of obsidian black and tar-sticky molasses. Perhaps she has extra proteins in them too, ferrous and seeking true north. 

"There’s been several disembowelments and dismemberments around the the Capitol and the larger cities nearby, if you've followed the news," she adds, like Will should know. 

He hasn’t - he doesn't. "What's one without a little of the other for flavor?" says Will, not looking away, but feeling caught in her sights.

Doctor Bloom and Agent Katz don't find this particularly funny, and Agent Jack Crawford hears this as a cheekiness that Will doesn't know if he really feels straight off the airplane from Louisiana, his limbs and breath still buzzing with the hum of engines and ozone. 

But it -is- insightful. 

Or so says their third consultant, who is neither sweet nor intense in gaze, but impenetrably...amused, Will thinks.

Indeed, Doctor Hannibal Lecter is all things mild and soft-spoken. Where Doctor Bloom is slightly off centered, he is a hall of mirrors, and all of the edges are uncountable yet still touch. 

House sigils for cuffs, lambskin gloves with grimoires for palms, and a stone-still face that Will cannot place as being very old, but neither does it feel young. This unknowable third that closes Agent Crawford's trinity is kin to canyons Will would be afraid to pass through, or roads he has been told not to walk. Not an inheritor of wyrdness as Doctor Bloom is, or gently touched by wyrdness as Agent Katz, but an original article that he cannot define and has been cautioned against before he even felt the spark of his own strange center as a child.

"Perhaps Officer Graham can speak to the absence of your colleague after all," says Doctor Lecter, smiling. "He seems to have a taste for what's on offer."

(You hate that you are afraid of him.)

—

The blood is tacky - darkened, rot-sweet. Not out of fashion, no matter that it hides behind the banners of yellow crime scene tape and flashing lights of law enforcement vehicles. Will doesn't think there's anything as timeless as spilling it. 

(It's funny how iron in bodies works different from iron in tools, weapons and earth, like it intrinsically knows it has been made living by the creature that carries it. It is nonsensical that blood is exempt from the fey others' iron sickness when it feels so certain it should be most qualified.)

How convenient, thinks Will, to have a crime scene made fresh. Easier to read than pictures, or when time begins to blur the edges of the violence. The first wave of investigators take the body down out of concern for the atrocity of the display, but Crawford wastes very little time in taking Will and the rest of the team to this incomplete picture instead of Miriam Lass' last known locations. 

A practical test, he is told, that he will be of any use to them. Reservoirs of power are all well and good, but if no one can draw on them (which you've never intentionally allowed), and if Will himself isn't insightful enough to make use of them the way that Crawford hopes he can (which you've never intentionally controlled), then there's no benefit to his presence. 

Will pinches two tar-black fingers together, where they slide oily smooth. 

"You said they were hanged?" he asks, grimacing a bit at the texture. No gloves for this kind of work - he is not here for standard forensics. He must be fully present.  

They don't give him the case file to check. There will be photos to review additionally tonight, assuming Crawford hasn't already seen them from the screen of a camera, another unnamed man on his team industriously cataloging, but that does him no good here. Another purity test, he surmises.

Agent Katz nods, as intent on Will's fingers as he is. "Hanged, exsanguinated, and gutted." 

"Like cattle," Will adds, feeling it drawn out behind his eyes. "Chest cavity open and flayed. What's missing from them?" he asks.

"What makes you think anything's missing?" asks Doctor Bloom, face placid and white in the middle ground between the emergency lights and Will's dirty hand.

Doctor Lecter picks up on the thread easily. He seems pleased with Will to have something to pick up. "You can either field dress on the ground, or you can hang them. Offal ," Doctor Lecter says with pointed pronunciation. "So named for falling off during butchering.”

“If the organs are not here..." he leads.  

"They are with the killer," Will finishes, nodding towards the pocket-square at the ( man? creature? ) doctor's chest in lieu of making eye contact. That would indicate thanks. That would indicate fulfillment, and Will doesn't want anything of his, not even support. 

He continues to slide his fingers until they are as ripe smelling as the blood on the ground. "Or this wasn't the place they were killed."

Doctor Lecter notices all of this. The avoidance. How Will avoids it. The careful fixation beneath the neckline. 

He pulls the pocket square out to unfold it; a flag of dark green. 

"Care to clean your hands, Officer Graham?" Doctor Lecter says pleasantly, smiling secret and self-assured when Will says no in a carefully polite way.  

—

It’s uncomfortable, of course, but not so uncomfortable as Doctor Lecter’s attention to Will’s hand, which he holds relaxed but away from the fabric of his clothes to keep them from getting stained. A public restroom will be enough, Will tells himself, feeling the glide of his fingers grow tacky, and flake when they dry. 

The green pocket square flashes in the corner of his vision until he finds one in a nearby park - refolded, but persistent. It’s a relief for it to vanish with the closing of the metal door. 

Cold water from an automated sensor. Pink soap from a pump dispenser, that leaks onto the counter and oozes its way to the basin. He works the two together, scratching with his nails to work the worst of it out from between the creases and cuticles until his hands are white and chilly. It doesn’t quite get everything out from underneath the crescents of the fingernails, but that’s the irony of the tools needed to clean other things - something always stays dirty. 

—

The caprice of the universe is that consent is not required for bad things to happen. There is no promise of living within the average of human experience anymore than there is a promise of doing everything right and being rewarded for it. 

This truth is particle deep. Atoms decay and transform by the randomness of proximity to other atoms. Proteins fold and destroy themselves. People follow clear-cut paths to success only to be subsumed by things that they had no way of predicting. Misfortune falls into the cracks where it fits, and pays no mind to the protests that it should not be there. It becomes part of the floor. It becomes comfortable. 

Will doesn't ask for his ability. He's not sure if there's cause for it at all. Genetics have never been a reliable tool to chart the unquantifiable magnetism of wyrdness when there is no known fey name behind it. If there is one, it will be sealed to a birth certificate as a literal brand, greedy to be known. If it is a gift from one of them, they are the first to make you aware, lest the receiver come to believe that they are free of a bill they didn't know they had.

("The kindly folk," you hear said in tones between serious and sarcastic. You cannot offend, but neither must you be honest in your praises. They are kindest if they ignore you, or pass you by as storms sometimes miss coasts.)

It is naive to think that there is any control over incurring debts, that a clever phrase will hold them off. Wyrdness and the fey are no different from mountains crumbling or building collapses in this way. Tradition keeps the token charms and prayers in their mouths, but cannot account for the wyrdness that fey act on when left in a perfect void.

The hotel room Will is given is as every corporate business trip promises, and not strange at all. Tastefully bland - white bed with foot blanket for color but not much warmth. Two tea bags next to the coffee maker, with grounds left from the last guest. Officers in their early thirties don't get the red carpet rolled out for them, even in as niche a field as Will. 

But Will can sleep in it, and that's all that really matters. 

Will pulls off his collared shirt, tie, and professional's coat - checks them for blood stains, thinking of the wood ash he will need if he has brought any back to his room to purify them - finds none. 

He ignores the crease of filth under his thumbnail, but soaps his fingers up again anyways. He washes his face before lying down without bothering to dry it - the cool water feels good with the corporate business AC unit rattling away near to the window. 

He dreams of pools of polychromatic blackness that coat his hands and his face, and absent mindedly wipes it away with the idea of deep woods green, the undercanopy dark of a forest that is mossy, quiet and patient. 

(So patient.)

—

(Ideas are sufficient to fill that unmeasured reservoir inside you that has no lineage or creator. The void will accept and find a place to grow them. You never -could- control it, could you, Will?)

Chapter Text

Will wakes to the pocket square fisted in his hand near to his head, and his face tidily dry. It is very soft between his fingers, snagging on the dry edges of the nails which in their own manner are now tidily clean. Will thinks of resting under tree canopies - a tent of leaves and moss and the assurity of being hidden from the sun on the forest floor.  

"You have a curious way of accepting help," says Doctor Lecter, both close and far away.

Will opens his eyes, reflexively closing his fingers around the silk. 

He cannot claim total surprise to see it or him, as much as he claims the dread of it. The fabric shines in the dull dawn light peeking beneath the blackout curtains, every bit as slick looking as the brackish mess it cleans away in his sleep. 

(And one sickle moon of black blood teasing at the threads - conspicuously absent from beneath your thumb.) 

Doctor Lecter sits angular and at ease from the chair near to the window with his legs crossed and his palms pressed together from wrist to fingertips. They are still gloved, and gently smoking in the sparse morning glow. How he gets here is surely hidden there in the crush between the hands, as native as faults crashing together to release their energy. 

The why, however...

Will blinks - he tightens his hands further, feeling nauseous at the glide of the material. He feels stretched, like he has run a great distance, and everything feels weak and out of sorts. 

"I didn't," he says, rubbing his eyes with the fisted hand. The pocket square is cool and smooth with each pass. “Ask for help. Or accept it.” 

The stately shoes cross each other again as his visitor shifts. The gloved fingers press hard and relax. Doctor Lecter finds that denial funny even if it is true, Will suspects. There is no laughter save the creak of leather and the hissing slide of black tufted fingers, but it simmers between them, ripples of a passing wake.

"Come now, Officer Graham...Will," says Doctor Lecter, turning his head. "That's rather like holding a flower in a garden and saying you haven't picked any."

Will ignores this as best he can. He casts the sheets aside, and rises from the bed to stomp to the safety of a shirt and his cell phone. 

"Was this what you were hoping for?" he asks. "When you offered? That I would accept by conscious decision or not? I won't offend you with the accusation you sent this with me - I made sure I didn't have anything like it when I left."

Will suspects though. It would be discourteous to them both to not. 

Doctor Lecter, who is lake-surface placid in their brief acquaintance so far, smiles properly this time, the same way one does when they are tickled by what they hear. 

"The intended effect was to make you uncomfortable," he says, hands parting, the golden threads of the sigils at their centers glinting weakly. "You'll forgive me of course," he adds with a contrite shrug and deepening of his smile. "I wanted to see what you would do, and you were so very typically…kindly, shall we say, but firm in your refusal. Consider it a surprise to us both that your innate skill has taken the proverbial proffered hand without your permission." 

Will stares down at the pocket square, sneering. "I don't control it the way you all think I do…my skill."

"I took you for a random act of god from the moment you walked through the door," says Doctor Lecter, standing to open the window. "Something that builds up quietly year over year to occasionally break loose - a hundred year flood." 

The casement hisses open, curtains sliding along the metal rail in loud clicks. The city is alive with the squeal of car brakes, the patter of salarymen and office workers walking their way into their towers. They pay no attention to the smoldering hands braced on the sill towards them. Will reflexively winces at the oncoming brightness, but drops his hand to follow Doctor Lecter's stride away from it to the chair to directly before Will, smoking palms just inches from the side of his face. 

Will thinks to look up at him. 

He looks down instead. 

(You don’t know how to handle that - to politely decline the attention. Do you ask him to return to the armchair, away from you? Do you dismiss yourself from the room, a stranger in your own shelter? How do you tell a vapor to disperse? A knife to sheathe itself?) 

"I look forward to seeing what it subsumes next," says Hannibal, with the ease of discussing the weather.  

Will thought to but finds he cannot meet his eyes.

—

Will insists on leaving the hotel room before Doctor Lecter can see anything of note in Will's belongings, or make comment on them. Not that Will travels with particularly interesting things other than himself - he has no creature comforts. No photos in his wallet. There are no favorite jackets or pieces of jewelry, unless one considers the crescent badge of New Orleans one to be worn like great houses wear sigils, but even this is telling of something, and Will doesn't care to share what that might be with Doctor Lecter.

("Hannibal at this point, I think," he says like you are now great friends. You tetchily reply that you think that would be inappropriate and pay no mind to him calling you Will. Your fate has been altered to some unknown end, but you can pretend at neutral professionalism.) 

In turn, Doctor Lecter has his own matter of insistence - a meal. "No strings attached, to clarify, if it makes you feel more at ease,” he says with a careless consideration of his hand, staring at the now cooled black of the fabric as though Will and the pocket square doesn’t interest him at all.  “I intend to eat with or without you, but prefer company when it is practical," he adds, lifting delicate red and gold lacquered boxes. They are described as a breakfast in the Japanese style, where he'd sooner find a sweet omelette than binding agreements written in magical fruits or "other such rot."     

(As though he hasn't come to rubberneck at his own rot that you accidentally gave room to spread.) 

Will gets his way, as does Doctor Lecter, though not as he'd like. 

The two of them sit on the concrete benches surrounding the Darlington Memorial Fountain, watching the sunlight play off the golden bodies of a nymph and doe and the arcs of water from its base. She and it are lovely and shining, near enough to FBI Headquarters to be on call, but not to be disturbed. Doctor Lecter is very serious in his intention to eat. 

Will is very serious in his intention to not accept, but is…ok to watch, he says with a shrug. 

As promised, the food in Will's box is simple compared to the other. Will feels nothing of the sticky dread that he's learned to feel at the edges of charmed things and elder places, only fragrant rice and pretty slices of yellow egg against a bed of vegetables. It is very lovely, but ultimately unremarkably unmagical.

Will makes no move to eat it, afraid to be wrong, but he does look with jealous eyes as Doctor Lecter consumes his with a studied elegance.  

"Your breed of power is hungry work," says Doctor Lecter, taking a tender mouthful of something sauced and glistening between chopsticks. It looks like it should crunch, but instead tears as bread would, dark as rye. He makes no comment on Will's hesitation to join him. "I am sure you feel fatigued. As do I," he adds after a pause to taste and chew. "I don't often need to travel so far without preparation."

"Heaven forbid no courtesy call," Will says shortly, but Doctor Lecter merely raises a shoulder with a hum, mouth a curved scythe eating with careful bites that do not show his teeth. 

No offense taken, even for the snubbed meal. Very strange - likely telling of something too.

—

Will tries to give the pocket square back. 

Or he thinks he does - when the boxes are returned to their carrier (yours heavy - his light enough to spin teasingly like a top in his sigiled hand, sighing his satisfaction), Will turns to pass it back, and finds no one to pass it to. Doctor Lecter is already yards ahead of him and paying Will no mind. 

Will folds the green square and slots it into his own pocket where it cannot be seen. He thinks of shelving coverless books as he does, both him and the folded fabric standing upright and uncomfortable in the suit jacket  - full of words that he has not read, and does not know the language of, and can see nothing of from their featureless exteriors. 

Like shelved books sometimes are, he forgets that it’s there for a while.

—

Miriam Lass is - 

(Was, you mentally insist. They know as well as you do. That's why you're here - you deal in deaths, confessions, and the relative chaos of a universe that thrives on both.)

- is a woman of no particular consequence in terms of wyrdness. She is (was) unfailingly human, with all the routines of one. She graduates with a masters from George Washington University. She commutes to DC from Beltsville using the yellow line of the Metro, emerging into the light of the Navy Memorial station with the masses, blinking into the stone and concrete of Pennsylvania Avenue. She owns a small, unremarkable home amongst several unremarkable others, where she grows small spicy peppers in the summer because it reminds her of the navy and the damp warm of Pattaya. That's how she meets Jack Crawford. 

Miriam Lass excels as an investigator. She's bright, largely unafraid of the wyrd and fey others as people of sturdy logical minds often choose to be. Will has always thought this to be a failing, but also understands in the absence of logic, the most sensible are the most adrift, and like the religious, the rational must cling to whatever helps them survive the irrational world. See no evil, hear no evil. 

Will thinks this is where Miriam Lass meets their butcher of men - between the safety of tangible evidence, and a refusal to see it for the dangerous thing it is. The prosecution is made to rest before ever reaching the courthouse. 

Where she rests is the question. 

Will turns a pepper in his hand, still attached at the stem at the eaves of Miriam's house. They are round, like little Christmas lights dancing in the leaves. They look garish with significance that missing person reports and sad printouts of last known photos don't, peeking their vivid red eyes out from between branches. 

"A bird's eye," Doctor Lecter says from behind Will. "The pepper in your hand. A new world transplant brought to South Asia. You do have an uncanny skill for theme, don't you Will?" 

(“All migratory birds are other,” says the older gentleman, and you rush to question if that’s true.) 

Will doesn't put the pepper down despite the impulse to do so. Everything Doctor Lecter says feels barbed, looking for things to catch on, but waits patiently like spider webs instead of thorns. Crawford insists that Doctor Lecter stay with him, none the wiser to their new entanglement, but Will doesn't have to change what he does. 

"Apophenia is a symptom of schizophrenia," he says. "Assigning value and connection to places that there are none. Trying to build a story about me, Doctor Lecter?"  he adds, with particular emphasis on the name.   

"You are the one to pluck things from thin air, my good Officer Graham" Doctor Lecter replies, examining another bush. "One might say that the entirety of the Atypical Crimes division is indulging you on the chance that there's something to it. Maybe steal a morsel of Lass from the air like a passing electron." 

Doctor Lecter pulls it. "That's what you're afraid of, yes?" 

(“Wouldn’t that make them just wyrd, not other?” you ask, insisting on the difference.) 

"I wish you would just say what you want and get it over with," Will says to the winking eyes of the fruit. 

Doctor Lecter instead takes a turn around the yard, and compliments the growing greenery of dahlias waiting to bloom at the fence. They do quite well unattended, drawing moisture up their long necks from the soil as pipes do from aquifers, he explains, pulling ray florets loose from the closed buds. 

—

Doctor Lecter waits three days to give a straight answer.

But he does answer, cleverly turning to other things at each attempt to hear one, getting more comfortable and fond of Will's intense distrust of him. Those are answers in and of themselves, even if not the one Will is looking for. It’s very fey of him. It’s nice to be able to find something typical in him at all. 

If Will was a gambling man (which you are - just the kind to count cards rather than the kind to consider yourself lucky), he'd bet that Doctor Lecter's idea of a good time is having the debt. Having it paid is too straight-forward. It's much more fun to watch people try to guess the currency of someone other, and Will doesn't think he sees what Doctor Lecter is enough to know what he'd want.

"A pocket square isn't worth so much," Doctor Lecter says when Will persists anyway over the next couple of days, and always when he accidentally stumbles into his pocket to feel it with a hand that has forgotten it’s there. How Will could forget, he doesn’t know, but he does. 

Doctor Lecter continues, shifting the contents of the work room tabletop, panning for interesting things, turning them to make orderly right angles together. "Nothing next to deliverance, or a kiss. I'll have it back if it bothers you so much," he offers.   

"Strange equivalency there - protection from death and kissing," Will says, turning crime scene photos over each other, still no closer to knowing who's responsible. "And it does,” he adds, but leaves the pocket square folded and carded against his waist.

"Value systems change between cultures," Doctor Lecter replies, polaroid photo propped upright between two fingers. "It is not strange to me...at least not as strange as how little the thoughtless typical amongst us value things like food and gifts.” 

The velvet gently hisses as he pinches it. Will fights the urge to take it from him, even if he has been nothing but considerate of the evidence files.

"Both kisses and protection require offering the safety of yourself," Doctor Lecter adds, turning the photo towards himself with bland interest before setting it in a pile of others. "Both require trust."

Developed on the film - a woman with her head sheared diagonally from cranium to jaw, with a spill of ivy, alyssum, and geraniums in the opening of trachea and esophagus. A summer garden bouquet. 

"As does food and accepting gifts?" Will asks. "Or are those worth more than that?"

Doctor Lecter smiles, waiting. 

Will knows his wyrd theory enough to make other gambles - that Doctor Lecter like his kin can be friendly with people, but not friends. The composition of their selves is as timeless as the thing that made them, and much of that is ideas, sensations, liminal space, belief. 

Not immortal, but hard enough to shake off over the epochs of the earth that they may as well be. Nobody knows how to quantify the mass that they hold. There is not yet a tool equipped to measure it. Black holes don't make friends with the telescopes that observe them. Given the chance to get close enough, they would consume them.

(But you don't know that for sure, the same way you don't know getting close to Doctor Lecter would hurt. Humanity must first get close enough to the event horizon to move past theory. You must do the same, even if unnerves you, shakes the bones loose from sinew. Science is scarier from the frontlines, and you have gotten too used to reading evidence instead of living it.)   

"What is a pocket square worth, Doctor Lecter?" Will asks, only now possessed to pull it from his pocket where it has rested like a coiled snake. It’s not his, Will reminds himself. It’s something he’s tried ridding himself of for three days. He holds the forest green fabric out, the subtle stacked diamond pattern glinting in the fluorescents of the conference room. 

"How much it can absorb," Doctor Lecter replies, pulling at it until it slides free of Will's hand, dark and bright eyed all at once.

—

Will doesn't feel any different. 

No different than one pocket square lighter, if that’s actually quantifiable, his cell phone rustling around in his pocket with all the extra space. It's never had to share before, and now it feels strange that it doesn't, so Will concedes maybe he feels something after all. Hyperawareness is an unfortunate side effect of anxiety, and much like being made to think about breathing, everything is significant with fear.

He clutches at his coat pocket anyway when opening his little utilitarian room with the single queen bed and humming cooler, worried that he's lost something, only to remind himself that it's been returned. 

This doesn't necessarily mean that Will isn't different beyond the perceived absence. Suspicion still guards him. There is no more of the weariness in him that smothers him the morning of Doctor Lecter’s arrival in his room, not the kind that left him feeling withdrawn, and while the pocket square is very small, Will suspects Doctor Lecter's sorcerous capability is quite large, larger than most.

If he wanted the pocket square to wick away Will's own reserves as his payment, he would make it so. If it pleased him to make Will into a conduit, Will thinks he wouldn't go out of his way to make Will question their time together. He would either make that so too, or make Will think there was no threat of it ever happening at all, with no room to question his intention. 

(It's messy when the lamb recognizes the culling knife, you think from the small shower of the hotel room, and take deep breaths to the metronome of your heart until you forget to count. Stressed animals make poor meat. They bleat at the charnel house entrance, and crush each other in their instinct to retreat. The farmer must be soft-handed if he wants his sheep to go gently to the chute.)  

But...Will feels crossed somehow. 

The tap from the sink tastes different with toothpaste. The sheets brush the fine hairs of his arms and legs like he has raised them as dogs do to show their wariness. He splashes more cold water on his face to dry on its own time, but stays awake to make sure it does. He checks that his coat pocket is empty, and all his other still packed clothing to be certain. He stretches his own awareness of his wyrdness to make sure he still can and yes - it is still here despite all this. 

Will stares at the dark of the ceiling and thinks some more, flat on his back, hair still damp behind the ears. He shifts his legs. He listens to the linens scrape against his fingernails when he pulls them. He listens until he forgets to, and sleep eventually finds him. 

Will dreams of more water - a pool of it. A lake of it. The entirety of a valley subsumed by it, and all the trees and rises of exposed rock forgotten by the dark ripple of its waves. He dreams that he submerges himself at the lapping edge of it, one arm passing unhindered in the cold blackness, and the other straining tendon-tight to hold onto a stone, a tree branch, the smoking reach of a wildfire gone black with char until his own hands feel blistered in its grasp. 

("You have a curious way of accepting help," the fire whispers, littered with embers you keep stoking by merit of needing to breathe.)

Chapter Text

(One time - a long time ago by your career standards, but yesterday by the count of years - you meet a true fey that makes you feel over your head, as if pretending to be able to understand them.

You are very young this first time you are at serious risk of being recognized and harmed by your wyrdness - before the man that your partner shoots you for. That is well and good - your partner would not be able to shoot you for this one. It would do no good to do so.

It garners no attention save the footnote of a case report in the disappearance of a young woman, of whom there is nothing left but stringy silverskin and tendon strung across her bones, being buried and exhumed in equal measure in the delta of the river. It reminds you that fey do not always bother with fine words and elaborate tricks. Some are just starved, and in one of three options when facing that kind of danger, humans are programmed to flee. 

"You're not fit for the fork," they tell you, working the gristle of supraspinatus viscera - the shoulder's rotator cuff - out from between sharp teeth and blood darkened lips. 

You are not offended by this. You are relieved. You take a certain comfort in those words, deliberately misremembering them when you need assurance that you are safe in your job. You know the right responses to their temptations. You've learned all the tricks to keep yourself safe. You think you know better.

You do not want to be wanted, and are happy to not be.

You keep your distance anyway, in case it changes its mind.)

---

Will opens his eyes in the morning with a start, arm alive with pins and needles. 

It hurts. 

The buzzing remains from elbow to fingertips, even as Will blinks away the sensation of burning, and weakly flexes the muscle. He thinks initially that maybe he has slept on it wrong - there's an old injury there.

(That police force partner that knew better than to let you be taken by that suspect, that doesn't hesitate to shoot when they try - he nicks your shoulder with the bullet that kills them, and while he apologizes, both of you know he should not be sorry. There are worse things that could have happened - that might still if you are less careful.) 

Will rubs the sleep from the corners of his eyes with the opposite arm, and swings the offending one up to look at it. 

And the great black brand imprinted on it at the hand.

(There are worse things.)

"For a man not much inclined to know me better, your actions show a very different inclination," says Doctor Lecter, legs crossed, pitch colored gloves pressed together. “Twice now you’ve gathered me up as mountains gather snow.” 

Will doesn’t respond to this, not trusting himself with a tongue cleaved to the top of his mouth in discomfort. It’s not a lie. It’s not even fully that he doesn’t expect to hear it the moment his arm begins hurting, in the dumb way that instinct senses pain and wants to run away from where it comes from. 

He watches the hands again instead. 

He knows in that place inside him that just knows that wedged between them are the sigils of a waiting snake carded against each other. He knows this because it matches his own, new and tight like a burn, waiting to blister. 

"It seems I don't know my wyrdness as well as I know myself," Will replies quietly, eyes wide and stuck in the space between the hidden dark coils. “I don’t want you here, so it must be that.” 

Unlike the hands, he can't bear to look at the sheen of the suit beyond their wrists that seems very home in the armchair, even in as unremarkable a hotel as this. Grey-brown-blonde glints of perfectly coiffed hair. Beetle-shiny black shoes. That constant half smile, ever ready to grow with secret joy. Maybe if he ignores all of this, it fades with the sensation of treading water, and the vast hollow of the depths below that. 

"They are the same," says Doctor Lecter. "You may continue to tell yourself otherwise, but they are the same."

Will throws the good arm over his eyes. 

"And I must insist on Hannibal from now on," he hears close to his head, the distance between chair and bedside immaterial to whatever it is Hannibal Lecter is. "Since we are getting to know each other so well ."

—

Will is not in the mood to be trifled with by the time he is fully awake, clothed, and selectively shaven at the neck. 

(You never bother with the rest - you don't have much of a beard, but with it at least you don't look young and lost, which is how you feel.)

Doctor Lecter - Hannibal - doesn't trifle, but only by merit of the fact that watching Will doesn't really constitute deliberately aggravating him. It does anyway. Especially with how he seems to admire the graven lines in Will's left palm. 

"Your satisfaction with this isn't exactly building my confidence in your intentions," Will grumbles when they make it to the elevator, cast in blue light. 

"I rather question yours, Will," Hannibal says, blinking slow. "But perhaps this is fate - for all the scholars and experts the human race produces on the subject of the abnormal and terrific, there's nothing like a genuine and immediate example to learn from."

"I don't need to learn anything from you," Will says to the closed sliding doors.  

Hannibal smiles - Will sees this from the doors as much as he sees his own awkwardly folded arms. Hannibal doesn't laugh to match, but it's a near thing, eye tooth glinting at the corner of his mouth. 

"You'll have to if you'd prefer to go back to waking alone," he says with a tilt of his head, doors to the elevator sliding open. "You keep looking for dry land when the entirety of you is drowning in your own inert power. Your mind attaches to things to keep afloat." 

"So what," Will snorts, "you offer a short course in magical self-help, and you pretend my hand doesn't look fresh from a mystic’s corpus? I don't really believe you when you say you don't want to collect on something." 

Hannibal does laugh at that.

“Yet you are the one collecting,” he says, watching Will watch him from the doors’ reflection. “I wonder why you wouldn’t want to know how to make it stop.”  

The elevator ticks down from floor to floor - never fast enough, two times now with Hannibal in tow, and Will looking as washed out and tired in the fluorescent light. Will hates being caught this way - in his own inability to change the circumstances, myrdness good for nothing but problems, it seems. 

"Do I really have a choice?" Will asks in the brief calm between the second floor and the lobby, suddenly not ready for the exit, or an answer, no matter how careful his morning routine, or a fourth day of careful work. 

"As much as anyone has, I suppose," Hannibal replies mirthfully. "The alternative being that you keep calling me anyway." 

Will frowns. What bullshit. What a turn of bad luck, when he's done everything he can to control himself, only to end up here. 

(Not everything. Not yet, whispers the piece of you that is still a child.)

"Twice is a coincidence," Will says, and walks out to the street, ready or not. 

"And three times a pattern," he hears from behind, but doesn't stop to respond over the din of cars on the street, and the busy shuffle of commuters rushing down the sidewalk. If he closes his palm to make a fist, he doesn't feel more strange than any of them.

—

Hannibal leaves Will to Agent Katz when they arrive at the FBI Headquarters. Will doesn’t think this is his intention in any way initially - he very nearly has Will where he wants him in many ways, or so Will feels at the edges of their shared space, thrumming with whatever it is that has taken Will’s hand for its own from Hannibal’s sigils. 

“May I speak with you?” asks Doctor Bloom upon seeing Will’s face, and the way he favors his hand, blue eyes flitting curiously between it and Hannibal’s tie in the morning light of the lobby. It feels so obvious to Will that he’s been altered that surely someone with half a molecule of fey lineage must know. While the acquaintance has been brief, Doctor Bloom is nothing but a paragon of appropriateness. She’ll want to know what Hannibal’s business is with him.

(If she’s half-composed of wyrdness as you surmised, she’ll want to know how to avoid crossing him while she’s at it.)  

“Of course, Alana,” Hannibal says, as one granting a boon does.

Will prefers this - being left alone to think, rather than obsess over their increasing attachment. Fro someone to be aware of how unequal their association is becoming. It’s not as if Will’s ever asked to be walked to and from the doors of his hotel every day like a child. Or to have someone to watch him sleep.

He cringes at that thought.   

The cool light of the morgue is a relief, somewhere that he doesn’t have to think about any of that. He is free of Hannibal here, the blue of his nitrile gloves hiding the one thing that would remind him. 

“Nature likes repetition,” says Agent Katz from her side of the examination tables, her eyes sparking with the perception living inside each dark pupil. Between her and Will, the woman with the spill of flowers for a face, as had been in the polaroid - the flowers are gone now, but leave green stains where the skin of the neck is greying. Behind, another five tables with corpses in various states of flaying and butchering, but none quite so beguiling as the first.

“Wyrdness too,” she adds, and looks at Will rather than their quiet company. “What do you see when you look at these?”

“That nature also likes clusters of similar things,” Will says without thinking much about it, but feeling the same spark chasing around Agent Katz’ eyes.

“The corpses are similar. The method of death is similar - same disdain, same bad sense of humor.”

Will thinks about that. Each corpse has the mark-making of the same artist, and the cavernous thing inside him echoes back agreement. Crawford is certain of the continuity. Miriam Lass was certain enough to merit removal. Will’s adding nothing new.

Will shifts on his feet, frustrated.  

What did Lass see that made her a liability? What’s written here in the tables that he’s not seeing?  

(Another echoing thought inside you - why is she special enough to not be in this tidy lineup? What made her different to keep her from the coroner’s table? You know in your heart that she’s dead, so why isn’t she strung up  like a new product for the shop?) 

Will blinks, heart beating loudly in his ears, under his tongue, behind his eyes. 

(Yes, now you see it.) 

“Whoever killed these people didn’t take Miriam Lass,” he says, turning the white-blue wrist of the woman’s body to see its enviably naked palm. “Or she’d be here too.”

—

Will’s theory, more silhouette than a portrait, is accepted reluctantly by Jack Crawford as a possibility. 

He has to, Will thinks with resentment at the unhappy twist of Crawford’s mouth - he’s the one who asked for Will, the strange officer from down south that knows things he has no logical means to know. There are no polaroids or witnesses screaming to validate Will, but there usually aren’t. There’s only a long line of solved cases, and that’s the only validation required. 

True to form, Hannibal feels perfectly at home to comment when the rest of the team filters out to reconsider who all Miriam had seen before disappearing, something carefully considered. 

“Nothing tells more than something unsaid,” says Hannibal, stepping out to walk the edges of the examination tables, measuring the distance and time of it in granular detail, running a hand against the steel edge. “It leaves a long shadow.”     

“Strange that you never posed this as an option with all this time you’ve spent on the case,” Will replies, worrying the edge of blue nitrile at his wrist. Hannibal watches him do this too with a smile, perhaps charmed by Will’s hesitation to uncover the brand. 

Will tries to not let this bother him anymore than the rest of the things he tries not to be bothered by. 

(Which means it’s all you think about at all.) 

“I think Agent Katz was speaking to you on the preferences of nature…for all its vastness, it doesn’t like a complicated answer. Humans are equally quite taken with the law of parsimony,” Hannibal replies.”

Will watches his shoes and their linear path, how he uses the black tips of his fingers to straighten a dead young woman’s brow, or her neighboring body’s fingers. He rearranges them to please him, orderly once more in the stillness. 

“You’ll have to forgive me,” Hannibal adds,  “I do not have your magnetism for unseen truth. I must wait for it to find me.”

Something about this frustrates Will - perhaps Hannibal's dogged insistence of knowing why Will keeps summoning him. Perhaps the way that he seems to know everything, and that it feels like deliberate obstructionism to act like he doesn't.

“What is your skill then if not to advise? What is your purpose on this team?” Will finds himself asking, no matter that it is inappropriate. “Other than making smart remarks and morning wake-up calls.”

It’s not a kind question, and perhaps the kind that can’t be answered. The other folk do not require the validation of things like purpose. Granite doesn’t care that it is cold and hard, only that it must be heavy and compress. Stream currents don’t care that they carry sediment that they’ve carved from the same granite, only that they must flow.   

But Hannibal hasn’t shied away from Will’s fractiousness yet, and he doesn’t today either. 

He makes his turns around the tables to stand before Will again, carefully easing the blue band of the nitrile at Will’s wrist open with two fingers until they rest against the mark underneath, the other hand braced on the metal edge. They trace the dips and rises there, perfectly comfortable despite Will holding his breath in shocked displeasure. 

“Understanding a thing as it presently exists,” he says, fingertips tapping the underside of the table in time with the underside of Will’s hand. “I find it interesting to see how they change when under duress, or between states of mass.”

“Duress sounds a fair bit less like helping, and more like spectating for your own amusement,” Will says, every tendon in his hand tight under the barely there pressure of the velvet, plastic of his gloves squeaking as it stretches. “But I guess most things about humanity would seem amusing when you can watch from a safe distance, laughing when the local fauna does what it does.”

Hannibal doesn’t let Will’s tense hand deter him at all, nor the nitrile of the glove. He burrows deeper, gloved fingers resting on the backside of Will’s until Will is certain the nitrile will split and snap at his skin. 

“It is with aqua regia that gold is made pure,” he says, eyes amber bright in the smooth crags of his face. “An acid that doesn’t need the time of water, earth’s greatest solvent, to do the same. A dangerous kind of potion, even now in this modern age, to be handled with care. It eats away everything until only the valuable elements remain. ” 

Will holds his breath - Hannibal only a step away, looming long and bigger than what the suit should contain. But still the glove doesn’t break. The hidden sigil dances with more pins and needles under the skin, looking for something to cling to deeper than the velvet can go.

“Would you not feel called to see their sublimation?” Hannibal asks, just as collected as ever, pulling his hand back to himself, sliding the seams of his own gloved hands against the skin of Will’s. “To see the completion of their intended existence?’ 

“Is that not sufficiently purposeful?” he asks kindly, voice very warm. 

—

The quiet silver-whiteness of the office fluorescents pools over them, undisturbed by their conversation. It must be pleasant, having the guileless usefulness of a light - only bothered by whether it must be on or off. Will lets himself feel this more than the computer’s information before them, extending his small amount of control to center himself in its current, content to feel the hum of electricity and let Hannibal’s presence fade.

(Like he would ever be so easily ignored if he did not allow you to. Like you are driving that particular bus, and not a passenger at the mercy of another driver - your capricious talent’s, or Hannibal’s.)  

It’s not without reason that Will doesn’t trust fey. 

He doesn’t begrudge fey their curiosity - what they must see of him is very different from the sallow-faced man that stares out from the mirror of the bathroom. It is natural to want to walk to the edge of a cliff to see how far it goes down, or dip your toes into an unknown pool.  

But he doesn’t have to trust it. 

(“Animals attack on instinctual mandates, not moral ones,” an instructor at the academy tells you. “Food. Defense. Breeding. Add dangerous subatomic properties and the ennui of a 1000 years of existence, and you have a fey - something you don’t want to catch in the woods, or be caught by.”) 

The temptation to ask Hannibal what he sees in Will is a strong impulse, but pride keeps his mouth closed. He knows better. 

Will sets his mind to the list of names before him instead, and waits for -something- to click. Lass is (was) an industrious keeper of notes. Someone is here that Will should connect to. Someone is here that Hannibal should meet, if what he says about himself is true. 

Mr. Samuel Parks, neighbor, typical. Ms. Audrey Parks, neighbor, atypical, D-rank. Mr. Marcus Tanner, witness, typical. Mrs. Erin Cunningham, witness, typical. Dr. Alana Bloom, colleague, atypical, A-rank. Dr. Abel Gideon, expert witness, atypical, A-rank.   

Will pauses on that one, hand tingling. A-rank, two in one list, not terribly common outside of specific circles.

Judging from all the doctorates floating around in their peerage, Will wonders if there isn’t some sort of allure to humans that their othering parentage insists upon, drawn to the iron magnetism of blood, their vector to infect and replicate near to.

“How many A-ranks do you know?” asks Will, knowing Hannibal will answer, no matter that Will hasn’t said more than two sentences to him since the morgue. 

“As many care to introduce themselves,” Hannibal replies, lifting his head from a coroner’s report Will knows he likely memorized days ago. If he has thoughts on their long silence, he does not care to speak of it now. 

“The density of our wyrdness is unequal,” he explains, hand cutting across the table. “Many first generation children find being close to fey uncomfortable, not to speak of the rarity of interacting with pure fey to begin with. They prefer the awe of their human peers.”

“Similar enough to resonate, but different enough to not fully understand why,” Will nods, flipping to another page of names, but not before ear-marking the previous. “Doctor Bloom must be a very determined person to work with you.”

Mrs. Annette Dobson, witness, atypical, E-rank. Ms. Beverly Katz, colleague, atypical, D-rank. Mr. Jack Crawford, colleague, typical. 

“Yes,” Hannibal says. “Contrary to whatever narrative you’ve constructed for me, I am a good teacher, and she was a good student. I’d be happy to show you, if you ever manage to summit the peak of your bias.”    

Mr. Jimmy Price, colleague, typical. Dr. Frederick Chilton, expert witness, atypical, E-rank. Mr. Matthew Brown, witness, atypical, C-rank. Dr. Hannibal Lecter, atypical, S-rank. 

Will earmarks that page too, hand tingling again as he passes over it. “No thank you,” he says, growing accustomed to the phrase, and not terribly shy of saying it. It feels good to say it against the tingling in his hand, which he bunches up against his face - less the memory of pain now, but instead of velvet tickling its skin. 

—

Will isn’t unhappy with today, even with the-

(threat-promise-dread) 

-inconvenience of extending his debt to Hannibal. Or the pointed rudeness of asking Hannibal if he has a point, like Hannibal is merely there as a government contractor earning a check instead of the unaccountably old being that he is. 

It feels good to do something on his own, to help in some way, to find people and footsteps to retrace in a new light. Being able to definitively say that Miriam Lass isn’t connected directly to the dismemberments feels like something. It would be more convenient if he could simply manifest all the answers, but maybe it wouldn’t - maybe Hannibal’s interest would grow from something mild to be indulged before and after work, to something far more dire. 

Today, Will insists on no more elaborate meals. 

Hannibal takes this to mean drinks next to the Pew Gallery is nothing to complain about.  

“I find it novel,” Hannibal says at one point, turning Will’s hand without much concern for whether or not Will likes it.  

Will doesn’t - but it feels less intrusive to let his fist be considered like an injury instead of the obscene press of another hand to his inside the gloves. The intimacy of skin chafing against each other, snakes seeking each other out to twist into the other's scales…

Will swallows, and nearly jerks his hand back when Hannibal uses his index finger to scratch a small scar on his thumb.

Pay attention, the scratch says.

“Truly, Will, I haven’t seen the mark anywhere but on myself for several hundred years,” Hannibal continues from across the expanse of bar top, sweating glass of something spicy and acetone-sharp next to Will’s own bourbon. “I wonder what you could mean by it.”

“Nothing,” Will says, and turns his eyes to the white walls and shelves of the room, bottles glittering between them. “Dreams are just daytime thoughts being flushed away, the same way sleep is flushing plaques around the brain,” he explains. “By normal considerations, I was scrubbing you out.”

A laugh. “How fortunate for me that you are not normal.”

Will winces into his drink, thinking of the list of names - they tried to rank him once in high school, and twice in the academy. His name could appear on a list not so different from Miriam Lass’ acquaintances, and it would read Will Graham, expert witness, atypical, rank undetermined because he is odd even amongst oddities. 

“Story of my life,” Will mutters, and throws back his drink hard enough for the ice to crack the glass.

“It is a good story,” says Hannibal mildly, who takes it from him before anyone realizes that he’s done so. 

He settles Will’s hand. He orders more drinks. An hour later, he leaves Will at the front of the hotel, drunk but functionally upright. 

(You hold the elevator rails for stability on the way up to your room. You use the faucet and showerhead as handholds when you shower. You eventually sleep and use your fingers to search for cracks in deep blue ice, holding your breath until you feel like gasping at the cold in your chest, sinking downwards.)

(You dream of summer sun, dancing on the water, and you watching below until you are gently prodded upwards toward it, a small scratching at your neck, a light burning in your lungs, wanting to breathe.)

Chapter Text

Morning is balmy and wet, the park’s dawn chorus singing in shrill whistles to match the brightness of day. Will feels every curl on his head like a leaf waiting for its chance to stretch out to meet it. They hang close and tight. 

He swallows around a tongue that tastes of cottonwood, eyelids rock heavy and lips pinched tightly closed. He’s fallen asleep in the bathtub before, and this doesn’t feel so different. Surely that’s what has happened - passed out in the shower after drinks. Maybe found a bath after all, even in the mediocre holdings of the business travel hotel. He can’t think how he would have found one, or why, or that it would be so warm and buzzing with the early sounds of robins and sparrows and cars rolling down the promenade. 

Unlike a bathtub, Will is tethered by his arm, slung upwards and held very tight by a noose at the wrist. Will opens his eyes to look, but closes them just as quickly, each shocked with a headache’s pain - the sun is very bright.

Instead, Will holds on.

“You’ve gone on quite the swim today, Will,” he hears in his ear, soft and delighted. “I suppose you didn’t need a wake-up call in the hotel after all - you’ve come to collect directly this time.” 

Will opens his eyes. 

The picture of Hannibal Lecter in a bright red suit, striped with tiny lines of robin’s egg blue and yellow plaid, is no great stretch of his imagination. It fits him - makes his mouth redder, the white slant of his rare teeth and strange face more stark.  But Will is stretched in another way, watching Hannibal stand in the lily pads of Patterson Park - a solid fifty miles northeast from Washington DC. 

(You know it is because Hannibal tells you. He asks you to say your name when he sees that you are awake. He asks if you know what time it is or where you are, and you become dumb with the embarrassment of knowing neither.) 

Hannibal could be a water lily himself, or a dragonfly, perfectly at home knee deep in the blue-green water, his shoes glinting weakly under algae that waves with the current. He doesn’t seem to mind the algae and the musty scent of the stagnant water, and doesn’t seem to care, smiling from above the red and black cut of his blazer and shirt collar, water sloshing when he readjusts to better hold Will’s wrist.

Will looks closer at that, and the manacle of Hannibal’s black velvet fingers. He notes that the sigil grows up and outward from beneath it, spread from his own fingertips to elbow, a waving band of reeds unto itself. 

Will considers closing his eyes again - it makes him tired to even look at it. At Hannibal. At the water lilies and their pads taking on water that shimmers mercury silver in the sun. Everything hurts from his toes to his eartips, drained and rung out. It doesn’t make sense for him to be here. He doesn’t know how he could.

“It’s just as well that you’re here,” Hannibal hums, dripping from the forearms where he kneels to hold Will just above the pond’s surface, searching for a better grip with which to lift. “Our butcher is back to his knives.”

“Everyone goes back to work someday,” Will mumbles, licking away the taste of decay.

 “You’ll get to see it properly this time,” Hannibal nods, adjusting his grip, seemingly satisfied with Will’s fragile attempts to grip back. “Perhaps that is what you need - to see our most industrious of early birds.”  

Will nods, but does not open his mouth again. He is afraid that if he does, all that will come out is nonsense, pouring in gouts of wordless freshwater and tar sand. Fish will swim out with it. A spring will bubble up to take him somewhere else.

(It’s not enough to go to bed dry - somehow the crush of water finds you all the same.) 

Hannibal holds his other gloved hand to Will’s face, hot as a sunspot and dry even here in the middle of the pond. 

“Stay with me here, Will,” he says. “Or you’ll find yourself back in that place.”

“Where else would I go?” Will wants to ask, and isn’t sure which of those he means.

—

Will has grown to be a great believer in patterns. It is always gratifying to see them surface, like they were merely waiting for him to understand. 

(Even ones that you haven’t internalized yet, you remind yourself when you feel the press of black-fingered supportive hands. You don’t believe in exceptions just because they inconvenience you.) 

Johns Hopkins Hospital shares a very peculiar feature that Will doesn’t initially pay much mind to, beyond the occasional consult on the case autopsies by people familiar with injuries both strange and other. They excel in such things - make a practiced study in wounds and deaths of wyrd origin, as though knowing the device that makes them is any different than the cause. Atypical Wounds and Wyrd Pathology reads a class description in their college curriculum, where it sits comfortably next to Sports Medicine and Obstetrics. 

It’s not the class offerings that catch his eye though. It is that three of Miriam Lass’ contacts have a presence there in one form or another. It is not enough that they are doctors, or deeply wyrd - they share the same workrooms, constricted to the same routines and diamond inlays of the hospital’s arterial paths. 

“We have a habit of finding each other,” says Hannibal from beside him, hand close but not still closed on Will’s chilled and bony wrist. It flexes on the bench seat between them, strange and arcane against a cab’s simple grey lining. 

“Surprising,” says Will, rubbing at his hands to push away the chill in them, industriously pretending to not have to hide shaking arms. That he is cold in summer is disconcerting. He may as well have been in a winter lake and only just floated his way into warmer climes. 

“Flocks and herds are for prey animals,” he continues, closing his eyes to a wave of nausea and only just avoids asking if that’s because it’s easier to pick off meals from an unsuspecting crowd.   

But this is as good a place as any to go missing, Will thinks while spinning through the entrance roundabout in the cab, watching the hedgerows hiding the hospital garden. It is also as good a place as any to be found.

The paved labyrinth center of the garden hides little inside it - meant to be seen, and wandered, and provide introspection in a time of others’ well-meaning extrospection. The crime scene tape twists in the breeze off the Chesapeake Bay, and together it, the hedges, and the stone pavers’ pattern surround the perfectly bent and balled up body of the victim. 

A woman - mid 40s, pretty once with bottle blonde hair and hands that are unblemished and soft. Opposite to these, she doesn’t look happy, with the pinched mouth and eyes held tight even post-mortem. 

A kept housewife, Will speculates with a glance at her wedding ring. The diamond is large. Bent up as she is, she looks like a rather large rock herself.  

Will feels an inappropriate laugh bubble up inside him, behind the exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like it belongs to him. 

“You weren’t joking about it not being far,” Will says, blinking slowly, pushing down the compulsion to open his mouth and laugh. Maybe vomit, still taking right turns in the cab long after stepping out. He is still concrete heavy and damp, and he struggles to picture a time he was not, or that Hannibal did not need to hold him upright. 

(And how he does - hand no longer looking ominously still and intentional against tired car leather, pressing into the back of your arm, brand hot.) 

Hannibal, still a cheery stain of crimson against the brown-white of the courtyard, turns his free hand to gesture to the hospital. “In my own backyard,” he says. “I know my territory as well as the next apex predator, to borrow your phrasing. It seems an insult for it to happen so close without my knowledge.”

“Or your permission,” Will replies.

He circles the body with Hannibal’s help, frowning. That feels off too, alongside the stifled laugh. The phrasing pricks at the edge of his awareness, like seeing stripes in the tall grass.  

(A predator. A territory. It may have been your phrasing, but you both know it’s his nature. If he wasn’t so careful with you, mindful to move slow, hands up, stand down when you have the presence of mind to ask him to, you would never forget that he’s something to be afraid of.) 

“Any ID on the victim?” Will asks instead of pulling away, the FBI team nearby. “It’s a pretty public place to leave someone. Can’t imagine cameras wouldn’t timestamp the moment things changed even if it didn’t catch the event.” 

“You’ll be tickled to hear a familiar name,” Jack Crawford nods, standing near the victim’s coiled body, hands full with a wallet of conspicuous quilted white. 

There are more patterns to be seen in the familiar silhouette of a billfold. Held within, a Maryland driver’s license - Caroline Gideon, with her insurance cards blazing behind it with the hospital employee group number, and she, the dependent. 

“Well that makes it kind of easy to choose who to detain, doesn’t it?” says Will, chasing the curving path of the labyrinth with his eyes, and wondering why that is. 

Nothing’s come easy before - nothing save Hannibal, who is a bad hat Will can’t seem to lose from the moment Will starts thinking a little too long about him. Hannibal, who keeps his ears to the ground, and his eyes on things that haven’t taken shape yet, that he insists will come together with persistence and time. 

(Why does it want to now?)

—

Abel Gideon is as blase as a person can be when faced with their arrest. “Oh good morning,” he says, hands folded on his desktop. 

Will is surprised to realize this is very blase indeed - barely more than a raise of the brows over eyes that are tired, bloodshot, and bright. But he’s felt that way before, surely. Resignation and factuality are twins to each other for the unsociable amongst them. Perhaps fey, who have more time to learn their pessimism, are just as inclined.  

The thought that Will cannot shake once the commotion starts, and after when it has passed: Abel Gideon doesn’t look like a fey other. 

(And what should that look like? Should everyone of his ilk be as obvious as Hannibal and Alana? )

Sure, there’s the static pull of what is surely his wyrdness. There is the erudite wall of degrees that the average human cannot complete in a lifetime, one generation of fey removed still attached enough to their sires and dams for extraordinary longevity. He has all the pieces, but none of the presence. He looks like any person on the street that’s never once thought about unseen lightning in their veins. 

Just another sick man, Will thinks numbly, watching people flood the office. 

(Does it bother you that he’s not so unlike you?) 

“Did you not want to see the rest?” asks Gideon to the room, hitting the floor with his knees, arms cuffed behind him. There’s an interesting grandness to his voice. Transatlantic, Will thinks, not really from here, or anywhere else. Just an old idea of what fine people should sound like.

“I rather thought you were starting to enjoy it,” Gideon adds condescendingly, no attempt to hide anything at all.   

“Abel Gideon, you are under arrest on suspicion of the murder of your wife, Caroline Gideon, and seven others, including a Federal agent,” Jack Crawford says over the din of shuffling feet and rustling clothing. Katz flashes her eyes over the contents of the room. Alana Bloom frowns prettily, making piercing glances at Gideon. 

Gideon doesn’t give Crawford the time of day anymore than he gives much to the idea of arrest, or the contents of his office, or Alana Bloom’s and Beverly Katz’ fey-born perceptions. 

No, he simply eyes Will briefly, taking stock of the damp clothes, the cold hands. Maybe measuring what undefinable thing Will has, if he too doesn’t meet up at the corners, or is boring and human. 

Gideon then turns his gaze to lock on Hannibal. 

Hannibal doesn’t return the gaze at all, if he is even aware of it. He acts instead like he is touring a gallery and there is nothing to consider beyond the artwork and accolades framed along the walls. He paces around the walnut veneer of the desk, black velvet rasping against the grain. He admires a crosscut wax model of the human torso, the liver saddled over shiny pink intestines and the jut of the stomach. 

Still, the dull blue of Gideon’s eyes stare on. 

(A look of envy, you suppose. What is it like to work with something you are a lesser copy of? Hannibal said most like Gideon and Bloom didn’t like to be reminded of their inferiority - what is it like to be made lower than even that, with the target of that ire pacing in ringleader red, looking like he has found his way inside the chicken's coop?) 

“I didn’t suppose I’d see you here…but of course I would,” he eventually turns and sneers to the ground, and the cuffs, and the iron-rich rope that is tied in a truss around the arms and neck. The officers are ungentle in how they drag him, no dignity spared by their hands that they know better than to place against his body. He is no better than a bull, dragged to the ring.

“I see now that I was meant to,” Gideon rasps over the increasing wildness of his eyes, wider with each foot closer to the door. 

—

Parting shots don’t matter any more than arrests, or being dragged into hotel rooms, or sloshing through knee deep water to the likes of Hannibal Lecter, atypical, S-rank, of a great house, of good standing.  

“Ah,” says Hannibal when Will asks what he thinks in the ringing silence that falls after, because it is clear he will not say anything otherwise. “He was not keen to be instructed in our early acquaintance. A shame to see that kind of talent in cuffs,” like the shame is the cuffs and not the wife in the courtyard, being carefully encased in the coroner’s black bag just outside the window. 

“Did you know him long?” asks Will, seeing that it is a clear day outside, and that it will feel good to be back in the sun. 

“For however long it was useful to the both of us,” says Hannibal. 

Fair enough. 

Will turns again to the window, feet itching and cold. The labyrinth pattern spirals below, dotted with the yellow reflective sparks of numbering placards. 

Gideon probably watched them pull out her wallet from his own desk - metaphorically and literally above it all. He probably watched from the moment he arrived. He saw the first person discover her. He saw the sheriffs and the CSI cordon her off the same as a spell might be in rosemary and salt, more a list of ingredients than a barrier to anyone not burdened with wyrdness. He saw Will lean into Hannibal, look pitiful, not actually understand, not see his dead-eyed gaze from the office suites to the scene below. 

Just a man, like that’s disappointing, that he should be more obvious to Will.

(And you more obvious to him.)

—

Will is not invited to the interrogation - not for lack of usefulness, but vigor, nearly tripping on his own feet from lobby to circular driveway below. Everyone seems to know that he is running on fumes, and that Hannibal is handling him emptied of strength and patience, a pitcher of something normally sparkling and fresh, vessel drying out and readying to be filled once more.

Useful things get used, Will comforts himself, slumping to a bench outside the entryway, with the rest of the discharged patients. That is why he is here, and wanted.  

“You should rest,” says Alana Bloom, mouth frowning to match Will’s. She looks more approachable today - perhaps a different shade of lipstick, that makes her teeth less pearly white and insistent in her round face. “It’s not a small thing to travel so far, if what Hannibal says is true.” 

(Not small at all. Louisiana to DC by plane, and again by the particles between DC and Hannibal as though your bed was a door waiting to be opened and you to fall through. She means the second, but you still defer like it’s the first, and are troubled with tickets and waiting in terminals when what you really had was the sensation of drifting between sides of a pool, kicking to find a hand.) 

“Will is impressive,” Hannibal says, smiling and proud in a way that doesn’t match their short entanglement, but that Will feels tickled by regardless. “Immaterial spatial movement is beyond the ability of most wyrd folk, regardless of rank.”    

Alana takes this with an unreadable look of her own, perhaps something learned from Hannibal. It feels less intimidating, seeing it opposed to Gideon’s minutes before. Evil has a human face, fey or not.

Exhaustion comes in a wave. He hangs his head between his hands, waiting for it to pass. 

“May I offer you the run of my house and hospitality?” Hannibal asks, bending down to speak quietly, as though Will would be embarrassed to accept out loud. “I would be happy to return you to your hotel, but that is better done by car, and mine is still at home. Consider it without debt - I know you are quite fearful of any such thing.” 

“As long as it’s meant kindly,” says Will.

(Like your manners, which he values as highly as food.)  

“I do not know another way to mean it,” says Hannibal, toothy and bright in the late morning sun.  

It’s only a short distance after all - Will transports himself to what was the closest body of water between himself and Hannibal. It is not so unlikely that Hannibal was already basking in the swaying plants of the pond of Patterson Park where Will bubbled up, rushing and waiting through the tall grass alongside the robins. Maybe Will called Hannibal after all. Maybe he just wanted to be close to something after drifting so long in his sleep in unmeasured depths, coat pockets empty and missing their square of stolen fabric. 

Hannibal transports the two of them like he has not just proclaimed it difficult. He pulls Will in one moment to the sliding doors of the hospital, Will’s stomach dropping, only to blink and see it is now the double doors of a sandy colored brick manor that smells of pine resin in the summer sun. Each wavy-glassed window is an eye covered with deep red velvet drapes that let nothing peer in, and no light peer out.

Will stares at it, confused only for a moment. 

“Why all the red today?” Will asks, stepping through the door frame, imagining the varnish flaking when his hand brushes the casement.

“Why not?” says Hannibal to his ear, fingers hot at Will’s wrist, doorway very cold and hard to tell up from down in the drawn-curtain dark save the few motes of dust that fall inexorably to gravity’s center.

—

The happy story would be that Will sleeps. Will recovers. Will tolerates help without argument, and is slowly restored. It is not in his character to be taken care of, but it seems to be in Hannibal’s to play caretaker regardless. He is a shepherd of a kind this way, dressed in stripes now, fit for ancient valleys of Ararat as much as townhouses and the concrete towers of offices and hotels. 

Will is treated kindly, as asked. He wakes occasionally in the muteness of something buried hundreds, thousands of feet under the earth with nothing but the hum of the bedrock to keep him company, and water passing through limestone and copper and rusting iron to fill him. He is cradled by it. It is a den, an exceptionally made one. 

(With Hannibal’s hand reaching like a tether from a hole in its cavernous depths to hold you too, lithic, ancient, clenching. His wyrdness finds you again even here, between the fisted fingers.) 

So insofar as that, the story is happy. 

(Hannibal’s hand is strong for something so old.) 

—

Hannibal’s house feels much like Hannibal does at first, that it is an old thing from an old place, and grass grows in the boughs of lightless forest floors because it must, because that is what it is born to do. The house is quiet, with no visitors and little daylight to disrupt Will between hours and heavy curtains. In nature, soundlessness is suspicious, as is no clear purpose or food source. Physical matter doesn’t like power vacuums, and no such thing exists for long.  

Will is normally smart enough to recognize this.

But Will is comfortable in his respite. He accepts the safety of a guest room with linens that are cloud-thick and nighttime dark, and thinks he falls into the bed with shoes still on as soon as the door closes. Just for the day, he tells himself at one indeterminable point. Just while the team handles the ugly business of confessions. 

If he does not owe a debt for the pocket square, he does not owe for the morning summons, or somewhere to lay his head. Fey debts are superstitious, and it was always a matter of the person-place-thing calling for the debt, not actual law behind it. 

Saying no is enough, if he is strong enough to say as much - Hannibal has always let him. 

“Stay as long as you like,” says Hannibal. “I will wake you when there’s a need.” 

“Sure,” says Will, rubbing at his eyes, grateful for warm sheets. 

Will wakes himself once. Or he thinks he wakes himself - Hannibal stands at the room’s edge like he has been waiting for it, but shows no signs of anticipation anymore than he showed distress at Gideon’s mutterings. Will is helped to pad down the hall with now unsocked feet ( how did that happen? ), to be seated at the table for a meal of what he is told is a Soffritto Napoletano, raising silver tableware with a strained grip that Hannibal must close for him.

“What is that?” he asks, taking small oily bites of tomato, chili pepper, rosemary, soft meat. It is hot enough to burn his tongue, but tastes wonderful. 

Hannibal does the same, fingers less challenged by the heavy silver service and very comfortable with Will at the table. “Something that celebrates all the animal, before parts of it would spoil,” he says, and offers bread. “Something that will stay with you and heal you faster. I was fortunate to have the ingredients on hand - they spoil very quickly.”

“Practical,” says Will, “I can’t stay for too long.” He continues to eat, feeling fuller in spirit and body after a bowl. Is that magic? he wonders. Is this the thing he has resisted accepting - a humble medicine in a meal? He was promised no debt, wasn’t he? 

“Not the usual fancy food tonight?” he asks, feeling unnerved. “I had begun to think that this kind of rustic meal was beneath you.” 

“Practicality comes with obligations to function,” says Hannibal, who eats alongside Will, and walks him back to his room with the gloved hands that match Will’s left one. He continues his thought like no time passes between. “Ornamentation will not serve my purpose.”

“Stripped down is easier to work with,” says Will, stumbling with tiredness still, and a rock heavy stomach. 

“The unencumbered truth of a thing, the extraneous burned away and forgotten,” Hannibal nods, and asks, “Will you not stay another night? You are still very tired.” 

Will, who doesn’t know night from day in the heavy pull of the bed and the meal, nods. He doesn’t remember finishing the meal, only that they must have, with the empty plates and oily spoons set down to stain the linen. He doesn’t really know how he knew there was one to be had, made in perfect time with wakefulness between dreamless sleep.

Chapter Text

(You’ve never been a good sleeper - quick to fall asleep, yes, but never deeply, too eaten up with dreams and accidental displacement. The pond is not the first time you disappear from where you’re supposed to, just the most profound. You’re not unfamiliar with finding yourself standing in the hallway at home, halfway dressed to go outside.

At home, you at least know where you're trying to go. You’ve always had a calling to go walk by the river at night - living in Midtown does exactly what it promises, placing you square between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi and keeping the wyrd pull of either in opposition to each other. It’s expensive for a young officer to live alone. It’s a lot of people to avoid. But still, you want the river, a thread that you can’t cut, a drip from the tap that never dries out, and you need polarizing forces to keep you from its smothering.

You don’t have that here in the brownstone house. You sleep like strata does, needing pickaxes and earthquakes to move you. Your legs are plutons buried and waiting to be uncovered. Your eyes, emeralds, compressing, colorless in the dark, comfortable and dreamless. It’s near perfect in that respect, but your stomach hurts, full and aching and awash with acid. 

Your stomach hurts.) 

—

There’s something to the small number of things that Will travels with, beyond the practicalities of being a frequent flyer.

He hides them from Hannibal the first few times there’s cause for Hannibal to see them, knowing how pared down it appears. It’s embarrassing, he supposes, to be seen like that. There’s not a terribly personal message written in his overnight bag and duffel - just features of a well-worn routine. What data can possibly be extrapolated from toothpaste and tortoiseshell plastic combs? Who cares about three white cotton shirts rolled against each other, same brand, same size, same worn spots where his button-ups and blazers wear away at the shoulders?

(It says you live simply. It says you are not attached to much of anything. It says that someone with the right intuition can see that other than the wyrdness that flows through you in ever-changing intervals, you are afraid you can be easily summarized as being the sum of your incalculable power and nothing else.)  

The schedule, simple, shameful, or otherwise, is important to Will. 

Floundering for one now, Will feels adrift now that he feels well enough to make the train ride to DC for meetings. Replacements for his inconsequential possessions are not negotiable. The departure for the day is even less so.

“Are you certain I can’t persuade you to look through my things?” Hannibal gently argues, hovering at the doorway in his own home with greater consideration than he afforded Will’s hotel, just as he does the one time Will wakes here.

He is almost more oppressive this way - that stain that can be seen below an air vent. That tile on the wall just far enough from the others to feel wrong. 

If Hannibal were not so perfectly pleased to have Will as a guest, Will would feel threatened the way children are threatened by open closets and long hallways at night: illogically. 

(Dr. Alana Bloom, atypical, A-rank. Dr. Abel Gideon, atypical, A-rank. Dr. Hannibal Lecter, atypical, S-rank. It’s still pestering you, even as you argue your way away from it. You built a career on gut feelings, like when wyrdness found you, it settled in your stomach. This morning, yours is upset.)

“What, does the dried-in pond water not give my shirt a certain allure?” asks Will, turning the taps of the sink until they steam with hot water that screams between a washcloth and his face. It stings. It’s a relief that it still can, that he is a real person and can detach from this house.

Hannibal half-smiles, leaning into the door frame. “Clothes come as cheap as pocket squares,” he says with a wave. “It would be rude to send you to the FBI looking rested but bedraggled.”     

Will wipes his face, eyes closing with each pass. “I think Jack Crawford can tolerate me coming back after staying with you, but probably not smelling like you too.” 

“I would consider his reaction to that a very rich payment, indeed,” says Hannibal, sly and not doing much to hide it.

Will tries not to let his discomfort return with that little flirtation, wringing fabric between his fingers and the sink’s basin. He has chosen to not think about debts today. It is difficult to do so, with the black seal of a snake twisting out from and up his palm to the taper of his elbow.

(Is it longer since you slept? You don’t recall. You concentrated too much on covering the sigil before, its presence a publicly shared liaison between the two of you, shared over drinks and handkerchiefs. What a simpler world it would be for that to mean something common like getting drunk together, or sex, but in this one suggests more.)   

Hannibal lets him go with no great protest. “Then may I request your company again tonight?” he asks. “Once you’ve found your belongings again, I presume.” His eyes glint with good humor, like he’s read something in the quiet.

Perhaps the imaginary drunkenness or sex. Perhaps the black mark’s path.  

Will agrees, wanting to know what the other has seen.

—

Five days. 

That’s how long Will disappears into the mute rooms of Hannibal’s house. It is not Hannibal that tells him this. 

It is the arrival times for the train that let Will know that he’s been missing for the better part of a week. He blinks up into the marquee of numbers and names, today’s date flashing between them. He watches it a few times to be sure, but the date persists, no matter how tightly Will holds the transportation map, Miriam’s connecting line highlighted in yellow. 

Crawford must be livid. How much has he missed?

Will grasps at his belly, and the cramping anxiety that roars through. 

(“I will wake you when there’s a need,” Hannibal had promised, and you shuffle uncomfortably at the idea that there wasn’t. Not that there’s no developments - just that there was no need for you.) 

—

The coffee they sell at the train station is terrible, little black grounds floating at the bottom of the cup, burnt to the worst kind of bitterness. It centers his though. He’d have something like this back at the hotel, or from a bodega that is better known for its sandwiches than its drinks. There’s a factor of convenience there, familiar to him if no one else. 

Will is alone, as one is in a crowd - for the first time since he arrived for any greater stretch of hours, and this is good. He can find use for himself on his way back to DC. The last place Miriam Lass is seen is on her commute, and Will can follow her footsteps, imagining her small but serious face boarding the rail car. 

The Metro clicks along, whirring between the green suburbs and the hollows beneath the city, people swaying from handles and in seats. They read their books, and phones. They do not worry about the metaphorical gut-pull of magic around them, or the literal one of people like Abel Gideon. Will would be sad for them if they did, like he does.  

Will closes his eyes to that, and thinks instead of her. 

He is Miriam Lass, says the foreign sounds of the train. He is planning his testimony. He is thinking of ways that Abel Gideon would carve through bodies, but maybe still not know why. He is considering a jog on the Quantico training course this weekend to shake a suspicion off. He is arriving to the Archives-Navy Memorial Station, and instead of disappearing, Will is reappearing for the first time in five days in front of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, waiting to meet someone. 

(“I appreciate you coming here on such short notice,” says Miriam, says you through the muffled ether, smelling of burning copper.) 

Will blinks, and absently disembarks from the train as it sings his exit. He moves towards the stairs, feeling that same dreamy forgetfulness that characterizes all the hours he spends in Baltimore.   

(“Where are the organs?” asks Miriam, asks you to the concrete platform and the little gated toll booths, walking fast to stay in stride. “I keep wondering why no one focuses on that.”)  

He steps into the street, one of dozens brushing past each other, to daylight on water.

(But Miriam and you suspect, here in this moment. So too does her short-notice visitor. They recognize that she’s figured it out somewhere between the Greenbelt station and the flags waving above the fountain as the two of them speak. They laugh at her foolishness to ask them of all people about it if she has.)  

“Graham,” Will hears Crawford yell across the courtyard, hands tucked in his pockets, frowning at him from the nearby fountain steps. “You ok?” 

Will turns with a start. It takes a moment for his mouth to work again, his eyes to pull away from the water to either side. When both inevitably do, the embarrassment comes rushing back with today’s date chased between them. That Hannibal did not say anything about the days missed.  

(She-you do not see Crawford, just the sun reflecting from pools, and the stink of city sewage with chlorine, a less gentle version of the hotel bed. You-she see that it is bright and red and you are tired again, five days of rest or not.)

—

“Gideon’s been asking for you,” says Crawford, looking at Will from over the expanse of his desk. “Won’t talk with anyone else.”  

Will opts to pay attention to the desk instead of Crawford, puzzling at that. Until now, he’s been inside Miriam’s head. Seems he’s in someone else’s too.

Strange though, how this is the first he’s heard of it. Hannibal said no one had needed him - in what world would this not count? “How is it that you haven’t been asking for me if that’s the case?” Will says, puzzling at that. “And how does Abel Gideon even know my name?” he asks the whorl of a knot in the veneer. 

Crawford’s eyes alight at that, dark like Beverly’s and just as clever. It’s sometimes easy to forget that his position as the lead of Atypical Crimes is earned, with none of the advantages that being atypical himself would afford him. 

“It was suggested to me that you were overextended,” Crawford says carefully, laced fingers flexing against each other, cracking the knuckles. “And that Gideon will keep his longevity in jail as much as he does outside of it, assuming no one chelates his wyrdness out in the meantime.”

(You forget that sometimes too - the only official punishment that has any bearing on the wyrd and fey weak enough to be held by it. Being drained at the subatomic level, each cell made important with sorcery excised out, harvested, mass conserved but removed from the offender. They do that to punish people. People strong enough to do it outside of the law threaten to harvest you in like mind.)  

Will swallows - still full, uncomfortable from the neck down with heartburn, but not tired now. Maybe the coffee doing its sludgy work. Maybe all the sleep finally doing it’s part. 

(You have not been drained like that, you tell yourself.) 

“I can’t say Gideon and I have had the benefit of a formal introduction,” he says, folding his fingers to match Crawford’s, sneaking a look back up to the man’s searching eyes, and then back down to the safety of the wood grain.  

It’s true that they haven’t, no matter what Crawford is looking for in Will’s absence. Gideon is a name in a list. Gideon is a dead-eyed man that occupies one of hundreds of offices in a research hospital. Gideon is a concept, a good-sounding number to resolve a series of murders. The math shakes out. 

Inversely, Will is a face in a round up. Will is a finger to point. Will is an expense that will be written off as having been largely unnecessary - most killers give themselves up with time. Fault lines relieve inescapable stress - truth and violence are faults. 

The desk of course doesn’t answer, but neither does Crawford, who looks for something in Will’s face with the kind of scrutiny he has come to expect of people’s suspicion of him. Atypical, unrankable, unreliable. Will understands there’s a lot there to be suspicious of, but he warned them he didn’t have any control. 

“Do you ever wonder how I know yours?” asks Crawford, smiling, hands folding deeper into each other. They are big and earth-brown, each finger a tap root. 

“The world’s a big place, full of gifted people,” he adds. “More Miriam Lass’ at the academy. More Alana Blooms’ at the universities, Beverly Katz’ in the atypical agent ranks. But somehow you’re here, despite the inevitability of Gideon’s capture.”

“I get shopped around,” Will shrugs, and remembers - utility. Purpose. From the trajectory of this case so far, he had a lot of nerve asking someone else’s was. “Comes with a nice list of testimonials. Not my fault if it wasn’t the right solution for you…You did some of that shopping yourself - or do you not remember asking the police chief to lend me out and me telling you that results may vary?”

Crawford snorts at that. 

“So I did,” he says, chewing the corner of his mouth. “But like anyone’s favorite watering hole, you hear about them from word of mouth. So I ask again - do you know which one I heard yours from?” 

Will tilts his head, and affords the man a quick glance. 

“Hannibal Lecter’s,” Crawford says, hands resting at the desk’s edge, pressing just enough to whiten the skin of his palms, annunciating each syllable as accusations are. “Highly recommended you even - called you an immense talent, not long after Miriam disappeared.”

Will shifts, crossing his legs. Uncrossing them. Shock feels like too strong a word for what he’s feeling - shock implies enough information to feel wronged by its irrelevance. The dragging undertow of the ocean fits better. Another face of dread.  

“I can’t recall meeting him before you either,” he says numbly, eyes moving back down to the veneer.

Crawford nods. “I’m…curious about that connection. Working with atypicals has taught me that wyrdness is just that - weird, but uncannily truthful, and your name coming up unprompted like that says you’re a thread to pull.”  

And pull he does - thirteen minutes away, to the district jail, where Will doesn’t have time to think about what gets unraveled.

—

(But you do think hard about that in those thirteen minutes - if you do know Hannibal Lecter, and don’t remember. Fey others not only don’t always meet in the corners of their reality. Sometimes their corners are somewhere else entirely. Hannibal Lecter could have been a cottonmouth in your yard for a summer, drawn in the same way all fey are to you. He could have been a tourist wearing another face, or a witness with the same one, and you too lost in following the magnetic trail of another thing’s strangeness to recognize it. It’s just as likely he heard about you from someone else. You said it yourself - many know of you. Just not you, yourself, what you are.) 

—

Abel Gideon’s perversity is not in question - it is fact.

“My motivation was for them to die,” says Gideon on the subject of his victims through the speakers of the recording booth. 

Here in the interview room, Will has a hard time looking away from the wrists that clink in their cuffs raw red and blistered from the iron. They look painful. Festering.

“Mission accomplished,” Gideon hisses, scratching at the soreness.  

Additional facts, pulled from archives and admissions, which even the A-rankers amongst humanity are subject to: 

Gideon is born in the 30’s to little fanfare. It’s unclear which of his parents is fey other, or that it matters he shows no particular aptitude for sorcery, no matter his heritage. The Great Depression doesn’t have time for have-nots, and the Gideon family is of the kind, and still kindly regardless. 

He goes to school. He becomes a surgeon with clever fingers to match. He enjoys a long career, going on to highlight it with serial killing of the typical kind, throwing it away like it had been a lark. None of his butcheries are stained with sorcery or ritual beyond the appearance of it. At least that’s what the lab results say. 

“You had plenty of accolades,” says Will, watching his reflection in the glass walls of the room when he is at last escorted in to meet dull blue eyes again. Their manic wideness has grown. “A long history with accomplishment. Seems strange to do something so base.” 

“Someone not looking your way?” Will asks, and wishes he could glance to the side. 

Abel snorts from across the table. “You’ll be asking how my relationship with my father is next,” he drawls. 

Will’s irritation starts to catch up with the morning. “Does your father have any impact on your tendency to split people at the sternum and wash out the abdominal cavity, or is that just the whimsy of age?” he asks, annoyed. 

Gideon finds that funny though - Will sees it when the deadness fall away from Gideon’s eyes, and fill with the unnatural light that all strange things seem to share, brightness eager to gather the heavy mass of wyrd energy. 

“In a fashion,” says Gideon, corners of his mouth lifting, tracing Will’s face and the line of his arm to the clenched fist. “What is a role model if not a kind of progenitor? What is their attention if not some kind of currency?” 

Will scratches at his arm and the sigil hidden underneath his shirt - not so easy to hide as it first was. 

Gideon catches that too, mouth quirking wide at the corners. “One wonders what they want in exchange for their regard,” he says.

“Why do I have yours?” Will replies, pulling his hand away, unwilling to take the bait.

Humming, Gideon folds his fingers into each other. “But you know, don’t you, Officer Graham? I already told you.” 

“We’ve never spoken,” Will asserts. “Not directly.”  

“I suppose not,” Gideon replies airily. “Not in the conventional, professional way. But being present is a conversation of sorts. You were dragged into mine.”

He stops for a second, measuring his words. Smart, not in that he is afraid of confessing something to the police - Will’s certain that’s never been a real concern, at least not since leaving his wife in a little sad knot. There’s something valuable in all the dross. 

“I saw you the first time because I was meant to,” he explains with a smile. “I wanted a second to spite the intention of the first. Ask me why that is.” 

So he wasn’t talking to Hannibal, Will thinks, chewing the side of his mouth. Gideon was talking to him.  A threat? A warning? Is there much of a difference when it comes from the sorts of creatures known best for their double-speak that would merit the cost of asking?  

He bites the corner of his lip. 

He licks away the ache. 

“With respect, I don’t want to owe you one,” he says, not sharing his thoughts. 

“I can see why you wouldn’t,” Gideon says, eyes flat and unreadable once more. “A word of advice, Mr. Graham,” he adds. “Fey attention, like fey debts, have compounded interest. No good banker wants it repaid before its time.” 

Will frowns quietly, waiting. 

(You wait, but you deliberately pull the magic parts of you away from him so you can't make the same mistake you’ve been making since you arrived - needing to have things you can’t afford.) 

“Ask me about it tomorrow,” says Gideon, scratching at his iron burns, “and I’ll consider it on the house.”

—

Instinct is a misguided gift outside the circumstances it’s designed to respond to. Intrinsic to living things, no matter how much or little of the atoms that dictate otherness amass inside. Man, animal, plant, prey, and predators are subject to it, all wrapped up in its beguiling natural packaging.

Herd mentality. Fight-or-flight. Dear enemy effect. Terminal burrowing. Diving reflex. Paradoxical undressing. Angor animi. Hypervigilance. 

A place for everything. 

Poor results when used in a place it’s not meant to be. 

“Did you find what you needed in the Capitol?” Hannibal’s voice crackles over the office phone. “I was thinking of picking you up from the station, to save you the trip. No great walk from the stadium to my home, but surely you have had a long enough day.”

The interview leaves Will in that anxious space he initially fills upon his arrival, leaving an arm’s length between everyone. There’s a lot to be anxious for, including the chiming ring of his phone that says he has obligations. 

He answers Hannibal because it feels foolish not to. 

Will holds the receiver between the crush of his shoulder and neck, and thinks. 

Returning to Baltimore ought to be an obvious no. All roads point to something not being quite right, that Hannibal knows more than he lets on. Will’s name and nature. The long forgotten week. Gideon’s certainly that Will has made an oversight. He envisions this to be an outright misstep.

(Hypervigilance.) 

“About that,” he says over hesitation and static, “I think I should stay in DC tonight.” Logic concurs - says this is correct. 

“More interviews tomorrow,” he amends to the sound of Hannibal’s patience. “Get Crawford’s money’s worth out of it. Don’t know if I’m up for the trip back up and down before then.” 

“Of course,” Hannibal says without missing a beat, lilting and light. “It’s only efficient. I’d hate for you to waste a trip for something as pedestrian as a meal.”    

Dinner - that’s right. Will leans against the edge of a desk, and wonders if that’s safe to refuse. It feels a risk and a shame to renege at the last minute when there’s effort that’s gone into its making.  

(Reciprocal altruism.) 

“I’m certain it’ll keep,” says Hannibal, like this is perfectly reasonable. 

Maybe it is. It could be the kind of thing that boxes up well for early mornings. It could be a simple thing eaten between long days of rest, tender enough to not need chewing. Better with time to stew - not as inclined to sour as their last meal’s ingredients allegedly are. 

“I’ll bring it to you a bit later, at a better time,” Hannibal cheerfully adds, the sound of chopping, going about his day, filtering through. 

Will tries to picture him. Hundreds of years old, and perfectly content in his own company. Whatever Will’s concerns are don’t amount to much from the bemused silence of Hannibal’s house, and Hannibal himself. 

(Pursuit predation - missing. You are definitely the type to run, but Hannibal and most fey, by instinct, rarely chase. They are ambush predators. They do not have to wait long for new prey that does not know the shape of their claws and fangs.) 

Will goes to bed on an empty stomach, feeling another misstep. He doesn’t eat - still unpleasantly full from the meal before with no breakfast or lunch and a dark cup of burnt coffee to hold him upright. Being satiated feels less pleasant without hunger to sharpen it. Being so for a full day? Unnerving. 

He drinks from the tap of the unremarkable sink to curb a sour mouth. He showers and scrubs at the mark on his arm until it burns, emptying tiny bottles of hotel body soap out onto it in splashes of bile orange-yellow that smell like oranges and clove. He falls asleep in sheets that smell of chlorine, in walls that are loud with the city outside and other travelers within, maybe some of them as secretly wyrd as he is. 

(They are ambush predators - as are snakes.)

Chapter Text

(You think of that fey sometimes, that could have harmed you. 

Before the gunshot to the shoulder. After you get your badge. When you are younger than you are now, but not so young that you cannot understand that there’s a lot of things you will probably never know. 

You know of six documented fey within the state of Louisiana - this one will make your seventh. They do not have the likes of Hannibal Lecter’s elegance, or unimpeachable presence, made more sturdy by long years. They are but the sentient remnants of dredged volatile metal mass, working their way to the vastness of the ocean but slow to concede their dispersal. 

There’s no clear reason why they made your acquaintance, save that both of you have directives. Them - to eat. You - to see them do so. 

“ Bonswar et bon chans,” they say, digging steadily at the ground, as solid as any man. You wonder how long it took them to manage that - if you were born yet when they did. If anyone was born yet. 

You are not far from the river - just a small state highway from it, saddled between two houses. The Mange Cemetery, says a small wooden sign that is held upright by a piece of shipworm eaten wood, the base of it encased in grey-black tin. You have been told there was a body seen from the mansard roof windows of the house to the north. The house to the south - empty, set with hollow windows for eyes that have broken in hurricanes past, sees nothing. 

You wonder if they should call it a cemetery at all, but rolling into the gravel drive with the red and blue of the vehicle lights, the discomforting press of wyrdness finds you. It insists that this is not the place to be, your booted feet sinking into the boggy ground. There are maybe four graves for the whole of the site - white stones raised but sinking at the head of three. The third is open and crumbling, and your seventh other hews away at it with flailing limbs that smell of the rich decay of the wetlands, holding their young woman with the decaying remnants of her humerus and scapula that refuse to be parted.  

You are only here to recover the body - but you do not think much will be left. 

“ Zanmi, beau frere, you’re not fit for the fork,” they say with a bloody mouth, a wiry white arm falling over and over again in the rich soil, turning over brown dirt, white bone. In their hand, an iron ladle churns the earth and pours it out - crudely plated with something silver and safe for their wyrd hands, layered in rings between their many-jointed fingers. 

Beneath them, their long-dead prey is still - egret pale, as the birds in the cypress to either side are, watching with shining eyes.

“Thankfully, sir,” you say, straining to listen and always mindful to not offend. “ I see you’re finishing up with another?” you ask, flashlight pointed at them with hands that only avoid shaking because it would do no good. “A couple of typicals like us (a lie, a lie) are not good enough to eat.”

Your partner steps back, but you stand as steady as you dare when it turns the pits of its eye sockets to you - nothing to shine back, save the dull black-silver shimmer of its skin. 

It considers you. 

It smiles, rotten gums shining under the torch. 

“Not you, beau frere,” they say. “No room in me. Think you’d sit too heavy - think you’d sink right down where this one is light. I am étain,” and they gesture broadly down the dark line of their body, and the vermeil handle of their ladle. “Merely tin. There are more valuable folk amongst us. Given time, you will be gold.”      

Your partner and you watch them finish their meal, not sure what the polite response to something like that is. You don’t think they could have been stopped for the simple brass of your badge - the crescent of New Orleans means nothing to them. You do not know what they value, save that flesh seems high, if hidden, in their hierarchy of needs.

You do not ask them to clarify what they mean about you, even if you are curious. Asking is inviting change that you may not like.) 

—

The cool, thick vastness of water is no surprise when Will sleeps. 

Not today, not in days past. It’s not new - a thing that has waited for him since someone declared him it’s host. A reservoir they called him, like he is being saved for something. 

Winter snowmelt. 

Rain.

 A sixth strange Great Lake. 

Will makes attempts to map the vastness, but it shifts, strata and volume fluctuating with his seasons. Some erode and evaporate faster than others, clouding his vision ( understanding ) as he wades in, afraid to go too far. He feels very small sometimes in the aftermath of great works, like his transubstantiation from DC to Patterson Park. Other times, he is stormy and brimming with the need to release it somewhere. 

Palms up, eyes closed, Will settles in after nearly a week of forgetting its emptiness. He passes from bright surface to cool inky canyon wall depths that forget their texture and composition. He forgets his.  

Then three fingers press to the side of Will’s neck, pulling his hair to drift in the void. 

(You forget that things can be aware of you, even if you are not aware of yourself.) 

“In the beginning,” comes hissing to the side of his ear, warm and cloying and full of sibilant joy, “God hovered over the waters of his creation and saw it empty and dark.” 

Will opens his eyes to see nothing save darkness and bubbles rising from his mouth, exhaling, throat constricting with panic. 

The surface swims to meet him, the water’s edge crumbling and granite-smooth in view, and Will is dragged across it in a vice grip the same black pitch color of the deep canyon below. He gasps against the pull of his own skin on the ground, and the velvety soft where the hand that does the hauling doesn’t crush so hard.

The rocks become smooth hardwood. 

The hand is now gentle.

The voice continues. “The firmament forms - metals and brilliant jewels within it. He fills it with light. Radiation, heat, trillions of atoms coalesce into the creatures and plants inside it. Some of these gather more of the remnants of creation to themselves - in the time of its making, or in the billions of years that follow."

"Some will be born this way,” they say. “Some will evolve, growing from decay. And some must eat the fruits of Eden, and become more complete.”

Will sits - no, that’s not quite right. Will is settled on a chair, and blinks when a heavy silver spoon is given to him. 

From the floor of the dining room in the unimpeachable quiet of Hannibal’s house, Hannibal beams up at Will.  

“You didn’t have anything for dinner, Will,” says Hannibal, golden-eyed and plutonic with a crescent moon for a mouth, fingers reaching to card through the curls on Will’s head. His teeth are very clean. “Are you not hungry?” 

The dark water slips into the gloves, drying as fast as they blot between fabric threads.

“I promised to save you some, and so I have. Now,” says Hannibal, pulling the gloves from his hand, where underneath they are as if he hadn’t undressed them at all - eschar black - necrotic, smelling of rot. He raises Will’s spoon, full of soft meat, hot and opaline. “Let us eat.” 

Will opens his mouth.

- and wakes to the chlorine smell of the hotel sheets, trembling with exhaustion. 

Just where he’d left himself, save that he is soaking wet. His belly burns as it did the night before, full to the point of hurting instead of simple distraction.

He licks oil from the corners of his mouth, skin itching and blistering from left palm to neck. His teeth feel dirty with ligament and graveyard soil, the space between each tooth stretched and sore. 

—

In the cold light of the bathroom, a fist and a shirt are no longer sufficient to hide the mark, or the sour turn of Will’s mouth when he sees it. It’s viper head terminates under the left eye now, a curling tongue that meets the corner of Will’s eyelashes and red of the lacrimal caruncle, and the arm that it grows from is very nearly black for all its scales and curving tail. 

Will swallows. His mouth tastes of the strange stew of the nights before, fragrant with cardamom, calendula, thyme, basil. 

(Provides clarity. Foretells riches and love. Eases nightmares. Settles stomachs.) 

He tastes the heavy metal of carcass - the centerpiece protein.

(You’re not sure about that one. Surely it means something.) 

He rinses his mouth with tap water, and brushes with artificially flavored mint.

(Strengthens courage, but only if it’s the real thing, so it doesn’t help.)  

Will rubs his face, and tries to not think of the sigil snake’s mouth, open to every worried wrinkle of Will’s shut eyes. He tries to not let it bother him, and buttons a creased white collared shirt that does nothing to stop the feeling that his blazer pockets are empty, that he is missing something, that he is full to bursting, that he will be sick. 

(“Where are the organs? I-keep-wondering-why-no-one-focuses-on-that,” asks Miriam Lass under the waving flags of the memorial courtyard, the thing that brought her there rolling away below, the other one standing unabashedly entertained in the morning sun. “Thank-you-for-meeting-me.”) 

When Will rattles his way past the reflective doors of the elevator alone, further across the street and to the knotwork of Jack Crawford’s desk at the FBI Headquarters, Crawford tries to not draw attention to it beyond a tight-mouthed look.  

“Doctor Bloom mentioned your working with Lecter might not be sustainable, but she never explained why…can you still do this?” asks Crawford, eyes drifting from the terminus of the tail at Will’s palm to the flicking tongue at his eye. “The jail is expecting us for the second interview. I don’t know what’s happened to you, but I don’t like the look of it.” 

Will doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t much like the look of it either. “I can’t afford to not do this,” he replies, rubbing at the corner of his marked eye. It doesn’t itch, but Will thinks it ought to, and so it does. 

“My ears still seem to be in working order, if that makes it better for you,” he says in lieu of explaining that he is afraid for the first time since seeing Hannibal Lecter for the first time.

“We’ll be talking about this later,” says Crawford. 

“I’m sure that will make it all better,” says Will.

—

Somewhere, Will knows a camera is rolling. Whatever is said here will be kept for posterity - perhaps more. The iron shackles of their inmate subject will seem very dull in film, but across from Will, glowing forge-hot where the blood has burned away, Gideon is the very image of torn earth erupting beneath their ferrous heat. 

“Thank you for meeting again with me,” Will tells Gideon, doing his best to not pull more attention than his mark already brings from all the guards and Crawford’s team.

“Third time’s the charm,” says Gideon, eyes affixed to the flicking snake’s tongue at the crux of Will’s face. He looks at Will like he knew this would happen - that he told him so . 

Will resents this, of course - Gideon didn’t tell him anything. But then again, Will would owe something if he did.  

“Funny thing about covering stains is that it gives them time to set,” says Gideon, eyes walking from Will’s left palm to left elbow to left eye - the same path Will’s take in the hotel bathroom seeing it for the first time. At least there’s that - that they experience things the same from each other, even if they don’t take away the same conclusion.  

“Ask me how I know,” Gideon says in rough laughter, a familiar refrain. 

Will feels wan and tired watching the blue eyes across from him come alive - Gideon as much a product of his other kin as his degrees of separation suggest. There’s glee in the set of his dour face as much as there’s envy. What would Will call that other than inherited traits? 

Will blinks. He cannot see it, but imagines the snake closing its mouth around his eye. 

“Lots of clothes to wash clean,” Will replies tonelessly, unprepared for the real answer. “Lots of mess to account for.” 

Gideon smiles, and waits. 

(Is knowing actually better than ignorance?)

For a time, there is only the quiet of the interview room, and Will’s avoidance. He wonders if Gideon is aware of his discomfort, full to the base of the throat and all the acid with it, and if that is why he is so amused. 

Will wishes he could pull things from the air. That those answers come as easily to him as everyone assumes they do. It’s embarrassing  - inconvenient - to ask for them instead. 

“…Where do the organs go?” Will asks, throat tight. He shifts in his seat, the pressure in his belly bordering painful. “You’d know. You harvested them. Miriam asked someone else, but maybe she should have asked you.”

“Funny thing about that too,” says Gideon, leaning back in his chair, not at all bothered by his bloody blistering wrists after several days in the chains now, “how asking a favor is just giving it time to be forgotten. New faces, and all that. We talked about role models last time, Mr. Graham…has mine finally decided to share his gifts?” 

Will stares, and tries to ignore the upset in his stomach, roiling at the blankness of Gideon’s eyes.

“He promised to give them back to me for a while,” Gideon smiles. “But favors are fickle, and spoil if left uneaten for too long.” 

Will swallows again, bile riding up underneath his tongue. 

Something that will stay with you, Will was told. Ingredients that were fortunately on hand, that would be quick to go bad were they not prepared in time. 

—

(Miriam asks the right person after all - absently stumbling from her train car, manila folders pressed into her arms, thinking if she can speak the right words carefully enough to be taken seriously. She answers two questions for you that day. 

If Hannibal is aware where the rest of it is. 

If that’s the actual answer to the case, and that all those dead people and their murderer are secondary to its absence.

“How curiously foolish that you would ask me when you already know,” you are gifted the sound of from the metro station courtyard from behind her eyes, more than you hear and see from your own aching body. “I had thought you knew better than that.”)  

—

Will stands before the door of Hannibal’s house, one hand rubbing absently at the side of his face. 

 The closed red eyes of the windows do not blink to see him better, their drawn curtains tight. The yellow-brown of the brickwork yields nothing in the summer sun, content to disguise and absorb.  An infernal castle the color of sulphur and flame. It looks like it should steam - fumaroles to let onlookers know the violence lurking deep inside it. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Will knocks on the pine of the front door, full of chills even in the humid heat of the afternoon. He clenches his teeth again the tremors, fighting the sensation of the aching full belly, even now, hours after waking. 

(“Why do you think Doctor Lecter is a doctor?” asks Gideon. It feels so bizarre to hear Hannibal’s name at last thrown into the ring, that you haven’t been imagining things, and the subtext is true. “I daresay he was made long before the first surgeon knew to cut away a gangrenous limb. So why would he want the distinction of such a distinctly human concept, watchful literalist that he is?” )   

(“You seem eager to say,” Will replies.) 

Hannibal doesn’t take long to answer. He is poised as though his hand has been hinged to the knob, waiting for a signal to strike. His fingers at the brass handles are as black as Will remembers, gloved and softly burnished with their velvet. He wonders if the inside of Hannibal’s mouth is black as the skin underneath, waiting to pull prey into his den, but Will can’t see it for the white grin at its front. 

Wolves and bears keep their teeth clean on other bones - it should be no surprise that Hannibal’s are so bright. 

“You look well today, Will,” he says, dressed again in shifting greens, the pocket square peeking from beneath a black lapel - a cool spot in all this brick and seething stone. “I trust that Gideon was more forthcoming than before?” 

“I’d thank you for the compliment, but we both know you don’t seem surprised to see me,” says Will, absently rubbing his left arm. “Or how well I look.” 

(“You call a man trained in the anatomy of lesser animals, and how to break down those, a butcher, right?” Gideon nods, and cracks his thumb in a loose fist. “And the man trained in the anatomy of men and how they can be broken down a doctor.”) 

“On the contrary, Will, I am surprised to see you here ,” says Hannibal, opening the door wider, velvet hands rising to carefully touch the hair behind Will’s ear - covetous, Will feels his gut insist. 

Will doesn’t immediately pull away, and Hannibal takes this for tacit permission, pressing harder, the fine hairs of the velvet scratching against the thin skin beneath them. 

“I thought I would have to meet you halfway again - keep things equitable, as it were,” he continues, gaze gleaming and affixed to his fingers’ path.  

“With all due respect, there’s nothing equitable about this. You don’t see us as equals,” says Will, staring at the threshold of the door instead of the gold in Hannibal’s eyes. His skin tingles under the increasingly ungentle touch. He is ashamed of that. 

(“Hannibal likes to call things what they are,” and Gideon laughs.)    

“Not yet,” says Hannibal, hand coming around the lobe of Will’s ear to tenderly trace the snake at his cheek. “Not as you are, but…I have watched for a long time,” he adds, “and have seen many things come into their truth by great works, once the useless parts have been washed away. I’ve been patient watching for someone like you.”

“I don’t understand,” Will says, flinching away when Hannibal’s finger drags the corner of his mouth, and the sudden hunger that finds him despite being full to bursting. His own arms come up to clutch the width of his torso and the bitter roar of his insides beneath. 

“You accrued a debt when your magic intuitively called me for answers, and again when you asked me to name my purpose, Will,” Hannibal says softly against the pull of stone-firm hands.  “I would see it paid.” 

That feels more authentic than the polite, impenetrable amusement - the tender sound next to the crushing force. They press whisper-thin breaths and anthracite thumbs to the hollow beneath Will’s jaw. They feel out the space between incisors, canines, molars, until surely the gums are white beneath them. 

Will considers pushing back - pulling the fabric tips of the fingers to see if they crumble as charcoal should, all that is recognizable of Hannibal himself long since burnt away. If instead of fingernails beneath there’s shimmering pitch-dark scales. 

Hannibal flexes his grip from painful to feather light. Maybe he senses some of this. Anger, pain, and passion share a face, and maybe both are written there for him to read. He eases the seams of the gloves across eyebrows and the soft bottom lip. 

“You needn’t be afraid,” he says. “A great alchemist doesn’t wait for worthless matter to become gold,” says Hannibal more to Will’s sweating temple beneath the wild hair there. “He applies his arts to God’s unfinished works. He makes it so.”   

Will breathes in - holds it - lets his eye lashes brush the darkness before them, fruit-rot sweet - lets Hannibal use his free hand to pull him into the vacuous entry. He ignores everything inside him, from nausea to doubt, and enters the crucible of the house. 

Will is clever enough to know better, but curious enough to want to know how. Not fit for the fork, he was told before he could be pulled into the wyrd gravity of Hannibal Lecter, no matter that he has been branded and gorged like he is destined for the meat hook like the others. 

All he can wonder is what that makes him instead, or if he is still being made.  

—

Energy is a transitive property. 

It cannot be destroyed - only put away. Tectonic plates save theirs in waves of magma, granite, and gneiss. Electricity distributes it in arcs, reaching to conduct and spark. Water creates waves, its weight pushing into the firmament wherever it can find ingress. 

Wyrdness is not so different. Wyrdness waits in marrow, fascia, and tender organs. It makes visible the magnetism of the world’s atmosphere, or the present nature of a thing. It finds the spleen. It settles in kidneys. It makes veins in the liver and muscle in the heart, settling as metals and sediment do in delta beds.  

And like any mineral that makes its home in the living tissues, it waits to be given new forms in the mouths of others - from the flora to the prey, from the prey to the predators. 

Will stares at the dining table, and the red broth swimming in a bowl of what Will comes to suspect by its dull sheen is lead - not a problem for a fey, and made only for them. The utensils are still silver,  polished to exacting standards. They are very heavy.  

“Are you familiar with vernal pools?” asks Hannibal, shaking out the green napkin that they sit on - not a pocket square. Perhaps never one at all. 

That feels right to Will, buoyant somewhere under the lungs and above the navel where there is still room for more inside him. 

He tucks it neatly into Will’s shirt collar in charmingly paternal fastidiousness, and Will lets him, not out of curiosity - 

(You know what it is - what happens next.)

- but surging certainty that he should. 

“They do not last long,” Hannibal explains, lifting the spoon, stirring. “Most dry up, their passage unmarked - ephemeral, unless they find permanence in abundance. Wyrdness is fickle that way…content to rest until it is evaporated away by its use, only as constant as the source.”

Will watches the dark meat shining dully from beneath greasy rounds of fat that settle at the bowl’s surface. Iron rich, with the kind that doesn’t cause pain, but strength instead. Spleen, kidney, liver, heart. 

“And you are very generous with your abundance,” Will replies, and thinks of Gideon’s wild eyes and thunderstruck understanding. “Unless you decide to not be.”

Hannibal looked pleased, called on his bluff but amused by directness. He turns the cutlery this way and that, looking for the way it will best sit straight. 

“Gideon wishes to be fully other,” says Hannibal, “A proper fey instead of an inheritor, like that will give him the life he thinks he deserves. Our industrious and desperate friend Abel has asked for it many times…but he cannot put enough of other people’s lives in him to surmount his deficit, no matter my guidance. Perhaps if he had put you in him, before you met me.” 

“You, however,” - he leans against Will, turning the spoon in the bowl, “were already halfway there. Only needing the bounty of a few years’ rain to be carved deeper and become something native and complete.”   

Will puzzles at this for scant seconds before the answer strikes him. 

“You…think you can make me fey,” he says. He is surprised with himself when the first emotion that brings is hesitant curiosity rather than fear.   

Hannibal shakes his head, smiling still and admiring Will’s marked hand. His marked neck and cheek. 

“Dear boy… I know it. I think you’re nearly there. You gather wyrdness as nebulae gather dust to make stars. But you burn through it too quickly  - desiccated by people without respect for your potential. I saw it in you, holding yourself apart from the likes of me but with none of the skill to keep the likes of me away.” 

“By that logic, what makes you so different from them?” Will asks the empty quiet around them.

Hannibal sets down the spoon - turns the handle towards Will - and kneels earnestly next to him, as he did the night before. 

“Perhaps I’m not,” Hannibal smiles, as kindly as the word is meant to be. Flinty eyes, ember warm. No tricks, no dancing around the subject. “Truth need not be respectful to still be truth.” 

“And what’s the truth of you ? Not your purpose - but what you are.” 

Hannibal hums mildly, smiling. “Do you not see it?” he asks.   

“I see parts,” replies Will, fingers closing around the metal, clean as the spoon and more so. Maybe that’s what the water does, no matter how many times he finds it, or wyrdness drags him and others through it - it erodes. It dissolves. He clenches his hand, just to feel the cool press of the handle. 

“The ones you care to show,” he says, grinding it against the bones there. “When you care to show them. Sometimes warmth, when it breaks through to the surface. Sometimes cruelty, when it serves you better. Aloofness. Curiosity. Appetite.” 

Hannibal hums again like he means to laugh. “Then you do see, as I’m the sum of my parts - of which there are many. Is that not the sum of most creatures? There was room in Eden for the snakes as much as men and all the rest of the animals after all. But you have a taste for this sort of thing after all - and I hate to see anything wasted.”

(The scant space in the pit of your stomach churns - the place your best thoughts live, your intuition driven by how it turns things over inside to know them. You’re hungry again, it says, when you can’t imagine ever being so. They’ll be no room left for whatever you were before if you sate it now.)

“Are you not also curious, Will?” hisses the smoking black void.  

Will raises the spoon, where broth sloughs over its edges, saponaceous and bright on its edges. The universe narrows, and contracts in its drips. 

(Maybe you do have a taste for that.) 

He takes a bite.

—

(“Think of the years it took for the Mississippi to carve its course,” says Hannibal, stroking your hair as you seize on the floor. It hurts - you don’t know what - everything, maybe. “You were born near to it, a child of its hundreds of tributaries - how wonderful that you would have its time to find one for yourself.”

You blink, watery eyed - mouthfuls of another person, the last physical matter left of them. You will bury it inside you with the others that you consumed under the watch of Hannibal, and enshrine this one as the only one you chose to eat.

“How perfect you will be like this,” says Hannibal, wiping spittle from your mouth with hands that leave greasy soot, you held aloft in his lap from the wooden floorboards in the cavernous vastness of the house. You think you laugh through bubbling blood in your throat at the irony. All the mess of the things before washed away, to be replaced by the hidden, elegant mess of him after. You’re relieved by that - that the sum of his parts includes something as base and unattractive as that. Maybe there will be room left for some part of the old you after all.

“How terrible it will be when you will at last be able to see on your own terms,” he continues stroking at your cheek, black line after black line written there.)

—

When Will is twelve years old, he is told that he is powerful, and that he is vulnerable to harm. He is shy of the attention and the smoking anise, and very lonely in his fear. With good reason there is no discussion of what he can do with that inborn electricity, only that someone else might abuse it, or harness it for greater purpose.

Floating downwards now, in the dark of the reservoir once more, that sounds like inevitability more than it does a threat.

Maybe he is not in control of anything he does or who knows him. Maybe it was only a matter of time before he would have to change or be caught. Twenty years of careful dancing around the margins of where humanity and wyrdness meet, all lost for a case that would have resolved itself once Gideon lost his patience with Hannibal’s ambivalence. Hannibal understands a thing as it presently exists - and there was not the base material necessary in Gideon for his potion’s craft.

(But there is - was - in you.) 

From this far down in the mute depths, the case is a very small footnote. Nothing is left to solve that is actionable either. Miriam Lass is gone - maybe in one of the spoonfuls that Will forces down alongside Gideon’s wife, winking out of the broth in blistering red chili pepper bites. Maybe that’s what hurt inside him, kicking her way to the forefront of him, never able to leave between the sinew of his insides.

Will follows after her thoughts, one more time. 

They drip from the leaves of her bird’s eye garden. They condensate on her desk. They sparkle in the morning sunlight, buzzing between the dozens of others in the sea of people that makes her last home. 

—

The water of the memorial station splashes chlorine fresh. Pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters wink from beneath the ripples, left behind for good luck, waiting impatiently to be collected. It is cool and sparkling on the seventh day since Gideon’s arrest, and untroubled save for the sudden contraction of it. 

For a moment, it is a pond. It is a lake. It is the slot of a subterranean cave, subsumed with lime and burning itself away. 

From this, Will stands, sopping in his one good work blazer and shirt.

He blinks here too, clutching at a mouth that only tastes of water and stone and a belly that is flat and unbothered by hunger or glut. This he clutches at longer, pressing at where the ribs disappear.

(“Agonizing, isn’t it?” Hannibal asks, passing thumbs over your eyes, wicking away what you think is tears. His mouth is very close to yours. “You will have no use for growing pains next time we meet,” he says with copper sweet breaths, lips not quite kissing but speaking into yours. “Neither will you fear debts.”)    

There is no Hannibal Lecter to pull him from the water this time - only his own grip against the soggy line of his arm. Will sees his unmarked hand, and lets go of his stomach to marvel at this instead. 

Clean, marble white, as veined and rough at the knuckles as he remembers before the unintentional favor begins to grow - just as wet as the rest of him too. He holds it up to the sunlight, watching the brightness pass through droplets - each a mirror and a spyglass. 

They whisper, a constant murmuring that Will cannot make sense of at first. 

“Officer Graham,” comes a call from across the courtyard.

The droplets roll downwards, stinking of clean sheets and reactants. A shadow passes through each of them - Will watches them individually reflect the growing image of Agent Crawford’s familiar face, and say in their twinkling fountain whispers, look there.  

Agent Crawford, who rises from the maw of the station’s tunnel, looks at Will like he’s seen a ghost. His eyes look for serpent seals, or perhaps wounds, even as his hands defensively remain in his pockets. He seems perturbed to find none. 

“I’d hoped I’d find you here,” says Crawford, rubbing the back of his neck mildly, but not without keeping his gaze unusually sharp to Will’s face. Whatever he sees there, he doesn’t like. “You left without telling anyone where you’re going, and Gideon has done nothing but giggle about it. Thought you might be sick.”  

Will opens his mouth to answer, but stops. 

His ears buzz, and his arms with them.  

Something got him, comes a quiet accusation through the space between Will and the stolid rise of Crawford from the stairs. It sounds close, but far away - through a full glass, or muffled by bubbles underwater, like he has held his head beneath a tub full of them. It speaks into his ear, borrows the idea of Crawford’s voice. 

Maybe Gideon - maybe Lecter. Lecter’s a liar like they all are, if an occasionally useful one, it says - it would be like him to not explain if there was danger. There must have been. Just look at what happened to Lass.    

Will frowns, brows furrowing together - listens longer - watches the furrows in Crawford’s face grow the longer Will waits to respond. He pulls his soaking hand up closer to his ears, wrist turned like he is merely checking the time.   

Just look at what’s happened to Graham, says the muffled, sloshing voice of Jack Crawford between them in greater volume.  It chimes from each droplet, seemingly unheard by anyone other than Will. 

Private thoughts, he thinks. Distilled from the air as sure as vapor is, to pool on him.

(“I do not have your magnetism for truth,” says Hannibal, who sees the literal potential of that in you and laughs with an apologetic face to hide it.)

Will reaches into his pocket, hand shaking, and all the little humming voices with it as the droplets shift and catch on the fabric. The water-logged phone presses against the wall of the jacket, dead and useless, with something else next to it. 

He pulls it out - an emerald green pocket square. 

A napkin. A token. A parting reminder that he has been transformed. 

(That is a truth and a pain that is at least more merciful than your meals of late. It grows inside you, saying you are a finished work, but not a forgotten one.)

Will shakes it open. 

Just look at what’s happened to Graham , the water repeats.

Enough of that for now, Will thinks kindly to them, and wipes the water droplets from his hands and face away, pocket square a flag of restful green for them to hide behind with their humming. They vanish into the threads of the green fabric, and every part of his fingers and clothes is as crisp and dry as the summer. It is quiet and light again.  

Will smiles at Crawford - the wincing kind, he thinks, the way the fearful Officer Graham would. A small one, even as he feels fit to fill the granite and concrete of the courtyard, maybe spill further down Pennsylvania Avenue to the shores of the Potomac and back home. 

He holds that compulsion in  - he feels able to now. 

Will casts his gaze back down to the fountain below. The shimmering surface of it waves its agreement - invites him back down into it. The splashes ask if he would like to go somewhere else. The ripples ask if they may guide him there. 

To the hotel shower. Patterson Park. The Mississippi banks and its city apartments and sinking cemeteries. The Gulf of Mexico, to the bottom of the Atlantic and the pulling gravity of the equator’s belt on the earth. To Hannibal Lecter’s house, which must surely be its center. 

What is the dining room and the proffered silver spoon if not Will’s inevitability, and he its patient master transforming things that come into his gravity? A scholar of things above and magician of things below, as it suits him.

“Graham?” Crawford interrupts him, and brings Will back to the stairs of the Archives-Navy Memorial Station, and its modest reflecting pool. 

“I’m ok, Agent Crawford,” says Will, fabric passing over neon-bright eyes. They fluoresce with the same gentle light of sunlight at the bottom of a pool, and all the little droplets he casts away. “Just dinner plans that I had to rush to. It was a long standing invitation that I couldn’t politely refuse.”

“And that was your priority over the case?” asks Jack carefully, gaze still set to Will’s. 

“I’m sure you’ll be welcome to take it from my consulting fees,” Will says with a shrug, recalling the taste of herbs and metal-dense meat. Where his belly is calm, now instead his mouth waters for more. His eyes burn. “ I’ve been told that food is valuable, and that I do hungry work.”

(As is water. As is gold.)