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When Will pointed at the exit sign beside the highway, Hannibal thought he was joking. An ill-advised joke, to be sure, and very badly executed, but Will had never been particularly adept with humor that wasn’t either sarcastic or bittersweet. When Will’s insistent pointing turned into stubbornly crossed arms, Hannibal experienced a sudden surge of adrenaline that felt suspiciously like panic. But he could feel Will rapidly shifting into what he termed “The Silent Treatment” (another Will Joke, except when it was entirely serious), and when Hannibal weighed Will’s silence against the thought of suffering for a half hour at most, he took the exit without objection.
The McDonald’s sign shone like a beacon on the towering street-side pole. Cars were packed into the parking lot around it, all dark and silent except for the slow trickle of brake lights through the drive-thru. The whole tableau reminded Hannibal of classical engravings of the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. He turned to remark on the similarity of a crowd of sinners around a golden idol (and the obvious beef connection) but Will was already out of the car and slamming the door. Alone in the car, Hannibal thought about delivering the speech anyway — it was a good joke, not a Will Joke at all — but talking to oneself was suspect, psychologically speaking. Besides, the windows weren’t tinted and Will would almost certainly see. Hannibal restricted himself to a sigh.
The parking lot stank of both engine and cooking grease as they crossed to the door. Hannibal stepped over a puddle and began to regret not leaving his spotless coat in the car. The door loomed before them, dingy and dotted with well-defined fingerprints. One of them was going to have to touch it, he realized with dawning horror. He was going to have to sacrifice his favorite driving gloves, all so Will could eat a soggy, shrunken lump of waste products masquerading as food —
Will leaned in front of Hannibal and opened the door. The gloves were saved, but Hannibal’s reprieve was short-lived. The smell of grease washed over him like a physical presence. He could almost feel it condensing on his skin and clinging to his hair. It took all his self-control not to gag.
It might have been a trick of the stark, ugly fluorescent lights, but Will’s knowing smile had an almost evil edge.
Will led the way into an extremely disorderly line that seemed to be a mix of people waiting for food they’d already ordered and people who hadn’t ordered at all. Hannibal stared hard at the poles that were meant to be connected with ropes in order to direct foot traffic — and wondered why they existed if they were never put to use.
“You look like you’re at a funeral,” Will said at last. The amorphous line-that-was-not-a-line shifted and reordered. They moved up a step.
“My own, perhaps,” muttered Hannibal thoughtfully. His tone sounded properly martyred, he thought. A hint of wounded righteousness and benevolent forgiveness for the one trespassing against him. He waited for Will to apologize.
Will shrugged.
“It’s lunchtime,” he said, as though that was any kind of excuse or explanation. No matter how hard Hannibal glared, Will wore an indolent smile and refused eye contact.
Somewhere behind him, Hannibal detected the arrival of a large family in the line-that-was-not-a-line. Without looking — he refused to look around him and acknowledge the reality of this eighth circle of Hell — he counted four children. Numbering them by sound alone was easy enough; they were all clamoring for happy meals in tones very near the maximum level of both pitch and volume.
He’d often mused on the strength of family bonds and the nearly supernatural ability of family members to find each other. In the most unlikely of circumstances (with sticky orange tile underfoot and glaring fluorescent lights overhead and current pop hits playing through damaged speakers), Hannibal had a sudden breakthrough. Perhaps it wasn’t mysterious at all.
Perhaps it was merely echolocation.
The youngest of the brood let out a particularly shrill wail; Hannibal began to retreat into his memory palace.
Will tapped his arm, pulling him away from vaulted ceilings and music and clear white light.
“Sure you don’t want anything?” he asked. “You must be hungry. It’s lunchtime.”
Hannibal distilled all his disdain into a single look. “Time is a construct, Will.”
Will, annoyingly, looked him in the eye (disdain and all) and laughed.
“I can't help but notice that it wasn't a construct at breakfast when you were hungry,” he remarked, and left Hannibal’s flash of annoyance behind him when he moved forward in line.
“Perhaps because we went to a bistro with edible food on the menu,” he said to the back of Will’s head. “There is no such food here.”
Will’s hair was always a welcome sight, whether brushed and gelled into submission for a night out or sleep-mussed and wild against their pillows, but on this particular occasion, Hannibal found it a frustrating vista.
“No food on the menu, in any case,” he added carelessly, forcing himself to turn his head enough to create the impression that he was perusing a butcher shop for cuts of meat.
Will turned on him in a flash to unleash the warning look he’d perfected over the last few months. Hannibal was hard-pressed not to smile with delight.
Will searched his eyes and relaxed. Satisfied that Hannibal wasn’t serious, a smile twitched around the corner of his lips. Hannibal mentally added a tick mark to the Hannibal Jokes column. The total was so outrageously stacked against Will that there was no hope of him ever catching up. Hannibal allowed a fleeting smile before smoothing it away.
“None of these people have been rude,” Will objected without heat. Merely prolonging the game. Hannibal delighted in their games.
“Look at where we are, Will,” he said, glancing around with what Will would certainly call one of his evil looks. “Eating here is offense enough.”
Will closed his eyes. “Oh my God,” he muttered, shaking his head.
Hannibal smirked. “Praying, Will?”
Will opened his eyes again, and his expression would have withered the pathetic bushes beyond the windows if they’d possessed any life to start with.
“No,” he said. “But if I was, I'd be begging for patience. Stop looking at people like that.” A razor’s edge of sarcasm crept into Will’s tone. “I’m pretty sure you made that baby cry,” he said, nodding vaguely at the family of echolocaters behind them. Hannibal was about to object that this was an extremely unfair accusation — the child had started crying over its insipid happy meal toy long before Hannibal made any cannibalistic overtures—
“Anyway,” Will continued, interrupting his thoughts. “I thought you never felt guilty about eating anything?”
Oh, this was really too much. Hannibal seriously considered taking the tally of Will Jokes into the negatives. He relented on the grounds that it was excessive and unnecessary.
“There is a difference between guilt and horror,” he said loftily, and lifted his eyes like a man thinking Deep Thoughts.
Will ruined the effect by snorting.
“You're killing me,” he muttered, but Hannibal heard the undercurrent of a laugh.
“Not yet,” he replied. He flashed a wicked smile. “However, if this continues…”
Will looked completely unimpressed. “Fine,” he conceded, moving up to the register at last. “I’ll take one Big Mac meal, please.”
Hannibal began to count the seconds until they could leave. Soon they’d be away from abused formica tables and peeling wallpaper and the cloying stench of cheap meat. He could survive a few more seconds. It had been a close thing, but he’d managed to come out of this mostly unscathed…
When Will spoke again, Hannibal heard the twist of his smile even without seeing it. Alarms sounded in his mind. He knew that tone. It was the Hannibal-will-suffer tone. He braced for impact.
“He’s paying,” Will said, and turned his grin on Hannibal.
===
Hannibal was so relieved by the prospect of escaping the premises of the restaurant (although he hesitated to call a grease factory by such an elevating title), that he agreed to let Will eat his abomination of a meal in the car. It was very well insured. If Will stained the interior or the smell wouldn’t come out of the carpet, Hannibal could always drive it into a standing body of water and buy another.
He was halfway across the parking lot when he realized Will wasn’t beside him.
“Hannibal!” Called his distant voice with something like glee. Hannibal was instantly wary. He turned to find Will staring at a bench encrusted with both dirt and gum that was situated on the sidewalk. There was a stiff, slightly eerie figure sitting on the bench. As Hannibal approached, he perceived it wasn’t a man at all — it was a man-sized clown statue mounted, bafflingly, on the bench. The figure was seated, one arm extended along the back of the bench in invitation. Its frozen smile was fixed on the parking lot.
Hannibal didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so revolting. With the possible exception of the contents of the paper bag in Will’s hand.
“Ronald McDonald,” Will clarified in the condescending way he often did when he was laughing about Hannibal leading a charmed and/or pretentious life.
The Will Jokes column abruptly fell to -1.
“You know,” said Will in a conciliatory tone that instantly put Hannibal on guard. “We could eat here, if you'd rather not have food in the car.”
Hannibal watched Will’s hand creep toward his pocket — and his phone. He saw his plan in a sudden flash of insight, pale lightning illuminating the jagged, confounding terrain of Will’s mind. He wanted to ambush Hannibal into a photograph with the clown statue for his own demented purposes.
For a moment, he marveled at the unpredictability of Will’s labyrinthine mind.
But then he imagined the existence of such a photo. It would be found somehow, in the way that all damning photographic evidence was. He could easily imagine the TattleCrime exclusive: Fallen Gourmand: The Chicken Nuggets are People! Hannibal nearly snarled at the thought. He had to defend his reputation, he decided grimly. Some things were sacred.
“Oh no, Will,” he insisted with his most charming smile. “We’ll eat where you’re most comfortable.”
===
After a torturously long period of time that Hannibal’s watch informed him was only thirty seconds, he regretted allowing the horrendous display currently occupying the passenger seat. Will had taken the unfortunate maxim “dig in” to heart, and was consuming his Big Mac with all the grace of a shovel.
To add insult to injury, he was moaning in a way that Hannibal had only ever heard in a very different context.
He began a list in his mind:
Things That Can Elicit Delicious Sounds from Will:
1. Myself
2. A barely edible monstrosity from McDonald’s
He mentally tore up the list.
“Sure you don't want a bite?” Will asked, the picture of innocence and solicitude.
“I've never been more certain of anything in my life,” Hannibal replied stiffly.
“Your loss,” said Will. Then: “Come on. It's not that bad.”
Hannibal’s sigh escaped before he could control it — an alarming lack of discipline. He decided to punish Will by talking at length about Dante.
“Are you familiar with Dante’s Inferno?” He began with relish. “Doré made particularly visceral images of the damned, punished and crying out in agony. I have always been able to envision the sight and sound of such torment.” He looked pointedly at the burger in Will’s hands and the grease stain that marked the position of the fries in the bag on his lap. “But not until this moment have I been able to imagine the smell.”
Will took an enormous bite and chewed thoughtfully. The epiphany broke over his face like sunlight piercing a cloud bank, dazzlingly bright — and so exaggerated that it couldn't possibly be genuine.
“You know where food is worse than this?” Will asked with a tone so guileless that Hannibal could almost taste the guile. Or perhaps the toxic fumes of Will’s dinner were merely congealing on his tongue.
Will didn’t seem disappointed when Hannibal didn’t rise to his bait, but he did lean closer, as though proximity might increase the weight of his words.
“In prison,” he said pointedly, and took another massive bite.
Hannibal could feel the power of his own withering glare, but Will seemed blissfully unaffected as he licked the sauce (a watery solution that was an alarming shade of radioactive orange spotted with flecks of green) from his fingers.
“Even in the Baltimore State Hospital,” Hannibal replied, pointedly leaving off “for the Criminally Insane” as it was an insult to both himself and Will, “the food was superior.”
It was an objective fact. Not even a stubborn Will could deny it.
“That's only because they let you cook,” Will argued, dragging his fingers across a napkin until it was a crumpled, soggy version of itself. “For some reason. You're lucky I wasn't in charge. I'd have sent in McDonald's three times a day and laughed my ass off.”
Despite the fact that Hannibal could still smell the grease-soaked beef patties, and despite the fact that Will was eying the bag of fries with intent, Hannibal softened.
“No,” he said in a quiet tone. “You wouldn't have.”
Will went still, and something leaked out of his posture, leaving him less prickly than before.
“No, I wouldn’t have,” he agreed softly. “Well. Maybe for a while. Hand me another napkin?”
It took Hannibal several lingering moments to understand that Will meant for him to reach into the paper bag and retrieve said napkin. He didn’t understand why he needed assistance; it wasn’t as though the bag would be further damaged if some of the radioactive sauce stained it. But Will’s eyes had gentled, and Hannibal was too distracted to insist that Will had made his grease-covered bed and now deserved to lie in it.
He leaned across the car, shoulder brushing Will’s, and reached into the bag, feeling very much like a man grasping at a bear trap that might spring shut at any moment. He was so focused on avoiding the horrific prospect of brushing his coat sleeve against a grease stain that he didn’t notice the other threatening horror until it was much too late.
Will kissed him with all the lightning speed of a striking cobra, using Hannibal’s shock to his advantage when he shoved his tongue between his slack lips.
Hannibal experienced a mind-numbing cognitive dissonance between the jolt of pleasure from Will’s touch and the searing horror of becoming so intimately acquainted with the flavor of a Big Mac.
He knew it would haunt him to his dying day.
Nevertheless, it was Will who pulled away first, wearing a self-satisfied smirk.
“See?” He said, in a surprisingly good imitation of Hannibal's profound tone on the cliff top months earlier. “Not that bad.”
The Big Mac flavor was overwhelming; Hannibal was too nauseous to reply. He felt something very like fear when his stomach lurched and threatened to empty itself all over the interior of his car. He was prepared to sink the car into a convenient lake if Will stained the interior, but not even buying a new car would cure his despair if he had to dispose of the car because of vomit.
He snatched a handkerchief from an inner pocket and ignored Will’s incredulous, “Is that monogrammed?” in favor of focusing on deep, even breaths.
The nausea passed.
Will, infuriatingly, was munching on fries.
“I bet now you could tell me all the ingredients in the special sauce,” he mused between bites.
Hannibal grasped for his dignity as he carefully folded his handkerchief (and kept the monogram out of Will’s line of sight).
“I could,” he agreed imperiously, “if there were any edible ingredients. Although I can easily imagine that despair might taste like that combination of freezer burned beef and stale bread.”
When Will smiled, Hannibal knew he’d somehow said precisely what Will had wanted him to say. He realized he wasn’t as troubled by that fact as he once would have been.
“That's where you're wrong,” Will said, dragging a fry through a puddle of sauce on the paper wrapper. He popped it into his mouth and chewed reflectively. “Yes,” he concluded, “I definitely recognize this. That's the flavor of reckoning.”
For a moment, Hannibal was still and silent.
And then he begrudgingly added a single tally mark to Will’s side of the board.