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He hurts Hannibal sometimes, purposefully. Looks up and sees only the monster, savagely sharpened by the years in prison, and lashes out with his own weapons; unable suddenly, to bear the sight in front of him. They’re still two halves of the same whole, he and Hannibal, but the pieces jam together now instead of fitting smoothly side by side, too many raw wounds rubbing and catching, tearing further open on each other. Hannibal is a sharp and jagged landscape, always threatening to draw blood, so he smashes into him.
"I should go." He tells Hannibal blithely as though unaware of the pain he inflicts, as though it were just an errant thought that crossed his mind. A casual cruelty. "I shouldn’t be here anymore with you." There’s always a breath of stillness after the pronouncement, but the storm, silent though it may be, never fails to follow…No matter how many times he sings this song. The reaction is well hidden to be sure, but Will sits in the very core of the other, within his cells, within his thoughts, and doesn’t miss the slight widening of the eye, the harsher intake of breath, the flash of slight humanity that echoes around the other like a trick of light, muted shades of heartbreak and sadness amidst the rage. Maybe that’s why he does this, for that tremulous heartbeat of fragility, the only part of Hannibal he can properly torment, the only part he can properly love. In these moments, he seeks to punish the other for being who he is, for who he wishes he were, for the fact he poisonously loves him all the same, so he reaches in, to the heart of him.
And Hannibal too sits always on a hair trigger. There are no veneers between them anymore, no masks or person suits, just the creature itself and a thin layer of control. Hannibal never reaches out for Will physically, though his twitching fingers curl into clenched fists; they both know if he started one day, he wouldn’t stop. But he exacts his revenge in other ways. Brings home, one evening, the body of a dead girl who looks so like Abigail it turns Wills stomach and proceeds to cut her open on the kitchen counter, blood seeping scarlet across the surface, dripping onto the white floor, staining Hannibal’s shirt and his hands, coloring him red. Will watches wordlessly from the doorway, Hannibal’s triumphant eyes finding his, and he knows he wears his hurts much less gracefully, that the scent of his anguish only makes the symphony sweeter in Hannibal’s mind. He lets Hannibal see, because it’s only fair, and then turns on his heel. That night, he doesn’t come down for dinner, the angry sounds of some dissonant, ugly melody, making their way up to the room he uses when even thinking of Hannibal is too much. They don’t speak for a week.
But neither of them does well apart for long, as destructive as they are together, and eventually, as though forced by some strength of nature beyond themselves, they go searching for one another, clash back together in a fury of touch and skin. Once, when things were softer, and Hannibal looked at him not with that terrible glittering gaze, but as though he were the most precious gift in the world, he’d said it would take divine intervention to bring them apart. Will has never believed the words more.
Their hands are soft no longer, their eyes not loving, but they do love, with a terrible need, with a dependency and a breathlessness unmatched. Little by little, they have sucked each other’s lives clean, have left nothing but the other undestroyed, standing between them and madness. To leave would be to never be whole again, an agonizing slow death.
So they stay.