Will spent the night with Lecter after their next therapy session, in a back bedroom crammed with boxes of documents the doctor intended to burn in case the Allies ever put him on trial. Will nearly skipped his appointment altogether, so fixated was he on getting through the door near the radio lab, which now mysteriously lacked the oaken barricade and two of the sliding locks.

"...and when I looked again the door was gone." said Will, expertly flipping open the back of another clock and squinting at the mechanism within.

"I see," said Hannibal, though it was plain by the tone in his voice that he did not see. He poured wine and turned his chair so as to watch Will and drummed his fingers on a nearby surgical tray concealed by a linen napkin. The mask along with the sound of his tapping on steel, tick tick tick, lent him an aspect of the room-sized computers Will had come across at Oxford. A calculator with an agenda. Half man, half machine, with the requisite patience and inaccessibility of both.

"Do you have a history of seizures, Mister Graham?"

"Why do you ask?" Will licked the end of a pencil and prodded a wire.

"Paranoid ideation is not an uncommon sign of post-ictal psychosis."

"Ictal?"

"Meaning, after a seizure."

Will used his thumbnail to pry the insulation from the loose wire and twisted two copper ends together, his hair falling over his eyes. He smiled without looking up. "You think I'm psychotic?"

"I think you're operating on a different ontological model."

Will wound the hour hand of the clock with his finger. "I didn't cause the door to appear in the real world."

"Perhaps the door was always in you. Perhaps there is a space, an emptiness, in you that you formerly lacked."

Will hung up the clock. He wiped the pencil against his slacks and replaced it in a silver quill jar that probably originated from the 13th century and walked toward Hannibal with a slow fearful tread. "Something grew in my heart the day I came here." His voice sounded strange to him. "Every night I dream and I forget it's there, and then every morning I wake up alone with this hole in my chest, with this...terrible silence."

"There's no such thing as silence." Hannibal offered him wine, and Will drank it down until the lines of the room blurred. "Even if you were to lock yourself at the bottom of the ocean, you would still hear the high tone of your own nervous system, the low buzz of blood pumping through your veins." Hannibal refilled his glass and Will drank that too. "So you need not worry about silence. You will make music until the day you die, Will." Will's eyes watered and yet Hannibal was very sharply in focus. "You will never be free of it."

A certain something, not charm but just as magnetic, reeled Will in. He couldn't recall ever attributing the word 'elegance' to another man, but it fit Hannibal. It was elegance that informed their conversations together, the doctor's taste in all things, the casual cruelty with which he waved away other people's suffering. As Mason began screaming again outside, it sank in how far removed this office was from the rest of the camp.

Hannibal leaned over the side table and produced a notepad with pen. "I'd like you to draw the door in your dream for me. Just as a visualization exercise. Was it locked?"

Will regarded the blank paper warily. "No. It's only locked in the real world."

"Why do you think that is?"

"To keep me from escaping."

"Or to keep something from getting in."

Will sketched out the door, trying to recall the architecture in his dream without resting too long on the more illicit details. Hannibal watched wordlessly. Aftershave wafted toward Will and he felt like water being pulled down the drain of Hannibal's mask. It's the wine, he told himself. "Why can't I go thru the door?"

"You will in time. It's like boiling a frog. Some things must be done by degrees." Hannibal took the completed sketch and held it up to the light and then hid the notepad. "You have a keen eye."

"Thank you doctor."

Hannibal fiddled with the linen napkin beside him. The sun had fallen behind the trees outside and sent red bars of light through the window slats. "In your dreams, do you think about killing me?"

It must have been something in the wine. Will began to sweat. He only stood a few feet from Hannibal yet he couldn't quite get a fix on where he stood in relationship to anything else in the room. "Yes."

"Tell me," said Hannibal, pulling the napkin from off the surgical tray, "How would you do it?"

Hannibal rolled up his sleeve, revealing a priceless six-pound watch, and lifted a scalpel from his tray. Everything on the tray glittered in the hazy twilight, ten or twelve objects, Will couldn't keep count with so much alcohol on an empty stomach-a knife, a straight razor, piano wire, a loaded gun. Something that might have been a bone polished to a mirror sheen.

"Why are you...?" Will began. He couldn't get enough air to complete the question.

Hannibal waited. He sat straight, wrapped in his fur coat like a Cro-Magnon hunter, scalpel extended in one hand as if asking Will to be his sous chef at a dinner party. If Will could have removed the glove and taken the doctor's pulse he would have found it racing.

"There must be some mistake."

"It's alright to be scared Will."

There was no doubt in Will's mind that he'd fucked up by coming here. Sunset turned the office into a den of red shadows. Will had escaped Chilton's frying pan and walked right into Lecter's oven instead.

"You suffer from paranoia and tangential delusions, events in time occurring without clear transitions. We can not have this. You must regain your sense of personal autonomy if you are to function in your capacity as a codebreaker. Role reversal is the best course of therapy."

"Like Spartans eating dead enemy soldiers to gain strength."

"I'm fond of the old ways of medicine."

Will took the scalpel in his sweaty hand. He turned it in the light and prayed someone would break down the door behind him, would drop a bomb and turn Hannibal's chair into a smoking crater. "I've never murdered anyone."

"This isn't murder. This...is a performance. Everything in life is. Even the silent reading of a music score is a performance."

"Is it?"

"I'm reading you."

A gloved hand cupped Will's face. Gentle and appraising, as though Will were a prize stallion, it curved up the side of his cheek and under his bangs and it took all of Will's self-control not to lean into it. Hannibal's mask was a deep red. Flustered by the nearness of his nightmare, Will kept very still though his body strained forward.

Several seconds passed in this reverie and Hannibal slapped him none too gently.

"Do you want to escape, Will?"

Will stared at a line of blood, his blood, on the floor. He touched his mouth. "Yes."

"Then you must clearly distinguish the line between being in the audience and being a participant. You must evolve."

"Into what?"

"Into the kind of man who can walk through that door."

Will tested the scalpel's edge against his thumb. He could have shaved with it. Hannibal drew little circles on Will's bloody cheek with his thumb, waiting. Will's gaze slid to the gun. "I used a gun in my dream."

"Did you?"

"But that's not your gun."

"No. I stole it from the Contessa de Rimini, who slipped past the Spetsnaz long enough to break into the dungeon and murder all her children before I could. Brave woman. Could you do that when the time came?"

"Do what?"

Hannibal was not looking at him. He removed his winter coat and jacket so as not to get blood on them. Something in his tone softened. "A mercy killing."

Hannibal's back was turned and the uniform lay over the desk. A bit big on Will, true. Will pictured himself jamming the blade into Hannibal's neck and stealing the mask for himself. It was dark enough outside.

Instead, the rage he'd held onto the last few days smoldered at Hannibal's last answer. Hannibal's last request.

"Do all your patients undertake such rites of passage?"

"You were never a patient Will."

"You don't even know me."

"Of course I do. I read people very well. You're intelligent, an excellent mechanic, living by a loose definition of time brought on by trauma and sleep deprivation. And I..." Hannibal sat down and crossed his legs invitingly. "I'm just another broken clock."

Will surveyed the surgical instruments. "I wouldn't know where to begin."

"I trust your instinct."

Will put the scalpel back on the tray and read the label on a syringe beside it. He'd come across all kinds of self-medication in the field, when he could get it, when raiding armies hadn't already looted the pharmacies, and Hannibal had the fancy-pants stuff. The kind of stuff that could tranquilize a horse if diluted with enough saline. Undiluted, it gave a wicked kick.

Will rolled back Hannibal's left sleeve. "So what was in the wine?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"I wouldn't drug you without your consent, Will. Any episodes of ecstasy or terror you undergo in my office are purely psychosomatic. You are your own pharmacist."

Hannibal touched Will's face. A gentle touch, yet Will's chest felt strange, as though someone had punched him in the heart. He took the syringe full of pearly gray narcotics and pushed the needle into Hannibal's vein, eyeing it intently, watching the plunger go past each little black line. He felt Hannibal's arm relax beneath him. He put the needle aside and took the gun and checked for a round in the chamber.

Hannibal casually flicked a drop of blood from his arm. "Is this what you dream?" He tilted his head mockingly.

Will pressed the barrel of the gun under Hannibal's chin and tried to guard his memories. Even now he felt those phantom hands on his body. Will thumbed back the hammer. The stubble of Hannibal's face scraping his cheek. Will's finger touched the trigger but lightly. Hannibal's knowing hands unbuckling his belt and sliding down inside.

"I have a question for you Doctor."

"Yes?"

"What happened to your other patients?"

Neither of them breathed. Not a bird, not a dog, not a single living creature moved outside to indicate there was a world beyond that room. Except for the clock ticking they were both framed in silence.

"Did you kill them?"

"They didn't matter, Will."

"They were people."

"They were oysters to be shucked." Hannibal uncrossed his legs and planted his hands on Will's hips to bring him closer. "You are not so expendable."

Will's gun hand trembled as Hannibal's fingers ran up his arm and caressed him. Will bared his teeth. "I hate you."

He leaned towards Hannibal, pressing the gun hard enough to mark the skin. Will's rage was a weight around his neck, and it pulled him down into Hannibal's arms.

"I hate you so much."

Will whipped his hand away at the last second. The bullet tore through the chair and bounced off the table and splashed wine up the side. A small part of Will curled away in disgust that he should be so complicit with the enemy, but only a small part as he fastened his teeth around Hannibal's collar and tore his shirt open.

He hadn't eaten a thing that day. Down went Will's mouth, inhaling old sweat and new aftershave and warm skin, dragging his teeth over a nipple. He hadn't meant to bite so hard. Hannibal clutched the chair arms until his knuckles whitened. Will looked up.

"I'm sorry." Will tasted blood and not his own.

Hannibal's hand came down on the top of Will's head. "You didn't hurt me."

He curled a lock of hair behind Will's ear. "Is this how you see me in your dream Will?"

"I never see you at all."

"That may change."

Blood soaked through Hannibal's shirt as Will unbuttoned it the rest of the way. Hannibal leaned over to retrieve his wine. With the chalice in his hand and his muscled chest smeared with blood he resembled an Ostrogoth refreshing himself after a field battle. He poured wine into Will's lips.

"Do it again Will."

Will breathed hard, shaking with adrenaline, kneeling with one hand on top of Hannibal's knee. He drifted in and out of reality, wondering when this dream would end. The door behind the radio lab loomed large in his mind, less a door than lightning flashes at right angles. It whispered his name. He went for the scalpel.

Hobbs' words swam to the fore of Will's brain. Do you know what Spetsnaz do to their lovers?

The scalpel sank into Hannibal's shoulder as the sun vanished behind the mountains and their bodies molded together in the therapy chair. Blood bloomed around Will's fist. He panted into Hannibal's ear, heart pounding as power vibrated through him like a gong sounding through a darkened temple.

"Do it again Will. Go for the heart."

"I can't."

Hannibal laughed. Will yanked out the blade in a spray of blood.

"You could have killed me."

"I won't." Will slurred his words. Hannibal's thumb traced Will's lower lip and Will opened his mouth to take it, teeth chattering with fear and lust. "I'm not a murderer."

Hannibal's nails dug grooves inside Will's shirt, eliciting another shiver. "You're making me work hard."

Will tried to pull away but Hannibal was stronger. He held Will as skillfully as a coachman training a particularly vicious horse. Will tried tossing the scalpel back and accidentally knocked all the tools to the floor. When Hannibal pushed his head to the new wound Will's tongue curled over it eagerly, sucking hot blood as though his insides were on fire. He was a stray kitten in a bowl of cream. He was wild.

Hannibal's hands grew more insistent, powerful fingers working their way inside Will's clothes down to the small of his back. "Tell me what to do." Hannibal's cock was a hard line against Will's hipbone. His voice was raw. "You have to tell me what to do."

Will looked up through his lashes, the bottom half of his face bright red, and had a moment of sanity. Was the door worth it? Was this what Hannibal meant by engineering your own evolution?

Then desire snapped him back like a rubber band and he saw himself, clearly now, walking through that door to join his husband in evil splendor. For the first time since Will had arrived, he didn't want to escape. He belonged here.

"Chain me."

TO BE CONTINUED