Work Text
There is a certain rustic charm to the old house, but for Hannibal the main selling point is the basement, which with the addition of some sound proofing tiles and a work sink will be ideal.The name under which he registers the house is not his own. He intends it as an isolated work space, and a safe house, should the need arise. At first, Hannibal has no intention of spending much time there.But all of that is before the ghost reveals himself.He has not been in the new house for long before he begins to feel as though he is being watched, nearly all of the time. Hannibal is not given to paranoia. He knows that his instincts are good, and does not doubt what they tell him. Hidden cameras are the first thought that strikes him. Perhaps the house’s former owner was something of a voyeur, or maybe the FBI has finally caught wind of him and has laid a trap. But though he goes over every inch of the house, he finds no signs of surveillance gear.What he does find is a body.The smell is very faint, even to Hannibal’s heightened senses, but when he works his way into the back of the attic, past all the discarded furniture and dusty boxes, he suspects what’s inside the steerage trunk even before he breaks the rusted latch.The lacquered wood flakes under Hannibal’s hand as he lifts the trunk’s lid.The body inside is mummified, dried out like a piece of jerky. Shrunken as the body is, the flannel shirt it’s shrouded in looks absurdly oversized, but Hannibal suspects that even in life it fit poorly. Most of the hair remains attached to the scalp, and it strikes him strongly that the brown curls might once have been lovely.There’s deep gouges in the trunk lid, the scratch marks stained black with old blood. When Hannibal lifts one of the shrunken hands he sees that the nails are ragged and broken, ripped away entirely on two of the fingers. The fingertips themselves are torn so deeply that Hannibal can see the white of bone peaking out from the desiccated flesh.It’s simple enough to see that the man climbed into the trunk and then hadn't been able to get out again, but the why and how are harder to know. He supposes that the lid either closed on top of him by mistake or that he closed it himself without realizing that the latch would engage. Either that, or someone forced him into the trunk and locked him in. In any case, no one had come to look for him, or if they had they’d come too late for him to cry for help, or else they hadn’t heard his calls.A hazard of living alone, Hannibal reflects, but skirts around whatever implications that might have for himself. The trunk is not airtight, and Hannibal thinks it more likely that the man died of dehydration rather than suffocation.A lingering, filthy, lonesome death. Hannibal tries to picture it, lays it against the gnawing hunger that nearly claimed him during his tenth winter for a comparison, but imagination fails. He feel more troubled than he would expect of himself, contemplating it, and that fact troubles him further.There is a peculiar sort of feeling when he looks down at the body, as though he’s happened upon something important that he hadn’t realized he’d lost, but has found it broken.He closes the lid again and leaves the attic, but the feeling of unease hangs around him. Hannibal is not entirely sure that the feeling is completely his own. A thread of whimsy has always woven through Hannibal’s sense of rationalism, and the idea of ghosts is not something that he dismisses out of hand. Mischa’s ghost had been with him almost his entire life, after all, watching just outside of the corner of his eyes whenever he sits down to eat, bleeding among the shards of every broken tea cup.Memory, to Hannibal, is as tangible as flesh and bone. But it is his own mind, he knows, that is haunted by that particular ghost, and she is only the echo of a memory that was burned into him, fused onto his corneas and within his cerebral cortex. The ghost is not Mischa herself, but only his own sense of her, those things about her and what happened to her that he has been unwilling and unable to release.All minds are haunted, he knows very well, though some carry more ghosts than others. But he had not really believed, before the ghost began to make himself felt, that a building could be haunted in the same way that a person’s memories might be.After all, if a hard death and socially improper burial was all it took for a spirit to be trapped behind after its body had died, every work space that Hannibal has ever utilized would be thick with ghosts. Nonetheless, he cannot deny the materiality of this particular ghost, and makes no effort to try. He trusts his own perceptions.The sense of powerfully troubled emotions hanging about him continues to grow, blatantly alien from his own affective state at any given moment. The ghost hovers around him, never visible or tangible but felt, nonetheless, the air moving oddly in its wake. Objects around him fall over for no discernible reason. Hannibal is often beset by sudden cold chills. Hannibal simply waits, curious, to see what the ghost will do next.He is not terribly surprised when the face appears in the bathroom mirror, watching from behind his right shoulder.It’s no horror show mask, no nightmare creature. The face is gaunt and the faded blue eyes are haunted, but aside from a faint sense of opacity it is not discernible from that of a living person. The face is handsome, in fact, almost angelic in its classical beauty for all its weariness.It’s easy for Hannibal to recognize that face as belonging to the dead man in the attic.“There you are,” Hannibal says, and lets his pleasure at finally seeing his admirer show clearly in his own reflected face.The ghost doesn’t answer. The thin line of his troubled frown does not change, but the end of the ghost’s tongue darts out, as though to wet the cracked lips. The eyes, so full of aching desperation, blink rapidly and then shy away from meeting the reflection of Hannibal’s own.When Hannibal turns around he finds, of course, that the ghost is no longer there.It will be weeks until he again manifests so tangibly.
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Hannibal does not need, really, to bring his work home with him - particularly to this particular home. But he is curious as to what the ghost will do when he sees him kill.There is an intimacy to their mutual awareness of each other, and Hannibal wants the ghost to understand him as much as he wants to understand the ghost. And too, the ghost is the one being with whom he can be completely honest about himself without fear of exposure. The potentialities of that leave him nearly giddy.All through the process of remodeling the basement, Hannibal has explained to the ghost what he is doing and why; the meat hooks, the chains, the big stainless steel work stink, the soundproof tiles. He explains the purpose of these things calmly and without shame, and watches and listens closely for any signs of the ghost’s reaction.There’s been some resistance. Often, when Hannibal speaks of killing the ghost paints the air around him with anxiety and the sharp bite of disgust. Hannibal has, on occasion, come into the basement to find his tools scattered across the floor.But the ghost always circles back to Hannibal. He misses little of what Hannibal has to say, regardless of the means by which he registers his disapproval. Hannibal can taste his fascination, the longing. The sensation is almost tactile, something akin to the brush of spiderwebs against his skin. Hunger knows hunger.Hannibal is fairly certain that the ghost could hurt him, if he really wanted to, but Hannibal doesn’t think he will.Before Hannibal came here, the ghost had been terribly lonely, too. Hannibal goes back to the attic and looks at the body again.He knows that the ghost is getting stronger, that he is somehow feeding off of Hannibal and the attention that Hannibal has paid him. The ghost is visible more often now, and though he usually appears as little more than an ambulant patch of smoke, sometimes there are shades of color and definition to him.There is a whimsical part of Hannibal that wonders if his ministrations might have breathed new life into the desiccated flesh, as they’ve granted the spirit new vitality. Perhaps, Hannibal fantasizes, knowing it to be a fantasy, if he does enough to feed the ghost's hunger, someday soon he will be able to return to his body, and Hannibal will see before himself a living flesh and blood version of the presence to which he has become so attached. But nothing about the body has changed. Hannibal was not been sure if the ghost followed him, but now he becomes fully conscious of the presence beside him, watching from just outside of his line of sight. Distress flows off the ghost in waves, and Hannibal shivers at the sudden cold. He is struck by the intensity of his desire to do something to comfort the spirit, but cannot at first think of any way to do so.Then a thought comes to him. He leans over the body, and lifting it gently reaches into the back pocket of the jeans. There’s a billfold in there, and Hannibal takes it out and looks inside of it.“Will?” he inquires of the empty air, reading the name on the driver’s licence. Then he says, “Will,” again, simply to savor the taste of the name in his mouth. It feels right, somehow - such a simple and straightforward name for such a complex phenomenon.He does not know if the ghost is pleased by the speaking of his name, but doing so pleases Hannibal. The ghost’s emotions are more real and immediate to Hannibal than those of his victim. Hannibal can easily shut out the clammer of the man’s desperation and pleading, and when he does chose to be sensitive to the distress it takes on a different character when filtered through Hannibal’s own impulses and desires. It becomes something refined, worthy of being savoured.On the other hand, Will’s emotions are raw and harsh and they drum against Hannibal’s own skin like the buffeting of a storm. They oscillate wildly - desire and repulsion, fear and eagerness and self-loathing and shameful joy, combinations and flavors of a complexity that Hannibal had not thought possible.It is intoxicating and overwhelming and so entirely unlike anything Hannibal has known before, and he could not defend himself against it all even if he wanted to.The ghost’s ability to manipulate physical objects is clumsy, so when Will knocks the instrument tray across the floor Hannibal is not entirely sure if it is because he feels compelled to try to stop Hannibal using them or if it is a sign that he wants to take part himself. Hannibal knows that it most likely a bit of both. The man’s eyes were on the tray when Will threw it, parsing their potentialities with a nearly fathomless dread, whereas Hannibal was looking elsewhere. Now Hannibal sees that the man’s eyes are filled with a new terror - one that is more uncanny even than the knowledge of what Hannibal means to do to him, and Hannibal is delighted by that.“You saw him,” Hannibal says, not really a question, but of course the man can’t answer around his gag in any case. He removes it and asks, “What did he look like to you?”It takes a great deal of coaxing to get a coherent answer out of the man, but Hannibal is patient with him. The gist of it is that he saw the tray move without either of them touching it, seemingly lifted by a shimmering patch of water vapor which hung in the air, the faintest outline of a vaguely human-shaped patch of movement.Knowing for sure that other people can see Will, but not with the same clarity that Hannibal can is information that he finds profoundly gratifying.When Hannibal is satisfied that he’s heard all that is worth learning, he gathers his tools off the floor and goes back to work.There’s no more interference from the ghost, but Hannibal feels the hunger grow thick in the air. It’s the proximity to strong emotional states that is making the ghost more tangible, Hannibal comes to understand.Will's like a sketch drawn in clear wax crayon, present on the surface of reality but barely visible. The violence makes him real. He is painted in by the screams; They give him color, definition, depth.But joy has nearly the same effect. Hannibal is sure that his own pleasure when the blade is in his hand influences the ghost, makes him more vibrantly real. Even smaller enjoyments - the taste of good food or the sound of a favorite piece of music - effect the ghost vicariously.When Hannibal catches glimpses of the ghost now he doesn’t look exactly has he had when Hannibal first saw him in the mirror. He is rendered in sharper lines now, and there is a sense of menace in the jerky way that his shape seems to skitter across the surface of reality.The eyes seem bluer now, and something predatory has subsumed the wounded torment that Hannibal glimpsed the first time he looked into Will’s eyes. Hannibal could not be more pleased.
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The first time Will slips inside of Hannibal it comes as a shock to the both of them.There is, for Hannibal, a sudden jolt, as though being struck by something large but padded, which is followed by a claustrophobic feeling of overcrowdedness within his own skin.Before he’s had even a fraction of a second to attempt to understand what’s happened, his head is filled by a confused jumble of emotional impressions. He knows the thought-feelings to be something alien, entirely unlike the ordered words and carefully structured rooms that usually define his mind. He pushes back against them, trying to make space for his own thoughts, but he doesn’t push hard.He knows who it is that’s knocking around frantically inside of his skull. And he knows too, who is causing his fingers to twitch.Will breaks away, and the loss of his leaving is for Hannibal almost physically painful. They are two again, and Hannibal feels hollowed out and abandoned, though he can feel the ghost standing beside him. The cold that radiates off of him raises goose-flesh on the back of Hannibal’s neck.“Try that again,” Hannibal says, voice a little ragged, and Will needs no further invitation.The hands that touch Hannibal are his own, but they do not in that moment belong entirely to him. They move over his face, tentative at first but then eager, tracing line of Hannibal’s lower lip with the pad one finger. They bury themselves in Hannibal’s hair, fascinated by the texture, and when the fingers brush the back of his neck Hannibal shivers and knows that Will feels the shivering too.Using Hannibal’s hands, Will traces the swirl of Hannibal’s ears and the lines of his cheekbones, before sliding down Hannibal’s jaw. He presses lightly against the Adam's apple, feels it bob under his fingers. Two fingers pauses against the side of Hannibal’s neck, feeling the pulse of blood beneath the warm skin and drawing wonderment from it.Will’s thoughts are not ordered in the same way that Hannibal’s are, and he cannot decipher words or coherent ideas from the among the shifting emotional associations, but the pleasure is plain, the joy at being able to touch and to be able to feel that touch and to at last be touching Hannibal and it is all so close to Hannibal, so tangled up inside of his own mind and his own body that there is for Hannibal no distinction between Will’s enjoyment and his own. The hands hesitate, wanting to go lower but uncertain.“It’s alright, Will,” Hannibal says. “Do whatever pleases you.”He is, he knows, guilty of Narcissus' sin. He has worshiped his own body as the artful tool of destruction that it is. This, though, is something unprecedented. Under his own hands, every part of himself is a brand new discovery.There is no distinction between Will’s gratification and his own.
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The killing goes on, and Will is now almost entirely visible almost all of the time. They all see Will now, and when they do they scream in a way that they have never have for Hannibal.With Will so present in the world, it seems natural to Hannibal to lay out a second place setting across from himself at the table. He considers, briefly, putting food on the plate, but that feels a waste.When Hannibal sits down in front of his own plate Will manifests in the chair across from him. There is an inky blackness that fills up his eyes entirely, save for two red sparks of malicious intellect. His teeth and the skin around his mouth are stained red, as though with blood.He’s not a ghost anymore, if that had ever been exactly what he was. There might not be a word for what Hannibal has made of him - what he has been able to Become. Poltergeist comes closer, or perhaps demon.He is, Hannibal feels, stunningly beautiful.But he is morose now, looking down at his nearly solidly reflection in the white plate.“I could have been different from the what I am now,” Will says.It is the first time that Hannibal has heard him speak, and they are not the words that he’d expected - or at least, not what he had hoped for, but he tells himself that it doesn't matter. He has had Will literally underneath his own skin and inside of his skull. Hannibal knows what affection Will has for him, and he knows that it is real.“I wasn’t like this before you came. If you had given me softer things - if you’d fed me on anything other than… what you've been giving me, I’d be different. I wouldn’t look like this. I might be gentle.”“Who I gave you,” Hannibal says. “Not what.”Will swallows, audibly. He does not answer.“If you’d only been given soft emotions to feed on then you would only be a pale shadow of what you are now,” Hannibal tells him.When Will refuses to answer, Hannibal takes the opening to ask a question that has been weighing on him from the very start. “Will. How was it take you became trapped?”The question is hard on Will. The very walls vibrate with his distress. Above them, the chandelier begins to sway. “I was sick…” he begins. The voice is raspy, for the hundredth time Hannibal thinks of the swollen roughness of extreme thirst, and of how Will must have torn his vocal chords screaming for help. “I was sick, and there was something in the house. It felt like… you, but it was larger. Colder. It was a monster, It caught me - trapped me in the trunk. I thought that it would come back to eat me, but it never did.”Hannibal is reflecting on how, if he heard this tale under any other circumstance, he would assume the teller was describing psychotic delusions or fever dreams, when Will says, “You’ve trapped me now, too.”Hannibal frowns. “I’ve freed you.”His words anger Will. “I could take you,” he threatens. Sharp-tined black antlers seem to rise suddenly from his body, and as they grow they cast a barred black shadow over Hannibal. “I could take everything from you, the way you've taken everything from the people you brought into my home to kill. I could lock you in one of the oubliettes in the back corner of your mind and walk out of here inside your skin.”When Hannibal blinks the antlers are gone.“You could try,” Hannibal allows, “but I don’t think you’re strong enough yet.”Privately, he does not believe that Will will ever be capable of pulling off such an attack. In the ghost Hannibal has found his equal - or at least, someone in whom he sees the potential to be an equal - but he knows that not even Will would be able to overpower him in the territory of his own labyrinthian mind.“I have a better suggestion,” Hannibal continues. “Wait, and grow more powerful, and when you have achieved the fullest potential that you can while remaining in this place, I will find someone who resembles who you were life and bring him here for you to wear, and then we will leave together.”Will does not answer at first. His swollen tongue runs between his cracked lips. There is a hesitation in the hands that both are and are not Hannibal’s own, a tremble when the blade first presses against the bare skin of their victim. The tip draws away, but just a fraction of an inch.“It’s alright,” Hannibal tells Will, his voice gentle.Blood-shot eyes lift to look up at him, desperately eager to claim that gentleness for their own, searching for a reprieve in the turmoil that Will’s conflicted feelings introduces onto Hannibal’s face. He is ignored.Hannibal pauses for a long moment to allow Will to gather himself. And then, together, they cut.