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Hiding out with Hannibal after the fall had been… enlightening to Will, to say the least. To start, he had never felt more at peace in his life than now, when he was technically a fugitive. His entire life he had done his best to walk the narrow path of justice and normalcy, never experiencing a moment of calm.
Now, as they hide in a small though perfectly comfortable, nondescript house in the middle of nowhere Florida, he should feel on edge. He should feel the anxiety of potential discovery. He should feel his sanity slowly disintegrating under the pressure of what he did with Hannibal and the life he chose. Instead he feels light, relaxed, and for the first time since before Hannibal framed him… hopeful.
The first night, when Chiyo had helped them into the master bedroom of the little single family home in LaBelle, a few miles off of Fort Myers along the bank of the Caloosahatchee river, he hadn’t questioned why they were unpacking all of their things into one bedroom when there were at least two others and an office. They had, by some miracle, made it alive as far south as Douglas, Georgia where an expatriate Cuban doctor that had for a year until then made a living as a farm hand, patched them up. With impeccable skill, in less than ideal conditions, and for the price of three hundred thousand dollars, they were on their way to their current accommodations minus one bullet and with a series of prescriptions “from Havana” to be obtained from a variety of accommodating pharmacies along the ethnic enclave- god bless the state of north Cuba and unlimited resources, etc. Hannibal had made a single comment about being able to monitor each other through the night, and Will had not even acknowledged it.
They would share a bed. Of course they would share a bed. They would share food, water, a bathroom, clothes. They would share the functions of vital organs should one of them suffer from its failure. There was no question about it after they jumped off the Chesapeake together. There was something twin-like about their re-birth, and they would have that if they couldn’t have anything else.
Not that Will did not want other things. As a matter of fact as their bodies recovered, he found it increasingly challenging to ignore all other things he wanted. But there was something sublime and quieting about being able to sleep with Hannibal that was like a balm to his wounds. Never in his life, had he experienced the harmony and stillness that he felt when they finally came together at the end of the day. The warmth, the scent of Hannibal, the sheer vulnerability of the way the man held him as if he were his most precious, irreplaceable possession, as if the older man were afraid at once to let him out of reach and to smother him. This last fear dissipated as days bled into weeks, and as the pain of his wound diminished too, Hannibal held him closer and closer each night.
Will would not complain though he was often manhandled around the bed by an unconscious Hannibal, who refused to let go of Will when he turned in his sleep. Easily, without waking up, Hannibal dragged the smaller man to lie on top of him, or brought him round to the opposite side, mirroring the position they’d gone to sleep in, which involved handsy manipulations of Will’s limbs.
At first, Will had been as heavily medicated against the pain of their injuries as Hannibal had and slept through most of it, waking here and there to the endearing thought that he felt like a well-loved teddy bear and didn’t mind it in the least. He wasn’t about to complain however at the first sign of Hannibal breaking the ice, when he felt lips on his forehead and the gentle rocking of hips against his own, Hannibal’s hard cock gently nudging his thigh.
Will moaned and felt his own cock filling quickly, but then Hannibal stopped completely. In his sleep addled state, Will parted a little from the other man’s chest and looked up to find him completely asleep despite his arousal.
“Will…Yes my sweet boy.” The older man moaned without opening his eyes and Will realized what was going on. Flattered and a little relieved that Hannibal was having a sex dream about him, but cursing his luck that it wasn’t the turning point he’d thought it was, Will tried to stay still in the older man’s embrace. Hannibal did not stir again and they went back to sleep.
It happened on the following morning and on the one after that. It happened so many times that Will had to assume Hannibal had sex dreams about him every night and that perhaps it had only stopped for a while because of his wounds. Being flattered did not make him feel any less frustrated. And he was frustrated. Hannibal’s speeding breath and aborted movements against his tightly clutched body were not easy to ignore when he himself had not had sex for years.
But it was the talking that was the most difficult to ignore. Words escaped Hannibal’s mouth in the midst of his half ecstatic state, some romantic, some sensual, some affectionate, some downright filthy. And the whole situation was driving Will insane, but there was one thing he dreaded more than blue balls and that was an open honest conversation where he had to say in plain language things Hannibal had only confessed through metaphor and that he had never acknowledged.
They were clear enough to anyone who knew his life intimately, but Hannibal had been in prison and only knew what he told him and what he allowed himself to think in the moments the walls came down. His love for the older man was stitched into every silence when he was alone with his wife. It was written on the cold side of her bed, painted in the hushed stolen pleasures he allowed himself in the guest bedroom, his bedroom, across their adjoining bathroom. His arousal went down, despite Hannibal’s still hard against his stomach when he thought of those days. Doing laundry before Molly came home so she wouldn’t ask or see, hoping he wouldn’t have to again give some considerate excuse about his restless sleeping and not wanting to wake her up, hoping she would understand enough and let it go.
He was almost in distress, remembering his old life which served as much as any other off-putting thought to get his body under control. But then Hannibal’s hands wandered down his back and settled on his ass.
“Oh…” the moan escaped Will’s mouth without permission. He would have been able to dissociate perhaps, if it weren’t for the overwhelming fact of how well their bodies fit together. One thing demanded his attention. Hannibal’s hands were big, his ass… not so much, and the way that worked out was that Hannibal’s warm, masculine hands covered his cheeks almost entirely. Just as he was trying to count backwards from fifty in Italian (Hannibal had been teaching him to pass the time), the older man sighed with a sinful sound in the back of his throat and nuzzled into Will’s hair. As he cupped Will so perfectly and pulled him up, pressing him harder against his body, his impressive arousal pushed Will’s pajama shirt. The younger man felt the wetness of the blunt head against his hip, and his own cock throbbed, trapped in an uncomfortable position in his pants.
He knew the slightest touch to relief himself would push him over the edge, so he ignored the pain and squeezed his eyes shut.
“That’s it, good boy…” Will cursed all the gods in heaven for this torture. Did their kinks align so perfectly or was Hannibal just being cheeky. For a time Will had resigned himself to a life of sexual frustration and unhappiness without Hannibal, and there was a certain compensatory freedom in fantasy that accompanied that hopelessness. His fantasies of a potential sexual life with Hannibal had gotten what he considered to be out of hand. “…open up for Daddy.” Will whimpered involuntarily and Hannibal must have sensed him in his sleep because, without waking up, the sound seemed to spur him on. “That’s it, Will. Give me…mine” As he half-grunted, half-whispered the words in his sleep his hands crushed Will to his at-once firm and soft middle and Will panted as he clung to him. When he felt himself approach the point of no return, the pleasure blinding him to all other thought that could have saved him, he tried to push Hannibal off. Knowing he was coming, and panicking, his plan was to run to the bathroom. Except Hannibal just held him tighter, pressing his own arousal to his thigh. Will was so far up on the bed that Hannibal could find the crook of his neck, his hot breaths harsh and gritty there. Will had no escape, whimpering pitifully as he came in his thin flannel pants like an untried teenager. He bit into the palm of his hand hopelessly, as if the wetness between them were not enough to wake Hannibal, and being quiet could help him.
Had he made it to the bathroom, he had hoped to jump in the shower, take care of his clothes there, and then walk out in a towel hoping that Hannibal would be in the kitchen making breakfast already. But no such luck. Hannibal was no longer panting, and the change told him the man had woken up. Three heart-pounding seconds of silence were all he could take before he made another attempt to push him off so that he could get up and go to the bathroom, where he would live as a Boston Fern- Hannibal said those did well in bathrooms-.
The older man held him tight still, but this hands had made their way up to his back where he rubbed soothing circles.
“I’m sorry…” Will rushed, finding to his further humiliation that all the anxiety and agitation had resulted in tears.
“Shhh” Hannibal soothed and now awake, pulled him back down to lie where his height naturally landed him agains the older man's body.
“I… Hannibal, s… sorry.” He attempted to put space between their lower bodies but Hannibal restricted his movements with a hand on his lower back.
“Nothing to be sorry for, my love.” It was the first time Hannibal directly called him that word, and the shock of it distracted and soothed Will.
“Do you remember your dream?” Will asked him after a few deep breaths he took, matching Hannibal. The older man tensed.
“Did I do this to you?” Interpreting his tension as distaste Will tried to push him off again.
“I didn’t mean to. You were just saying such things and pulling me close, Icouldn’thelpmyself” He gulped another panicked breath as he kicked at the sheets. “It’s been years since I’ve been with anyone, Hannibal, and-and-and-and…” He stopped talking before his verbal diarrhea made things even worse. He had turned the one conversation they now needed to have into three more because how selfish was it of him to say something like that when Hannibal had been in literal prison. Good timing to reveal you didn’t have a sex life with your wife, Graham. Excellent… He cursed himself mentally and gave up his efforts to move as Hannibal swept him under him.
His amber eyes were molten lava, no trace of sleep left in them after Will’s revelations and his arousal very evidently unabated.
“Don’t hide from me, Will. I beg you.” This made all thoughts in Will’s head come to a screeching halt. Hannibal? Begging?
“Hannibal…” He appealed softly, without a clue as to where this childish tone was coming from. He’d heard it in some of his partners in the past and came to a realization… it was always those who were far from vanilla and fell on the small side of the slash. So of course it was was coming naturally to him now. He had spent years fantasizing about Hannibal and in all of those fantasies, he had held the reigns of the situation approximately zero times. As Hannibal’s eyes dropped to his lips and the older man descended tantalizingly close to his mouth, Will’s heart sped up again and he felt the stirrings of impossibly quick arousal in his belly.
“Will…” He whispered. “Tell me you want this…” As he spoke his lips, those tempting, soft, savage lips brushed his.
“Yes, please!” He whined, but there was no space in his mind for the undignified cry or any resulting embarrassment because Hannibal’s mouth was finally, fiercely, maddeningly on his. The sinuous tongue he’d dreamt of countless times and with such clarity, for his imagination had come tortuously close to accurate, licked at him and coaxed his mouth open. And Will realized his mouth had never felt like an erogenous zone before this moment. It was unbelievable how this act changed by mere virtue of experiencing it as the object rather than the subject. The love of his life was kissing him, and that changed everything. Hannibal was inside him now in the simplest of carnal ways, but something in the flavor of Will’s mind must have told him just how he liked to be touched because no mechanically expert sex, and Molly had been good at it when he had let her in, had ever felt as erotic as this kiss.
Hannibal moaned into the kiss, and the sound of his nails on the sheets made Will’s hair stand on end at the back of his neck.
“What did I say?” He breathed, snarling as he broke off their contact to speak, as if it took his greatest effort not to bite Will’s lips raw. “To make you come, what did I say?” Will blushed, and Hannibal smirked devilishly. “My Will…” He sighed almost wistfully. “I want to do everything under the sun to you, and in positions Vatsyayana did not think of, but it will require extensive conversations to explore it all. For now…” Unable to wait until the end of the sentence to kiss him, Hannibal crushed their lips together again. Sparks went off and Will whimpered and arched his back, forgetting himself the second the wetness of those tempting lips met his. “For now, tell me what I did my darling to make you this deliciously warm, wet,…” To Will’s embarrassment he closed his eyes and breathed him in, clearly getting off on the scent of his climax. “… fragrant. My brave boy… you can tell me. I told you first.” It was a good point, and Will was too far gone to care as much as he normally would for his own dignity.
“You called me a good boy… and you said-” He mewled. “You said… oh God, Hannibal.” The older man had reached down and pulled both of their pajama bottoms down their thighs. Will gasped as their erections touched with nothing between them for the first time, the skin on skin contact almost enough to make him come again. “You said open up for Daddy…” He blurted and Hannibal grunted, an unusual flood of precum joining Will’s cum to slick their friction.
“Will you give me this, my darling boy?” He asked, almost unbelieving and Will met his eyes pupils blown with pleasure to find that Hannibal’s eyes were full of…. Awe? It was something he had never seen in a lover’s gaze before and it drove him even more desperate for the peak. “Will you be my baby, Will?” He nuzzled him in that innocent, animal way he had about him even at his most dangerous. “Will you let me be your Daddy, my angel?”Will was, at moments, aware of the high, needy pitch of his voice but he was also too enthralled by Hannibal’s reactions to it to care that he sounded far from masculine and in control. Hell, he didn’t want to be in control.
“Yes…” It came out so low that Hannibal chuckled. A gentle hand cupped his cheek and Will’s eyes fluttered closed as he gulped and tried again. “Yes, Daddy.” Hannibal made a sound that Will had heard wounded animals make though Hannibal had barely ever uttered a sound himself when he’d been hurt. Hannibal didn’t need to fidget or make sounds to self-regulate like mere mortals, and that only meant that when he did make them, they were heart-felt and struck Will like lightening. He keened at the delicious pressure when Hannibal took them both in hand, pressing their cocks against each other and fucking his grip with devastating precision. Will saw red and then white as the length of Hannibal’s cock rubbed against his oversensitive frenulum, panting like he was in heat. He soon became dizzy… too much oxygen, he supposed. He wouldn’t be surprised if he passed out. The last time his heart had beaten this fast, it was because he was plummeting thirty-two feet per second off the edge of a ragged cliff.
“I need to…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. A whorish moan ripped through him as Hannibal shortened his thrusts and held them incredibly tighter. It was just painful enough to make him scream so loud he knew he’d lose his voice. He kicked at the blankets helplessly and then settled for dragging the arches of his feet down Hannibal’s calves hard enough to burn and bruise.
“Sh-sh-sh…” Hannibal shushed him, cheeks flushed over the sharpest cheekbones, glowing with the effort as a drop of sweat ran down the side of his face. Will didn’t know how a sound could be so patronizing, comforting, and sexy at the same time but it pushed all the buttons he knew he had and those he didn’t. “Give in, darling. Make another mess for Daddy.”
“Ah! Fuck, you’re killing me!” Will’s eyes filled with tears of heat and effort, his own sweat getting into his eyes and irritating them as he threw his head back and tried not to die of ecstasy. Hannibal’s hand slid down their cocks and snaked between them to cup Will’s balls and press his taint suggestively with little rubbing motions that almost reached his hole.
Will went silent for an agonized second as his body seized and locked up. He screamed again, sharply as he came, nails digging into the skin of Hannibal’s arms. “Daddy! Daddy… yes! Ah!” Hannibal groaned as he came with him, looking almost defeated in his release, flooded by emotions that even Will couldn’t understand in their totality. When he kissed him Will felt the cold drops of Hannibal’s tears falling on his burning cheeks and rolling off as if they were his own.
“I love you.” He finally said what he’d been dying to say since they’d started. He had held off because he didn’t want Hannibal to think it was only sex talk. More tears fell on his face, some of them landing on his very eye lashes and he kissed him frantically. “I mean it. I love you. Whether you love me or not, whether you can or not.”
“Of course I love you, you impossible creature.” was Hannibal’s rushed, almost exasperated confession. “I am jealous of the food you eat because it touches you when I am not touching you. I renounced all others, all happiness, all freedom to exist in your memory. If the world defines love as something that cannot survive the rest of my nature, it is no matter… How they define love does not matter. Can’t you see?” He sobbed and Will felt his own emotions overwhelming him until he was crying too. “I love you. I love you. Of course I love you.”
Will cried childishly loud. He cried with regret, with acceptance, with happiness, until he felt his face must be gross and splotchy. He didn’t care. He let it out and then he let Hannibal’s weight and heat sooth him.
Minutes later, Hannibal used one of the sheets to wipe them and let it fall to the tile floor to be dealt with later. For some reason, Will’s exhausted mind picked that moment to remind him there were wasps building a nest in the garage, which is where the washer and dryer were, and they couldn’t risk going to home depot for supplies to get rid of it. The devil take the sheet. Chiyo was on standby for emergencies, since she would leave with them to Europe when Hannibal’s contact at a close-by airfield gave them the green light to get picked up by a private jet off the logs. She wasn’t nice enough to bring them groceries and hang out, but they could piggy-back-ride off the next pharmacy trip to ask for extra clothes and bedding if they wanted to burn the ones they had.
He had everything he needed right here. Hannibal easily moved them to rest on their sides, close enough to breathe in each other's breath, and they let the sun come up in stripes through the humble blinds adorning the sparse shelter with a beauty that was no doubt enhanced in his mind by the significance of the moment. Jumping into the chesapeake with Hannibal had been the end of an era, and this was the beginning of the next. Hannibal kissed his hot cheek and Will rubbed their noses together, sniffling, absurdly happy.
"Grace, gift, mercy." Hannibal whispered.
"Madness, fever, delusion." Will responded.
"violence, surrender, freedom."
"hunger, ache, longing."
"Mystery."
"Magic."
"Miracle."