you're too young & eager to love

I haven't been this excited about a fandom since Game of Thrones.



Drabbles and more drabbles! A collection, I suppose, you could call it. None of them are connected. Or at least they aren’t intended to be.

According to the fandom (I learn new things every day), Abigail, Hannibal, and Will are known as the murder family. I like to put an exclamation between the words for emphasis. Murder!family. …. A very inappropriate, non-traditional family that probably engage in a number of sordid activities. Remember that.




--

1.

"Do you hunt?" Will asks the question while they are eating, with his eyes on his plate and to the side, though they lift marginally to trail the path of Hannibal's fork when he draws it from his mouth and turns it in his hand.

“Yes.” Hannibal crosses his knife diagonally and parts the venison along the grain, brightly pink in the middle and weeping juices as his knife tears it, but it parts like it was never whole to begin with. The fork is most of the way to his mouth when the follow-up arrives.

“Could you show me?”

He has seen Will Graham shoot a man and eat animal. Hannibal wonders how long it will take for Will to realize that it could be done the other way around.

"If you like." Hannibal says, and he is thinking about the chest freezer in the finished basement, and how near to full it already is. He wished he had cooked the tongue with the steaks to see if Will would have shied from it before tasting how buttery and soft the meat is and how little it needs beyond salt and pepper to have a thick flavor. "But it can get messy."

--

2.

Hannibal once bit the lips off of a woman; tore them straight off when she leaned in too close. They were soft and unexpectedly meaty between his teeth, he remembers. She had ended up as a bastardized bourguignon for the Baltimore Association of Cosmetic Surgeons. Her lips, however, had been all his, raw and full. He remembers chewing while she tried to scream, gums exposed, silver fillings glistening.

--

3.

Will has a complicated relationship with physical contact. He said as much the first time he went to Hannibal's office, apologetically refusing a handshake with eyes directed at the floor, shaking his head. Will is quietly mortified by his inability to perform such a simple task of human manners.

Hannibal nods and is careful not to sit too close during their conversations.

He's seen Will's shoulders tense at the brush of fingertips, muscles coiled tight. He's seen him shake once the hand is removed. Will has exercises to control his breathing, to talk himself down, but it's only a stalling tactic. He goes home and kneels in his shower, under scalding water, and he shakes so hard that his thin, bony knees knock against the porcelain sides of the bathtub.

Hannibal knows. Will tells him.

--

4.

Will is fighting sleep himself when Abigail murmurs softly that she doesn't want to go to bed yet. They're sitting in the drawing room of Hannibal's house after a supper of heavy cream of leek soup with thick chunks of bacon, meatballs spiced with cumin, and delicate slices of roast rubbed in sage and salt. The red wine that Hannibal poured for the three of them has gone straight to Will's head, as it always has, and to Abigail's too. It can be easy to forget how young she is, sometimes. But curled up at Will's side on the long red sofa, head on his shoulder as he absently rests a hand on her thigh, he looks down and suddenly remembers. Her blue eyes are tinged with fear beneath all the sleepiness, and Hannibal looks up from the paperwork that he's finishing at his desk.

He stands, pulling a thin blue volume from one of his many bookshelves, and comes to rest beside them on the couch. Abigail and Will's heads turn as one to look at him and a small smile curves his lips. He pats his lap with one hand and Abigail scrambles over like a dog to curl herself on top of his legs, wrapping her arms loosely around his shoulders and letting her head drop against his chest. Will fights his own Pavlovian response to do the same. He also instantly misses her presence at his side and moves closer so that he and Hannibal are brushing shoulders.

Hannibal reads The Little Prince slowly, his voice low and husky. He strokes Abigail’s hair absently with his long fingers, and she glances at the illustrations on the glossy pages of the book before he moves his hand lower on her back and cups her shoulder blades, digging his thumbs in to the flesh there. She is tight from stress and she groans and pushes back into his touch, shifting against Hannibal's front. Will moves down further and fits his palms to her hips, kneading there, then her thighs. She shivers, hot, under his touch and buries her face in Hannibal's shoulder.

He continues reading, as if nothing has changed. “"'If a sheep eats bushes, does it eat flowers, too?' 'A sheep eats whatever it finds.' 'Even flowers that have thorns?' 'Yes. Even flowers that have thorns.'"

Will slides a hand up under her skirt, suddenly, very much awake, the soft fabric rustling. Abigail gasps and shifts, legs spreading, twisting on Hannibal's lap. He keeps reading even as he helps her to move, turning her around so that Will can have easier access. As Will's fingers, calloused and rough, press at the thin white cotton of her underwear, Hannibal's free hand deftly unbuttons her shirt and cups the gentle swell of her left breast, thumb rubbing insistently through the fabric of her pale green bra. Abigail moans.

Will pushes her skirt up to her hips, pulls her underwear down her pale legs and kisses the inside of her thighs. He notices, not for the first time, that she is freckled everywhere. Dusted with constellations.

"'For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers?"

Abigail muffles her cries in the curve of Hannibal's neck as Will kisses between her legs, tongue flicking out to stroke and taste her. Hannibal reads, and skims his skillful, tapered fingers across the planes of her skin, across her chest, her stomach, her arms, her sides. She arches, caught between the two of them, body shaking from the youthful butterflies in her stomach and the heat inside her veins. She comes quietly, flushed with belated embarrassment, and Hannibal returns to stroking her hair, his approving downward glance betraying the neutrality of his voice as he reads. “It’s so mysterious, the land of tears.”

--

5.

“Difficult case?” Lecter asks, less calming ocean and more forest fire today. There’s something excited about him, something not quite contained. His perfectly tailored suit strains to hold him in. The teeth in his eyes are gleaming.

“No,” Will says honestly, because it’s not, not really.

Hannibal smiles. An invitation. The ground is shaking under Will’s feet again.

“I looked up Cassandra,” Will blurts out. Bites down on it because he shouldn’t—he can’t—trust this man. This man has danger carved into the lines of his shoulders, the syrupy texture of his voice. His silken tie is red. His smile is an act but the teeth in his eyes are a truth.

“Oh?” Hannibal leans back, the picture of decorum. Social nicety wrapped in a suit. “And?”

“No one believed Cassandra, when she tried to warn them.” Will says. Cassandra, the seer who warned Troy of its fall.

They didn’t believe her.

Hannibal smiles and this time it’s genuine. “And yet, Troy fell anyway,” he says.

Will opens his mouth and closes it again. He sees a heart on a plate in his mind’s eye, half-eaten. Still beating. Red, red blood pools out from underneath it, overflows, drips down the table and into Will’s shoes. He leaves bloody footprints when he walks. His teeth are sticky with it.

--

6.

“Why?” Will asks, sitting across from Hannibal.

Lecter smiles. He’s still a presentation, a caricature of a man sane. “Why what?”

Will swallows convulsively. (He still doesn’t know if he’s anticipating or terrified.)

Why, why, such a layered question. Why here, why now, why those men, why their organs? Why reveal yourself? You’re so good no one would have ever noticed you. “Why me?”

Hannibal’s smile turns harder, sharper, a wolf grinning. “Because you’re letting them destroy you,” he says. “You’re letting them take you apart, piece by piece.”

Will spreads his hands. (My therapist is a cannibal, he thinks. Figures.) “I’m doing my job.”

Lecter’s eyes are dark with pity. “No,” he objects, soft and calm and just on the right side of seductive. “You’re doing theirs.”