Work Text:
Hannibal Lecter was a man of simple tastes.
He enjoyed early mornings just before the sun rose, so he could walk to the bathroom in the cool twilight and not turn on the light as he washed his face. He enjoyed freshly brewed dark coffee, rich and warm that filled his senses for hours after he’d finished it. He enjoyed sleek cars and well-tailored suits.
Of those, he had several dozen. Blues and browns, checkered and pinstriped, shawl, notch, and peak lapels. Shirts with square cuffs, round and angle cut cuffs, French and three-button in every possible color. Wing collars and spread collars, semi spread and classic.
So perhaps it was more accurate to say that Hannibal Lecter was a man of simple tastes, but very expensive ones.
It was actually his suit – a dove-gray English-cut, thin lapel piece with a dark blue tie – that got Hannibal Lecter into the predicament he was in. If, perhaps, he had worn a different suit, his story would have taken a rather different turn.
-
Will tears the page from his typewriter and screws it into a ball before tossing it aside. It lands, as predicted, nowhere near the dustbin.
The day is too hot for anything. Humidity sitting on Will’s back like a demon and leeching his air and his concentration. Not that he had much to begin with, of either. He had the unfortunate habit of hyperventilating during any heightened emotion, and the nightmares that plagued him nightly had grown more frequent and cruel.
He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, glasses hanging from the folded knuckles at a precarious angle, and sighs.
Usually writing made the nightmares go away.
He doesn’t even remember when he’d started doing it, he knows that at one point in his career, some poor bastard assigned his case had told him to write his feelings in a journal. He said getting the fear out on paper made it no longer his mind’s responsibility to deal with it, and he would feel better.
Despite Will’s usual disdain for psychiatrists and their advice, he’d taken this to heart. Simply because he’d found himself unable to do anything with his insomnia but create new and more terrifying nightmares to fill his mind with later.
He’d started to fill up notebooks with his experiences with the dark, dirty things he saw at work, with the horrors his mind spewed at him when he returned from possessing someone else’s. It had started as an exercise in patience and a way to pass the time. It had ended in a book deal, and three – if he could ever get this one finished – novels to his name.
Will jerks when his cellphone rings, sending his glasses falling to the table with a clatter before they continue their path to the floor. He lets it ring out, he knows who it is. There are only two people who have his personal number now – after he’d changed it multiple times to avoid any fans who had the hacking skills to track him down – and his publisher called the day before.
He gives it two minutes before he turns his eyes to his home phone just seconds before that starts to ring as well.
He takes his time getting to it.
“Jack.”
“Will, we need you at a crime scene.”
He’d almost considered giving the character in his book based on Jack the same catchphrase.
“Seven girls have gone missing, Will none ever found. Same physical type, similar family backgrounds.”
“I profiled this case, Jack, a month ago.” Will rubs his eyes, wonders if he can go back to his book, if he can go back to bed, if he can empty a bottle of whiskey into his stomach and crawl into the safety of the glass instead.
“They found a body, Will.”
That’s enough to have Will pause, to furrow his brow and purse his lips in a displeased sigh. The killer he had profiled never left bodies, he was notorious for it. No prints or fibres and no evidence. He had a systematic killing pattern, he was organized and clever. He did not slip up like this.
“It’s not him.”
“Will –“
“It isn’t him, Jack.”
“Then we have another killer of young girls and I need your eyes, Will.” Jack interrupts before Will has the chance to hang up on him. “I need your imagination.”
It’s guilt that seeps cool and heavy into Will’s bones. Guilt that has him swallowing and agreeing to show up at the lab in an hour.
-
The drive from Wolf Trap is silent and uneventful, filled with the gentle hum of the air conditioner keeping Will conscious in the heat. He’d left all the windows in the downstairs area open, the dogs would find a place to rest in the shade until he got home, the wooden floors more forgiving than the upstairs carpet would be.
He thinks if anyone tried to break in he’d be doing the world a favor by removing them systematically from the gene pool.
As he drives, he narrates, a slow pulse of words in his mind that shuffles and resets them as one would notecards, committing the important points to memory, discarding the rest like dust. He thinks about his character, of Hannibal Lecter, in his expensive suits and his expensive house with his expensive tastes. He thinks of how the shadows fall over the man’s face if he turns it a certain way, changing the charming expression to look like a skull with dark eyes.
He thinks of the man’s past, of his affinity for fine art and opera, of his cellar that housed dozens upon dozens of bottles of fine wine, some covered in dust, just waiting for their vintage to tickle his fancy, for his rough, veined hands to pull the bottle from its place.
He thinks of the refrigerator in his kitchen, metallic and sleek, modern, filled with human body parts. Thinks of how ironic it is that he named his cannibalistic killer something that rhymed with his crime.
He rubs his eyes and rolls down the window, feeling the stale air shifted and unsettled by the air con forced outside and replaced with something breathable, albeit hotter and thick enough to swallow. Will sighs and wonders if any of his books will ever end with the main character still alive. He thinks about killing so often, and in so many ways, it’s unsurprising that his outlet holds similar drastic turns. He works with the most gruesome killers, it’s expected he ends his books as realistically as those men end their lives.
Somewhere at the back of his mind, Will makes a mental note to mention Hannibal’s sense of humor. Someone so put together, so meticulous, would need an outlet as much as someone like Will, in his disorganized frenzy.
-
The BAU offices sit hulking, stone and glass and no design to make either appealing. It looks like a prison without bars and feels just as stifling.
Will stops at the coffee machine for something watery and black, something to occupy his hands while he listens to Jack detail the case to him, while he lets his mind wander anywhere but where Jack wants it.
He doesn’t take a plastic lid before he continues upstairs to Jack’s office.
The corridors are nearly empty, a few clerks here and there on their way to or from the bullpen. No one notices Will, no one stops him. He knows his way around, and his tag, hanging limp and clicking subtly when it strikes the button on his corduroys, is enough of a shield to prevent unnecessary contact.
He turns the corner, free hand up to tug his glasses off his nose to wipe the sweat under them, just over his nose, and collides with something solid, sending the hot, bitter liquid from the cup to burn his wrist before he drops it.
“Shit!”
The pain is unexpected, unpleasant, a very effective shock to his system to have Will’s mind reset to base instincts before Jack drags it back. He shakes his hand, brings it to his lips to suck the sore skin before raising his eyes enough to see if any damage had been done to the person he’d walked into.
He cringes to see the light, dove-gray suit has a very obvious stain just above the pocket.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, voice garbled by pain. He shakes his head and resolutely eludes the man’s eyes as he looks up, past the dark blue tie, finding himself freezing in place when he actually can’t avoid them.
“That’s quite alright.” The man replies, voice tinged gently with an accent, something eastern European but difficult to place. “Perhaps a subtle reminder for myself to wear more appropriate attire to an FBI field office.”
The joke is subtle, the man’s eyes flicking quickly from Will’s eyes down to take in his casual clothes before returning to hold his gaze. Brown eyes to blue, the light falling from the overhead LEDs in such a way as to make the man’s face appear skeletal despite his smile.
Will blinks, lips parted in shock, lungs burning with the same throbbing beat as his hand when he forgets to breathe and fill them again.
He only moves when Jack opens the door to his office, leans out to speak.
“Ah, Will. I see you’ve met Dr. Lecter.” He leaves the door open and steps back into his office, a clear expectation rather than an invitation, “I’ve called him in to help consult on the case.”
Will’s look shifts, enough to rest his gaze on the crow’s feet at the corners of Hannibal’s eyes. The other seems unperturbed.
“Jack tells me you are not fond of eye contact.” He says, and Will wonders for a moment if this is a sick joke. “I promised him I would help you see.”
Will laughs, a weak sound that edges on hysteria.
“See.” He repeats, and for a second, allows their eyes to meet again. There is nothing there, no pride in the work done, no subtle tilt of his head suggesting another kill is present at the forefront of his mind… and most of all, no recognition. He does not know who Will is.
When he directs his eyes down again, Will wipes his glasses on the untucked hem of his shirt.
“I’m sorry, again, about your suit, Dr. Lecter.” He says, “But perhaps if you had worn another we would not have met like this,” he sets the glasses on his nose again, low enough for the top of the frame to cut his vision in half, “And our story would be very different.”
It’s subtle, something Will’s sure no one was meant to see, no one would see but someone who knows the man so intimately he knows his mind, but Lecter stiffens. His entire body seizes up for a fraction of a second in what could only be panic. When Will looks at him again, recognition burns bright in the brown eyes, enough to turn them redder, enough to show Will that he has the man’s full attention.
He swallows. Hannibal blinks. Then gently, gracefully, he gestures for Will to go into the office before him.
“Perhaps.” He replies, quiet, following when he does.