Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/14100294.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Hannibal_(TV)
  Relationship:
      Will_Graham/Hannibal_Lecter
  Character:
      Hannibal_Lecter, Will_Graham
  Additional Tags:
      Alternate_Universe_-_Western, Cannibalism, Murder, Size_Kink, Will_is_15,
      Will_is_a_criminal, psychopathy, Outlaws, Underage_Sex, Sex_Addiction,
      Dreams, sweat_kink, it's_gross_and_i'm_horny, Age_Difference, Come
      Marking, Blasphemy, Porn_With_Plot
  Stats:
      Published: 2018-03-26 Updated: 2018-03-29 Chapters: 3/? Words: 5261
****** Loverman ******
by bible
Summary
     Western AU.
     AT MIDNIGHT WHEN THE POLICE ARRIVED
     THE TWO HAD TO RUN INTO THE WESTERN
     MOON-DOWN AND THE BODIES STAYED IN
     THE HOUSE, REDDENING THE DIRTY FLOOR
     AND THE CRIMINALS KISSED WITH THE
     BODIES’ MISSING ORGANS IN THEIR MOUTH
     HA-HA-HA: AT NIGHT THE DESERT’S RIPE WITH
     DIABOLICAL THINGS.
     Will is fifteen. Hannibal likes none of God's children. Good thing
     Will belongs to the Devil.
***** Loverman *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
                                   LOVERMAN
                               New Mexico, 1985
            On the television, behind the eddies of altered transmission, a
reporter tells us that the cannibal has escaped. Somewhere in the armpit of the
southwest, in a barren town of less than two-hundred, a young Will Graham
watches the Ripper’s old court footage on a rotting television. The screen
blips intermittently with cigarette burns and shivering lines. Now, a headline
at the bottom of the screen announces Hannibal Lecter’s break-out from a Texan
penitentiary. The colors of the screen cut through the dark of the room and
play acid-yellow on Will’s sun-kissed, sunken face.
            A state-wide search is being conducted and a fourteen-year-old Will
has strange dreams that night. Strange dreams about this man who’s occupied so
much of his free time. Intangibly, of course. They’ve never met. But once he’d
heard word from frightened old women of the cannibal and killings that were
overtaking the state over, he had become obsessed. Newspaper clippings were
collected in a drawer along with his lighters and his bullets and his buttons.
Police files were sucked out of those willing to give him any information. The
tabloids were collected, the TV interviews recorded on his VHS tapes.
            This isn’t the first dream, but it’s one that forces him awake.
            In the dark of the early morning, where the sun has barely made its
grey ascent over the desert horizon, Will recollects the dream-image of the
cannibal hoarding him close, in some public school closet. Among cleaning
supplies and mops, Hannibal presses his palm to the glass of the door and
crowds him into his space. Dwarfed by the criminal’s broad shoulders, Will
buries his face under his arm and inhales the smell of blood and chlorine:
antiseptic smells. Hannibal presses his crotch to Will’s stomach and the sky
outside is a strange green, so bright and fake it might feature on Nickelodeon.
            The cloistering scent of blood seems stained inside Will’s nose all
day. He can’t focus at school, his ragged, linen shirt wet with sweat as his
heart races. He’s had too much coffee and the dream of Hannibal, this non-
entity that has been so intangible, so incapable of touching in his mind, is
now free. He can’t think of anything besides the fact that he is now forever
lost. Will will never be able to visit him in prison when he gets older, like
he was planning. Will can only dream of him. The steady stream of reports, the
clever repartee between Hannibal and interviewers will cease to exist. This
phosphor dot wraith of his television set, the printed words that amused him so
much, this fake friend of his, will vanish into Will’s imagination. Only his
art, the trail of blood that he knows the cannibal will inevitably leave behind
him, will remain. It won’t be enough. Will can thoroughly seek out his nature
through the forensic evidence he forces himself to obtain, but the character,
the charm, the dripping sexuality of his (embarrassingly enough) idol, is gone.
            When Will goes home, he grabs a tacky gold necklace with a crucifix
and fastens it beneath his bandanna and prays to some God that Hannibal comes
west.
                                       *
            At the pulpit, Will kneels. Sunday evening and he clasps his hands
together and prays for a cannibal in a church. A cannibal to come to him and
fuck him, to kill with him, to soak him in blood. His heart races and he feels
the churning, unending upset stomach that’s brought on by his stolen obsession.
Having Asperger’s usually incites a hyper-fixation, and while he’d never deem
himself a hybristophiliac—he doesn’t even know what the word means—he’s
definitely a sucker for this one and only killer.
            Some people get boy bands or Star Trek or airplane models. Not
cannibalistic serial killers that have the suave appearance of something so
foreign and far-away that it is unclear as to where he’s even from. Some people
cite Sweden, or Poland. But he read in a very obscure, long-forgotten interview
that it was Lithuania, a country that Will has since dedicated extensive
research to.
            Will isn’t yet that intelligent. Stubborn, fixated, obsessive,
astute. But he isn’t a genius, not yet. He’s only fourteen and his empathy has
yet to be harvested in full. He is not as egocentric as his peers but he has
his own agenda.
            When he unfolds from the pulpit, he stands up and sits on a pew in
a show of fake, dedicated meditation. He isn’t a Christian, but in the southern
world of the 20th century, this goes unseen too often. His atheism being
discovered is the least of his concerns.
            Can you even define yourself as a homosexual when you’ve only ever
been interested in one person?
            He closes his eyes and gathers the reverie of another dream. These
unconscious thoughts are all he has. They’ve become something of a linear
narrative. Another life in sleep, affirmed in consciousness by the newspapers.
            In this dream, they are sweaty from a long day in the sun. They’re
somewhere in Italy or in France, one of those pretty countries that Will
watches on TV. There are ruins and stray cats and there’s an ocean lapping at
marble, and the sun shines soft and glowing, not hot and beaming like in the
hell of New Mexico. But they’re sweaty nonetheless, and exhausted. Day at the
beach exhausted, where your skin stings with trapped light and your hair is
tousled with the smell of ocean wind.
            The cowboy killer laid Will down on the ground and pushed his legs
back. He unbuttoned a pair of corduroy pants which pressed into the back of
Will’s tan thighs as he slid his huge, pulsing cock into him, and it didn’t
hurt. It was warm and full and Will clenched around him, smiling serenely and
relaxed as he was fucked, as if having a pleasant massage rather than a
thorough fucking. His own cock, small but hard, bounced in time with the
thrusts as his toes curled, rested on Hannibal’s shoulders. Hannibal’s face was
blurred and abstract, and the sex was wet and noisy, slapping and sighing and
huffs emanating from Will mostly. He held his own cock and jerked it off and
Hannibal, a praising killer, leaned down and collected the pre-cum and seeped
like honey dew from the tip of his pink-headed cock. Will clenched and
whispered over and over, “Breed me, breed me,” like some girl or some animal. A
completely heady thing, that made no sense. He couldn’t get pregnant but this
animalistic nature overtook him and in the dream, he could feel it when
Hannibal shot him full of cum, let it seep out, an unrealistic amount of it
that seared his hole. Will drooled with his hand shoved in his mouth, eyes
blurring, making Hannibal’s shape even less coherent. Hannibal collected the
seed that came out of his puffy hole and put it to Will’s valentine-heart lips
and said, “lick it all fuckin’ up,” in a strangely American accent. So Will
did, for his cowboy killer, his human gator lover, his fucking sinnerman. And
eating a piece of Hannibal like he did made him feel like a cannibal himself.
            That night, when Will woke up, hard and feverish like a madman, he
found his corduroy jacket was pressed too hot to the back of his thighs. He had
fallen asleep on it, pantless, on the bed.
            Will looks down at his lap, now, in real time, and notices he’s got
a raging hard-on in the memory of it. He looks up at the cross hung high over
the pews, over the altar. He cups his crotch in his hand and massages it,
noting Jesus’s lacerations, and thinking about sucking the blood out of them.
            The priest asks Will to leave around midnight.
                                       *
            Well, you know. Thought turns to words after a while, and words
turn to action if they’re spoken adamantly enough and without sarcasm.
            That’s the fear Will’s parents had for a while when Will became
bigger and older and stronger than both of them. When he started speaking what
was on his mind. What if he took action? What if those yellowed notes they
found in the old copy of the Bible were true? He wrote things like this:
            AT MIDNIGHT WHEN THE POLICE ARRIVED
            THE TWO HAD TO RUN INTO THE WESTERN
            MOON-DOWN AND THE BODIES STAYED IN
            THE HOUSE, REDDENING THE DIRTY FLOOR
            AND THE CRIMINALS KISSED WITH THE
            BODIES’ MISSING ORGANS IN THEIR MOUTH
            HA-HA-HA: AT NIGHT THE DESERT’S RIPE WITH
            DIABOLICAL THINGS.
in Japanese ink.
Which, of course, was only fiction. Will insisted as the dreams became more
feverish and intense that he had to record what was going on in his head. This
was only the id, mom. But she didn’t get it. Parents—they don’t get anything.
Especially not psychology. Because if they had, they wouldn’t have put him in
the New Mexico Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Where he stayed, rotting, dreaming, and getting angrier, for eight long months.
Chapter End Notes
     yee-haw
     i've been listening to a lot of nick cave. i'm trying to get more
     comfortable writing sex scenes. so here's an excuse to write porn
     around my favorite landscape: the southwest.
***** Call of the West *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
            If Will thought his public school was full of irritants, the
neuroatypical company within the walls, the ones that wail and scream and
repeat themselves and ask Will why why why over and over again, is something
else entirely. Will doesn’t think he hates them, but he certainly prefers his
own company. He gets it, for the most part. Shut in the library, bereft of a
roommate, studiously quiet, playing mute when approached. But his anger is
fostered and bottled up. The appeal of being alone, of being free, starts to
build.
            He sees Hannibal in himself. He takes time in the mornings to brush
his hair back. But he can never tame his mop of curls into the sleek and flat
style that Hannibal wears. (Wears, not wore. Because Will is sure that he is
not gone, and he is sure he will resurface in Will’s life, either by proxy or…
otherwise.) He brushes his teeth a lot, to keep them strong for biting. He
tries to eat the new foods in the institution and judge their taste logically,
tries to harvest a sophisticated palette.
            Even scouts for a particularly fleshy boy to perform cannibalism
on. But that never ends up surmounting. As Will’s psyche deteriorates, he hides
behind a guise of normalcy and recovery from the abstract, dark, homosexual
thoughts he once maintained in the house of God, and, more threateningly, his
parents. Besides, he doesn’t want to choose subpar meat. He holds conversations
with Hannibal in his head at night. Hannibal fork-feeding him the prime meat he
chooses, holding his chin, Good little boy, isn’t it delicious?Brushes his
teeth harder and chooses a new victim that he can murder and remurder and
remurder in a billion different ways using only his mind. It’s truly a talent,
the violent imagination he’s got on him.
            The institution is pretty shitty at treatment, and pretty
expensive.
            Only the latter factor convinces his parents to take him out of it.
Will doesn’t feel treated. On the ride back home (home, such a strange word, so
far away from the scrupulously clean and soulless make-up of the city
institution) Will sits in the backseat, hearing distant, underwater discussion
about his ‘condition.’ His ‘improvement.’ On the radio (a thing that’s had to
replace the television since the boys in the institution insisted on ball games
rather than police reports), a song comes on that Will registers as very
significant.
            As they drive past the cacti that line the dirt road, the sundown
desert-rose in color, plumes of dust being kicked up by their tires behind
them, Will knits his eyebrows together and tries to make the voices of his
nervous, birdlike parents disappear. Underneath their chanting, some strange-
mouthed man wails weirdly and angrily about runaways and shooting motherfuckers
full of lead.
            His mother turns the dial down.
            “Won’t you be happy to be back in your own bed?” she asks Will.
            “Uh-huh,” Will says, accustomed to grunts now. He never was very
talkative. The excessively chatty do no good, anyway.
            “We’re sorry you missed so much school, but I hear they paired with
the school system there…”
            “Yeah.”
            “…So hopefully you’re all caught up.”
            “Okay.”
            “You don’t have to go back tomorrow, though. You can take a little
break. Take tomorrow off. Treat yourself to some relaxation. Won’t that be
nice?”
            “Yeah, mom. It’ll be nice.”
            Will presses his forehead to the window and watches the outside
world, barren, a yawning, low-reaching sky showcasing how far he can go off,
how empty the world is away from the fake make-up of society. They don’t have
to follow this trail back to the little shitty town where people pick on him.
They don’t have to go back to school, where his lessons in physics and algebra
II distract from the things he’s really interested in that they don’t offer.
Not with their fifteen teachers in total. Psychology, criminal justice, sexual
education—all moot in Mosswater, New Mexico. Most of this comes from Will’s
psychosexual fixation on one legendary man who’s become a haunt.
            He wonders how he’s doing. Like an old friend. As they drive
further and further away from the lack of civilization, Will thinks of going
out there. Clenches a hand over his malnourished leg and imagines a bigger one,
capable of murder, in its place. Closes his eyes and tries to force the thought
away.
            In isolationism, you never have to worry about popping boners in
front of your parents.
                                       *
            When he gets home, he runs into the bathroom with its claw-footed
tub, ringed with dirt, its floral, peeling wallpaper, its mothball smell, its
old, shuddering vent, and grabs his cock over the toilet. Pulls it out of his
pants, the ones he was wearing eight months ago, when he was forced into the
institution. His dick is small, and he squeezes his eyes shut as he jerks
himself off, tongue bitten between his teeth, working his hand over the flesh,
searing hot. What kind of angsty teenager is he? Jerking off instead of yelling
at the top of his lungs, instead of losing his mind because he was forcefully
hospitalized by his parents. He’s forgiven them (in word only, don’t get him
wrong), run off to the home he dreamed so often of burning down, and works his
dick.
            He realizes now why, exactly, he’s so excited. Hannibal, for the
majority of Will’s life, was indicted. As soon as he was out, Will gets
institutionalized. They’re on the same playing field now. They’re both smart
enough to have escaped. (Even if Will’s escape wasn’t as… heroic.) They’re in
the same space. What a fanatic I’ve become, Will thinks with a fleeting moment
of self-consciousness, chagrin making his cheeks pinken, but that fades as
quick as it comes. He reaches back and plays with his own balls a bit, eyes
squeezing shut.
            He’s gonna get his hands on me, he thinks, trying to recall his
voice from the interviews. He’s gonna put me on all fours and rub against me
and puts his hands on me. Lovely creature that I am. He’s gonna tell me how
beautiful I am, how I’m a desert flower that needs to be unfurled and played
with.
            The thought of Hannibal looking at his hole and playing with the
pink, furled spot, that ice cold viciousness melting as he sinks himself into
him makes Will shiver, stroking his cock from root to tip, toes curling in his
shoes. Stretching him with his cock, Will fitting perfectly around him, a neat
sleeve for him to use. Will doesn’t make a noise as he leaves a messy stain on
the toilet’s rim, quickly cleaned with toilet paper. He tucks his sticky,
softening cock into his underwear and washes his hands. Feels very content, and
refreshed, and energized in a way he hasn’t felt since he was eschewed from
this house.
            Soon his absconding will be voluntary.
                                       *
            By seven AM the next day, Will’s in a gas station forty miles west
of Mosswater, buying chorizo and cheese and sleeves of saltines and a canteen
of water, shoved in a knapsack that’s thrown over his shoulders. He had woken
up with a throbbing headache and had to puke in the toilet. He’s never had
anything to drink so he’s never been hungover, but if this is what it is like,
he shares an empathetic thought for the alcoholics of the world. The sickness
was wrought not from any poison, but a complete refusal of the body to spend
another minute in the cyclical normalcy, separate from his loved one. He is
tired of dreams, of the home and of his school. Today is his birthday, and the
fifteen-year-old Will is determined never to return to the hot slab of
Mosswater.
            There is a life to be made as an outlaw. He wants to be a character
in the dime store cowboy books he collects, not its reader. There are people
destined and content with mediocracy. And there are people like him—like
Hannibal—destined to be written about.
            He unrolls a wad of cash for the cashier and thinks about buying a
pack of Chinese cigarettes. But it’s all too early to get into that kind of
nasty shit. He’s gonna be a killer. Not a smoker. Besides, there’s something
intensely erotic about the thought of Hannibal placing a cigarette in his mouth
and lighting the end for him, letting him suck in the smoke. Maintaining eye
contact between the silvery cloud of nicotine.
            And at the thrift shop next door, he buys a police scanner, and a
revolver.
                                       *
            New Mexico isn’t a big state, not nearly as expansive as some sort
of hellish no man’s land like Texas, where the few municipalities intersect the
long stretches of nothingness in between Houston and Dallas and Austin. But
it’s not the easiest path to travel by. Will is on foot for a lot of it,
soaking his shirt with sweat, his bones visible through both his skin and the
cotton. He’s an underfed, pallid boy, his suntan lost from his months in the
institution. A walking corpse, people tend to pull over when he juts his thumb
out, fearful of his health. His youth is also an attractor, both due to his
doe-eyed, sullen beauty, and concern as to why such a small kid is out here
playing runaway.
            One man smiles while he drives him into the pitch-black night, lit
only by the overhead moon and neon cacti that advertise motels with the sickly,
fluorescent green. He tells Will that this is the perfect time to be out here
on the road. A kid’s gotta go places, see things. Will sleepily watches the
cross swing on the rearview mirror, his eyes blurring with exhaustion as they
drive. His breathing is slow and calculated and the cross becomes hypnotic in
its back-and-forth swaying.
            Soon he drifts.
            It’s a dreamless sleep and a short one. When he wakes up, he has a
prickling paranoia that comes from location-based disorientation. The air that
rattles through the vents in the car make him shiver, pinprick goosebumps
raising on his flesh. Awkward, shy Will feels a surge of anger that has no
logical root. Irritable, uncomfortable, head throbbing, eyelids seeming too
heavy for his worn out, oversensitive eyeballs, and the bottled-up emotions of
the last eight months seem to come out all at once. He’s trembling, watching
the man and his unending, placid smile; his leathery, tan face; his thin lips;
the roll of trembling, pink flesh beneath his chin. As vulnerable and annoying
as a newborn.
            There’s really no reason that would hold up in court as to why Will
brandishes his revolver from his knapsack, loads it and cocks his wrist to
throw the cylinder into place, and empty the lead into the driver’s head. But
he feels justified, exhilarated, all the same. The blood cakes the driver’s
side window and Will can’t hear the tires screech from the sudden blow. With
surprisingly steadied hands, Will stills the steering wheel and pulls the car
to a stop after climbing over the divider and sitting on his victim’s lap. It’s
still warm.
            He’s had two driving lessons prior to this. He can figure it out.
            Will unloads the body onto the packed dirt outside. It makes a
sickening crunch as it hits the ground. He sits there for a while until the
ringing in his ears subsides, parked by the side of the empty road. The time on
the analog clock announces that it’s only just past midnight. The digital
numbers blink for a while. His heart thrums in his chest and he catches his
breath, staring out at the horizon that vanishes somewhere out there. One of
his skinny legs sways out the driver’s side door. After he gulps down dry, hot
air, he starts the car engine again by turning the keys, his foot planted on
the brakes. It rumbles to life.
            See? Not so hard.
            Pulling his leg back in, he buckles up, and goes on his, down some
arbitrarily numbered route, going 5 miles under the speed limit, a pleasant
Sunday driver.
            He can’t wait to jerk off tonight to the thought of Hannibal
praising him, and the brain matter he splattered on the window.
Chapter End Notes
     "okay cool where's hannibal tho"
     he's fuckin coming and then he'll be fuckin CUMMING u know what i
     mean lol
     thanks for the kind feedback, i'd mouthfuck each and every one of
     you!
***** Some Wholly Wretched Baptismal Candidate *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
            The worst thing you can do to a kid on the road is take his boots.
Will learns this pretty quickly. His money and his food run out faster than he
anticipated and it’s late April the day he wakes up in a canvas tent that he’s
sharing with a couple of piss-drenched no names and finds both them and his
boots gone. Somehow, they neglected to take his trusty revolver. It sits
shining in the knapsack. Will sits up, his head throbbing, and checks the
chamber, huffs at the lack of bullets.
            He pushes the canvas flaps open and goes into the late morning
sunlight, a blinding, searing, hot sky and barren land of nothing spread out
before him. His feet are calloused and worn, but standing straight on the
ground, baking under the sun, even the dead skin caking the flats of his feet
isn’t enough to keep them from burning. He jumps from foot to foot with a hiss
through his teeth and goes back inside the tent.
            What kind of fucked up man steals a kid’s boots? But then, Will is
hardly a kid anymore.
            In the past few months, bar fights and working for food has become
a life for him, and while Will isn’t a huge fan of this fruitless search for a
serial killer that may not even be in the country anymore, he can’t help but
attune all of his issues to his own doing. This chosen impoverishment is all
his own doing. Still, he’s a bit proud of it. The capability of survival in his
own self-chosen destitution seems noble, somehow.
            But he’d really like his fucking boots back.
            He’s been tricked a lot. The car was stolen early on. He worked and
worked only to be given nothing, not even a can of beans. But when he gets his
gun out—something he pretends he doesn’t like having to do—people tend to start
acting right.
            Cops are after him, he knows it. It’s a wonder he hasn’t been
caught for anything by now. But drunken bar fights and dead hobos doesn’t often
interest the police the way a high-end cannibal had so long ago. And that’s top
priority. Will leaves a few bodies around, but none that didn’t deserve it.
None that weren’t already involved in enough sketchy shit that they would have
met the same fate just a little bit later.
            Will stands back outside on his bare feet and grits his teeth and
decides it’s time to shove off after destroying whatever nerves he has down
there.
            Normally, around this time, he’d take up a job to pay for some new
boots but working usually requires shoes and all Will’s got is a gun. He spends
the day in the canvas tent, the smell of urine and blood still in the dry,
stuffy air. Damp sweat and the smell of musty linen hang there like a fog, and
he sleeps in it uncomfortable and with intermittent awakenings that make him
kick off his blanket and whine like a sick animal.
            Eventually nightfall comes and he can step outside without his feet
burning too much, though the ground has trapped warmth and it isn’t the most
pleasant sensation. He carries his almost empty knapsack over his shoulder as
he slogs through the heavy heat. The gun is in his hand, and he wears a grim
glower. His hair is long, now, and soaked with sweat that dampens and trickles
down his neck in a way that incites goosebumps on his flesh.
            Eventually, though, he makes it to a bar.
            It’s there, like a mirage, lit up on the ozone dark countryside,
the WONDERLAND TAVERN, the name outlined with flamingo pink neon. Inside, Will
is self-conscious about his height and his sweat and his bare feet and his gun,
but they let him in without word and he sinks into a dark booth with its sticky
vinyl, and orders whiskey he knows he can’t pay for. Does it again and again
and drinks himself sick and pissed off until he has the gumption to get up and
slog through the cool dark of the tavern and level his gun at the first
bartender closest and says, very drunk, “C’mon.”
            Even drunk, Will has learned to defend himself, so when he notes
the slight movement to the left of his ear, he side-steps and lets the guy
smash the bottle down on the bartop instead, and juts the barrel of the gun
into his gut, swinging him with his fist. The smell of good tequila spreads in
the air like a spray of perfume. The guy is taller than him, though, and he
hits his throat instead of his cheek and Will listens to the gag which strikes
him as very funny. He laughs and staggers back, shaking out his hand and
turning back to the bartender.
            “C’mon,” he repeats, his mouth spreading in a grin. His teeth are
yellowed with plaque now, a month and half isn’t too much damage but the
pristine shine of his teeth from the institution are a memory. “I don’t wanna
have to hurt anyone else. See, I lost my boots, some fucker stole ‘em, and I
can’t really afford all the drinks I put down either, and I really don’t know
what I want in life or why I’m doin’ this to myself, but I’m going on through.
So just. C’mon.”
            He motions to the cash register and is given its contents.
            Happy as a morning dove, he pockets it in his knapsack and lazily
salutes the clientele with his gun, before making his exit.
            Yeah, he will later think in retrospect, it was all too easy.
            Whenever the bartender catches him by the ankle—after following him
in silence for what Will perceives as hours—and directs his face into the dirt,
Will is too beaten and disoriented to do anything but snarl and struggle. His
revolver has gotten away from him and dirt particles crunch between his snarled
teeth as it’s brought down on the back of his head. Being pistol whipped is
really what does him in that night. Will’s got nothing in the end except a
linen shirt and the last wrinkled pair of briefs on his ass.
            Poor kid can’t even find the gall to jerk off.
                                       *
            When he finds him, Will’s turned on his side, caked in a heavy
layer of light brown dirt. If Hannibal was less keen, he might have thought he
was decaying already. There’s a large scabbed gash on the back of his head and
he’s curled in on himself as if in protection. Bracelets of bruises line his
forearms and a puddle of liquidated, reddish vomit lays next to him. Hannibal
stares from beneath the fan of his hat, those feline eyes narrowed just above
where his bandanna hides his guide. He unmounts his horse and walks over to the
child, curled there like an embryo.
            As he kneels down, arms rested upon his thighs, and studies the
boy, he sees the minute flickering of his eyelids in sleep, the slow, shallow
breathing of his small, rodent-like chest beneath his thin shirt, and even
dollops of sleep-sweat culminating on his forehead.
            The smell of alcohol and iron is most predominant, but beneath
that, fear, desperation. He’s only a child, Hannibal realizes, but he’s not
touched.
            As he hefts Will limp but light body into his arms and carries him
over to his horse, he saddles him up and tries to awaken him with a few shakes.
But he’s thoroughly unconscious. He finds his balance with a bit of effort, the
both of them upon the horse, and sets Mischa off riding.
            Hannibal isn’t one for merciful tenderness, but he isn’t going to
give up free meat.
                                       *
            Little ranch house by a well does the trick well enough because no
one’s found him for a year now. It’s short and hidden among normal neighbors,
though they’re sparse and unsuspicious. Older ranch folk raising cattle or
retiring where they were born, too poor for those haughty condominiums in
Florida. Hannibal melds in with his horse and his newly-found humbleness when
it comes to fashion and décor.
            You can never be too safe. It was a fault, once, his taste for the
grandeur. Perhaps in some alternate universe he’d continue pursuing that when
on the run. But he plans to stay out of the law’s reach in this one.
            The child isn’t awake yet, so Hannibal takes his time in the tin
tub when washing him and shaving him. A pair of scissors and a straight razor
has taken care of that disgusting mop of curls, leaving him a shaved head and a
barren, infantile body. Plain soap has been dragged over his skin, revealing a
strikingly pale pallor beneath all the grime, though his shoulders and nose are
peeling with what looks like a fresh sunburn. Besides the head wound, the most
startling of Will’s issues are his feet, these cracked, caked bottoms that are
blistered and burst.
            As Hannibal continues to wash beneath his knees and over his
calves, Will’s breathing changes. He shifts in the tepid water and a hand comes
up to slap at his own face, as if scratching for a bug. A stray hair has fallen
down from where he cut it and is now tickling his nose. His sore muscles relax
in the soap-milky water and he sinks into it until the petal pink skin of his
eyelashes flicker and open.
            They meet eyes when Hannibal has the bar of lemony soap under his
heel.
            “Hello,” he greets casually, washing away the dark stains of dirt.
            “Hi. …Hi, Hannibal,” Will says, his eyes blinking with sleepy and
unsurprised recognition.
            When he says his name, Hannibal’s scrubbing stops and he puts the
bar of soap aside, washing the grimy, lathered bubbles away. He looks over his
body and then settles on Will’s youthful but somehow exhausted face.
            “Oh, what a shame,” Hannibal says, mouth downturned as his infamy
precedes him, “I didn’t know I’d have to drown you so early.”
Chapter End Notes
     chapter name from blood meridian :^)
     comment ur lovely thoughts/criticisms or perish
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