rhymeswithcannibal | Until we get a real season 4...

Until we get a real season 4...

[Continuing from thread here.]

The weather forecast for Bethany Beach, Maryland said there was a 30% chance of thunderstorms for the next two days, but currently all the weather seemed to be bringing was cloud cover just dense enough to turn the entire sky steel gray.

Hannibal had a spring in his step as he slid out of the passenger side of the rundown pickup truck they'd bought for cash and never transferred out of the original owner's name. They could leave this behind without worrying that it would ever ever track back to them. No breadcrumbs for Uncle Jack at this marina to have him looking at boats that had been docked for a minimum of three years and then recently left.

"It's the farthest slip from the parking lot," he said as he opened the tailgate and reached in to drag a heavy, wheeled cooler out and settle it on the gravel at his feet.

Five months after they'd died at the cliff house, Hannibal had put some effort into changing his appearance. His skin was tanned, his hair was longer and shaggier, his beard was full, but could never be full enough to hide his distinctive cheekbones, and he was wearing jeans, work boots, a heavy fisherman's sweater, and a bandage on his left hand that he ignored as he worked.

"The keys are in a combination lockbox hidden on deck. I engaged a service to come in quarterly to ensure that the boat was aired out and maintained to a functional standard. We shouldn't have to spend too much time getting our house in order before we can leave."

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"Practical is the adjective I choose within earshot of other people," Will replied pointedly.

He lingered in the doorway shoulder against the frame, watching Hannibal scrutinize the space. He could see Hannibal mentally laying it out, probably deciding where to leave his own fingerprints in the space that Will would inhabit. It was almost endearingly animalistic, hovering in the space between controlling and territorial. He was not yet sure if he would allow it.

Will followed him across the surprisingly intact hall floor to the master suite, "It will be difficult for you to survey and appreciate your domain from the deck of the yacht in the harbor." That was his answer to the house in Miramar. "It was too mid century modern, the kind of place with stark walls and furniture people don't actually sit on."

The realtor was still waiting downstairs. There was little she could say to sell them on the property and she wasn't overly inclined to try when the house in Miramar would fetch a far better commission. Only her absence had given Hannibal license to call Will by his real name.

Unless Will was going to buy the furniture out of pocket, Hannibal's hand would be in every room in the house in one way or another. Once the renovation progressed, Will would see that Hannibal's decor choices would be suited to a more tropical environment and style. His Baltimore life of dark colors and heavy furniture wouldn't do, although his bedroom would be an exception to the light colors and modern decor he would choose for the rest of the house.

"A pity you didn't have more time at the cliff house," Hannibal said, dismissing Will's unspoken message while his eyes slid over the walls, selecting colors and considering bedding styles. "I found the furniture quite comfortable."

He pulled open the closet door and shook his head in disapproval. Not even a proper walk-in. "The views in Miramar were better."

Will's caution was greater than Hannibal's, it had to be in order to account for Hannibal's bon vivant penchants. Those, coupled with his surprising bout of self destructiveness in Italy left Will holding the responsible adult bag.

In a space meant to be defined by the two of them, Will was hardly going to let Hannibal wrest control over every choice without Will's input. Will had precious little care for design or decor outside of efficiency and quality, as evidence by what Hannibal saw of Will's previous home in Wolf Trap, but that didn't mean he intended to cede all decisions and influence to Hannibal.

"Another mark against Miramar, it was entirey to your tastes," Will replied, arching a brow. Though it was slightly hypocritical to proomote compromise on Hannibal's part when Will was saying the fixer upper or life on the boat, but Will made no claim against hypocrisy.

Will honestly, truly, definitely needed to lighten up. Hannibal had lasted into his 50s without turning self-destructive, and the reason for that attempted self-immolation was now living with him after forsaking his old life for Hannibal.

Hannibal was trying to compromise, trying to be a good partner, but when it came to the interior decorating, he was less likely to yield than he was when it came to his choice of murder targets.

"Are you telling me that panoramic ocean views offend you?" He scanned the room and shook his head before leaving it to walk back toward the main staircase back into the foyer. If he didn't get out of all this dust, he was going to end up sneezing, and that just didn't fit the image he preferred to present.

Will felt like he was holding onto something (everything?) with a grip so necessarily tight that the slightest loosening would begin something that could not be stopped. This feeling was not alleviated by Hannibal's long stretch of good behavior nor the eventual bad behavior that would be forthcoming or the wore behavior that wold be hidden.

Had that prowess in manipulation atrophied behind the glass of his cage? Or his ability to guide another party into thinking they've made up their own mind? It's obviously more difficult with Will, but Hannibal was clever and Will wasn't all that interested in paint colors and fabric swatches.

"There's a fantastic panoramic ocean view from the cabin of the yacht," He replied. "The imitation lines of Wright and Eichler offend me." Will followed him down the stairs and back into the foyer. The real estate agent remained standing there, shifting her weight in her heeled shoes, carefully trying to avoid dust and scuffs

The only thing Will was holding onto was an outdated conception of himself. He could relax into the inevitability of entropy and let go.

Hannibal could say he was saving subtle manipulations of Will for a time when they were more settled, for when he would have time to plot out something appropriately byzantine, but the truth was Hannibal couldn't stop manipulating if he tried. In small ways and large ways, it was the water in which he swam.

"Not every home will have the rustic charms to which you are more accustomed." Although frankly, in recent years Hannibal had spent more than enough time with clean lines, hard angles, and sparse decor.

He paused in front of the agent, shifting to flawless Spanish even though she had a more than adequate grasp of English. He was playing Russian, not ugly American. "This house will not meet my needs. Call me tomorrow with more listings."

He didn't ask Will. John was just the hired help and didn't have a say beyond suggestions that were meant to meet Aleksey's preferences.

He didn't want to become something other than himself.

Like the scorpion, Hannibal did what was in his nature, but Will was no frog and Hannibal would not drown them. Yet. He accepted the manipulations without condoning them, if for no other reason than he had his own. Some subtle, some, like the house, more like a sledgehammer to a glass house.

"Rustic charms," Will repeated with mild amusement. "As opposed to a stylized veneer of perfection." Covering horror underneath. Literally, in the case of the Baltimore house.

Will held the door for Hannibal noting the relief on the real estate agents face for the promise of a far better commission.

People left behind old selves all the time. Will had started the process in a cell under the BSHCI; he wouldn't end it until they ended everything. Will had found his own sting and Hannibal had felt its burn, and here they still were - together.

"By whose definition?" Hannibal asked. "Is your perfection the same as mine?" Hannibal's perfection included his well-tailored person suit, included the home that shallow minds called a house of horrors, included the tableaux he staged. The suit was no longer as perfect, but it was what it needed to be for the life they were crafting.

He passed through the door with a nod for John and a final aside for the agent, "We'll walk." Rather than riding back to the marina in her car as they'd been transported to begin with. It was a pleasant day and a walk would go a long way toward clearing the dust from his lungs and sinuses.

Can't live with him, cant live without him.

Will had shed so many layers of himself, he clung tightly to the things he considered pieces of his essential self, those were the things he refused to give up in this. Without the contours of morality, the things and people he held value in that shaded who he was, he feared he would become a flat reflection of Hannibal.

"The definition of anyone looking at the way you moved through the world before the revelation of your basement chop shop," He said after the real estate agent and happily driven off. Will's brow furrowed slightly as he held the gate for Hannibal, waited a beat for taking a breath and saying, "I like this version. The imperfections add character," he said with the faintest edge of teasing in his voice.

Hannibal wanted Will to be his own kind of monster, not just a poor mirror of himself. He wanted to be seen, not duplicated, however inadequately.

"Those anyones who are quite happy to tolerate slave labor if it means a cheaper iphone? Who let food rot in their refrigerators without more than a twinge of annoyance for their grocery budgets while outside their very doors their fellow men starve?"

He didn't need to visibly scoff for his derision to come through. "Most only care about what lies behind the veneer if they can be titillated or horrified. Preferably both."

Now there was an opinion he wouldn't have voiced before his incarceration. He'd certainly believed it, but speaking it aloud would have stuck in someone's head to be prised loose by the right questioner at the right time.

He waited for Will to start walking with him before he answered that last statement. "I'm disappointed to see such a lack of subtlety in your machinations."

And Will waned to be himself. As he was. Not the person that set Matthew Brown on Hannibal, not the person that used Freddie Lounds and indulged his curiosity with Chlton. He wanted to feel horror at bartering one life for another, no this faint thrill of anticipation, of ... of rightness in her payment in blood and flesh for the things she had visited upon himself, on Abigail, on everything she could milk for a byline.

Will gave Hannibal a flat look, "You could have volunteered for Doctors Without Borders or practiced in an underserved rural community. I'm sure you put in a publicly respectable amount of community service, but you also murdered and ate people who ruined your dry cleaning or overcharged for floral arrangements. We aren't better than that, we are also serving out own wants at the expense of others."

It was a surprising bit insight, one that many people would have enjoyed disssecting and speculating on.

He fell in step at Hannibal's side, "It's a house. I wasn't aiming for subtle."

Will could want it, but that bell couldn't be unrung. He was the man who had killed Randall Tier with his bare hands and who had brought the sharp edge of his forgiveness to Florence.

He was the man who had fed Frederick Chilton to the Dragon because he was curious. And he was the man who had taken a fork still stained with Hannibal's blood and put it into his mouth along with a piece of Bedelia Du Maurier's leg.

He was Hannibal's perfect foil.

"The difference is that I don't tell myself that I don't serve my own wants." He knew exactly what he was doing, and the costs that other people paid for his wants were mostly unimportant.

No, he told himself other lies, like the biggest one - that he knew exactly what he was doing when it came to Will.

"Clearly not. Your choice serves many purposes from your perspective, but you have made no case for how it advantages me."

He couldn't unring the bell, but he could control how and when it rang next. And for whom the bell tolled.

"An unflinching gaze on your own actions does not distinguish you or the outcome of your actions from those who look away," Will said, a slight frown at the corner of his mouth. Looking at the result of one's own horrific actions and not feeling that horror, or worse, the warm sense of dawning pride or appreciation should make things worse.

"When we agreed on the features, you never added that they be in tact."

Will tipped his head slightly, letting the previous mood roll off his shoulders and settling back into the stubborn mode of negotiation. "How would you like it to advantage you?"

He could try to control the next tolling of the bell, but if he truly believed he could, he had forgotten to hold the devil well.

"That reflects a far higher estimation of humanity than I think is warranted." Said the man who saw most of humanity as little more than cattle.

This freedom to express opinions he'd only ever couched in euphemisms was something he'd decided he didn't want to give up, even if it was only with one person. Of course, he'd also decided he didn't want to give up this one person, so it worked out well enough.

He gave Will a sidelong look, eyes narrowing just a little before he gave a hint of a smile. "It would seem that the devil in the details is not I this time. I shall have to remember to hold you well."

But to put this into blatant negotiation now wouldn't give him what he wanted - points in their ongoing power game. "I prefer to use my advantage at a time of my choosing." Would Will expect anything else from him? Asking for concessions now just took away from his slight position of power here, spending those points at a time when the wins were as meaningful as spending $200 at a carnival game to win a $2 trinket.

Between murder and discretion, Will would prefer discretion out of Hannibal. In how he killed and disposed of his victims and in the victims themselves. The price for having Hannibal with him was blood. WIll didn't have to like it, but he understood it.

Will gave a thoughtful hum, "Does that mean your expectations for their behavior are impossibly high?" Punishing a cow for doing what is in a cow's nature seemed sadistic, after all.

Of all the cows in the herd, Will was Hannibal's favorite? He wouldn't find it flattering to be couched in those terms.

Hannibal's smile was met with the upturn of Will's mouth, an expression edging on relief. The urge to touch caught him off guard, to lay his hand on Hannibal's arm, feel the warmth of life radiating through the material, the flex of muscle. The tactile sensations of heat and fabric under his fingertips was too real for a moment.

His fingers curled against his own palm, nails digging in slightly to ground him. Will looked away for a minute, then back at Hannibal, full eye contact, "Thank you," he said, then inclined his head, the shift of his smile leaning towards something more self deprecating. "For indulging my obvious manipulation."

"My expectations are high, but not impossibly so. I have met many people in my life who have been worthy of respect." And thus were off his table in general. It wasn't punishing the cow for being a cow, it was punishing the human for choosing to be a cow rather than embracing their potential.

And Will wasn't a cow; he couldn't escape the predator under his skin, even when he put his head down and tried to cover the taste of blood with that of grass.

That smile was a weapon that Hannibal was glad Will wouldn't be able to properly weaponize. Its power lay in its complexity and its honesty. It lacked the knife's edge of bitterness that Hannibal had once blinded himself to because he'd wanted to believe that they'd balanced the weight of harms given and received. He still wanted to believe it, but trust, given despite all his doubts, was a soap bubble waiting for a careless touch.

He met and held Will's eyes, searching and finding only the truth of the moment. "Will this earn you a temporary brush with peace, knowing that you've busied my idle hands?"

"Do you rank humanity's predators as highly in your lack of respect as you do the discourteous?"

Hannibal's taxonomy of humanity was as straightforward and as complicated as Hannibal himself. Everyone was expendable and classifications could shift based on action (see Will and Alana). The necessity to remain in good standing was the good opinion of Hannibal and loyalty to Hannibal, which did not guarantee safety (see Abigail Hobbs and Randall Tier), but a continued posthumous good opinion.

There was one thing that Hannibal could rely on, Will's inability and disinclination towards the coy or seductive.

This fragile trust between them, the collected shards of a very fine bone china teacup, delicately held together with lines of lacquer and gold dust, not the same as it was before, but whole and beautiful in a different way. Kintsugi the Japanese call it. Will felt the delicacy of it as a tangible thing.

Will did not drop Hannibal's gaze, "You've always been an excellent multitasker."

"You know the mind of those predators and you know me. I expect you already know the answer to your question." Most so-called predators were weak opportunists, scavengers, others like Randall Tier were closer to rabid dogs than wolves. Francis Dolarhyde's childhood damage left him a wounded animal rather than the dragon he aspired to be.

In short, most of those predators were doing nothing that hadn't been done before. A rare Tobias Budge might rise above the pack, but they were just as prone to turning rabid as their lesser kindred.

Hannibal couldn't rely on Will's disinclination to seduction. He'd been seduced by Will before, and all it had taken was a shave, a pressed shirt, and a bit of cognizant cannibalism.

Kintsugi was an apt comparison, presenting an object that was whole and beautiful, with its history of damage of repair considered an accepted and acceptable part of its totality rather than something to be concealed. The scars of the porcelain world.

The crows feet around his eyes deepened at Will's observation, a hint of smugness creeping in with his spreading smile. "Yet you will endeavor to keep me on only the tasks that you set or approve." Fat chance.

"Then I suspect you know which slips I'm less inclined towards looking into," WIll replied. And there it was. Could he even see the top from his position on the slippery slope? Probably. But he wasn't backing off. He knew what freeing Hannibal and keeping him would entail. Blood. Why not make it ... useful?

Hardly Will's fault that Hannibal was easy, then. Or easy when enticed by Will settling back into Hannibal's life on a more (though not entirely) honest scale.

They had changed each other and it was a thing to glory in.

"And you will endeavor to do what you want and take pleasure in my being none the wiser when you get away with it," Will ought not find that expressions endearing. Especially when their pleasant banter was the foreshadowing of future murders. And yet.

"If you would like me to use your ambiguous response to define my own boundaries, I can certainly do so." But he'd much rather make Will come out and say it. Call it tossing some marbles down that slope toward Will.

They'd shared the most honest moment of Hannibal's life. In comparison, everything else that wasn't that night with Francis was always going to be shaded with lies, half-truths, circumlocutions, and lies of omission.

One truth with very little shading on Hannibal's part was that he did want Will in his life. The leverage that truth gave Will might chafe, but Hannibal still chose to live with it, choosing to believe that there would come a time when Will would admit to them both that he was living that same truth.

"It's an interesting balance we must strike while you wrestle with what you are, what I am, and what we can be together." Neither a yes nor no, which was yes enough. "Do you imagine that years will pass with this arrangement never changing?"

"No," Will replied. Hannibal was never free to use ambiguous anything to define his own boundaries, he would put congress to shame with his gerrymandering skills. Will lay a hand on Hannibal's upper arm and stopped walking, turned towards Hannibal and stepped in though they were quite alone on this stretch of path, water to one side and road on the other, between them and buildings. The proximity allowed for Will to avoid eye contact as he kept his voice low and steady, "I would ... very much prefer knowing you were hunting criminals, Hannibal. Murderers. Rapists. Abusers."

He leaned back, then, brow slightly furrowed, and met Hannibal's eyes, "That is ethical meat I would have no qualm joining you in eating." It was a poor showing in Will's mind that such an offer did not pluck at those last strings of his morality that Will so clenched in his hand, unwilling to cast aside.

There would come a time when Will would admit the truth of it aloud, that he wanted Hannibal in his life. For now, actions would have to speak louder and here they both stood, alive.

"Change is inevitable," Will replied with a slight frown. "I only don't know what it will change into." What he would change into.

When Hannibal had tossed those marbles, he hadn't been certain that Will wouldn't dodge them. He might have found some verbal gymnastics to avoid having to come out and once again condone murder.

But he didn't, and Hannibal listened with the same avidity with which he might watch Will eating a bit of forger. The stipulation wasn't surprising, but the certainty in Will's demeanor was striking.

"Does that include a fait accompli, or do you expect to be consulted before I make a choice?"

Will was signaling with both words and actions. If their declarations of love were described by the space they occupied without being spoken, so too was Will's acknowledgment that he'd made his choice not to try again to die and take Hannibal with him because he'd wanted this.

He didn't take his eyes off of Will, and only the knowledge that they could be observed kept his hands at his sides rather than reaching for Will. The smugness faded away, his smile gentled until it was almost sad. "Fear is natural, but you have my word that if there comes a day when you hate what you have become, I'll end it for you."

He could have tried. There was no telling how he would feel about this deliberate bit of honesty tonight or tomorrow, but for now, an attempt at avoiding the acknowledgement of outright condoning murder rang disingenuous.

Will tipped his head, eyes narrowing, really considering the question and taking a moment to consider his own feelings about it, not the knee jerk feelings of indignant and righteous fury, but the slower waking reactions that Will tried very hard to ignore. "Consultation unnecessary," Will replied. Was it a fragile offering of trust? Possibly. Possibly not. His breath hitched and he added, "I think you would prefer the reaction if proof of guilt were offered post act."

His expression shifted as thought he meant to add something, but his mouth closed and Will took a step back out of Hannibal's space, eye contact broken.

That offer, though, it drew his head up, his gaze drawn sharply to Hannibal's face, searching for a minute, a bittersweet taste at the back of his throat. He looked away, then, head jerking in a sharp nod. "Thank you," voice tight. He turned fully back to their path towards the docks.

Hannibal wouldn't rub his face in it today or tomorrow or even the day after. Finding just the right person to be an ethical kill would take time, and Hannibal meant that first time to give Will no reason to recant his commitment to come to dinner.

He tilted his head to acknowledge the truth of Will's supposition. He would indeed prefer to see Will's reaction when it was too late to demand a change of course. "I will ensure that you have no reason to decline a dinner invitation."

Will could take some cold comfort from Hannibal's logic in taking his time - he needed a proper, complete kitchen before he prepared that dinner. The boat's kitchen was quite good for a yacht, but not as much for the kind of show he'd like to put on for Will.

He fell into step with Will. He'd just promised that he'd blow the horns, break the seals, empty the bowls and take them to their mutual end for Will's sake. That inconvenient compassion that was even more surprising than love for Hannibal.

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Until we get a real season 4...

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