Chapter Text
Hannibal sleeps, so Will doesn’t.
It’s sleep or unlife, death or dreaming and they can’t both be awake so one of them must. It’s Will, bracing good shoulder against the bed as if for impact but really so he doesn’t sink to the floor and keep going.
It’s Will, watching Hannibal’s arm, blood and sweater and seawater, shelter the hole in his side. It’s Will, blinking away the stickiness of the minute, hour, day.
They’re both chilled but their wounds sour in the heat. Sour hour and the hot press of Hannibal’s side against Will’s curious palm and the curdled blood that Will keeps tonguing from his cheek. He spits it where Hannibal and his half-lidded gaze can’t see. Not out of any strong desire to shirk medical advice or make Hannibal worry—Hannibal deserves to be consumed by something as painfully human and rotten as worry—but because he might get a tongue in his mouth for the trouble.
It’s a hazy, tissue-paper thought, delicately shredded like the slick of his mangled cheek under his own tongue. It’s hard to know where it comes from. Sleep or unliving, dead or dreaming.
The flies know they may as well be dead and treat it like a foregone conclusion.
Hannibal is different sideways, supine, half-curled and mouth slack. The math is all wrong, Will thinks, sweat-matted hair crushed under his head half-cocked against the cool mattress. He knows the geometry of forehead to silvered cheekbone scar to soft corner of lips hooked on a scar of their own but the proof of it slides quietly through his fingers.
Will inches them towards Hannibal’s instead. Stops.
Hannibal’s eyes are a sliver. Glassy with fever, faraway like resin and pearlescent paint fitted in scraped orbits of mounted heads. They won’t catch the light, either, glittering, because he is not an animal who sees well in the dark, eyeteeth and hunger besides.
“Is this what you wanted, Will?”
A palm up, like a question. A pinky, blood dried on the edge of it, brushing against Will’s knuckles, more scuffed and swollen than breaking up soft from the root system of his veins.
Will takes the hand like he can crush it and everything else. Hard? Too hard? It’s always too hard.
His mouth is all clots and stung-nerve tongue. It’ll hurt to open. It’ll hurt to say yes. It’ll hurt to say no.
No matter which one is the truth.