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If you ask the psychiatry community in Baltimore, or hell, even the general DC metropolitan area, they would tell you that making eye contact with Will Graham was near impossible. They would tell you talking to him about, well, him, would be near impossible. You know that ad on tv, the one that tells you that nine out of ten dentists love this toothpaste and you should definitely buy it? That’s how psychiatrists phrase their love for Will Graham. Not like they’re getting any closer to the toothpaste, per se.
Nine — nope, ten out of ten psychiatrists would kill for a chance to be in a therapy session with Will. The empathy that bleeds out of him could keep a doctor on a high daze for days. And let’s not get started on Will’s bone structure. The Adonis jaw and the wide forehead, and the curly hair and the eyes and — it didn’t matter your gender. If you were a psychiatrist slash psychologist slash therapist slash counselor with the ability to see with thine own eyes, Will Graham was a wet dream.
Will was quite stupid though for someone that had two degrees and taught future FBI agents. He just sort of ignored the longing stares of all of the psychiatrists he saw throughout college and his time as a cop and attributed the weird horny feelings he felt as all the doctors being turned on by his brain. It’s half true, truth be told. He thought that was the norm until he started having conversations with Hannibal. He mentions it offhand, one day, and Hannibal raises his eyebrows.
“So during your psychiatry sessions, you would empathize with all your doctors — and correct me if I’m phrasing this wrong, Will — you would feel their sexual excitement.”
“Well, when you put it that way —”
“And you think it’s because of your brain?”
Will is embarrassed. “It’s not? I mean, anytime I see any kind of doctor, it just hits me. Like, I don’t know if it’s because I don’t get laid enough, or something, but it’s really strong.”
“Will —” Hannibal’s mouth twitches, like he’s trying not to smile.
They don’t really get to finish the conversation, because a crime scene calls, and the beauty of it takes Will down a stream where body parts are strewn across, bobbing up and down, flesh colored things in the dark murkiness.
*
It’s not until Hannibal invites him to a dinner party that the topic gets broached again. He’s there with a wine bottle he gets Alana to buy for him which Hannibal accepts, looking pleased, even though Will knows he knows Alana chose it out for him. Will blushes when Hannibal’s fingers brush on his own, accepting the bottle, and he gets a weird feeling in his stomach. He decides to attribute it to being hungry, because, Will again, is pretty stupid for someone who has two degrees. It doesn’t help that Hannibal looks handsome in his plaid colored suit, with his finely cut cheekbones reflecting the gloomy light Hannibal has in his house. Will is stupid, sure, but he knows a good set of features when he sees them — objectively, of course.
He’s in the appetizer section with Bev, who is somehow trying to beat him on how many crab legs they can eat, and he’s on his fifth one, when he feels a set of eyes on him. When he turns around, it’s Chilton, a doctor Will met once on a case with Jack. He mostly remembers Chilton vomiting after finding Abel Gideon’s latest masterpiece at his own residence, but that's another story, albeit very funny.
“Will Graham. At a dinner party,” Chilton preens. “I never thought I would see the day.”
Will rolls his eyes, and lets the crab leg drop onto his plate. “Chilton.”
“You do realize you’re at a psychiatrist’s house? Isn’t this forbidden in your world?”
Will shakes his head, and Bev decides to chirp from behind him, “It’s Hannibal’s house.”
“Ah, yes, the ever magnanimous Hannibal. He must realize what a gem he has on his hands,” Chilton says, and he looks up at Will from beneath his eyelashes.
“Gem?” Will asks, confused.
“You’re his patient, Will. Who else in Baltimore, why, the world, even gets close?”
Will huffs out a breath. “We’re just having conversations. He doesn’t try to, well, dissect me. Like the rest of you guys do.” In that, he finds relief.
“He doesn’t? Well, to each their own,” Chilton says, his hand coming down on his cane with sureness, and he gazes at Will. Chilton was always very dramatic.
But then Will feels it — a stab of heat in his stomach, and somewhat of a blush coming over his face.
See, the thing with empathy is, sometimes you don’t know where it’s coming from — either it’s the other person, or yourself, or a weird horrifying mix of both. Right now though, he’s feeling fully aroused from what, a five minute conversation? He knows it’s not him. Chilton’s just not his type.
“Uh. Dr. Chilton. If you would excuse me,” he says, his voice coming out a bit high. Bev peers at him, and she mouths doctor?
“Doctor? Well, aren’t we on our best behavior today, Will,” Chilton beams at him. Will couldn’t hightail it out of there fast enough because he was, uh, yeah, definitely getting hard. He mutters that he needs to go to the bathroom to Bev and she nods, taking it in stride, because she’s used to Weird Will.
He manages to make it out of the room, his cheeks fully red, and he bumps into a woman in the hallway on his way to the bathroom. He says sorry, politely, like Hannibal taught him, but the woman stops him.
“Will? Will Graham?” Her voice is deep and raspy, like she smoked at least a pack before she got to the party.
Will doesn’t make eye contact, as usual, but he mutters a hello because he tries to make it a rule to not be rude to any of Hannibal’s guests, Chilton excluded, of course.
She puts a hand on his arm, and he doesn’t miss the way she slightly presses down and her bright eyes seem like they know something he doesn’t.
“I’m Dr. Ruba Mirza. I’ve heard so much about you,” she says, and for someone very short, she positively radiates alpha energy. It’s in the way that Will can’t seem to move from her gaze, and he’s not even making full eye contact.
“Oh, uh — I’m Will Graham,” he says, not thinking, and she grins, and comes a little closer.
“Oh, I know, darling. We were so sad to hear that you were a taken man.” It’s practically a purr.
“Taken? Oh, no, I’m not like — seeing anyone —” he tries to stutter out because to be quite fair, Will has accepted he would be single the rest of his life, due to you, know, his whole fucking existence.
“Oh, you’re as delightful as Dr. Chilton mentioned,” she says, laughing, and is it Will or is she caressing his arm? “I just meant that, Hannibal has you all to himself. That beautiful brain just for him,” she sighs. “No one else.”
Will sighs. “I mean. We just talk — it’s just talking about cases, you know, nothing too serious. We’re friends?” He offers that last bit up, like he isn’t sure himself. He’s aware he may sound a bit dumb.
She laughs again, the sound tinkling. Will makes a sound he hopes sounds like a laugh as well, but he might as well sound like a hyena, and yes, we’re talking the ones from The Lion King.
Dr. Mirza is beautiful, Will admits, hoping she’ll ignore his anxiety, but Will feels the stabbing heat again, this time in his gut, spreading towards his groin. Oh, god. Now it’s physical, Will thinks, and he’s trying to think of the dead body Bev cut up this morning to help a little, but it just makes him choke out more hyena-like laughter.
Will really needs to leave, because the vibe he’s getting from Dr. Mirza is too close to comfort for his liking. God, why is everyone so aroused by his brain? He tries to edge from her slowly, her hand still on his arm, and he swears he feels it tighten, possessive. He squeaks out, “Ihavetogopeesorry!” and jerks his arm away. He senses her smile more than sees it when he practically runs away so he knows he wasn’t terribly rude. He’s trying to at least not ruin Hannibal’s reputation.
He ends up in the kitchen, because Will can never find the bathroom in Hannibal’s house. It’s a maze, and Will doesn’t have the heart to go and ask for help with his face all red.
“Will?”
Will turns. Hannibal is there in the kitchen, with whipped cream in a bowl in his hands. There are some tarts in front of him on the counter, some topped with cream, and some not.
“Oh. Hannibal. Hi.” Will hopes he doesn’t look crazy.
“Are you alright? You look like you have a fever.” Hannibal’s brow furrows, concerned. Ok, Will does look crazy.
“No, no, I’m just. Getting some fresh air.” Will explains, and wipes his sweaty forehead. He blows air out of his mouth at the same time, hoping his cheeks aren’t too pink.
Hannibal looks amused. “The kitchen is not the best place, I’m afraid. Far too many aromas lurking. Your lungs will be confused with your idea of fresh air, Will.”
“Right. What I meant was, uh, a change of scenery,” he gestures to the steel kitchen around him. Hannibal smiles at him, no doubt used to a clammy Will on any day ending with a y.
Will notices that Hannibal isn’t wearing his suit jacket, and by notice, he means he’s looking at Hannibal’s forearms with the sleeves folded up intricately. For a psychiatrist whose only hobby is cooking, drawing, and crying at the opera, Hannibal is pretty fit. Will remembers Dr. Mirza in the hallway, her hand a slight pressure on his own arm, and wonders what Hannibal’s hand would feel like. Maybe more pressure would be nice.
Will clears his throat, and tries not to come to the conclusion that he may or may not be attracted to his therapist. That required a whole dissertation. “Do you want some help with that?”
“No, it’s quite all right. I’m almost done,” Hannibal says, moving the whisk in the bowl. “We had a shortage of these tarts, and I had some extras lying around in my fridge. I thought I would just prepare them myself.”
He takes a dollop of cream and centers it perfectly on the last tart, its peak coming to a perfect curl. Hannibal wipes away a bit of cream that ends up on his thumb by pressing it to his lips, his tongue darting out to catch the white smear. Will was totally fine, but now he watches the minutiae act, horrified. It’s like The Return of the Butterflies: The Sequel in his stomach right now, and it really needs to stop. Who knew a dinner party at his doctor’s house could end up with this many feelings?
He decides to combat said feelings by glaring down at his body, but if anything, it gets worse, because Hannibal picks up the tray of tarts, his hands on the edge, almost delicately and Will comes to another great conclusion: Hannibal has nice, big hands. Good. Amazing.
“Will? Are you coming?” Hannibal tilts his head, and Will nods, jerkily. He ends up holding the door for Hannibal, and Hannibal does that thing where he looks fondly at Will for no reason at all and Will doesn’t know what to do with it.
They end up in the dinner room again, and Will sees Bev and Alana off to the side, laughing at something. It’s like a game almost, how Will catalogues everyone he sees in a room, something he’s always been used to doing since he was a kid and realized he could assume anyone’s point of view. It was easier at crime scenes, to be honest, because the violence was sometimes so great it edged out everything in competition.
This is why Will didn’t socialize with more than one person at a time. The feelings were all normal, justified, calm, cute. He felt all of it.
He could feel Jack Crawford radiating hunger from behind him about the tarts Hannibal was holding, and Bella’s annoyance at Jack about him accidentally spilling some wine on her dress. He could feel Chilton’s gaze upon him again, and it felt different from before, almost like jealousy this time around. He could feel Bev’s warmness and Alana’s happiness, and — a buzzing feeling almost. It sounds like the hum of insects on a warm summer day, and Will thinks that could be just because of how many people were in the room so he willfully ignores it. This is somewhat of a defense mechanism on Will’s part — let’s ignore all the red flags.
Hannibal sets down the tray. Jack reaches down to pick up a tart immediately, and tells Bella they taste absolutely amazing, and she should try one, and Hannibal beams at Bella when she does.
Will wants to try one of the tarts, specifically the one that grazed Hannibal’s thumb, but the buzzing sound gets louder, and he winces at the full brevity of it. That’s the red flag he ignored.
Will feels hot. He feels like his clothes are drenched in sweat, like he came out of a pool soaking wet, but when he looks down, he’s dry. He reaches up to swipe a curl from his forehead and the intensity of the sound and feeling increases.
He hears rather than feels Bev’s concern, which is discomfiting, considering he’s supposed to feel at least that, too.
“Will? Are you okay?” A hand comes up to his shoulder, and Bev peers up at him, her face worried.
A different hand appears on his other shoulder, Hannibal this time.
“He mentioned needing fresh air,” Hannibal says, and he turns his body to shield Will from the rest of the room. Hannibal reaches up to hold a hand to Will’s forehead, making Will blush. Not like he needs the extra blush, because he’s pretty sure he’s gathering some collective feeling from the room — he’s not sure if it’s just some aphrodisiac in the food, or an orgy. He senses the heat in the room, almost like a cusp before the chorus of the song, and he should feel concerned about it, but he just feels bad that his forehead is getting too damp for Hannibal’s big, and nice hands.
“I’m fine — honestly, I just need to —” and nope, Will is not fine, because he’s getting bits and pieces from the room at this point, and people are just extremely turned on. He’s almost dizzy with the full excitement. God, this can’t be an orgy. Will would die if Hannibal saw him naked.
Hannibal’s hand on his face tightens, and he darts an eye around the room. His face makes an imperceptible twitch and he comes back to look Will straight in the eye. Maybe Hannibal gets the whole predicament, because he smiles, not with his mouth, but his eyes. If Will could define it, he would say Hannibal was grinning like a cheshire cat, which was impossible, because Hannibal never grins.
Will suddenly notices both of Hannibal’s hands are cradling his face, and he doesn’t know how it happened. Did he space out again?
“Will. I need you to only look at me,” Hannibal says. Will makes eye contact, not that hard, considering Hannibal was easy to look at. “Can you try and empathize with me, if you could?”
Will tries — and he has tried it before, assuming Hannibal’s point of view, but it was an impenetrable wall, really, and Will could only ever glean a recipe for lamb brains during one of their sessions that one time.
Will’s trying again, but he meets the wall. This time, however, there’s a crack — a flash — smooth skin, a thumb caressing a mole. Hands around someone’s neck. Pressure. A slight bite, teeth sharp. Will wrenches his eyes open and tries to smother the gasp that comes out of his mouth, and Hannibal’s fingers tighten even more.
That’s when Will faints.
The fainting part is nice, because it’s like still being alive, but not really committing to it. In Will’s head this time, he just sees miles and miles of skin, smooth, muscles flexing, and cheekbones sharp enough to cut him. Yes, fainting is nice.
When Will comes to, he’s on the floor, half of his body on someone’s lap. They’re holding Will effectively, trapping him within their arms.
He hears:
“This has never happened before. At least, not at any of our crime scenes, and we have tons of people onsite.” That’s Jack.
“His lectures seem okay. He doesn’t ever burn out like this.” Beverly this time.
“I’m sure the number of people in the room, along with the fact that it was all pure socialization in such a tiny space, was too much for his mind.” Hannibal’s voice. Strange, Will could feel the vibrations of Hannibal’s words, and to his horror, realizes he’s lying in Hannibal’s lap.
He squirms, and Hannibal’s arms tighten around him once he realizes Will is conscious. “Will? Are you okay?”
“Uh. No.” He tries to slide out of Hannibal’s arms, but Hannibal is not having it, instead taking the chance to feel his forehead again and shift Will so that he is sitting up a little.
Will gives up on trying to escape, and instead looks around to find Bev, Jack, Bella, and Alana’s anxious faces around him.
“Where is everyone?” The room is empty, save for the help who Hannibal hired to help clean.
“Hannibal kicked everyone out,” Bev announces, grinning at Hannibal, who’s eyes crinkle with amusement in response.
Will groans. “Oh, god. You didn’t have to do that. It was just overheating —” He didn’t really want to explain what it was, to be honest. Overheating seemed like a safe response.
Alana says, “Overheating?” at the same time Jack says, “It’s in the middle of winter, Will.”
“You were so hot we had to force feed you water and cover you in damp towels,” Bev says, and that explains why he feels like he actually did come out of a pool this time.
“I would technically classify it as overheating,” Hannibal allows. His voice sounds nice against Will’s back where he’s propped up.
Alana glares at Hannibal.
Hannibal, hastily, “I didn’t think it would happen, honestly.” No one can escape Alana’s wrath.
She hisses, “You put him in a room with the entire Baltimore psychiatric community and didn’t think this would happen?”
Hannibal smoothly says, “Purely coincidental.” Alana narrows her eyes.
Will, his head hurting a little now with the exchange, says, “What?”
Alana turns to Will. “Will, I think you empathized with all the psychiatrists in the room. I have a feeling that’s why your body temperature spiked.”
Will knows this. He still says, unintelligently, “Oh.”
He then laughs.
Hannibal’s face swims into his view, and he says, “Maybe we need to take you to the hospital.”
“No — no, this is just. So normal,” Will explains. He snorts, a little. “It’s my brain,” he concedes. Might as well have it out. “I haven’t been around that many for a while.”
Jack asks, “What are you talking about?” Jack hates when he doesn’t get something.
“Well, psychiatrists get — horny. Around my brain. It’s a thing,” Will explains. He feels snug in Hannibal’s arms, but saying the word horny while touching Hannibal makes him flush.
Bev scoffs. “Your brain?”
Jack, his thundering voice, “Horny?”
Alana sighs, because Will is right, of course, and she probably already came to that conclusion way before Will did. Hannibal just moves his hand to grip Will’s own. This is new. Nice, even.
“It must have been the fact that none of them have met Will, and here he turns up at Hannibal Lecter’s house out of the blue, at a dinner party for nothing other than fun,” Alana says, her face defeated, because she probably would feel the same.
“You are probably right,” Hannibal responds, his voice getting dark, “but that in no way excuses any of them. They could have controlled themselves.”
Bev interrupts. “Wait. You think that Will overheated because psychiatrists were getting turned on by his brain?”
Alana and Hannibal look at each other, then turn to Bev and in unison, say, “Yes.”
Hannibal starts, “Will’s mind is quite fascinating —” and Bev snorts.
She rolls her eyes so hard Will worries for her, and she retorts, “Look. Yes, Will has a great brain, but he’s surrounded by a lot of people on a daily basis who know that.” She turns to Will. “Am I right or am I right?”
Will nods, not wanting to disrupt the nice little place he made in Hannibal’s arms.
“Will, do you ever feel Jack’s horniness?” Bev asks.
Jack sputters.
“Uh, no, but to be fair, we’re always at crime scenes,” Will offers.
“Exactly,” Bev continues, acting like Jack wasn’t still muttering behind her as Bella grins at him. “Your little psychiatrist group is, of course, attracted to his brain. They wanna be the one that cracks him, and you know, write those weird ass papers you write about the beauty of the brain and whatnot. Academic shit. Will probably feels that from Alana on a monthly basis.”
Alana concedes, a tiny tilt to the head, apologetic. Which is fair. He doesn’t blame Alana for it, though.
Bev proceeds, “And Will doesn’t feel any of that horniness from Alana. You got it all wrong, docs.”
Hannibal and Alana look at each other, considering, acting like they represent the whole of psychiatry at this very moment to dignify Bev with a response, when Jack grumbles, “Is there a point to this?”
“My point,” Bev says loudly, “is that Will is hot. Like. Scorching, Greek God, hot. Everyone’s got a hard on for your brain and body.” She looks down at him, grinning like she hit the jackpot. “Hate to break it to you, buddy.”
And Will — Will really does faint again.
*
The point, from Beverly, turns out to be true, when Will starts to fine tune his empathy to recognize attraction. He’s completely missed those feelings in his purview. It was completely different from the attraction for his brain, now that he can catch the difference between Alana’s view of him and let’s say, Chilton.
Will viewed himself as a collection of body parts used for certain things — there’s a hand to walk his dogs, eyes to see, mouth to give lectures to his students. His vanity lied in his intellect — he felt more offended if people thought he was bad at profiling or teaching or he was lying or he wasn’t doing his best. He covered his body with ill-fitting clothing, let his hair dry in the cold brittle air of Virginia, and brushed his teeth, covering all the bases of good hygiene, so it shocks him that people found him, well, hot.
He empathizes the attraction clearly now, after that night at Hannibal’s, where it awkwardly ended with him muttering his goodbyes after waking up from another fainting, this time with Hannibal’s affectionate eyes on him instead of Bev’s mischievous ones.
He sees it in the body of his students now, who lean forward and ask questions, and clutter by his desk to ask questions after class. The hum is not as bad as a group full of psychiatrists because he recognizes it as school crushes, nothing more. Sometimes, he would walk down the hallway and feel odds and ends from other teachers, some FBI agents, and on one occasion, a serial killer he interviewed for Jack.
He tries to avoid any counselor he sees in the hallway, with how many times Jack calls on different ones to help out with cases, because the attraction to both his brain and his body was sometimes too much for Will to cope with. He definitely ducks into the mens’ bathroom the day he sees Dr. Mirza walking down the hall. He can’t really afford to get a boner at work.
Overall, it’s disconcerting. Will doesn’t really like it.
“What’s not to like?” Hannibal asks, his legs crossed in his office the following week.
Will awkwardly says, “It’s just weird. I never really thought it was because of how I looked.” He rubs a hand on his face, pacing between the bookshelf in front of him to Hannibal’s desk. “I mean, now I know, it’s that and my brain. It’s just hard to reconcile it.”
He finds himself in front of a portrait of Dante and Virgil, hanging on Hannibal’s wall beneath the ladder. He looks at the portrait, and tries not to think of the stinging bite he felt last week in Hannibal’s mind.
Will turns around, and gestures with his hand. “Versus, like my personality. Why isn’t anyone turned on by my personality?”
Hannibal opens his mouth to answer — and Will holds up a hand. “Don’t answer that. We know I’m grumpy.”
“It’s a rare day you give anyone your full devoted attention,” Hannibal warmly says, his hand coming up to unbutton his jacket. Will notices his hands, clearly in the office light.
Now he’s thinking of hands around necks from the sliver of Hannibal’s empathy, and clears his throat, trying not to follow the rabbit down the hole. It was a nice rabbit hole, but purely one-sided on Will’s part.
Will scoffs. “I mean, it’s just pure curiosity. No one really cares beyond the mechanism of my brain, and now, thanks to Bev, my body.” He shakes his head. “Heaven forbid, someone get to know me.”
“Are you saying you would like to be in a long term relationship?” Hannibal asks, his eyes glinting.
“Well,” Will grumbles, “who wouldn’t? I mean, now that I know I’m considered somewhat attractive, and people actually like my brain, it kind of makes me, you know, hope at least.”
“It is something you never let yourself feel before,” Hannibal says. “You thought you would be alone. No one to understand the way you think and inform your world view.”
“I mean, I can hope. But it would stop at the fascination of my brain and how good I may or may not look,” Will says. He’s wallowing now in his sadness, and it’s an endless trench. “In the end, no one would still understand me. Except for —” he swallows, his words cutting off. Fucking rabbit hole.
“Except?”
A beat — then, Will hastily, “No one would understand. Any relationship I have now wouldn’t be based on liking me for me. Apparently, I’m cute. But is that enough?”
There’s silence. Hannibal watches him closely. He then sighs, like he’s being asked to make niceties with Franklyn at the opera and it pains him to do so. He gets up from his chair, walking over to Will standing near the desk.
Then —
Hannibal’s hands are at his neck, his thumbs pressing down the front. Will sputters, because he never saw it coming, because he never sees Hannibal clearly due to that fucking wall.
“Will,” Hannibal breathes, “except for who?” He’s not looking at Will at all, but his mouth. Will swallows again, and he feels a rush of want in his stomach, his throat dry.
It feels surreal, like one minute they weren’t really discussing Will’s need to be loved. The air feels like a hazy dream and this is what Will is breathing in, or trying to, with Hannibal’s hands around his throat.
His therapist is actually choking him, and all Will can feel is the stab of hunger in his body, the need for even more pressure.
This is his wet dream, honestly. Hannibal’s hands are as large as he imagined.
He comes to another, well, great, conclusion in the midst of all of his arousal about Hannibal’s hands. This is turning out to be an enlightening dissertation, one Will will publish posthumously.
“It was you,” Will realizes. His eyes widen. “You purposely invited every psychiatrist you knew that night. You knew what would happen to me.”
Hannibal smiles, a real one this time, with his eyes and mouth, his teeth sharp and mouth wicked.
“I admit. I was curious,” Hannibal says, his eyes glittering. He uses his knee to spread Will’s legs a bit further, coming between them, trapping him against the desk.
Will feels the spread, and moans.
“Curious for what?” He pants this out, his words hard to get through with the push of Hannibal’s fingers.
“When it comes to you, I’m just curious,” Hannibal says, the air of refinement all around him. He decides to press harder on Will’s throat, and brings his nose in to smell his pulse point, reminiscent of that one vampire movie Bev forced Will to watch with her.
“Who knew, Will? Out of everyone who ever wanted you, you want me.” Hannibal’s voice is dark, possessive, controlled.
Will blushes.
He mutters, “I mean. It’s not that hard to believe. You’re, you know. You.”
“I am me,” Hannibal’s smile is delighted, and his eyes are bright. He pushes forward and presses his lips against Will’s, and it’s just fucking wonderful. Will kisses back, desperate, because it’s been so long since he’s felt any semblance of touch in this way, and it feels incredibly good. He makes a noise, and Hannibal’s fingers fall away to grab onto his face and hair instead. He’s got fingers in his curls, Hannibal’s long fingers gripping tight, and a thumb caressing his cheek, softly. The kiss is harsh, biting, and Will breaks away, gasping.
He says, with as much breath as he has, “Can I?”
Hannibal pulls his head back, his mouth wet. “Can you what?”
“Can you — just.” Will doesn’t know how to ask.
But Hannibal understands. “Of course, my dear Will. Anything you want,” like they’re discussing which wine Will wants with dinner, all polite like.
Will, still gasping, tunes in. He meets the wall, the Great Wall of Hannibal, but now he sees the crack he’s always missed. He lets the pendulum swing, and he chokes. There’s a blur of Will on his knees, Will on all fours, between Will’s legs, and he moans. There’s that mole on his shoulder, and to be honest, Will didn’t even realize he had a mole, and the sharp bite, again, but it turns out to be Hannibal in real life, who examines his mark on Will’s neck and licks the burning feeling away.
“Did you see?” Hannibal asks, like he didn't just bite Will on the neck, and Will comes back, even more turned on than before. He’s hard, and he can feel the hard length of Hannibal against him as well.
“Please, please. Hannibal —” He wants it all now. The buzzing feeling is electric through him, and Hannibal surges forward and licks him inside his mouth.
“Can I have you?” Hannibal asks.
Will, desperate, “Yes, yes. Anything you want,” and he doesn’t sound as polite as Hannibal before, he just sounds wrecked.
They end up on Hannibal’s couch, and they’re both naked somehow. He wants Hannibal inside him in every way that matters, and Hannibal is on board with him, because he’s suddenly fucking Will, with long slow strokes after the mechanics of good lube and preparation. He has his hand pinned on Will’s throat, the pressure hard as Will wanted and imagined, and Will is moaning around the aborted thrusts, feeling hot all over.
He just wants to be plundered, quite frankly, and Hannibal is quite good at it. Hannibal looks down at him with full fondness, and fucks Will open, and Will lets him do it, because —
“This is what you’ve wanted, isn’t it? All this time.” Hannibal says, his voice hoarse. Will can feel the desire rolling off of both of them in waves. It is. It always has been.
“Please let me come,” Will gasps, still choking. Hannibal gets a hand around his cock, and jerks a few times and Will squeezes his eyes, and comes, Hannibal pushing his legs further up and watching while he continues to fuck him with deep thrusts. Will is overcome with stimulation, hot everywhere Hannibal is touching him, and he looks right into Hannibal’s face when he comes a few moments later. His face looks exactly like it does when he’s at the opera, eyes glittery and open mouthed awe. God-like in all its devotion. And it was all for Will.
*
If you ask the psychiatry community in Baltimore, and that does include the DC metropolitan area, they would tell you that being Will Graham’s therapist was as close as you would get to the Mona Lisa. Let’s not get started on his features or those eyes.
What they will also tell you, begrudgingly, is that Will Graham was taken. Taken, as in, walk the streets of Baltimore, and you would notice a certain doctor looming over a certain teacher. It was in the way they walked, their hands interlocked, the kiss on the side of the head at the crosswalk while they waited for cars to pass.
It’s like that ad on tv, the one that tells you that nine out of ten dentists love this toothpaste and you should definitely buy it. Only this time, it’s Dr. Hannibal Lecter telling viewers that he knows nine — no, ten — out of ten ways to make Will blush. That’s how Dr. Lecter would phrase his love for Will Graham. Only this time, Will adores him right back.