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Will has been alone with corpses before. He has been part of plenty of investigations where the room was cleared for him to immerse himself in the play-by-play of the murder, and some days he lingered by the autopsy table while the forensics team was on a break. But before he dragged Randall Tier’s body out to his shed and laid it on a table, he had never been so alone with one that there was no one around for miles and hours stretched before him with no interference. And crucially, he had never before been alone with the corpse of his own victim.
He can’t stop touching the body. With the winter chill, it has grown cool quickly, though warmth still remains trapped beneath Randall’s jacket, as he finds when he slides a hand beneath the seam. Bodies have always fascinated him. The processes of death and decay, the way they carry the story of a crime with them. When he was younger, a teenager, the closest he could get was crime scene photos. That was when he started to become aware that his mind worked in unusual ways, when he sensed more clinging to the images than simply evil, when he felt more than simply disgust when he looked. In those early years, it was hard to draw a division between what he saw, what he sensed, and what came from him. He could still vividly remember the polaroid collection of a necrophiliac and how intensely it had struck him when confronted with those images composed by the killer himself, the crime through his eyes as he wished to commit it to memory—bodies which were mutilated and provocatively arranged, an obscene sensuality streaked with gore.
Back then, there was no pendulum to visualize and demarcate what was him and what was another, nothing to buffer between his own emotions and what he sensed from the scene. He couldn’t distinguish between self-revelation and the sudden dawning comprehension of another’s perspective. Were the twisted bodies erotic to Will himself, or was the killer’s erotic framing simply so strong that he was unable to view those images in another light? The only firm boundary he could draw between himself and the killers he empathized with was the line between action and inaction.
But now, Randall’s bloodied face and broken neck are evidence that regardless of intent, the kill happened. He has happened. The harm is done, the violence over. Randall’s glassy eyes show there is nothing left, just the shell of his body in front of Will and his thoughts.
He knows what Hannibal would do now—take his trophies and transform the body into art. Elevate it. Putting an elegant spin on a murder, glossing over the sadism that led the Ripper to mutilate his victims while they were still alive. Transformative, aesthetic brutality.
Will is different. The method and circumstances matter to him. He has no wish to deny the how, the savagery that had overtaken him in response to Randall’s attack. Two bestial instincts colliding with each other, fists and flesh and blood. And Hannibal in the shadows, his urging to Randall to attack, his poisonous words to Will to let himself be taken over by such urges. Hannibal had gotten what he had wanted, but it was Will who carried it out in a blaze of rage and violence.
He removes Randall’s theatrical bone armor, and he lies there like a puppet with his strings cut. Hannibal pulling the strings, of course, attempted murder by proxy, the same as when Will had sent Matthew after him.
Thinking of Hannibal stirs the embers of the violence that he has just burnt through—the thought of facing him, how smugly satisfied he will be to learn he has succeeded, makes his hands curl into fists again, knuckles smarting with fresh scrapes. Will has to bring this to him, eventually. Despite how fiercely he resents being manipulated into this position, it will help deepen the trust between them once Hannibal knows he is truly culpable of murder, after all.
He releases his fists and exhales, breath hanging foggy around him in the chill air. His fingers return to Randall’s skin, gentle. It wasn’t Randall’s fault, after all. He was a creature Hannibal had cultivated and released to follow his nature. He knows Hannibal is attempting the same with him—providing the chrysalis, at least, even when he acknowledged that what hatches follows its own nature—but Will feels no clearer now on what that nature is. Perhaps even less clear. Righteous fury was one thing, but the impulse that leads to his hands wandering over this body was another.
Curiosity, he tells himself. He’s trying to read the scene of his own crime as he would for another, trying to glimpse his own nature through his actions. But this crime is not yet complete. Randall is dead, but Will is still with him, his body not yet disposed of. He is still shaping the narrative.
He removes Randall’s jacket, needing to see more clearly what he has done. Randall looks much softer in only a sweater. Hard to reconcile with what Will knows, that two creatures wore this skin tonight to attack—the beast within Randall, and Hannibal, in spirit. The skin is empty now, only the banal reality of meat. But the symbol and significance overlaying it is entrancing. Will’s first kill outside of the line of duty. A faint resemblance to the polaroid corpses that burned themselves into his brain.
Thinking of Hannibal’s emphasis on elevation gives him a childish impulse to do the opposite—to desecrate. To shrug free of the puppeteering grasp and do something he would certainly not approve of.
Cannibalism is one form of corpse desecration, though Hannibal chose to make it an art form. Necrophilia is another. The Ripper’s crimes never had a whiff of sexual motivation, no matter how flagrant the sadism. It’s almost funny, the implication that the sadism of disemboweling a victim alive is somehow purer and more aesthetic. More human, perhaps— cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.
More befitting Randall to follow the animal instinct, then.
He doesn’t commit to the idea of it, just allows it to roll around in his mind as he slowly pulls away more layers of Randall’s clothing. He lifts the dead-doll arms above the head, so limp and malleable in these early hours before rigor mortis will turn him stiff. He thinks of the many bodies he’s seen posed similarly, arms up as if they were diving backward. Strangely vulnerable, the wrists together. Restrained by death rather than handcuffs, but the underlying sentiment feels similar.
Randall’s head falls to the side after his sweater is pulled free, pale blue eyes with their fixed empty stare. Will traces his soft jawline, smeared with blood. He wonders what beast Randall imagined himself as, what strong crushing jaw it must have. He imagines if he were to change the body, transform him, he would replace this blunt human instrument with the majesty of a predator. He’s not sure yet if he will make that transformation, too preoccupied by the present moment.
Hannibal’s shadow grows fainter the longer Will draws out this moment with Randall. The Ripper is brutally efficient and doesn’t waste any time, and Will is most certainly wasting time. It’s a relief to feel the Ripper’s claws loosen their grip, and a strange blessing to be the only killer in the room with a body, for once. The shifting sands of emotions and desires are his alone. Influenced by others, perhaps—he doesn’t think he can fully unravel the threads of his earliest exposures to death. But not a full projection of someone else’s psyche.
Randall’s undershirt, next, baring his chest. For the first time, Will feels the unease of trespass. It had felt close enough, before, to how he had seen Randall as he chose to show himself, but now he is stripped. It feels private—something he was not given, but has taken. Like peeling back flesh from bone. Will places a hand on the sternum and closes his eyes, feeling the resounding stillness. Not a flutter of a heartbeat. His hand shifts, exploring the cooling plateau of flesh by touch. The stillness and silence soothes him. It’s just him and death, after all. A natural pairing.
Still, his heart beats faster than usual, his mouth dry. He moves more quickly with the remaining clothing—shoes, socks, pants. He doesn’t allow himself to hesitate even for the underwear. It’s just him and death, he reminds himself.
There is a difference between comfort and arousal, but he has seen enough necrophilia crime scenes to know well how it feels to be aroused by a corpse. With the naked body before him, the mental shift is effortless, almost automatic.
The sense of trespassing does not fade completely, but it begins to feel more like excitement than anxiety.
The plush redness of Randall’s lips, split by his fist and bled. Now, caressed by his thumb, dragging until his mouth opens to the soft gleam of his teeth.
This time, Will keeps his eyes open as his hands traverse the body, taking in the contrast of the living and the dead. Randall’s arms lie outstretched above his head, where Will had left them, so effortlessly moldable.
Will rolls him over on the table and runs a hand down his spine, falling onto his ass, calloused fingers squeezing and denting the death-pale skin. Possibilities unfurl in his mind, diverging branches of depravities, and he hesitates.
He would likely catch onto the tentative nature of this crime, if he were reading the aftermath. It’s a twisted kind of self-discovery—if not who am I, then what am I becoming. At the very least, his actions will speak of the soup his mind has been swimming through in his lifetime.
He does not have the distance of a polaroid or the romanticized polish of a memory. He has a body in front of him that still smells close to life, not disgusting but utterly human, a whiff of acrid sweat from the physical struggle. And his own body, still with the occasional tremor of adrenaline, his own sweat turning clammy and cool, knuckles ragged and hurting.
There’s no mess like there often is, with corpses—no postmortem release of the bowels. Maybe Randall liked to hunt with an empty stomach, the better for hunger to sharpen his predatory instincts.
Regardless. Will rearranges the body, pivoting it until the legs are off the table, almost as if Randall were simply bent over it, except for the broken, unnatural angles of his neck and arms. Will spits on his fingers and rubs them between Randall’s upper thighs where lukewarm heat lingers, and his fingertips brush against the back of his balls. With his other hand, he undoes his own jeans.
There’s a moment of irrational self-consciousness once he has his dick out. Maybe because he is used to a crime scene being seen, the memory replayed. The actions of a murderer do not remain private forever.
But he’s the only detective he knows who really sees the moment as if he were there himself. And he can’t hide from himself forever.
He strokes himself, appreciating the contrast between the heat and responsiveness of his cock and the limp chill of the corpse in front of him. He shuffles closer, pressing tentatively against the same crevice that his fingers explored. He pushes Randall’s legs more tightly together, the laxness of his body not helping this particular act. But neither can the corpse resist, infinitely cooperative with whatever his design may be. Uniquely malleable, limbs splayed exactly as he left them. An entire human life reduced to nothing more than a doll.
A guilty, twisted pleasure at the thought—a feeling so familiar he doesn’t know whether it came from him or one of the hundreds of minds he has briefly inhabited. Regardless, it is there and it is real, thrumming through him, and he cradles the feeling in his gut as he pushes forward.
It is a simple pleasure—not very tight, barely warm. He could go further and test his theory that Randall’s bowels were empty before death. But a hole is just a hole, and this body is a body. He is more interested in feeling and exploring as much as he can, and he keenly appreciates that here, as he squeezes together limp legs and nudges against flaccid cock and balls.
His fingertips dig into lean thigh muscle, and he tries and fails not to think of meat, of carving out a cut and wrapping it in paper to give Hannibal to turn into some succulent dish. That, at least, he recognizes as an impulse that does not belong to him. The blurred serial killers of his youth were not so refined.
Thinking of Hannibal interrupts his immersion in the moment. He imagines if Hannibal could see him now, there would be a raised eyebrow or curious tilt of his head, some cryptic question in psychoanalytical wrappings. Understandable judgment for such unseemly behavior.
Well, fuck you, Will thinks, and almost says out loud. That’s the point.
Not to annoy Hannibal, per say, just to be separate from him, at a time when Will is increasingly consumed by him.
This is his space, time stolen from the game played between them so he can still hear himself think. Just him, a corpse, and some dusty memories from his youth.
He rearranges Randall. On his back, this time, his head hanging upside down over the edge of the table, throat exposed and bent back too sharply. The rest of his body lies still and splayed. He is fully cold to the touch now. Will explores the slight gape of his mouth again, this time with the head of his cock rather than his fingers, before carefully feeding it in.
Randall’s mouth has dried out, and the sensation of a fully dry, cold tongue is unnerving, but the shiver it sends up his spine is not unpleasant, just intriguing. The disparity between this and a normal blowjob is more sharply evident than the deadness of his thighs.
He falls into the motions of fucking before long, marveling a little at how lax the throat is, how easy it is to push until he sees the movement distort the exposed throat. It becomes easier, automatic, sensation bolstered by shivering-sweet awareness of the taboo. His hands shift, sometimes holding the lifeless head in place, sometimes with a hand on the neck to feel the force of his thrust, sometimes spreading wide across the cold chest.
He pulls out before he comes, not thinking, but knowing the moment he tightens his fist around himself what he wants. When he finishes, he leaves a trail of white droplets dripping down Randall’s face, over his cheeks and into his unseeing eyes, like tears falling in reverse.
He stares in silence for a moment, tucking himself back in, processing the contrast of satisfaction with distant, creeping guilt. It takes a while to sink in that this is finally it—the answer to how his own crime scene would look.