Over the next few days, Hannibal scans the news outlets. He has come to accept, even foretaste, the peaks and valleys of Will's extreme susceptibility to circumstance. He is not merely buffeted by season, he is season incarnate. His competency is solid and cool, but when he flames into full summer he is volatile, reborn a new thing from thought to thought in the warp and weft of need and fury.

Hannibal's foresight is close to preternatural, but only because he directs contingency to display all possible outcomes before him. The very fact of Will Graham is a vivisection of his method, by which pure chance bleeds into probability. By his existence alone, Will changes Hannibal's design. If he could feel fear, he might be terrified. If he could be exhilarated, his heart might race. But, Hannibal being Hannibal, he is curious. And he desires.

Perhaps true to recent form, he comes upon the story by happenstance, on a loathsome website called .

The headline reads, "Ripper's Trail Leads to Very Dead End." Outside of the distasteful attempt at clever wordplay, the article is rather informative. The author, one Freddie Lounds, was at least astute enough to take note of the unusual FBI presence surrounding the investigation into the man found in the bear trap, and deduce that it was related to an ongoing investigation.

The victim, Jonah MacRae, as it turns out, had a long-standing land dispute with his neighbors, and had taken it upon himself to escalate the dispute to vandalism and theft. Apparently, the neighboring family's youngest son had broken under light interrogation and confessed to having taken part in MacRae's murder. A simple grudge killing.

Hannibal dashes off an anonymous letter to the Sun, Baltimore's leading newspaper, and the Washington Post, decrying the waste of federal funds and manpower in chasing false leads while the Ripper is still at large. He is careful to word it in the most banal terms possible, putting across plebeian indignation while serving dear Jack Crawford a well-deserved dose of humility.

It is not that night, but the night afterward that his doorbell sounds well after dusk. It puts him in mind of the night Bedelia came to confront him, but Hannibal does not believe in coincidence as it applies to him. He knows exactly who stands outside his door.

Will Graham, face livid and eyelids heavy, supports himself with one hand on the doorframe. The other is raised toward the door, less in greeting than in supplication. The heat of his body is so profound that his sweat-soaked hair releases steam into the frigid blackness beyond his head. The front of his shirt is stippled with dark blotches-entirely too dark to be perspiration-that show red when Hannibal draws him into the entry hall and shuts the door.

"I'm-" Will begins.

"Don't speak," Hannibal says. "Come with me. Quickly."

He leads the stumbling man through his sitting room and into the rear hallway, straight to the master bath suite. Will stands, swaying, by the door. He appears blurred, overwritten as he is with the scrawl of confusion and agony. The flame dances over him as he wilts within it, a shadowplay inverted, and Hannibal is entranced.

Will's knees give out, then, and he collapses onto the tile in a sitting position. Hannibal opens the tap and holds his hand beneath the flow, warm but not hot. It will serve both to cool the fever and to clean Will's wounds.

Amid the water's white noise, he sheds his waistcoat and pulls off Will's boots and trousers. The man barely grimaces as Hannibal peels the shirt away from the still-seeping gouges on his chest and works it over his head.

Will is a sorry sight, thin and pale in his socks and underwear, bent almost double over the boiling in his gut so the causeway of his spine emerges stark from the flesh of his back. Hannibal places his fingers into the divots between the thoracic vertebrae and guides Will toward the shower.

He cries out when the water meets his skin, and struggles against a stream that no doubt seems much colder than it is. His strength is gone, however, and Hannibal easily holds him, arms pinned to his sides, inside the cradle of the water. His fine, tailored shirt and trousers soak through and grow heavy, and still he stands, pulling Will against his chest, soothing his agitation.

When he turns the shower off, he hears Will's teeth knocking. Still wringing wet himself, Hannibal divests an uncomplaining Will of his boxers and socks, and wraps him in his own Egyptian cotton bathrobe. It will be ruined, of course, like his drenched clothes, but by Will's blood from the still-oozing lacerations.

Slinging a towel over his arm, he leads Will into the bedroom, throwing back the coverlet and draping the towel over his pillow. Only a finite number of Hannibal's possessions will be spoiled tonight. Will's convulsive shriveling when his body hits the mattress curls him inward, fetal, the involuntary contraction of a corpse on fire. He does, indeed, burn, but the immolation is slow and internal.

Hannibal pulls the coverlet over Will's bare feet, then moves away to quietly strip and re-dress. From the bathroom, he retrieves rubbing alcohol, ointment, and gauze.

"Will, I want you to turn over. I need to examine your injuries."

"Too cold," Will says. "Just-just let me warm up."

"Let me dress them, then I'll cover you again, and you can sleep."

This spurs Will to turn onto his back. His eyes are wide, aimed toward the ceiling but seeing nothing. "No. No sleep."

Hannibal parts the thick cotton of the bathrobe, down to the crest of Will's hipbones.

"Christ," says Will. The word is a breath sacrificed to the cool air that encroaches on his bare skin.

The robe is of fine enough weave that it leaves no fibers in the wounds that mark the pale chest in a starburst pattern. On closer inspection, they are superficial, and Hannibal understands what has happened. He takes a moment to unfurl the hand clenched at Will's side, sees the blood and tissue that remains below the ragged fingernails. At some point that night, whether knowingly or not, Will had clawed at his own skin until he bled.

"This will hurt a bit," says Hannibal, and presses a gauze pad soaked in pungent alcohol to the bloodied flesh.

"Fuck," Will says, short and sharp, but only grits his teeth against the burn as Hannibal continues.

"What happened, Will?"

"Night-ow. Nightmare. I don't remember doing it. I woke up like this."

"I'm rather impressed you made the drive to my house without killing yourself," says Hannibal. "You could have called me. I would have come right away."

Will blinks, breathes in deep as the sting of the alcohol subsides. "I know. I wasn't thinking. I just had to get out of there. It was in my house. Inside my house."

"The stag?"

"Yes. Standing over my bed. Jesus, I could feel its breath on my arm. It was so cold, unbelievably cold. I tried to cover my eyes. But then it wasn't a stag anymore. It was a man. A man with horns. He was in shadow wherever he walked in the room, like he brought the shadow with him."

"Did the man say anything?" Hannibal asks, smoothing the thick antibiotic ointment over the abraded skin with cool fingertips.

"Nothing," Will said, surrender coloring the admission. "He stood, and he watched. I tried to sit up, I tried to see his face. When I did, he put his hands into his chest, just pushed them in, and opened it up, god, like a cabinet. Like his ribs were doors. I saw inside, and I saw his heart was on fire. On fire, and still beating while it burned. I thought it would be horrible, terrifying, but it was beautiful. And so bright. I couldn't look away. And even though it was bright, I still couldn't see his face."

"You woke up soon after?"

"Yeah. Bleeding, and burning up, too."

Hannibal presses clean gauze onto Will's chest. It is a light dressing, but will do for the time being.

"Is it me?" asks Will, helpless, as Hannibal folds the robe over his work, closing the wounds from view. "Is it inside me? I tried to get it out."

"It is," Hannibal says, "and it isn't. The stag, he is the man you seek, and he is seeking you, as well. He may not know you, but he feels as if he does. Just as you know him. You are close to one another, so close, and you bleed into one another."

"The Ripper?"

Hannibal nods. "Do you know of the horned god, Cernunnos? It is an obscure legend, most of it lost to time, unfortunately."

Will shakes his head.

"Cernunnos was a deity of ancient Gaul-what is now France and Spain. He is represented in carvings as a man wearing a stag's antlers. The stag was among his familiars, as were the snake, the goat, and the boar, befitting a god of the hunt. He was also a god of change, of death and regeneration. To some, also a god of fertility. A personification of the seasons. According to a few traditions, Cernunnos is born at the winter solstice each year, he marries the mother goddess at the onset of spring, and dies after the summer harvest. He then goes to serve as lord of the underworld until his rebirth at the next solstice. Unfortunately in my opinion, his cult did not make it across the channel, and he died a final death when Gaul was Christianized."

"What does that have to do with the Ripper?"

Hannibal smiles. "He has cycles, too, Will. Inevitable. Inexorable."

"No," says Will. "The Ripper chooses who and when he kills. There's no pattern, no cycle, nothing the same from one body to the next."

"He chooses, yes. But he chooses because he is compelled to do so by the nature of what he is. There will always be those who choose, and those for whom choices are made."

"Are you suggesting the Ripper is dictating my path?" Will asks.

"I only suggest that perhaps you haven't thought about what you will do should you ever catch him," says Hannibal.

Will pauses only a second, but it is enough for Hannibal to see. "Maybe go build boats on the bayou. Teach, maybe. Burn up, fade away. It doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter?"

"Everything will be open."

"Everything is already open," says Hannibal, placing his hand briefly on Will's forehead. "Rest now."

This time Hannibal wakes first. He has spent what little of the night he slept in the library's armchair, waiting and listening. Reflecting on the fact that he grows more discontented with the simple observation of Will's response to his offerings. They have grown unsatisfactory, paling as Will has paled, and now merely quaver in half-reflection over the surface of his inquisitiveness. With more direct intervention, of course, comes greater risk, but Will's increasingly compromised condition could very well serve to negate it. By all appearances, Hannibal is not a gambling man, but he does crave novelty in nearly the same measure as he craves luxury.

And his desire for the former has proved far more difficult to sate than his need for the latter. Amid the constructions, the machinations fractal in their complexity, a rigid structure has begun to emerge. He is frosting over, slowing by immeasurably small increments, and so thirsts for a thaw, a revenant flexibility.

Cautiously, though. Cautiously. Hannibal is not fool enough to believe that straining something so long unbent could not end in fracture.

This he thinks as he applies gentle heat to a saucepan of butter and egg for hollandaise. Into porous crumpets he will tuck a nest made of delicate shreds of Jason Markwell's extensor carpi ulnaris (and that will be the last of the gifts from the boy's body, the ascendancy made complete), to be crowned with a golden egg yolk.

As the fragrant meat browns in sweet cream artisan butter, Will Graham walks into the kitchen, still wearing Hannibal's bathrobe.

"Do you ever sleep?" Will asks him.

Hannibal laughs. "A necessary evil, I think, for people like you and me. Did you dream again?"

"No. This place is like a safe house. My nightmares can't get in." The smile Will gives, not to Hannibal exactly but in the direction of the rack of copper-clad stock pots by the wall, is genuine for all its evasiveness.

"Good. And here, you know that a meal will always be waiting for you when you wake. Food is far more pleasurable than sleep, don't you find?"

"Absolutely."

They sit down to the eggs benedict and strong, sweet Earl Grey tea. The residual aroma that accompanies the inflammation on Will's brain twines in unexpected harmony the rich bergamot. Hannibal breathes both in, inviting the blend across his palate. Mixing this smell with the taste of Jason Markwell is immensely satisfying.

"So, what do you think the heart means? The heart on fire," Will says as he blots hollandaise from his lips. They retain a sheen of fat from the meat.

"Apart from a manifestation of fever, I couldn't say," Hannibal says, and collects Will's dish and his own.

"I mean, my life sort of revolves around the Ripper right now," Will says, "but is this telling me that I'm somehow...emotionally attached to him?"

Hannibal's laugh startles him, he can tell. "Despite what the ancient Egyptians felt, the seat of the soul, as it were, is not the heart. Did you know, during the mummification ritual, it was given pride of place? While the liver and lights were removed and placed in canopic jars, the heart was left inside the body. The brain, that undignified thing, was diced and drawn out through the nostrils."

His mirth leaves Will confounded. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm sorry, dear Will. Your question. I meant no offense. I only meant to say that the core of a man is not at his heart. A romantic notion for peasants and poetry. It could be that your subconscious is playing on that trope, but I think you know better."

Will's brow furrows. He stands, then paces. "I don't understand."

"Calm yourself, Will. There is nothing to understand. If I were to interpret your dream, I would say the flaming heart is of no concern, a nonentity. It contains nothing, so who should care if it burns? What makes a man, what motivates him, is his mind. And that the horned man's face was still in shadow suggests only that, even though he seems bared to you, you do not yet know his mind."

"I don't know my own mind," Will asks, restless again. "I don't trust it. I can't even tell if what I'm seeing is true or a lie."

"Lies can be equally enlightening," Hannibal says. "If not more so. What are literature, music, if not lies to the senses and to the brain, convincing them to quell their restlessness for a while?"

"This isn't quelling," Will says. "It's stirring things up. I don't know what's real." He stumbles, crushing the heel of his hand to his temple as if trying to knock the invasive images from his skull.

Hannibal moves to his side, supports him, sure hands on wrist and waist.

"Help me," Will says. His lids flutter, eyes rolling and jerking below them.

"Will, listen to my voice." Hannibal says. He places one hand on the fevered cheek, where a droplet of sweat from Will's hairline falls and shudders atop Hannibal's fingertip. He smells both of illness and of flesh, cooked to perfection. Then Will's hands are on his biceps and his mouth is up against Hannibal's own.

Hannibal braces the man's face between firm hands, pushes him away so there is barely a breath of space between them. "Will, do you want to stop?"

"Stop," Will says. Then, "Stop talking."

And Hannibal pulls him forward again, and upward, bends even as he draws Will to him to lean in, to taste that mouth that brims with corruption and sustenance alike. With fingertips dug hard into his jaw, he shoves Will's head to one side with such force that he hears the teeth rattle behind the flesh of the other man's cheek, and sucks the sweat from Will's neck, drinks it in where it pools in the hollow above his collarbone.

The hands tighten on his arms, but the only sound he hears from Will is the rolling of his breath. Hannibal yanks at the robe where it is belted around Will's waist, and hears fabric tear. It is destroyed anyway, a nuisance, an afterthought. One square of gauze peels away from Will's chest and falls to the tile.

Hannibal's nose fills with the scent of the greasy medicine, and within that smell, Will's blood, scraped up to blooming on his skin. Sickness, sleep, blood, and sex-all of it grows stronger by exponential leaps with proximity to Will's groin. Hannibal's knee impacts the kitchen floor next to the discarded gauze. He hardly notices the reverberation, a sine wave lost in muscle and bone.

He no longer feels the pressure of hands; Will is pulling the robe from his shoulders with frantic motion, as if it is in flames. Taste, scent, and pressure concatenate and merge, the design solidifies, as Hannibal uses cool fingers to guide Will's rigid cock into his mouth.

The flesh is warm beyond arousal, beyond exertion-the fever expressing itself and Will only a conduit, passivity embodied. Hannibal's own erection grows painful at the thought of of tasting that fever, subsuming the illness and making it his own.

That which he consumes he controls, and makes transcendent.

Above his head, a single wordless sound falls from Will's lips. Hannibal presses his thumbs, one each against the most prominent ridge of Will's hip bones, crushing the flesh to bruising, a counterpoint to pleasure. He would have the experience drawn out awhile, unabridged by Will's helplessness.

"Hannibal." Soft and strained, from above.

Will braces himself against the edge of the breakfast table; at its joints the wood creaks under the weight of his compliance.

"Please," he says. Likely unconscious of the compulsion, Will has begun to move, trying tentative thrusts like entreaties for greater motion.

Hannibal shoves his hips back against the lip of the table, where he knows the wood will bite, will scatter Will's focus for a few more hoarded seconds. The taste of him is riotous, drawing all synapses toward the processing of distinct flavor notes that shift from second to second on Hannibal's tongue. Consumed in consumption.

"I-oh, fuck."

There is no coaxing Will back from the precipice now. His legs shudder, muscles knotting and unknotting in sequential play.

"Hannibal," he says, voice high and tight in a straining throat, "I'm going to come."

Hannibal feels it a moment before he tastes it, and the disconnect is sufficient to compromise his precision. Instead of a smooth slide into his throat, his mouth is awash with a horde of coruscating flavors-the bitter and savory, all shot through with the syrupy distillation of Will's peculiar malady. He must move one hand to grip his own erection through the cloth of his trousers, tamp his sudden need, for the moment, to an endurable level.

He swallows, and rises, brushing the back of his hand across his lips. When Will opens his eyes, the single second's breadth over which they meet Hannibal's should be more than time enough to read the inevitability there.