Vin Velours
A Hannibal Bar!AU
Chapter One
Every time Will blacks out, it happens. He sees it. Just before his eyelids click shut and his brain goes soft and blurry around the edges, the stag appears. Majestic but foreboding, the velvety antlers raise into the sky like splintered bones. The eyes – shining, dark – stare back at him. And for a moment, he is afraid.
And then the tonic water hits his face and he jolts awake, the bright white lights of the bar flooding his bloodshot eyes. His forehead is bleeding. His glasses, splintered.
"Come along, Will. It's alright. Wake up." Through a hazy squint of his eyes, Will made out the form of the bartender. He was a well-built Frenchman, all strong arms and broad shoulders with a sallow, yet somehow handsome flatness of face. He had aged like a fine wine, his expression alluding to a sort of headiness in his charm that was overwhelming and powerful. And as Will's eyes focused at last on the man in the three piece suit – crisp white cuffs rolled up above his elbows - scooping him from his pitiful position on the barstool, he noticed a certain empathy – an empathy that mirrored his own. Or at least, the empathy he normally had when he wasn't three whiskey sours deep in his own misery.
"What happened?" Will slurred, trying with no avail to right himself. The bartender held him steady.
"You passed out. Smashed your head right into the bar. And, I might add, into my favorite whiskey glass." The bartender smirked. "I will get you some water."
"No – no, I have to get home." Will tried to raise a hand to shake off the man but found himself seated again, two broad hands placed on his shoulders.
"Not like this, you aren't." The bartender returned to his post behind the dark-stained wood bar and raised two fingers. On them hung Will's keys, both to his car and to his home. "Sit. Relax. We will sober you up. I will get you something to soak up that alcohol." The bartender wiped his hands on the towel that hung from the black apron about his waist and smiled kindly, disappearing behind the kitchen doors. Will surveyed his surroundings. The bar, plush with dark red velvet and ornate wood, made modern by metallic fixtures and an air of foreign elegance, was empty. It was no surprise; the Esprit bar made its living off of its proximity to the FBI offices, and most of the agents were long gone by now. Although it was Will's first time to the locally famous spot, it had felt like home, somehow. And when he ordered his first drink, and the sweet warm burn trickled down his throat, so close to the air he felt he was struggling so hard to breathe, he grew roots on his barstool and could not be shaken. It was late, very late, practically early, and Will knew Jack would kill him if he knew he had spent another night boozing his concerns away. It wasn't his fault. It wasn't his fault. He repeated this to himself ten times, then another ten, then another. Finally, the bartender returned.
"Here. Eat this." The man handed over a tureen of thick, brown broth teeming with root vegetables and chunks of meat, and a hearty slice of white, crusty bread placed elegantly on a cloth napkin.
"What is it?" Croaked Will, dipping a spoon into the stew and watching it fall clumsily back into the bowl. He lifted his eyes to the bartender, who smiled.
"Boeuf bourguignon." The man replied. "Best thing in the world for an excess of spirits in the stomach. It was my uncle's recipe, with a few artful innovations added by myself." He pulled a dish of butter from the fridge behind the bar and set it before Will, waving a hand graciously. Will tentatively selected the butter knife laid across the dish and dipped it into the cream. "I consider myself something of a chef."
"You serve food like this at a bar?" Will asked. The bartender admired the glint of the knife as Will spread the butter onto the bread in long, artful strokes.
"You may notice that this is not exactly a dive. Eat up." He gestured towards the bowl, and at last Will felt a strange sense of relief, having been given verbal permission to add something worthwhile to the maelstrom of alcohol creating a pit in his stomach.
"Thank you." Will sopped up the stew with a handful of the bread – still warm and saturated with melting butter – and ate. The flavor was like nothing else, and his senses were flooded with the soul-reviving succor of a hot meal, meat, and bread. "Thank you." He repeated. "I'm – my name is Will. Will Graham."
"A pleasure, Mr. Graham. Though I do wish we had met under more . . . sober circumstances." The bartender poured Will a glass of water and gave a sly tilt of his head in his direction, a subtle study in body language that both criticized Will's condition and humored it.
"I guess that's the risk you take when you run a bar." Will said with a wry grimace before taking a sip of water. The bartender laughed, polishing a glass with casual perfectionism.
"Touché, Mr. Graham."
"Please, seriously, call me Will. You – you hauled my drunk ass off the surface of your bar – dead weight and all – please, call me Will." Will's strained expression, highlighted by his cracked glasses and thick brown curls, was not due to the bartender's insistence on manners but instead on his own embarrassment. I am supposed to be a representative of the goddamn FBI, Will thought, and I can barely hold my own head up. He watched the bartender watching him with a mildly amused expression playing across his uniquely handsome face. I'd give anything to just be at home. Home. Home. Home. Home. Home. He repeated it to himself ten times, then another ten, then another.
"In that case, Will, call me Hannibal." The bartender stuck out his hand, and Will noticed the expensive, impeccable French watch that circled his thick wrist. Will's unreasonably sweaty palms forced him to pull from their firm handshake before Hannibal did, but the bartender did not seem to notice, or if he did, he was too polite to show it. Just as Will opened his mouth to ask which region of France his accent was from, a cold breeze wafted through Esprit as the ornate double doors opened. Blowing in delicately, in contrast to the brusque wind, was a young woman, pale with the porcelain features of a doll. As if created by a loving master's hand, the young woman's face was the whitest white it could be while retaining its unmistakable humanity, her cheeks flushed from the cold the color of raspberry sorbet melting against a dish. Her raven black hair was cropped short at the chin, as if she had cut it herself with something other than beautician's scissors – perhaps a kitchen knife or a hunting knife. She wore a dark sweater that would have revealed her milky white shoulders were it not for the black leather jacket, tight, that she wore in the manner of armor. Her skirt and tights, equally dark, fed into black boots. The only pop of color was the scarf she wore around her neck, red silk with a darker red floral. The cigarette between her fingers glowed red, too, and the smoke danced up into the air and blew towards Will as the heavy doors groaned shut behind her.
The woman stalked towards the bar, her boots making an empty thudding sound with each step, and took a seat several stools away from Will. Hannibal cocked an eyebrow towards Will and turned to the woman.
"Awfully late for a young woman to be out socializing, isn't it?" He asked, approaching her from behind the bar. The young woman lifted sad, green eyes to Hannibal, eyes that sunk into the dark circles beneath them like verdant moons behind a tuft of midnight clouds.
"It's really none of your business as long as I buy a drink, isn't it?" She replied, her voice thin with the veneer of bravado, as if her voice were jutting out its chin and widening its stance. Hannibal merely clucked his tongue.
"In that case, what can I serve the lady?" The woman hesitated, and for a moment her wide eyes reminded Will of the shining, staring eyes of the stag. A doe, he thought. Just a doe staring into a pair of headlights. "I – uh - "
"She'll have a glass of your best white wine, whatever you have. And it's on me." Will announced, nodding his weary head towards Hannibal, whose eyebrows raised in surprise – or disapproval.
"I will have to dip into the cellar for a moment, then." The bartender said, raising a finger to imply brevity of absence. Will watched the broad muscles of his back disappear down the stairs and then turned to the young woman.
hands, which shook so slightly that no one but an FBI-trained profiler would notice. She nodded.
"My parents used to let me have a glass of wine with dinner, sometimes." She whispered. She raised her head and peered out at Will, her bloodshot eyes lined heavily with black. "Thank you."
"It's nothing. I have a – a thing, for strays, you might say. My ex-girlfriend used to say that." Realizing the implication of his statement, Will immediately raised a frantic hand. "I didn't mean – I'm not hitting on you! I just – it seems like you needed some help. I didn't mean to – sorry."
"It's alright," said the young woman. "I do. I did, I mean. So what's your story?" She took a long drag on her cigarette, her gleaming eyes never leaving Will's.
"My story?"
"Yeah, you know. Why are you in a fancy fucking bar at four in the morning on a Tuesday? There's a story there. I have one too." She tapped the ashes of the dwindling cigarette into a tray, her other hand drifting up to slightly loosen the red knot about her neck.
"You're awfully young to have a 'story'." Will said. The girl just smiled, sort of sad, sort of malevolent.
"Yeah. So, what do you say? I'll show you mine if you show me yours?" The young woman turned on her barstool, facing Will entirely, her head cocked curiously to one side. She would be lovely if it weren't for the whole rough-around-the-edges aesthetic, thought Will. She's running from something. I hide myself beneath leather, beneath kohl, obscure myself with darkness. I change my hair, my clothes, my attitude. I leave my house at an hour I normally wouldn't – I drink when I normally don't. I don't need to mind those habits any more. I shed my old self like snake shit. I drape myself in the robes of anonymity. I hide. This is my design.
And even as his mind whirred behind the broken glasses and the sensitive brown eyes, Will felt the pull of kinship with this young woman. This stranger – she felt like home. Like home. Like home. Like home. He repeated it to himself ten times, then another ten. And he was drunk, and he was tired, and he was afraid of being left alone with his own mind. And so the words came spilling out like seeds from a pomegranate split open wide: "Two nights ago a team of federal agents and I hunted down a wanted serial killer – he killed girls, teenage girls. We found him in his home; he had killed his wife and was going to kill his daughter, too. And I shot him, ten times. I shot him to death. And then I didn't stop." Will stared into his water glass and then downed it, wishing it was something stronger.
From just under the trap door of the cellar, Hannibal watched Abigail Hobbs' sad green eyes widened, then turned steely. "How nice to meet you under better circumstances, Agent Graham. Recognize me?"