Archive of Our Own ^beta

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He didn’t know who he was before Hannibal.

Always searching for someone, anyone, to truly see him; adopting strays because they kept promises that humans simply couldn’t bother to keep; living a solemn life in the woods with his dogs when he understood that he would never be accepted as he was. It was strange to find this sort of peace in the arms of a man, bloodied and wounded, who had tried to end his life on multiple occasions. But it didn’t matter.

For years he struggled. He battled with the darkness inside for over three decades, trying his best to keep the reins around his encephalon taut; this encumbrance was the only one he ever knew until he looked into the olive eyes that saw right through his carefully crafted veil. Eyes that appear to be red at times; saccharine, bloodthirsty irises he fell in love with. An interesting, extravagant, virtuous man with an endearing accent and a hair color he just couldn’t describe. A man who loved him unconditionally and who would kill for him (or perhaps one day, even kill him).

Suddenly he was thrust into another round of inner turmoil: who was he now? He had always desired what all men should desire: a wife, two and a half kids, a white picket fence, and a stable job leading to a respectable amount of money tucked away for retirement. Love, stability, conformity. And dogs, of course. He mostly gave up on faith in his youth, but he wanted the rest. He had always chased this, or at least attempted to, and never considered another option: it was compulsory, almost. Despite long periods of being alone, he was always in search of a woman who would accept him; he even tried this with coworkers and friends, but it always fell through. Irrespective of that, he always tried. At least he could say that. He knew the life he was supposed to want was supposed to fix him and cleanse his putrid soul - so why would he stray from the simulacrum that clearly works? He yearned for acceptance, and this was the most efficacious route to obtain it.

But then Hannibal waltzed into his life and started to deconstruct everything he knew. His thoughts became murky upon meeting, working with, and having unorthodox therapy sessions with him. After recovering from his encephalitis, he was aware of Hannibal manipulating him, ostracizing him, and fostering codependence - and he eventually returned the favor. A vacillating, romantically obsessive power play that kept him on his toes and sent a chill down his spine. Was it love?

Yes, he knew he loved him. He knew he didn’t have to hide anymore. 

With every gentle, sensual touch from his killer he felt a whirlwind of conflicted pleasure. Always leaning into his palm, always briefly fluttering his eyes in the placidity. He never averted eye contact, not even when he was ardently eviscerated in the kitchen in front of their surrogate daughter, his unclean blood pooling on the floor. Previously hesitant to initiate touch, he gripped Hannibal and leaned into the contact even through the agonizing pain. No one had ever calmed him like Hannibal; no one had ever scared him and infuriated him like Hannibal, either. He loved the thrill. He loved guessing which touch he would receive from him, wondering whether it would leave a scar that he would display proudly. 

He knew he loved Hannibal, but he was unsure if it was in the same way that Hannibal loved him. The deep connection that he had longed for was finally his, but the packaging was different than he expected and planned for. He loved the man that stood before him, breathless and imbrued with the blood of a dragon, but was it just misplaced sacrosanctity, brought upon by the forced hallowed musings of his youth? Was it romantic love, or religious devotion?

He reached out in front of him and allowed Hannibal to lift him up, trying to memorize the feeling of his hand in his. Wet from the dying man to his right, appearing black in the moonlight. Spellbinding.

He wanted to kiss the man; he wanted to kill the man. He wanted to kill himself.

He knew he took pleasure in the pack hunting, the massacres, the feeling of god deep within his bones. It wasn’t the ugliest thing in the world, not really. But he was still afraid of plummeting headfirst into this new life, veracity be damned.

His qualms began to dissipate some as he gazed at Hannibal under the starlight, hand in his. The blood, the supplication, the devotion to a god that ran sour. He had found all he searched for; he had found his religion in a man he had been chasing for years, striking terror into the Chesapeake. 

It wasn’t ugly. No, not at all.

“It’s beautiful,” he whispered, out of breath and blood catching in his throat. He embraced Hannibal and held him for a few moments, before plunging them both into the tumultuous sea below them.

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The waves sung their siren song underneath them, kissing the eroded rock they were fated to meet, destined to paint it with their poisoned ichor before being swept away together forever. Appearing malachite in the moonlight, he was transfixed by its evangelizing euphony as they fell. A calming hum and tender embrace before their end; a warm bath of peaceful green to wash away the darkness he tried so hard to quell for decades.

Arms that were previously fluttering in disbelief found their way around his waist and held him tight. The warm body of the man beneath him pressed against his own in defiance of gravity, fabric sticking together with the blood of the slain dragon. Hannibal’s face nuzzling in his neck, lips soft in spite of the cracks and dried blood that lay between them as he placed loving murmurs at the shell of his ear. Tender words of acceptance, forgiveness, love: everything he had searched for. The lovely timbre graced the spiral of his cochlea, calming him in their fatal descent. 

In another life, maybe he would have been comfortable enough to build a life with this man, deconstructing the reality he thought he longed for. In another life, perhaps they would hunt together unashamed, washing the moon with the blood of men. Another world. Another existence. He could imagine it: the colors and textures and sapor of what could’ve been flooded his senses as the wind pushed his incarnadined brown curls towards the heavens. He whispered back, feeling a smile  invent itself upon the lips pressed against his neck. 

He twisted his fingers tightly in his lover’s (could he call him that now?) sweater, attempting to pull his body completely into his own, yearning to blur together in actuality before they were welcomed into Amphitrite’s embrace. He breathed in the sweet scent of Hannibal that was mixed with sweat and gore, savoring those last moments tinged with madness. Madness shared by two.

Their limbs clumsily twisted together as they fell, as if they were lost chambers of a shared heart finally finding each other once again. Beautiful, he thought as their bodies hit the water as one. Serene caliginosity engulfed him; it was over.

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Water rushed in his ringing ears, and all he felt was peace.

Perhaps death wasn’t something to be feared; perhaps he was wrong to fear the horror his hands could inflict unto others, unto himself. Perhaps death itself, in the arms of a man, was truly beautiful.

His mind painted a brilliant picture of Death, the way she would envelop her newborn children into her arms dark as night, decorated with an unfathomable amount of twinkling stars and striking nebulas, lovingly spiriting them away into the unknown. Her arms cradled him in the salty ocean water, stinging his wounds at first, but the touch proved to be lenitive. A benevolent creature she was; how could he have ever dreaded bringing others into her embrace when it was this holy? She held him tight against her breast of ions and moonlets and interplanetary dust and started to soothe him, preparing him for their journey.

But it wasn’t Death that had embosomed him in that moment, as he was not yet dead. The arms he felt around him were human, and they were no longer gentle.

He opened his eyes. The penumbra of his lover’s face, and the seafoam that surrounded him, was all he could see.

The tender kiss, the chrysalis, that he had felt against his neck as they fell had metamorphosed into something more violently passionate, almost acherontic. He felt immense pressure and the languid scraping of flat teeth against his neck and jawbone. Slowly he felt the echo of incisors pressing against his omohyoid, then dragging across to the skin that sheathed his vagus nerve, not yet breaking the flesh. The water pressure slowed the agonizing kiss, but that did not deter his lover. With one hand gripping his jaw and the other at his waist, Hannibal sank his teeth into his throat and ripped at the sinew with as much fervor as he could muster underwater. They watched together as the gore created a beautiful crimson watercolor before their very eyes. Hedonistic, divine pleasure erupted in him at his sudden lightheadedness in conjunction with the blood he saw escaping his throat, although some of it remained and rushed right between his legs. 

His vision started to darken as he let the water pour into his lungs. He reached out for Hannibal, desperately wanting to sink his own teeth into the flesh before him and return the favor of carnal, bloody euphoria. His lover acquiesced. Eyes blinded with fuzzy constellations and his heart plagued with brachycardia, he torpidly pressed his lips to his lover’s bloodstained mouth. He deepened the salted kiss with his teeth, wincing in pain from the unhealed wound in his cheek, but still opened his jaw wide enough to bite down near his mandible. His tongue darted to lap up the estuaries of ichor before they converged with the sea that surrounded them, reveling in the metallic taste as he started to lose consciousness.

Their heavy, waterlogged limbs were entwined in the carnage. 

He always thought his life would flash before his eyes at the end, that his occipital lobe would project a tangled cacophony of deconstructed memories in front of him in a sort of macabre picture show. He thought he would be haunted by the archive of corpses he kept catalogued in the folds of his brain, but even that was lost to him. He could see nothing but the man in front of him as they both watered the ocean with their blood. 

The last thing he felt were Hannibal’s fingers threading through his own, fingernails softly puncturing the skin just above his knuckles. 

At the hand of his lover in the deep, dark waters of the crenulated coast, Death had inherited him from the anthropophagous ballet.

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It would be impossible to describe the nothingness that enswathed him. To simply call the phenomenon ‘darkness’ would be wholly inaccurate and an utter miscarriage of language, and of the truth.

It was the absence of not only light, but everything.

Time and space had faded from his bloodied grasp, along with his ability to think and hear and smell and taste and love and be.

No longer were there tectonic movements in his brain. No longer were there rivers of wine pumping through his veins, nourishing the marrow and the connective tissues within him. No longer did the nerves in his fingers send dancing impulses up along the twisting ridges of his spine.

He was no longer tethered to the masquerade of life.

It was nothing. He was nothing; they were nothing.