Hi again! I decided to do another oneshot, and am leaving it open for even MORE oneshots (shocking, I know) because Hannibal is just that awesome and inspiring. Anyways, this is a direct continuation of my first piece Home Is Where the Heart Is and you should probably read that first. Once again, Girl!Will and Hannibal and heartbreak abound. Also a bit AU, because I don't really know what happens after the last episode (although I do know Will gets out in episode 7, yay!) and Beverly is alive here (I miss her).
Enjoy!
(P.S. The title of this whole series is called In the Valley Where My Heartache Lies, which is from the song Down the Burning Ropes by James Vincent McMorrow, he's really great, check him out!)
Disclaimer: I own nothing (if I did, nothing would ever get ahead in the show because the actors would be very caught up doing very dirty things)
A Girl With Poison Filled Veins
"Hello, Will."
She regards him from under her eyelashes, stare murderous. Ironic, considering. She wishes she could let him go, but her heart strings tug towards him despite this.
She misses him desperately.
"Hello, Doctor Lecter."
xxx
She remembers in small bits and pieces. Alone in her cell, she disappears inside her mind, but carefully. She isn't sure she wants to find what she thinks she will find, and in the end she finds out it's worse than she could have ever dreamed.
The way he shoves the human ear down her throat makes her gasp, and she opens her eyes to find she is covered in a fine layer of cool sweat.
The gears begin to turn, and her lips tilt up in a feral smile.
Her brain is the most clear it's been in years.
xxx
The next time he comes to visit her, Alan is there with him.
The hospital caretakers are careful with her, but not so careful as they would be if she was a man, so they let her get away with striped pajama bottoms and a plain white t-shirt instead of the customary prison suit. Chilton's trade for her "cooperation". She is small and fragile looking, and they think they can overtake her if it comes to that.
They know nothing of strength.
He brings Alan, but her eyes are fixed firmly on him the whole time. She pretends, eyes watering, to break down. She asks for their help. She asks for his help, because Alan, despite what he used to mean, is nothing to her now. No, not nothing, that's wrong, because she refuses to be like him. She cares, dammit. She cares that Alan looks at her with those bright blue eyes that portray disbelief and sorrow and pity all at once.
Will Graham has never been a woman to be pitied.
They set a date for their first session, well, their first session in here, and she is sent back to her cell with the blooming feeling of her first victory.
xxx
When he comes for their session, she is ready. She has nothing else to do but prepare these days, and prepare she must if she is going to beat him. He is shrewdly calculating to the core, evil, the villain to this story. She cannot forget that, ever, despite how her mind may try to betray her.
"Hello, Will. How are you feeling today?" he smiles calmly, but she can see something dark and vicious brewing behind his eyes.
"I don't know, Hannibal. How well can I feel in a mental institution?" she counters, face set in stone. She will not let him see how he affects her. Not anymore.
The smile that quirks his lips is immediate and sad all at once. It's not pitying though. He knows how she hates pity.
"I'm sorry to hear that," he says, pulling the chair they've set out for him closer to her cage.
"Yes, well. Glad to know you care," she snarks back, and his smile fades.
He stares at her with that piercing gaze, and she feels as if he is looking into her soul.
"I do care, Will. More than you seem to know," he leans forward with a sudden intensity, and when their eyes meet she can feel sparks.
She wants to rip him apart inside, burrow beneath his skin and stay there forever. Listen to the steady beat of his heart and feel the warmth of his hands on her body and she does not know how she can go on without his lips on her skin, on her mouth, his taste on her tongue.
He must see it in her eyes, because he makes a small sound in the back of his throat that sounds almost like a growl and she shivers at the sudden lust that pools in his black eyes.
"Will," he murmurs and it sounds almost like a warning.
"Doctor Lecter," she breathes back, leaning forward ever so slightly.
They stay like this for a few moments, suspended in the time between uncertainty and action.
The bell rings to announce someone's entrance into the visiting hall, and Will blinks back into herself, sitting straighter in her chair and letting her eyes move away from those ever searching orbs.
For a moment, it had almost seemed like nothing had changed.
xxx
Her lawyer gives her a floral, frilly dress for the trial. He says he wants to portray her as 'innocent' and 'scared, but getting better'. She slips it on and it falls right above her knees, white and plain and pretty if she were anyone else. She pulls the cardigan he sent her closer around her body.
He makes her leave her hair to trail down her back, as well. She hates him just a little bit.
She is told that Alan was supposed to testify for her, but in the light of their recent change of defense, it is Hannibal who sits in the witness chair instead.
He says that Will was, is still, his friend.
His eyes are locked with hers the entire time.
When the cross examination asks if they have ever been sexually involved with a leering smile, Hannibal gets this look in his eyes that Will has never seen before. It is darkly vast, and she knows quite suddenly she has just begun to unlock the mystery that is Hannibal Lecter.
"Of course not. That would be highly unethical," Hannibal lies easily, and her heart twitches and collapses a little more with each word.
He is lying for her, for the sake of her case. She loves him just a little bit for it.
He's a cold blooded killer, this she must remind herself as his lips thin and her mind blanks and she remembers, so vividly, one morning when he had made her breakfast and she had asked, jokingly, if he did this with all his patients.
He had looked at her so firmly and so intently, with his lips pressed into that same thin line, that she could swear her heart had stopped beating for a few brief moments.
"I would hope by now you would realize you are not just another patient, Willow."
She had swallowed hard past the sudden lump in her throat, and they had ended up fucking in his kitchen. It had given her a little thrill every time they stood in that same kitchen with other people milling around, those two times she had come to his dinner parties and she could think to herself that 'they have no idea what we've done here'.
The judge's rough voice pulls her back to the present, but just to turn her white and shaky as he declares Will's new defense is inadequate and will be dismissed.
The next day they find him strung up by a rope, brain cut out and exposed to the public on a weighted scale.
Her trial is canceled for the time being.
xxx
"Will Graham. A pleasure to finally meet you," her admirer grins, and she can imagine blood coating his teeth, dripping down his throat and onto his pristine white coat.
"I need a favor. Friends do favors for each other, right?" she asks, pressing her hands up to the cool prison bars.
"Of course. Whatever you need, sweet Will," the admirer comes closer, close enough to touch, close enough to choke.
She comes closer too, her lips a breath away from his. She can see him quiver in anticipation.
The next words fly out on a soft breath, barely stirring the air.
"I need you to kill Hannibal Lecter."
Her heart breaks a little bit more.
xxx
When he next comes to visit her, he is seething inside. It is not something she can tell by just a cursory glance. He is still dressed impeccably, silk fabric vest and jacket and wide cut tie, but it is the things he doesn't say as he is walking towards her that show it.
He sits in the chair across from her and this is the first time he doesn't drag it closer. He stares at her for a few long minutes, and she drags her feet up onto the chair so that she can hide her face in her knees. She feels utterly uncomfortable.
He speaks first.
"You tried to kill me, Will."
She moves her face up a little so that she can meet his eyes, and in them she sees fury. She keeps her chin tilted down as she shrugs.
He lets out a harsh inhale, takes a calming breath back in.
"How do you think that makes me feel?" he voices the question calmly, but she flinches back at the look on his face.
He looks like he's ready to murder her.
Her insides pulse.
"How does it make you feel, Doctor Lecter," she scrunches her hands in her pajamas, jaw clenching against the sudden burst of anger that pulls through her body.
What right does he have to be mad? He framed her, made everyone think she was a killer. He locked her up inside this hellhole. She is the one who should be angry. She is angry, she reminds herself. She's angry to her very core. She hates him.
She can feel the lie even as she thinks it.
"It makes me feel very betrayed. I thought you were more than that, Will. I thought you had acquiesced that I was not the killer," he reminds her, and she shrugs again, wondering if any of his words are true.
"I'm sorry you feel that way," and she means it.
xxx
When she finally gets out of the hospital because of evidence that eliminates her as a suspect, it is to the welcome arms of Jack and a new case.
"Where's Doctor Lecter?" she asks as they gather around the medical table to look at the body of a girl with dark hair, pale skin, and poison in her veins.
The team exchanges a look, but it is Beverly who finally speaks up.
"We thought it would be better if you two had a little space, after...after everything."
She suspected as much, but she didn't expect for her legs to carry her to his office after they are done at the bureau.
She is seated in the waiting room when he opens the door to let his last patient out, and they are stuck staring at each other as the man leaves. He finally gestures her in, and she breezes past him, careful not to touch.
Look, but don't touch. This is what she keeps repeating in her head.
"Will. I must say, this is a surprise," he says, shutting the door.
She hears the iron click of a lock. It feels like a death sentence in her ears.
"Is it, though?" she asks, taking a seat in her usual chair from before, before, before everything happened between them and the case and Garrett Jacob Hobbs and Abigail and the Ripper.
He takes his own seat across from her, crosses his legs and steeples his fingers. "Well? What is it you want to talk about?"
She opens her mouth, and the words that fly out are not the ones she meant to say. "How could you?"
He raises an eyebrow, and she can see the smirk he fights to keep down. Hate bubbles beneath her skin.
"What ever do you mean?" he asks.
"You know. You know I know. Why are you doing this to me?" she hisses out the last words, all the anger and suppressed feelings that had been simmering the whole time she was left in that godforsaken place breaking out.
He is above her in an instant, hands bracketing the chair arms and face leaning close enough that their noses brush.
His eyes are like she's never seen them before.
"If I do know you know, it was not very smart for you to come alone, now, was it?" he says easily.
"I'm not scared of you," she finally growls after trying to blurt the words out a few times.
He stares at her for a few moments, leaving even closer so that their lips brush.
"You should be."
xxx
They fuck with abandon. He slams into her with the single mindedness of a man trying to make his last few moments count, grunts heavily when her nails rake bloody trails down his back. She couldn't even get his jacket and shirt off in the rush of their coming together, instead deigning to tug his button up (probably costing more than her whole outfit) out of his pants while he undid his belt buckle and unzipped her fly. He reached down to touch her there, at the apex of her thighs, and she let out a small keen that makes her blush bright red and just makes him smile and thrust harder.
She does not let him kiss her. He drags his lips over her neck and down her throat, teeth biting and tearing her delicate skin, but she does not let him catch her lips.
It seems too sacred. Their relationship is anything but.
xxx
They lie together afterward, sprawled on the floor, inches away but not touching. They are both breathing heavily, and when she turns her head to look at him, all she wants is to reach out and touch that usually so in place hair disheveled from her fingers. His bangs are long enough to just brush the tip of his eyelids, and they brush along his eyelashes with every blink. He is staring at her, too.
"I hate you," she whispers.
He nods.
"I know."
