Chapter Text
Will’s skin felt too small as they approached the Norman Chapel again later that morning, raw and exposed beneath the harsh light of day. Though he’d have preferred to retreat to the Nola, to the solitude of the den he’d sailed across the ocean, Will felt compelled to return. Perhaps quite literally, Hannibal did have a talent for such things, but he rather thought it was his instincts, in this case. Whether it was his mind or Hannibal’s that brought them back, it was immediately clear that things were not as they had been the day before.
A number of official vehicles were parked in the courtyard of the palace, blue lights flashing over a jagged cloud of anxiety that was nearly palpable as clergy and officials moved back and forth, not quite sure what to do with themselves. Shocked...horrified. It was a sentiment that Will well remembered from the Ripper’s crime scenes, a sense memory from a lover’s perfume still lingering.
It was amazing how far one could get just by acting as though they belonged, though it surely helped everyone was clearly reeling from whatever it was they’d found. Privacy screens were still being erected as Will and Abigail slipped into the chapel, though not quickly enough that they weren’t afforded a look upon the tableau. The scent of blood, of meat, hit Will as he gazed at the body - skinned, folded into a heart and impaled onto swords - and he hated that his mouth began to water. His wolf had remained with him, shadowing his steps, hovering at the edge of his vision, but now it paced intently. Lucky for Will, it was too soon after the full moon for the wolf to do anything other than gaze hungrily at the display so clearly left for him.
Will swallowed back a growl toward the humans that would dare to surround his offering, grateful when they finally erected the last of the fabric barriers, shielding Hannibal’s heart from view. This, of course, did nothing to conceal the scent and his jaws ached with the need to bite. To rend flesh from bone and gorge himself on the offering despite how well he’d been fed just hours ago. He wondered darkly whether a flank or two had been omitted from the sculpture for a late night carpaccio.
“Is it him?” Abigail asked quietly and like Will, she was still looking at the screens as though she could see through them, her hair pulled back to reveal her scars. It would be easy for her to walk through the fabric, to look more closely upon the morbid display, but Will knew that she would not. She might have been less conflicted in her feelings toward Hannibal, but she still struggled to see the beauty in the grotesque.
Before Will could answer what she already knew, one of the poliziotto took notice of him and approached, holding up a hand. “ Per favore, signore. È proibito qui. La cappella è chiusa. ”
Will shook his head. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak-“
“The chapel is closed,” the poliziotto repeated in English, prompting an obedient nod from Will.
Knowing he would revisit the scene again in his mind, Will turned to go, only to stop as another officer shouted something in their direction. “What did he say?” Will asked the poliziotto.
“He said, he wants to talk to you.”
The Polizia di Stato looked nothing like the bullpen of his tenure in New Orleans, but the energy was familiar enough as he waited to be questioned. It makes it easier to suppress the wolf, still riled from the moon and the fresh corpse. Less content to wait when she had no reason to, Abigail had taken to wandering the rows of desks, idly peering at whatever the various poliziotti were working on. Her hair was down once more and she looked rather like a tourist among the living, like the undergrad she never got to be.
Will felt strangely calm, considering the position he now faced. He expected Jack Crawford would know exactly where he was before long, if he hadn’t gotten a notification already, and knew the man was bullheaded enough that he might just come for Will.
Wouldn’t that be a fun conversation.
“ Signor Graham,” a voice spoke up as a man took a seat nearby and Will’s hackles immediately rose, a growl catching in his throat. The man did not look at him directly and it was immediately clear that he had no desire to be obvious about their conversation. “Chief Investigator Rinaldo Pazzi. Questura di Firenze. ”
It took Will a moment to parse that and his brow furrowed slightly as he remembered that he knew Firenze by a different name. “You’re a long way from Florence.”
“You’re a long way from Baltimore,” Pazzi countered. “I read everything I can on FBI profiling methods. I’ve read all about your incarceration.”
The wolf growled again at the memory and this time, Will didn’t bother to suppress the basso rumble from leaving his throat. “Keep reading,” he said, the irritation plain in his voice. “I was acquitted.”
The inspector gave him a brief, startled look at the growl and the flash of fear in his eyes gratified Will slightly before the man overcame his hindbrain and cleared his throat. “You come to Palermo and soon, very soon, a body is discovered. Sculptural in its mutilation.” When Will didn’t respond to the insinuation, Pazzi pressed on. “The priest at the Cappella dei Normanni said that you’ve been spending a lot of time there.”
“I’ve been praying,” Will said dismissively, resisting the urge to bare his teeth. He needed to get himself back under control before his official questioning began.
“There is some comfort in prayer,” Pazzi mused. “It leaves you with the distinct feeling you’re not alone.”
Studying the inspector, Will understood innately that whoever this man was, he knew Hannibal. Or knew enough that he was going to get himself killed.
Though the official questioning about his presence at the Norman Chapel proved far less substantial than his brief conversation with Inspector Pazzi, it still managed to take the better part of the day. Part of the delay was to verify that Will had, in fact, spent his evening chained to a wall at Tregua Della Luna, providing an indelible alibi he hadn’t expected to need so soon. Time also had to be given for chastisement over his lack of visa and the heavy packet of declaration forms required of non-human travelers.
Abigail was waiting for him when he at last descended toward the landing and he couldn’t help but smile at her, glad for a familiar face after hours of tedious paperwork. Will suspected that the only reason he walked out of his interview under his own power was due to the pressure of an outside entity, and so was not surprised to see that Inspector Pazzi was also waiting for him.
Leaning casually against the railing at the base of the stairs, Pazzi waited until he neared to say, “Is Will Graham here because of the body at the cappella , or is the body here because of Will Graham?”
After hours of bureaucracy and providing answers to the wrong questions, hearing the right question was bracing, too loud against Will’s already heightened senses. “Why are you here?” he asked bluntly.
“I’m like you,” Pazzi claimed. “I do what you do. We share the gift of imagination.”
Studying the inspector, Will would have known that he believed his words even if he couldn’t hear the steady beat of his heart, elevated from the surety that he’d found an ally in Will Graham. There was a fevered light in his eyes, a desperation to be understood, to be believed that Will was all too familiar with. Only in Will, the seed was still young, where it had clearly been festering in Pazzi for years , maybe decades. Until all that remained was the shell of a man who might have been great.
“I’ve got the scars of a man who grabbed his gift by the blade,” Will warned.
“You grabbed the wrong end. Those moments when the connection is made, in that synaptic spasm of completion when the thought drives through the red fuse... that is my keenest pleasure.”
“Knowing,” said Will.
“Knowing,” Pazzi affirmed. “Not feeling. Not thinking. You know who murdered that man and left him in the Cappella Palantina. You know what he is.”
“Don’t you?”
“I met him twenty years ago, yet he has not aged a day,” Pazzi said and his voice became thick with emotion. “ Il Mostro, the Monster of Florence.”
Shadows had lengthened within the church by the time Will and Abigail returned to it, this time escorted by Inspector Pazzi. Though the desecrated corpse had been removed hours earlier, evidence of the ongoing crime scene investigation remained, the fluorescent spotlights providing tawdry illumination. The scent of old blood and too many latex-clad hands sampling evidence was so achingly familiar that Will felt more at home than he had in months, though the sentiment was far from comforting. Considering the skeleton inlaid into the marble floor, Will fingered the folder that Pazzi had given him as he’d left to deal with the local poliziotti, ensuring they would not be disturbed.
Though he was glad in a way to have met Rinaldo Pazzi, to have been granted insight into an earlier chapter of Hannibal’s life, it was also a reminder of how easily he could find himself walking a similar path. Obsession embittering Will until he was old and worn and soaked in whiskey, desperate to reclaim the parts of himself that Hannibal had cut away. An abandoned, unfinished sculpture left raw and ruined.
Drawing out the photo of the mutilated body, Will studied it for a few moments and then took a breath and closed his eyes. He let the pendulum swing as he rebuilt the scene, constructing Hannibal’s heart again before him in his mind’s eye, discarding all else. Imagining the display as it had been intended, as it was meant to be viewed by Will and Abigail alone, before it was picked over by bystanders who could not hope to understand.
Opening his eyes once more, Will circled the morbid sculpture, studying it as though he were in a gallery. The feathered wolf paced alongside him and gazed at the wet, dripping flesh hungrily, salivating at the feast of which it had been robbed.
“I splintered every bone. Fractured them...dynamically. Made you malleable,” Will intoned softly. “I skinned you. Bent you, twisted you and trimmed you. Head, hands, arms and legs. A topiary.” He came to a stop before it, lifting a hand as though to touch. “This is my design.”
At his side, the wolf growled as the heart swelled grotesquely once, then again. A beating heart. Beating for Will. He backed away slowly and watched the pulsing sculpture of flesh in horror.
“A valentine written on a broken man,” he whispered.
The body shuddered and, with a snap of twine, began to pull free of the cording that held it in place, broken limbs unfolding. The swords clattered to the ground as the mutilated form came to rest on its stumps, bones twisting and cracking in a way that was all too familiar to a were. Will stumbled back toward the altar as hooves pushed themselves from the ruined stumps of flesh, a thick bramble of antlers sprouting from a headless neck. At his side, the wolf snarled, his prey now a predator, and then Will and the wolf were one form. With a roar of challenge, Will leapt upon the creature, wrestling it to the floor as he set upon the skinless flesh with tooth and claw.
“Will?”
Shuddering a little at her frigid touch against his suddenly fevered brow, Will started and leaned against the altar, panting. His teeth felt thick within his mouth and he realized they’d started to change, sharp against the swipe of his tongue. Keeping his eyes well away from her throat, Will swallowed, ashamed at his lack of control.
“I do feel closer to Hannibal here,” he admitted, then scoffed softly in wry amusement. “God only knows where I’d be without him.”
“What did you see?” she asked gently.
“He left us his broken heart,” he replied, but saw that she wasn’t entirely convinced. “You have a different theory?”
“It’s just…” Abigail looked back toward the empty space where the heart had been, her hair drawn back to show the ruined mound of her ear. “Three of Swords.” At Will’s blank look, she continued, seating herself on the steps leading up to the altar. “You know, tarot cards? Oh, don’t give me that look. All teenage girls go through a tarot phase.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Will said, smiling a little as he joined her. “So what was our reading?”
“The Three of Swords shows three swords stabbed through a heart,” she began. “And you’re right, it does usually signify a broken heart. But only when it’s upright, with the swords pointed down.”
Seeing where she was going, Will gave her a thoughtful look. “So it has a secondary meaning when it’s reversed.”
Abigail nodded and gave him a look that was heartbreaking in its earnestness. “Forgiveness.”
Will’s mouth tightened and he looked away. “You still want to go with him?”
“Yes.”
For several contemplative moments, Will tried to give voice to the feelings within him, to the things he’d been struggling to face even before Hannibal ripped him open and left him to die on his kitchen floor. At last, he could only ask more questions, his voice soft, aching.
“What if no one died? What if we all left together? Like we were supposed to. After he served the lamb...where would we have gone?”
Abigail smiled sadly at the thought. “In some other world?”
Will nodded, his own smile a bittersweet twist of the mouth. “In some other world.”
She hummed and gazed upward, her eyes trailing over the gilded dome. Will wondered if she were imagining it crashing down upon them. “He said he made a place for us.”
They sat together like that as minutes passed, both imagining what that place might have been.
Their solitude was broken by Pazzi’s return as he called out, “Are you praying?” Abigail sighed, as though she found the man tiresome in his tenacity and Will wondered what she would say to know how easily he saw himself reflected there.
“Hannibal doesn’t pray,” he answered, which drew an uneasy look from the inspector.
“I wasn’t asking Hannibal Lecter.”
Will wondered how blurred that line had become as he let his eyes drift over the murals overhead. “I think my prayers would feel constricted by the saints and apostles and Jesus Pantocrator.”
“Not buoyed?”
“Not these prayers.”
The steady beat of Pazzi’s heart gave a few rabbit quick beats from the way Will was unsettling him and his wolf felt vindicated by how the inspector tried to recenter himself. “I hope my prayers escaped, flown from here to the open sky and God.”
“Praying you’ll catch him?” Will derided, getting to his feet, needing to move. The wolf was restless in him, though Will couldn’t quite discern why. “You should be praying he doesn’t capture you.”
“I didn’t head the Questura di Firenze for nothing,” Pazzi scorned, as though the past-tense of that hadn’t come to a halt far earlier than he’d intended.
Will’s slow turn about the chapel came to a stop under the pulpit and he glanced down into the gated stairwell, the wolf at his side. “You couldn’t catch him when he was decades younger, what makes you think you’re going to catch him now?”
“You,” Pazzi answered firmly, confident in his answer.
Scoffing a little, Will continued to look down toward the catacombs, his nostrils flaring slightly as he scented the air. “What makes you think I want to catch him?” He could feel Pazzi studying him, hear another rabbit-quick beat of unease in his heart.
“Will?” Noticing how his attention had focused, Abigail came to stand at his other side, giving him a questioning look. “What is it?”
Giving his head a slight shake, Will held tight to his wolf as he caught the faint scent of blood and bergamot. He could almost see it pool beneath the door in evidence, spreading over the stone much as his own blood had spilled over Hannibal’s kitchen floor, mixing indiscriminately with Abigail’s. With careful intent, Will turned back to Pazzi.
“If you could possibly be content, I would suggest you let il Mostro go.”
Anger flushed red upon the inspector’s face, his heart beating faster now. “Can’t do that any more than you can.”
“He’s going to kill you, you know,” Will warned. “Usually right about these things.”
Stubbornly determined to remain on the path of imminent destruction, Pazzi gave Will a firm, too-knowing look and pressed on. “He let you know him. He sent you his heart. Where has he gone now?”
“He hasn’t gone anywhere,” Will told him with a faint smile and heard Abigail’s soft gasp before she hurried down the steps to the door. “He’s still here.”
Rather than attempt to find a clergy member at the late hour and risk losing their prey, Pazzi broke the lock, flashing Will a quick grin and murmuring, “Better to ask forgiveness,” before he shoved the door open.
Abigail had tried to pass through it and found herself repelled by the consecrated ground that was not her own resting place, so she watched anxiously as they set out on their hunt. Will gave her as comforting a look as he could manage with his wolf so close to the surface now, incited by the thought of tracking his prey. He couldn’t admit to her that he was grateful he would be walking this path alone.
Without a word passed between them, Will and Pazzi took opposing routes at the first split in the corridor, the latter drawing his gun. There was little light afforded to them among the Punic stone, lit only by candles whose wicks flickered alight seemingly at random. Will had no doubt that Hannibal would have lit these himself and was unsurprised to see Pazzi instinctively follow the light.
Parting his lips, Will drew in a deep breath, rolling the scent of the catacombs over his tongue as he searched for his prey. The mummified corpses about him smelled only of dust, their edible parts long expired, which helped to keep the wolf focused. Conversely, Hannibal’s scent was everywhere , as though he’d spent the day pacing deliberately through the maze of corridors. The richness of it after so long apart was like a tangible thing, a river of blood he had to wade through even as it pressed in on him from all sides, sliding over his skin.
Deeper and deeper Will went and the stone became newer in his wake, as though he were propelling himself through time, until suddenly he was met with a bare bulb that seemed jarring in its modernity. From deeper in the maze of catacombs and crypts, Will picked up the sound of footfall, slow and unhurried, and the wolf howled. For once, Will allowed it, letting the eerie sound echo out around him, reverberating off the stone in challenge to the alpha he hunted.
Spurred into movement, Will loosed the leash and let the wolf run, propelling them through the underground with a deep growl. The thrill of the hunt, of the chase, rushed through Will’s veins, until he had no doubt that his scent had become as tantalizing to Hannibal as the vampire’s was to himself.
The passage he’d been following opened suddenly to a wide junction surrounded by branching corridors like the center of a spider’s web. Wide pillars hosting shriveled corpses of dust and earth spaced out across the junction and the sound of footsteps reverberated off of them, scattering them in a ricochet to his senses. The hairs on the back of his neck rose as he paced forward through the pillars and he spun suddenly toward one of the passages just as Pazzi burst through it and skidded to a halt, gun raised instinctively toward Will.
His breath caught in instinctive fear when Will’s eyes caught the light and reflected it back at him, the rabbit-quick beat of his heart too loud in Will’s ears. “ S-signor Graham…”
Will lifted his chin slightly, scenting the air, but couldn’t detect the telltale odor of lead. “Is that silver, Commodatore?”
The inspector hesitated a bit too long, then eased his finger from the trigger, canting the weapon down. “Just a precaution.”
“Silver bullets don’t mean much to a vampire.”
“Neither do lead ones, but I expect they’ll hurt just the same.”
A small smile came to Will’s lips as he regarded the man, seasoned in his movements, yet riding the edge of fear all the same. Will, on the other hand, felt calmer than he had in months. “You shouldn’t be down here alone.”
Another uptick in the staccato of the inspector’s heart. “I’m not alone. I’m with you.”
Will made a soft, amused sound at that, watching his wolf pace around the man. “You don’t know whose side I’m on.”
Pazzi hesitated at that, looking him over cautiously. “What are you going to do when you find him?” he asked. “Your il Mostro.”
Letting his gaze drift among the pillars, he listened to the beat of Pazzi’s heart, then beyond it, searching for his prey again. “I’m curious about that myself,” he admitted. The question had haunted him all the way across the Atlantic, despite how much Will had tried not to think about it.
What would he do when he finally found Hannibal? When he met him without lies or chains or manipulations left between them? Capture...kill...or claim.
“You and I carry the dead with us, Signor Graham,” Pazzi pressed, as though trying to remind Will of a goal they’d never agreed upon. “We both need to unburden. There’s no arguing the point.”
Will glanced back at him, his expression cold, but calm. “Why don’t you carry your dead back to the chapel before you count yourself among them.”
The click of Pazzi’s throat was audible in the quiet as Will walked away from him, toward the darkest path. “You’re already dead...aren’t you?” he asked, low and hoarse.
“Buonanotte, commendatore,” Will replied softly in answer. And maybe he was...it was just as likely that he sought his own death here in the catacombs, though the wolf bared his teeth beside him at the thought.
Distantly, he could hear Pazzi turn back toward the chapel, but Will’s full attention had turned once again toward his quarry. The scent of blood and bergamot was fresher now, pulling at him, but no matter how quickly he moved or how far he went, his prey remained elusive. Like chasing a shadow in the darkness.
“Hannibal,” he called suddenly as Will realized he was going to lose him, the name a harsh echo against the still and silent stone. The air of the catacombs seemed suddenly stifled, as though the collected dead had drawn breath and held it in wait.
He knew...beyond any doubt Will knew that Hannibal was listening.
“I forgive you.”
The absolution, while hushed, seemed to ring upon the stone like the toll of a bell, disappearing into the darkness. A forlorn feeling of loss swelled painfully in his chest as he waited, desperate in his final gamble. Then at last, he felt the air move at his back, the soft scrape of a leather sole against stone.
“Do you?” Hannibal asked him softly, suddenly so close that his breath brushed over Will’s ear in a caress.
The air was charged now, leaving them poised upon a precipice, a great cliff over a dark, roiling sea. The feathered wolf sat before Will, but rather than snarl a warning to the predator at his back, the dark beast merely watched, and waited. Waited for Will to decide.
Capture. Kill. Claim.
In the sordid soirée of their relationship, Will had provided Hannibal with the makings of a meal on more than one occasion. Bass, bluegill, and the occasional farm-raised trout if he were feeling particularly ill-tempered, all leading up to the day when he slid human flank steaks across Hannibal’s marble countertop. But in all of that, Will had never offered the one meal that would actually sustain the life of a vampire.
Until now.
Hannibal drew in a sharp breath as Will slowly, deliberately bared his throat to him, knowing the vampire would know it for the offering it was, rather than the submission it might imply. Fingers tangled in his curls as they had the night before, Hannibal’s other arm becoming an iron band about his waist, over the scar he’d left there.
“Be very certain, Will. I cannot allow another betrayal.”
A soft, reckless laugh punched out of Will, for he had absolutely no doubt in his mind that they would betray one another until they found their eventual bloody end. It simply wasn’t enough to dissuade him from wanting Hannibal anyway.
“I came here for you,” he admitted aloud for the first time. “I came for you, Hannibal.”
The vampire’s grip tightened fractionally and then Will was crying out from the sudden, sharp sting of pain at his throat. He could feel Hannibal’s teeth in him, tearing into him and then came a soft suction that Will could feel everywhere, in his jaw and his fingers and the base of his cock. A startled, desperate moan spilled out to him and with one hand he gripped at Hannibal’s arm where it held him up, the other reaching back to his wool-clad thigh, his thickening nails digging into the meat of it. Hannibal hissed softly at this, then fit his mouth more firmly over the wound he’d made and sucked again, drawing Will’s blood into his mouth in slow pulls.
His body was on fire, awash with sensation that hovered between the point of pain and pleasure. Panting around longer, sharper teeth, Will felt almost on the verge of transformation and he released Hannibal’s thigh suddenly to press the heel of his hand against his groin. He was able to provide himself only a few seconds of glorious pressure before the vampire caught hold of his wrist and drew his hand away.
“Hannibal,” Will snarled, slurring the name slightly on the edge of his wolf’s grin.
“Not yet,” Hannibal chastised in a dark promise, mouthing at the stubbled corner of his jaw. “Not when you’re like this.” He pressed the flat of his tongue against the wound, licking at it until the bleeding stopped, his venom encouraging the rapid regeneration of Will’s cells. “If you are to seek your pleasure on my behalf, it will be without any uncertainty as to the reason. Your beautiful mind frighteningly clear with your own intentions.”
Will felt a shiver go down his spine at the words, settling warm in his hips as Hannibal released him. He swayed forward a little, less from the blood loss than from the weight of his indecision lifted away, catching himself against the wall of the passage. Lifting fingers to his neck, he touched the sensitive new skin and looked back at Hannibal, seeing him for the first time since the vampire had walked out of his kitchen all those months ago.
Hannibal’s hair was disheveled, hanging into his eyes like it had that final, bloody night, but Will got the sense that this was less to do with their chase through the catacombs and more a lack of effort. A careless disregard toward appearances now that his person suit had been torn open. His clothing was still expensive and bore its own sort of elegance, but the auburn lamb-skin and grey wool served function over fashion. For the first time, Will could see how much what had happened still affected the vampire, and it eased something in his chest.
“Is it always like this?” he asked hoarsely, uncertain whether he meant the overwhelming intimacy of bloodletting or the ache of reunion after bitter betrayal.
A small smile came to the vampire’s face and he held out his hand to Will and his wolf. “With you, dear Will, I believe it will be.”