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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That unspoken reaction would have been a reflection of Hannibal's mechanisms as well, that Hannibal considered Will's want of knowing him to be for the either or purpose of healing or harming. That there was no third option, between the two, where the knowledge wanted to better flesh out the person he was spending the rest of his life with. Though, all three options would have been correct, Will wouldn't hesitate to leverage that knowledge when necessary.

Will considered that, absent from his own gaze as he drew back into his mind for a moment. Then said, "A foundation for the things you choose to do and the things that must do, even if unpleasant?" It sounded more to Will like maintaining literal mechanisms, gears in a clock, than something so concrete as a foundation.

They were running the courses with no infection and morphine to draw out the truth from Hannibal's lowered inhibitions. This had its own sort of thrill. "No, not one of yours, not grown and tended personally in the liminal space of your office." Will frowned slightly, "But one of your adjustments, an opportunity that arose. Was he the only one, or just the first that caught Jack Crawford's attention?"

From Hannibal's perspective, Will wanted to know because he needed to know for a myriad of reasons that reflected the complexity of Will's way of seeing the world. In the end, though, the result was that healing or harming could come of the knowing.

"I don't enjoy scrubbing toilets, if you must know, but my day is substantially more pleasant for knowing that my home is clean and orderly. That is maintained by routine, which for the purpose of the metaphor at hand was once a foundation for my personal diversions." He paused for a sip of wine and continued as though he weren't talking about some of his methods for hiding his murders. "If I ever had cause to worry about evidence collection, the knowledge that I was meticulous in maintaining my home laid the groundwork for confidence."

For a superficial and/or legal search, at least. FBI agents snooping in his basement were like a jackhammer on his foundations.

Grown and tended, pruned and tied until a pleasing shape emerged. He liked the thought of some of his patients as a kind of bonsai - for some he constrained, and for others he cut their ties to let them finally escape their bindings. Will, of course, would be the latter.

"Give Alana her due - she held me well while she could. There were no opportunities to exploit until Francis. I was forced to be patient, knowing that an opportunity would come in blood."

He gave a half smile that failed at any self-deprecation. "I had expected it would be one of mine, but instead Jack found an autodidact."

Trust, even with the doubts.

"Scrubbed all the cracks, bleached the drains." He had the most absurd picture of Hannibal in elbow length rubber gloves (yellow) and apron, scouring pad in hand, glancing over that basement with an exacting eye, evidence of his crime before him, waiting to be tidied. He took a sip of wine rather than snorting in amusement, the cold chill of realization of the truth in that dark humor should have startled him. That it did not was more worrisome.

He watched their reflections in the surface of his wine, "Alana had her own foundational routines, then." A faint flash of a smile, there and gone. "She put on her own shoulders the mantle of responsibility that she thought she had woven with her inability to see the truth, her vehement defense of you." The previous close and personal relationship that Hannibal had used to his advantage.

It was like that well worn and overused false example of the kanji for crisis being made of danger and opportunity, one could always trust Hannibal to turn a crisis to his best advantage.

How strong they were together.

"It's suspicious if only one room has bleach residue during a search, it's fastidious if the entire home is equally clean." If Will was amused imagining him decked out to clean, Hannibal didn't begrudge him the humor at all. He'd take it as a positive sign of a kind of normalization.

"Alana found an interesting kind of ruthlessness over time." He could at least respect that when Alana acted, she did so out of a Hannibal-specific set of ethics that should be distilled as "harm reduction." "She'll never lose that hint of doubt in everything that comes of having been so thoroughly deceived."

Odd that he could actually understand that doubt, like a deep splinter. So could Will. It was quite the little club.

"What were your thoughts on seeing her again?"

"We'll use bleach and an activated oxygen mixture in the future," Will wanted to jam the meaty parts of his palms against his own eyes for a moment. His words were gruff and spoken as though forced out past his teeth. "It destroys evidence and ... confuses luminol." A whole scene that fluoresced would lead to frustrated crime scene techs and more time processing attempts at collecting evidence that would not lead in any direction but the one engineered to be pointed at, even if it pointed at nothing.

He didn't want to normalize. Will wanted to keep this so far out of the normal that he never slipped and began to forget the thin threads of morality that he clutched at. Balance.

Jack was a member, twice over now. And Hannibal was the common thread tying them all together.

Will swallowed, breaking eye contact again. "That she had adapted some of your more practical characteristics into a method of handling you." That Alana had lost the shine of hopefulness in the world that she had carried before being pushed out of a window. Not to the point of naïveté, but the willingness to still see and hope for the good of things that people who had never suffered a deep and personal betrayal had about them. Alana became ruthless practicality in a well cut pants suit.

Prior to their three years apart, if what Will wanted conflicted with what Hannibal wanted, they could both expect that he'd just steamroll on through. Since Will had returned to his life, he'd found that there were times when what Will wanted mattered to him even if it conflicted with what he wanted. That wasn't going to change his opinion on getting Will to normalize some of Hannibal's passions.

Was there anything more hopeful than having a child? Alana hadn't lost all of her hope for the world; she'd just compartmentalized.

His humor slipped away. "I respected Alana's strength and potential when I was her mentor. Her fall shattered the shell that had largely concealed her steel."

Once they had fully stepped out of this strange period in their new life and into something more normal, Will would take stock of Hannibal's behaviors where their conflicting wants were concerned. After all, Hannibal had proven he retained his same over reactionary streak even after the years in the BSHCI.

Necessity? Or imbued that hope into the child, given it the best, untainted parts of herself, the places where the shadow of Hannibal couldn't reach. Or did it reach even that far.

Will watched the humor drain from Hannibal's face in a few shifts of muscle under skin. "You trained her. You baptized her in betrayal and blood. Then she became your jailer." There was a near Shakespearean dramatic irony about the whole thing.

He straightened and was instantly more comfortable, putting aside the casual posture that didn't really suit him.

"We need a Greek chorus to properly appreciate the irony." He raised his glass to acknowledge the unseen spirit of dramatic irony that was a constant companion when he and Will were together.

After a sip, he set his wine aside and went to turn off the heat under the figs. While he opened a cabinet to choose the right dishes to present the figs, he said, "I'm already curious what approach you'll attempt to protect her again when our deal for her life expires."

"I refuse to accept our choices are limited to worshipping the god of comedy or the god of tragedy." Or being fools for either of them.

Will saved the rest of his own glass to drink with the figs, an attempt to appreciate the taste pairing of fig, sauce and wine. He kept a finger on the stem of the glass and stroked it idly as he watched Hannibal move through the small kitchen with ease and purpose.

"Five years is a long time for your curiosity to starve," Will said evenly. He had no intention of feeding even the barest of hints. The answer also depended on a lot of circumstances that would develop over the years, how amenable Hannibal was to distractions of other natures, how those negotiations went. Whether they were still alive.

"They've gotten by without our worship to date." He frowned into a cabinet before taking out two small, square, white plates. He was going to have to start collecting new embellishments for his table.

He opened the bottle of cabernet sauvignon he'd set aside earlier and left it to breathe while he fished figs out of the pot with a slotted spoon.

"I don't expect you to tell me now. You might have an idea now, but five years is, as you note, a long time, and we were just speaking of the merits of being flexible in your plans."

He was silent as he sliced four figs in half and set them on the waiting plates, thinking. Five years was a long time to be curious, but he could balance it.

"But I will make you an offer that you may spend the next five years mulling."

"I would say that the god of tragedy has grown fat on our worship," Will said dryly. "If we're extending the theater metaphor from earlier."

Maybe a nod to the god of comedy, too, now that Hannibal would have someone who understood the terrible cannibalism jokes that frequented Hannibal's table from before. Assuming he continued to make such insinuations in the future. Will wasn't sure he had the heart to curtail something so seemingly innocuous if it continued to bring Hannibal glee.

"I will take that advice to heart." Will was already crafting several viable lures already, but he didn't intend to let Hannibal know even that. Hannibal would remember and might push through the first few offers just to see what Will was holding in reserve.

He looked at Hannibal, then, giving the man Will's full weight of attention and eye contact, once more, "I'm listening."

"Sacrifice, perhaps, but not worship." He dismissed the idea out of hand while he spooned syrup over the figs and fetched the mousse from the refrigerator to add careful dollops on each fig half.

And his jokes about cannibalism weren't ter-- Admittedly, they were terrible, but a cannibal has to make his fun where he can.

He poured two modest glasses of cabernet and set a plate and glass in front of Will, adding a fork from a drawer. "The red pairs better, and the offer is lives for a life."

He brought his glass and plate to the bar and set them down as he finished his pitch. "I give you one of my projects and I keep my promise to Alana. You may do with them what you wish - kill them yourself, deliver an anonymous tip to the FBI, take out an ad in the Washington Post. You'll be saving more lives than are lost."

"Sacrifice is worship without getting anything in return. Wasn't that the point of worship in classical antiquity?" Among other complicated and interlocking things, of course.

One day Will might normalize that sort of humor at that specific sort of dinner table.

Will moved to pick up the fork and paused midway at Hannibal's offer, made so mundanely. He continued the movement and retrieved the fork while he considered. Hannibal wanted to keep his promise to Alana. Hannibal's projects were expendable. It would appeal to Will's sense of wanting to save lives, though cause just enough agony in the decision to appeal to Hannibal. It pruned away attachment and allowed Will to continue to clutch those last threads of morality.

It was also a beginning negotiation. What would Will offer to save Alana's life and destroy Hannibal's projects before they emerged in the headlines of Tattle Crime. There was a tempting counter offer. Though he imagined Freddie Lounds wouldn't be traveling outside of the States any time in the near future.

"Only one of your projects?" Will sank the tines of the fork slowly into a fig and glanced at Hannibal. He settled the fig on his tongue, mouth closing around the tines, sliding the fig off. He chewed thoughtfully, appreciating the flavor bursts on the various sections of tastebuds. He washed that down with a sip of cabernet. "That's very good."

"Sacrifice dedicated to a god is the ultimate worship, but there is no god to whom I sacrifice." And really, the point of sacrifice was loss. Hannibal also didn't lose anything in his acts of devotion to his own will.

When he grew tired of watching Will eat what he cooked, they would be in their last days. He cut into his fig with his fork and took a bite, chewing slowly, his gaze distant as he sorted through the individual flavors and appreciated the whole that they created.

He sipped the wine and smiled for the compliment. Of course it was good.

"We will both have five years to sustain our curiosities until negotiations truly begin."

"And our sacrifices are dedicated to this new life?" Years of Hannibal's freedom, the whole of Will's old life, burned to ash so this new thing of antlers and feathers could rise up from the embers, shake away the ash and move on.

Hannibal would grow tired of watching Will eat, Will's compliments would cease. The charm of each others' quirks would turn grating, if you sniff that glass of wine one more time...

"And prepare our potential sacrifices?" He raised a brow, the turn of his mouth slightly amused. Then inclined his head in concession, five years.

They had both sacrificed their old lives, they had sacrificed peace, comfort, and happiness. If the truest test of sacrifice was pain, then they should be smiled upon by whatever god caught the smoke of their burnt offerings.

That, however, was too painful and too revealing a line of thinking to share with Will. "Shall we offer a ram to Janus in our time of change?"

Things would change, but Will hadn't bored him in two years, had been worth the sacrifice of three years, and he trusted that Will would remain interesting for the next five, if for no other reason than that they had a pot of gold waiting at the end of a five year rainbow.

"Sacrifices. Plural." Hannibal searched Will's face. "You plan to offer me someone else. Who would you think would be interesting enough to me to divert me from Alana?" Their points of overlap were limited and easy to narrow down.

"Freddie Lounds?"

"A ram or a goat without horns?" Will shook his head. "That is neither permission nor an invitation." Will wanted to be absolutely, perfectly clear on that point, no room for Hannibal to find a loophole and slip through.

Doubts already slipping into that pool of trust, like alligators, gliding through the water with sharp teeth and their own hunger, muddying the waters?

Will's face remained carefully blank, an attempt to give nothing away from either expression or microexpression. Even his tone was an attempt at neutrality, "I thought you were leaving me to mull the subject." The curl of interest in his tone, reflected in his eyes was the only giveaway to his interest on the subject.

It would always be Lounds. The last two days of Hannibal's old life had given Will a flash of her humanity, the set of her face, the soft tone when she assessed rightly that he wasn't sure he would live through the upcoming events. He had almost weighed that insight against all of her many and extreme transgressions towards him and found her worthy of forgiveness.

Then he woke and saw the full color photos taken of his unconscious and uncovered form, read the poisonous accusations and that small sliver of insight curdled. He used her and found that it did not sit badly to think of hurting her.

"A ram. Ovis aries." Hannibal had only himself to blame for Will's doubts. He'd planted the seeds of these particular doubts with his fondness for cannibalism puns.

It didn't matter if Will wanted to pretend that he might have another sacrifice in mind. There was only one target that he could offer Hannibal to divert him from Alana. He already knew what caveat he'd require to accept that offer - Freddie would die to save Alana, but Will would kill her and Hannibal would watch. Then there would be no lingering doubts, because he'd seen with his own eyes that the "slim and delicate pig" was properly dealt with.

She'd earned her ending and put the seal on the death warrant with those photographs.

"You are mulling my offer and I will set aside thought of Freddie Lounds until the time for negotiations comes, but you've tipped your hand, Will."

Over fondness for cannibal puns, some might say.

"Does the idea of sacrificing a ram appeal to you?" Would the skull be boiled and bleached, scrubbed of flesh and mounted, horns and all in some place of honor.

Will smiled and tipped his head, "So I have." But not all of it, only the knave of spades, his ace would be kept well hidden until such a time as it became necessary. Should it become necessary.Will would not pretend there was another sacrifice to draw Hannibal's attention, but he would not let on as to what else there was to barter with. Let Hannibal puzzle over that, over how Will's mind was working to keep Alana safe.

Some just might be humorless.

He finished a fig, savoring every moment of eating his own cooking once again, even something as small as this. Dinner would be more of a production.

"It strikes me as impractical with our current living situation." Though that cleaned skull could serve as a centerpiece on their table from time to time. Perhaps once they settled in a proper home on land.

"How fortunate that you have time to adjust your plans as the winds of change dictate. Perhaps in five years all of my projects will be behind bars or dead and I will be the one forced to adjust." He rather doubted that, but he would wait and watch, and when he found time away from Will to discreetly search online, he would check up on his bargaining chips.

Or haven't normalized.

"The crew area's empty. He could be a mascot until we reached Cuba and settled in," Will's expression was guileless, though his tone was flatly amused. He drew the other half of a fig through the syrup and the mousse, then ate it.

Will took a sip of cabernet before answering. "If you described your projects in some detail, I could give you my opinion on the likelihood of it."

Humor would help with normalization.

He considered and discarded the idea of offering that a dog would be a better mascot. Offering a dog was something to be saved for another time, not when he wanted to manipulate Will to specific action - that would not just fail, but backfire - but when he wanted to simply sweeten Will's mood, which would be benefit enough.

"If we're housing livestock in the crew quarters--" Why not just hire some crew? "--chickens would be more useful." Hestia would take the sacrifice, and were they not building a home?

He chuckled for Will's offer. "I have far too much respect for your skills to give you any head start, lest I have no leverage in five years."

Fortunately Will was not humorless. Nor without motivation to normalize Hannibal's actions.

Offering a dog for the sake of manipulation would backfire in unexpected and consequential ways, yes. But offering one to soothe Will's mood to something more pleasing would have much better success. Hannibal could even save that particular card for when he acted without accord from Will with the intention of seeking forgiveness later. Though it would not due to sit on that slight leverage too long, Will was a particular kind of magnet for strays and in some things, he would also ask forgiveness rather than permission.

"Until it came time to butcher and pluck them." Hiring human crew would be no different than buying livestock, their fates would be the same. And as Hestia preferred pigs for sacrifice...

One corner of Will's mouth quirked up and he tipped his head slightly towards Hannibal. "You already have leverage. My leverage is just more interesting." Five years of keeping a loose watch on those projects, keeping the details close to mind and chest, all while in the close quarters of domesticity? Will would press his advantage.

Was Will really Will without the lingering aroma of dog? More to the point, what benefit would there be for Hannibal to deny that Will benefitted from having a dog or dogs around? Other than avoiding the lingering aroma of dog, but Will seemed almost naked without it.

"Their lives would likely to be spared until one of us caught cold." And then one of them could go on the chopping block for soup. There was a certain gentle absurdity to the thought of little silky chickens roaming the deck until they were needed for their black flesh, but his impish streak didn't tend toward wanting to clean up after chickens on a yacht.

"Convince me that your leverage is more interesting than mine." He quartered his fig with his fork and popped a piece in his mouth, chewing deliberatively before following it with a sip of wine and leaning in as though to confide, "Then I'll play a game of 20 questions with you about mine."

Will was a lesser version of himself without both canine aroma and the clinging canine hairs that shed from Will's clothes and car as much as they had shed from the dogs themselves. Truly, to accept Will, one must accept the eau de chien and the necessity of a pack.

If someone had practical taste, they would be speculating on cleaning up after hypothetical chickens on a boat. "A familiar and heartfelt sacrifice to Asclepius and the stockpot." Will would take no little amusement in knowing Hannibal's hypothetical chickens were silkies while Will's were the standard Cornish Cross hens.

Will leaned in, too, engaged actively in the conspiracy and pitched his tone softer, between the two of them. "Freddie Lounds. Her hourglass ran out of sand that day in Wolf Trap. She's been living on borrowed grains ever since." He sliced a fig neatly in half, spearing a piece deliberately with the tines of his fork. He inspected the piece for a long minute, then slid it off the fork and onto his tongue, savoring for a moment before chewing and swallowing.

"It would be like closing a circuit that was too long left incomplete."

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