The Affliction of Love
A/N: I've never written this pairing before so please feel free to offer criticism. Reviews are not necessary, although any advice you can give me is more than welcome.
Title: The Affliction of Love
Fandom/Spoilers: Red Dragon/Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal ~movie-verse
Pairing(s): one-sided Hannibal Lecter/Will Graham (implied Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling)
Rating: Nc-17
Warnings: Non-consensual sex
Timeline: Takes place a short while after the Silence of the Lambs.
Disclaimer: These characters are the sole property of Thomas Harris-I’m just playing with them. Likewise, I make no claim over the lines I borrowed from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. (NOTE: The actual poem has absolutely nothing to do with rape. Rather, it represents the frustration of the narrator and his powerlessness to give a voice to said frustration.)
Summary:
“...When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels...”
~The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (by T.S. Eliot)
Colours tumble as the world turns, broken fragments of a twirling kaleidoscope, until the night whispers gently across his face and the dream draws itself to an end. Through diaphanous curtains moonlight floods the room and in the illusion of darkness he hears the rolling ocean as it beats against the shore.
The world is at peace, he thinks.
Through the haze the synapses fire, his mind grasping at stray thoughts as Will tries to cogitate a reason for his waking. His limbs are heavy, his body weak, and as reality digs its spindly fingers into the base of his skull, he realizes, dimly, that he’s been drugged.
For a moment, he panics.
Molly is away with Josh tonight, visiting relatives as he lies, invalid, in their empty bed. Though he escaped the Red Dragon with his life intact, infection seeps into half-healed wounds to remind him of the nightmare. During the day he meanders about the house, and at night he sleeps away the pain, waiting out the storm until the day the doctors will eventually smile and tell him he’s pulled through the worst of it. He smiles too every now and again, although he only does it to be kind, because already he’s beginning to feel a little old in this skin and he can’t shake the paranoia that he’s being watched.
In the far corner of the room, the shadows part and his most honoured guest glides into the spotlight with a smile of his own tugging at the corners of his lips. No one told Will the man was free, not even Jack, and somehow this mere perfidy feels heavier than Hannibal’s deception in the Chesapeake case.
“I need your opinion, Will.”
The words float around inside his head until he’s able to pluck one from the madness: ‘opinion’. What a funny thought. Since when did Lecter seek out his opinion?
“You fumble with you wife with such grace. A balance of love and concupiscence-it makes me wonder where one ends and the other begins...” Hannibal takes another step forward until he’s reached the bedside table. He lifts the syringe lying there between his lamp and the alarm clock, and taps the glass to exercise it of its air bubbles.
Then he presses the needlepoint into the crook of Will’s elbow.
Will doesn’t feel a thing.
“Do you love your wife?”
He tries to make sense of the question through the fog. ‘Love’...? Yes, love. He’s always loved her.
“Of course you do,” Hannibal murmurs softly, keeping his eye on the syringe until it’s been emptied of its contents. Then he removes the needle from his arm. Gently. “I’m sure you tell her as much every day, like a mantra: ‘I love you. I love you. I love you’, even when it isn’t true.” And then he pauses, seemingly lost in this trail of thought. “...I wonder when those tender words lost their meat.”
‘Never’, he thinks, but he’s powerless to say as much aloud. Hannibal’s robbed him of his voice tonight.
So much for his ‘opinion’.
“You’ve always been such a clever boy,” the man continues, “so I thought I’d ask you if it was true what they say, that love transcends all boundaries?”
He recalls reading something in the newspapers about a Clarice Starling and the interviews she held with the serial killer as she hunted down Buffalo Bill, but he knows it’s impossible for a man such as Lecter to feel affection for another human being. This conversation is pointless, as far as he’s concerned. Lecter doesn’t possess the capacity for love...
The man deposits the syringe on the bedside table and takes a seat on the mattress beside his hip. He feels like an ant under Hannibal’s scrutiny, but if he had to be honest with himself the killer doesn’t necessarily look displeased...almost contemplative, rather, as though he were reminiscing the pleasant days leading up his capture. Will had actually been fond of the man back then-a person could almost call the feeling ‘admiration’. Hannibal was clever.
So very clever...
‘-eideteker.’
Shame and humiliation sting his eyes and he feels a rush of warmth as it corkscrews up from the base of his spine to the crown of his head. He knew something was wrong with Hannibal the moment he realized the Chesapeake killer had been eating pieces of his victims, but he hadn’t acted on that impression out of respect for his old friend and mentor. It had been an almost fatal decision on his behalf, one that landed him in the ICU and rendered him psychologically incapable of continuing his work as a profiler. He felt couldn’t risk looking into another man’s mind without losing a sliver of his sanity in the process.
Some darker part of him wondered if Hannibal had had fun.
“I suppose you’d prefer it if I cut to the chase and left you to your peace,” Hannibal concludes, leaning forward as he begins the menial task of unbuttoning Will’s shirt. Fingers brush deftly against his skin and with no certain amount of alarm Will realizes he can actually feel them.
He tries to move, but it’s as though he’s back in the X-ray room with a lead apron resting on his chest, half awake and dying. He can breathe and think and almost twitch, but there’s nothing he can say or do to save him from whatever Hannibal has planned for him in the last hours of the night.
“Shh...” Hannibal coos as he watches the younger man struggle. “Don’t try to move, Will. Just relax...”
‘-Don’t resist, it’s so gentle-’
There’s a twinge of phantom pain in the old stiletto wound. He winces.
“The paralysis will last only a couple of hours,” the man explains, tugging on Will’s sleeves until both arms are bare, enabling him to pull the shirt out from under his back. Carefully, he tosses it onto Molly’s side of the bed. “But since I require your awareness, please don’t be surprised if you can still squirm. I need you to feel this.”
‘I’m a captive audience,’ Will thinks to himself. ‘Can’t do a goddamn thing...’
His mind flutters briefly to the night Hannibal killed him before he’s able to rein in his thoughts. Closing his eyes, he thinks of the road trip he went on with Molly and Josh just last week; of his little boy sitting beside him on the dock as they fished, smiling with unimaginable joy when he managed to catch something bigger than his old man; of his beautiful wife as she reclined in the hammock by his latest, upturned boat, sun in her face, her eyes, her hair; of the last time he truly dreamed, not of monsters or Abaddon, but of life and all its wonders...
Hannibal folds Will’s quilt to one side and unties the knot on his drawstring pants. Smoothly, he slips the material down long, lean legs and goes about his work undressing him until the former FBI agent lies bare before his eyes.
The doctor murmurs something into the darkness, almost as though to quell his fears, and Will is suddenly reminded of how the hum of Hannibal’s deep, dulcet voice was once soothing to him in the earlier days of their friendship, a rare comfort in his hectic life. Now that voice is nothing more than venom, another dagger of Hannibal’s twisted mind.
“I’m not going to eat you, Will...”
Hands slip between is thighs, parting his legs, cold to the touch against his too-warm skin.
“I’m not going to kill you either...”
Will falls back into denial and closes his eyes. Listens to the ruffle of clothing before Hannibal joins him on the bed, weight resting over him like the blanket that was stolen only moments ago. Will’s mind drifts back to the summer sun, the Florida hurricanes and the lazy afternoons spent tucked away inside this house-to anything that’s not here or now. He wants to run. He wants to scream-
There’s a flash of pain as Hannibal tears a new hole in his sanity, followed shortly by a paroxysm of pleasure. Warm hands massage his skin, hook on his hips, and pin him down. Will’s aware of the small choking noises he makes in the back of his throat and the way his body convulses under the man’s ministrations, trapped in the heat somewhere between paradise and the abyss, every sensation bleeding together until all he can see are those broken fragments of colour and light, twirling, whirling, raining down upon his head...
With a cry he comes, goes limp, and watches those fragments fade away as the body above him moves furiously, gradual faster, until Hannibal joins him in this abdominal bliss. A moment of silence is shared between them until the serial killer removes himself from Will’s body and rustles in the darkness in search of his clothing.
Time passes indeterminately until he’s dimly aware of those same worn hands returning to his body. He flinches but is not harmed, merely moved to the bathroom where Hannibal deposits him in warm water and washes away the blood. Gently. Ever so gently...
When the doctor is finished with him Will is dressed and returned to a clean bed, this time on Molly’s side, as the first, blue blush of dawn floods the corners of their room. Vaguely he’s aware of Hannibal leaning over him as the man graces his lips with a chaste kiss and the small ‘clink’ as something is dropped on his wife’s bedside table. Turning his head slightly, he realizes it’s his wedding ring.
He can’t remember Hannibal ever removing it.
“Write to me, Will,” Hannibal asks him cordially. “And when you do, tell me if you still love her. Alright?”
Will keeps his eyes on his wedding ring, feels the affectionate brush of knuckles against his upturned cheek as the man wipes away a tear, and tries to pretend that this is just another one of his old nightmares as the man departs. Sleep doesn’t take him until the sun is halfway above the horizon, and even then his mind is wild and frenzied, searching for answers, wanting to know the reason why...
Nothing comes to him as he succumbs to his exhaustion, but he is left with these riddles and the question of love, and his mind offers him no peace as his demons claw their way out of the grave to haunt him again. He hopes someday that Hannibal will fall in love-madly, desperately in love-only to be destroyed by the object of his affection. It would be fitting, he thinks, for Hannibal to know both sides of the affliction.
And someday Hannibal will.
A/N: Somehow, my work is always anticlimactic.
I apologize if either character is even remotely OOC. If there’s anything that irks you, please feel free to throw rocks at me. I don’t mind changing my work.
Title: The Affliction of Love
Fandom/Spoilers: Red Dragon/Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal ~movie-verse
Pairing(s): one-sided Hannibal Lecter/Will Graham (implied Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling)
Rating: Nc-17
Warnings: Non-consensual sex
Timeline: Takes place a short while after the Silence of the Lambs.
Disclaimer: These characters are the sole property of Thomas Harris-I’m just playing with them. Likewise, I make no claim over the lines I borrowed from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. (NOTE: The actual poem has absolutely nothing to do with rape. Rather, it represents the frustration of the narrator and his powerlessness to give a voice to said frustration.)
Summary:
“...When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels...”
~The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (by T.S. Eliot)
Colours tumble as the world turns, broken fragments of a twirling kaleidoscope, until the night whispers gently across his face and the dream draws itself to an end. Through diaphanous curtains moonlight floods the room and in the illusion of darkness he hears the rolling ocean as it beats against the shore.
The world is at peace, he thinks.
Through the haze the synapses fire, his mind grasping at stray thoughts as Will tries to cogitate a reason for his waking. His limbs are heavy, his body weak, and as reality digs its spindly fingers into the base of his skull, he realizes, dimly, that he’s been drugged.
For a moment, he panics.
Molly is away with Josh tonight, visiting relatives as he lies, invalid, in their empty bed. Though he escaped the Red Dragon with his life intact, infection seeps into half-healed wounds to remind him of the nightmare. During the day he meanders about the house, and at night he sleeps away the pain, waiting out the storm until the day the doctors will eventually smile and tell him he’s pulled through the worst of it. He smiles too every now and again, although he only does it to be kind, because already he’s beginning to feel a little old in this skin and he can’t shake the paranoia that he’s being watched.
In the far corner of the room, the shadows part and his most honoured guest glides into the spotlight with a smile of his own tugging at the corners of his lips. No one told Will the man was free, not even Jack, and somehow this mere perfidy feels heavier than Hannibal’s deception in the Chesapeake case.
“I need your opinion, Will.”
The words float around inside his head until he’s able to pluck one from the madness: ‘opinion’. What a funny thought. Since when did Lecter seek out his opinion?
“You fumble with you wife with such grace. A balance of love and concupiscence-it makes me wonder where one ends and the other begins...” Hannibal takes another step forward until he’s reached the bedside table. He lifts the syringe lying there between his lamp and the alarm clock, and taps the glass to exercise it of its air bubbles.
Then he presses the needlepoint into the crook of Will’s elbow.
Will doesn’t feel a thing.
“Do you love your wife?”
He tries to make sense of the question through the fog. ‘Love’...? Yes, love. He’s always loved her.
“Of course you do,” Hannibal murmurs softly, keeping his eye on the syringe until it’s been emptied of its contents. Then he removes the needle from his arm. Gently. “I’m sure you tell her as much every day, like a mantra: ‘I love you. I love you. I love you’, even when it isn’t true.” And then he pauses, seemingly lost in this trail of thought. “...I wonder when those tender words lost their meat.”
‘Never’, he thinks, but he’s powerless to say as much aloud. Hannibal’s robbed him of his voice tonight.
So much for his ‘opinion’.
“You’ve always been such a clever boy,” the man continues, “so I thought I’d ask you if it was true what they say, that love transcends all boundaries?”
He recalls reading something in the newspapers about a Clarice Starling and the interviews she held with the serial killer as she hunted down Buffalo Bill, but he knows it’s impossible for a man such as Lecter to feel affection for another human being. This conversation is pointless, as far as he’s concerned. Lecter doesn’t possess the capacity for love...
The man deposits the syringe on the bedside table and takes a seat on the mattress beside his hip. He feels like an ant under Hannibal’s scrutiny, but if he had to be honest with himself the killer doesn’t necessarily look displeased...almost contemplative, rather, as though he were reminiscing the pleasant days leading up his capture. Will had actually been fond of the man back then-a person could almost call the feeling ‘admiration’. Hannibal was clever.
So very clever...
‘-eideteker.’
Shame and humiliation sting his eyes and he feels a rush of warmth as it corkscrews up from the base of his spine to the crown of his head. He knew something was wrong with Hannibal the moment he realized the Chesapeake killer had been eating pieces of his victims, but he hadn’t acted on that impression out of respect for his old friend and mentor. It had been an almost fatal decision on his behalf, one that landed him in the ICU and rendered him psychologically incapable of continuing his work as a profiler. He felt couldn’t risk looking into another man’s mind without losing a sliver of his sanity in the process.
Some darker part of him wondered if Hannibal had had fun.
“I suppose you’d prefer it if I cut to the chase and left you to your peace,” Hannibal concludes, leaning forward as he begins the menial task of unbuttoning Will’s shirt. Fingers brush deftly against his skin and with no certain amount of alarm Will realizes he can actually feel them.
He tries to move, but it’s as though he’s back in the X-ray room with a lead apron resting on his chest, half awake and dying. He can breathe and think and almost twitch, but there’s nothing he can say or do to save him from whatever Hannibal has planned for him in the last hours of the night.
“Shh...” Hannibal coos as he watches the younger man struggle. “Don’t try to move, Will. Just relax...”
‘-Don’t resist, it’s so gentle-’
There’s a twinge of phantom pain in the old stiletto wound. He winces.
“The paralysis will last only a couple of hours,” the man explains, tugging on Will’s sleeves until both arms are bare, enabling him to pull the shirt out from under his back. Carefully, he tosses it onto Molly’s side of the bed. “But since I require your awareness, please don’t be surprised if you can still squirm. I need you to feel this.”
‘I’m a captive audience,’ Will thinks to himself. ‘Can’t do a goddamn thing...’
His mind flutters briefly to the night Hannibal killed him before he’s able to rein in his thoughts. Closing his eyes, he thinks of the road trip he went on with Molly and Josh just last week; of his little boy sitting beside him on the dock as they fished, smiling with unimaginable joy when he managed to catch something bigger than his old man; of his beautiful wife as she reclined in the hammock by his latest, upturned boat, sun in her face, her eyes, her hair; of the last time he truly dreamed, not of monsters or Abaddon, but of life and all its wonders...
Hannibal folds Will’s quilt to one side and unties the knot on his drawstring pants. Smoothly, he slips the material down long, lean legs and goes about his work undressing him until the former FBI agent lies bare before his eyes.
The doctor murmurs something into the darkness, almost as though to quell his fears, and Will is suddenly reminded of how the hum of Hannibal’s deep, dulcet voice was once soothing to him in the earlier days of their friendship, a rare comfort in his hectic life. Now that voice is nothing more than venom, another dagger of Hannibal’s twisted mind.
“I’m not going to eat you, Will...”
Hands slip between is thighs, parting his legs, cold to the touch against his too-warm skin.
“I’m not going to kill you either...”
Will falls back into denial and closes his eyes. Listens to the ruffle of clothing before Hannibal joins him on the bed, weight resting over him like the blanket that was stolen only moments ago. Will’s mind drifts back to the summer sun, the Florida hurricanes and the lazy afternoons spent tucked away inside this house-to anything that’s not here or now. He wants to run. He wants to scream-
There’s a flash of pain as Hannibal tears a new hole in his sanity, followed shortly by a paroxysm of pleasure. Warm hands massage his skin, hook on his hips, and pin him down. Will’s aware of the small choking noises he makes in the back of his throat and the way his body convulses under the man’s ministrations, trapped in the heat somewhere between paradise and the abyss, every sensation bleeding together until all he can see are those broken fragments of colour and light, twirling, whirling, raining down upon his head...
With a cry he comes, goes limp, and watches those fragments fade away as the body above him moves furiously, gradual faster, until Hannibal joins him in this abdominal bliss. A moment of silence is shared between them until the serial killer removes himself from Will’s body and rustles in the darkness in search of his clothing.
Time passes indeterminately until he’s dimly aware of those same worn hands returning to his body. He flinches but is not harmed, merely moved to the bathroom where Hannibal deposits him in warm water and washes away the blood. Gently. Ever so gently...
When the doctor is finished with him Will is dressed and returned to a clean bed, this time on Molly’s side, as the first, blue blush of dawn floods the corners of their room. Vaguely he’s aware of Hannibal leaning over him as the man graces his lips with a chaste kiss and the small ‘clink’ as something is dropped on his wife’s bedside table. Turning his head slightly, he realizes it’s his wedding ring.
He can’t remember Hannibal ever removing it.
“Write to me, Will,” Hannibal asks him cordially. “And when you do, tell me if you still love her. Alright?”
Will keeps his eyes on his wedding ring, feels the affectionate brush of knuckles against his upturned cheek as the man wipes away a tear, and tries to pretend that this is just another one of his old nightmares as the man departs. Sleep doesn’t take him until the sun is halfway above the horizon, and even then his mind is wild and frenzied, searching for answers, wanting to know the reason why...
Nothing comes to him as he succumbs to his exhaustion, but he is left with these riddles and the question of love, and his mind offers him no peace as his demons claw their way out of the grave to haunt him again. He hopes someday that Hannibal will fall in love-madly, desperately in love-only to be destroyed by the object of his affection. It would be fitting, he thinks, for Hannibal to know both sides of the affliction.
And someday Hannibal will.
A/N: Somehow, my work is always anticlimactic.
I apologize if either character is even remotely OOC. If there’s anything that irks you, please feel free to throw rocks at me. I don’t mind changing my work.