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Will still isn't certain of why the memory returned. Maybe choking on that abysmal hospital food brought it back via muscle memory.
Hannibal dosed him with narcotics to try and wipe it from his mind, but his body remembered. It was the sensation of something solid stuck in his windpipe, reflex fighting the intrusion — except, unlike the food, he was unable to cough it out.
He had felt that to be less the extreme physical violation that it was and more just another piece amongst the pile that constituted his immense sense of betrayal. It's strange when he thinks back on it, he should've been angrier, but the past is past.
The recollection of Hannibal's gloved hands on him arrived along with everything else. He'd caressed Will's fever damp hair and face like he was proud of him for enduring the ordeal. There was a hungry tenderness in it, as if he yearned to touch the same way while Will was lucid but knew he might never get the chance.
//
Hannibal now knows of how Will's first recovered memory was the experience of being drugged with a thick plastic tube snaking down his throat, gagging and trembling in a chair at his own dining room table.
He apologizes with his tongue — but not with his voice.
Will asked how much time it took to perform the entire procedure. There were no attempts at avoiding assumption of responsibility, and he got an exact answer.
Then he said, "Do you think you can keep me down that long?"
Hannibal's default calm expression evaporated. He set aside the book he was holding in favor of undoing Will's pants.
They learned that he can, in fact, stay down for that long. Longer, even, if prompted. The act isn't new to him, though Will is the first to have him this way — the first to be allowed to make demands and take control.
When he's in the mood, Will settles into a chair with something to read and requests that Hannibal occupy himself for at least an hour. Hands aren't permitted. He'll pause to check in here and there as the time passes, stroking a fingertip along the prominent line of a cheek or brow bone, sweeping away stray sections of hair.
Hannibal admits the existence of any aches and pains when questioned. Discomfort barely touches him, he can morph his perception of it into pleasure if he wishes, but he understands the purpose of the inquiry: Will needs to know that he's affected by what he's doing. He needs to feel him choke, hear the rasp in his speech, see him flushed and messy. It's about witnessing the proof of how human Hannibal can be, brought down and disheveled like any other man.
The chosen book closes once Will decides Hannibal has done enough on his own. Both hands descend to press him forward, guiding his head. He hears nothing other than ragged breaths staggered with low sounds and curses — muttered praise, too, when Will’s particularly pleased.
Sometimes a thumb hooks around the corner of his lips to massage the inside of his cheek or coax him into opening up wider. Fingers grasp and yank his hair, twisting at the roots, petting over his scalp as he allows himself to be filled. On occasion, Will sits back completely to probe his mouth, tracing the ridges of his teeth and gums like he wants to map every inch.
If Will's feeling cruel, which happens fairly often, he slides a couple of fingers past the back of Hannibal's tongue and keeps his hand there. He leans forward in the chair with a stare sharp enough to cut glass as he fucks his fingers in as far and hard as necessary to force the traitorous uprising of reflex. That takes time, but Will is relentless.
When it starts, he doesn't stop.
Right as it seems like he's going to push things beyond the pale, however, he pulls his hand away just enough to grant Hannibal a reprieve... and then he'll thrust his fingers down deep again, holding them still, to stare in imperious fascination for as long as he wants. He doesn't say a word, silently listening to the wet clicking while Hannibal swallows and breathes.
It came as a complete surprise the first time, but Will soothed him through it, moving slowly as he introduced each step. Gentle yet firmly insistent, so confident that there was no way to guess how long he'd been scheming, he took Hannibal farther down the road to oblivion than he ever believed he could desire to go.
When Will had him hazy-eyed, covered in spit, he said, with a flicker of an icy smile, "I did promise you a reckoning."
He's never quite as detached from it as he seems. The flush coloring his skin and the intensity with which he returns to using Hannibal's mouth for himself speaks to that.
No matter what Will does to him, Hannibal takes it without complaint. There is no universe in which he refuses Will's whims — he stays on his knees and gives his body over to the only god deserving of his worship.
Will treats him with the same reverence after everything is over and done with, pulling him from the floor to gather him close.
In those moments, he handles Hannibal like the fragile, starving creature that he is underneath his carefully cultivated layers of poise and strength. To be seen and understood so thoroughly is a special variety of pain that comforts every place where it pierces him.
Want for reciprocation of pleasure can be the furthest thing from his thoughts then. The intimate acts they've grown accustomed to are simply an additional benefit of the relationship, their mental connection is where the foundations lie.
Hannibal has wondered, in the darkest hours of the night, where his life could have gone if his mission to consume Will's brain hadn't been interrupted. Or if he would truly have been able to go through with it. Would he have needed to stop after the crack of that skull fracturing under the saw, would the realization of the enormous loss he was about to face have fallen on him?
He's long since made peace with the fact that he'll never know.
Above all, he's grateful that he doesn't.