#hannibalvampirefest

[zacharybosch]

PLAYING DEAD - chapter 1

wheeeeeee here it is, the sequel to Playing God! which is my vampire AU for anyone who doesn’t know!

i’m also posting this as part of Vampire Hannibal Fest organised by @gleamingandwholeanddeadly!

read chapter 1 of Playing Dead below or on ao3! yayyyy!

Hannibal knows pain, and he knew fear, once. What he feels now is not quite akin to either, but shares more in common than it holds in opposition. It’s bizarre, the way he feels so entirely outside of his body, as though he’s floating four feet up in the air and is gazing down upon himself and all his blood on the beautiful marble floor of his entrance foyer.

He can hear great bells ringing, and the low rumble of huge drums, crashing in his ears like the restless roll of the ocean. The colours of his house alternately brighten and fade around him, and everything blurs, until it doesn’t, and becomes sharp, until it’s not.

The earth moves and shakes around him, and he’s in his kitchen, blacking out and coming to over and over again. The butcher block, he’s being butchered over the butcher block just as he’s butchered so many others before him. This can’t all be his blood, surely, there’s so much and it just keeps coming, filling his nose and mouth and ears and lungs, but then it’s only filling one ear because the other one is no longer attached to his head, and was it always like that? Hannibal can’t remember what his body was like, if he ever even had a body to begin with.

Every second stretches for an eternity and it’s like being born, but also dying, but also living, but it’s definitely like dying now because the Devil himself is looming over him, spilling black ichor on his skin, and Hannibal knew, he always knew that he would enter Hell as a king in splendor, to be greeted by Lucifer and all the legions of the dead.

He inclines his head and spreads his hands and takes a graceful step forwards into night.

***

The Santa Maria del Fiore was older than Will by all of twenty-two years, if he counted from the year that construction began. Counting from the year of completion, Will beat it by one hundred and eighteen. Not that it was a competition; indeed, he’d never even had a chance to visit the Duomo over the years, to compare cracks and weathering and general wear-and-tear.

Now that he walked past it on a near daily basis, Will had decided that it was in fact a competition, and that he was most certainly winning. All credit where it was due: the Duomo certainly looked impressive, but it required a huge amount of work to keep it that way, whereas Will remained damn near perfect with only minimal maintenance required.

It was a shame that Hannibal didn’t get to walk beside Will through the streets of Florence; he would’ve enjoyed it, and could even perhaps have been persuaded to admit that the Duomo’s magnificence was nothing compared to Will.

But it couldn’t be helped. Will had tried to turn him that night in Baltimore, but successfully turning a human was notoriously difficult even under perfect conditions, and given the circumstances at the time it was no wonder that Will had failed. But he would live with the consequences of his failure, just as he had lived for the past seven hundred years; there would be opportunities to begin again, somewhere new, anywhere he wanted. Florence was little more than an indulgence, really. A distraction. Hannibal had spoken of it so often, starry-eyed and staring off into the distance, so it only seemed appropriate that Will see what all the fuss was about. He’d missed the city entirely during the Renaissance, a good portion of which Will had spent in eastern Europe in thrall to the one who turned him. By the time he escaped the clutches of his maker, his taste for Europe had soured considerably, and he boarded a ship bound for the New World and never looked back.

Perhaps he had missed a trick there, in not coming to Florence when it was still the beating heart at the centre of the world. Modern Florence was uncomfortably heaving with tourists, and it seemed unthinkable that Hannibal could ever have loved such a place. The architecture was beautiful, yes, and the history that saturated the place was no doubt fascinating, but the effect was somewhat lessened by the noisy bar on the corner and the hawkers selling plastic trinkets on the Piazza. Probably better for everyone that Hannibal was out of the picture; Will could too easily envisage the countless unfortunate tourists that would’ve met an unhappy end at Hannibal’s hands.

Not that there weren’t a few who were meeting unhappy ends at Will’s hands. But that was beside the point.

Will wended his way through the crowded city streets until he came out onto a market square, no less filled with people but skewing slightly more towards locals than tourists. He had a few things to pick up, but otherwise little else to do that day but kill time. He didn’t like spending too much of his time in the house; it belonged to Hannibal, and was full of Hannibal’s things.

To the enclosed market hall first, for another random selection of food that he thought probably looked like a reasonable meal but which he wasn’t going to eat. Perhaps he’d get some artichokes today; the neat symmetry of the vegetable was pleasing to look at, and counting the leaves as he tore them off one by one would be eminently satisfying. Not to mention, the grocer who owned the best vegetable stall in the market could tell that there was something off about Will, and it amused him to spend too long silently perusing the vegetables just to make the man unsettled.

The grocer, as expected, greeted Will with his usual wary signore, and Will, as expected, smiled and kept smiling and didn’t look away as he gathered up every artichoke the man had in stock.

Then to the second-hand clothing vendor out on the forecourt, for more shirts. Will seemed to be buying shirts nearly every week, and if it wasn’t shirts then it was trousers. He should really find some wholesaler and just start buying in bulk, great boxes full of cheap t-shirts and sweatpants, but the thought of keeping such ugly things in Hannibal’s house was uncomfortable in a way that Will couldn’t quite pinpoint. The house was like a mausoleum, and Will had always had a healthy sense of reverence and respect for death. At least the clothes from the market seller were of a good quality and solid construction, if a little musty with age.

The clothes seller didn’t find Will off-putting at all, and was always too happy to chatter mindlessly in his ear while Will idly inspected buttonholes and counted the stitches running along hemlines. It helped with the verisimilitude, if nothing else.

With his canvas shopping bag filled, Will ambled out of the square and onwards to a nearby public garden. It was as pleasant a place as any to spend the remainder of the day; the people-watching was good, and the noise of the city was muffled by the high surrounding walls and the spreading canopy of the trees.

It had been nearly six months since his escape from Baltimore, and the freedom to sit and wile away the day on a park bench still felt somewhat foreign to Will. He had known so many freedoms over the course of his long life; the freedom to live, in spite of the onward march of time; freedom to fight and kill and sing the praises of death on wide dusty plains, or out on the open ocean; freedom from the drudgery of bodily functions and needs; the freedom to be beholden to but one thing and one thing only: the call of blood.

But right now, to sit on a park bench in the full flush of the Florentine summer was perhaps the sweetest freedom of them all. He could sit there for a thousand years as the whole city crumbled around him, and remain perfectly content all the while so long as the sun kept shining and the Earth kept spinning.

Will did not sit there for a thousand years, but he did sit there long enough for the sun to start sinking, shadows stretching across the park and roseate light fading into dusk. He’d need to go home soon; he’d been too long out of the house already, and there were unfortunate necessities to which he should attend.

On his way back through the twisting little streets, Will came upon an easy mark. There was no reason to pounce; he’d drained someone dry just last week, and wouldn’t need to feed again for the rest of the month. But where need was satisfied, desire was not, and Will began to pursue the solitary figure down a darkening alleyway.

He was a middle-aged man, skin turned tough and coppery by a lifetime spent outdoors. He would taste clean and simple, of oil and bread and the rolling green hills of the Tuscan countryside. Will picked up his pace, quick, steady steps until he was almost breathing down the man’s neck. He threaded a finger into the gold chain laying across the man’s nape, using it to jerk him back lightning-fast against his chest, then slamming him forward into the wall.

It was quick work after that. Will pulled the man’s shirt aside and bit down deep where shoulder met neck. He was dazed from being thrown against the wall, and didn’t struggle much. Will didn’t take a lot of blood, just enough to satisfy his impulse and keep him from stalking several more people on the rest of his walk home. It wouldn’t be smart to drop another body so soon. It wasn’t smart to be feeding at all, really. He’d already lingered in Florence too long. Someone would start to notice.

Will pulled a small folding knife from his shopping bag and made a few cuts over the bite mark, back and forth through the punctures until the area was a checkerboard mess of skin and blood. Then he flipped the man around so they were face to face, and slapped at his cheek until he roused enough for Will to catch his gaze.

“What’s your name?” Will asked. “Do you understand me?”

“Fr… Franco…” the man said, and then he started to slump, arms hanging heavy at his side and legs on the verge of buckling. Will must’ve taken more blood than he thought, or the man was already infirm to begin with.

Will shoved Franco more forcefully up against the wall and held his lolling head in one firm hand. He had admittedly become lazy with clearing his tracks; too many random, unconnected victims across too many cities to bother wiping and replacing all their memories, and it didn’t matter if he left a few empty minds when they were all so scattered. But Will was sharply aware of the fact that he’d left too many blank holes in the heads of Florence already. It wouldn’t take much for someone to link them to the bodies and start seeing patterns.

“You’re drunk, Franco. You stumbled into a railing and lacerated your shoulder. When you look at the wound later in the mirror, it won’t bother you enough to question it. Sit down now, have a rest before you go home. You’re drunk.”

Franco stared hazily into Will’s eyes, unblinking and nodding. Will carefully removed his hands from where they pinned Franco to the wall, and then Franco was no longer staring at Will, but through him, and he wandered off haphazardly a short way down the alley before stopping and sitting down on the cool cobblestones.

Will melted back into the shadows of the alley and was gone in an instant.

The sun had fully set by the time Will got back to the house. It was an unassuming building from the outside, with its plain facade of smooth, pale stone and the high, solitary window that looked out over the street. The shutters were made of a dark cherry wood, and they were flung wide open.

Will stood outside the front door for a long time, just listening. He didn’t remember leaving the shutters open when he left that morning. He couldn’t hear any noises coming from inside the house, couldn’t see any light spilling from cracks in the doorframe. Cautiously, he opened the door and set his shopping bag down inside the hallway.

He crept silently across the floor, fangs already out and ready to clamp down on whoever had made the mistake of intruding. As he ascended the stairs, he had the absurd thought that maybe he hadn’t wiped Franco as thoroughly as he should have, and now he was here with the proverbial torch and pitchfork. Getting paranoid over humans was as clear a sign as any to Will that he should move on from Florence soon.

But Will’s paranoia proved entirely unfounded: there was no intruder in the house. Rounding the top of the stairs and coming out onto the landing, he could see that it was only Hannibal, shuffling around the room like a corpse with his IV drip and his petty little resentments. He had churlishly opened the window and flung wide the shutters in some attempt to cause trouble.

The first thing Will did was slam the shutters and close the window. He’d taken great pains to conceal Hannibal as they moved across the continent, and he was not prepared to have their cover blown now just because Hannibal was feeling grumpy.

The second thing Will did was to ignore Hannibal for the rest of the evening. It was juvenile, and ultimately useless, but he knew that if he spoke he would say something incendiary, and then Hannibal would fire back with something cruel, and they would waste another evening sniping at each other.

Will had brushed it off the first few times that Hannibal had acted out in such a manner, but with every new weight that strained the fragile bonds between them, Will thought again that maybe it would’ve been better if Hannibal had died in Baltimore.