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theredofoctober · 2 months ago

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MANNA- CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: GUM

Dark!Hannibal Lecter x Reader x Dark!Will Graham AU fic

TW for eating disorders, noncon, abuse, implied CSA, Daddy kink, cannibalism mentions, death (including of a young people), pregnancy mention (no actual pregnancy happens)

Read after the cut

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You pass those early November days in a state half haze and half suggestion, the doctor's medicine the antidote for the inevitable tilt of your sane mind under the density of his evil.

It is relieving to be but his daughter, slurring and monosyllabic against your bed as he teases sheathes of meat past your lips or leaves you to work, or to exercise, or to meet unnamed friends at elegant bars that leave his clothes smelling of expensive alcohol.

This might have made you envious, had you not been so far under an influence of his making.

How beautiful the drug that cauterises the fetid wound of thought, taking from you ruminations of the boundless killing, the rapes, the guilt of eating and surely gaining from it; you could kiss the hand of whatever elf of morphine so surrounds you in its magic.

Never in adult life have you been so quiet of cognition, nor so truly at rest. When Will is announced to return and you're allowed to taper back into sobriety you think of asking for it to end, to have again that Xanadu where the dread of your days is but the black of a turning cloud.

But then you think of how many breakfasts, lunches, and dinners in their inimical triads you've taken there as though at some Roman feast, and you are revolted with yourself and that numb lapse into defeat.

You insist on dressing and making yourself up that morning in a burgundy dress patterned with foliage Hannibal had lovingly allowed you to select, with his iPad before you, from a Lolita Lempicka 1997 runway, sold for an unspeakable price from a stylist's collection.

Being that the dress is sheer you wear a shift beneath, unable to stand the sight of your body through it, wanting only the gown's flocked effect of coiling leaves like one last fragment of autumn upon you. That, and the power of having bid your keeper to purchase something so expensive; his tastes have somewhat rubbed off on you, you realise, elevating them to a standard he approves of.

He looks at you admiringly even after Will arrives, self-congratulating in having made such a mannequin of you.

Will, for his part, barely notices the dress at all. The Lover’s case is his mistress, and like such a wicked woman it has taken him from you.

“We’ve been given the details of three Mask Murder victims in Kentucky,” says Will. “They died thirty years before the Lover killings began. His youngest target in the present day was eighteen years old, whereas the Kentucky victims were all the same age as Anäis Foreau.”

He lays out images of the women as they’d been in life upon the coffee table: a family snapshot, a birthday celebration, a yearbook photo, all taken on cameras likely defunct relics of old technology by now.

“Lillian Greyflower, Bryce Mulligan, and Anita Bradbury were each dressed as dolls and laid to rest by bodies of water under the cover of night. All of them were of an unusually small build, with blonde hair and light-coloured eyes; that gives us a vague description of the Lover’s first muse, being that he obviously tried to replicate her in his murders.”

You stare at the three women, automatically comparing your frame with their thinness, and are ashamed when you realise their ages.

“They’re all little girls,” you say, aloud. “Which means she must have been, too. All of them... just kids.”

“Indeed,” says Hannibal, and he lays a serious hand upon your shoulder as though he, too, had not killed similarly young women in copying other crimes.

“I just hope I don’t have any children,” you mutter. “The world is a bad place.”

Hannibal looks at your leg, which has entered, of its own accord, its habit of tireless motion, the unshod foot tipping one of the striped sofa cushions onto the floor.

“You’ve thought about pregnancy, then,” he comments levelly.

You shrug.

“I mean... yeah.”

“What kind of thoughts?”

Feeling both men’s eyes burn your face with their focus you say, “I get scared it’ll happen to me. Sometimes it keeps me awake at night. I can’t have a baby. That’s what I am. I can’t take care of anybody and I don’t want to.”

Your voice strains into a strangled peak, and as Hannibal bends to retrieve the cushion he touches your knee gently.

“You needn’t worry,” he says. “I’ve been administering birth control since it was safe to do so.”

You examine him with dull apprehension. It would not be unlike Hannibal to experiment with such an immobilising condition as an unwanted pregnancy, the symptoms of which would force you to gain the weight you dread like the devil.

But then you cannot imagine Hannibal having much interest in the rearing of a real child, with its messes and disruptive noise and inappropriate demands. Yours he merely tolerates because he apparently perceives something in you worth enduring those assaults upon his taste.

Still you do not—cannot—trust his word. A carousel of alternate realities exists to him, all of them equally true.

“You’re sure it can’t happen even by accident?” you ask. “Because you don’t— neither of you have ever, well—”

You cannot utter the word that comes forth for protection, finding it clumsy and humiliating.

Tortured, you whisper, “Never mind.”

Will smirks, enjoying your embarrassment.

“Haven’t we left it a little late to talk about contraception?”

The thought of him pausing before an assault to roll down rubber over his arousal rises, sickening and provocative. Hannibal would do so clinically, as though putting on a latex glove, but Will would apply it quickly, crudely, if at all. He doesn’t seem like a man that would bother with condoms; certainly he never has with you.

“It’s not funny,” you say. “It really freaks me out. If I got... bigger. If my body looked different because of that I’d hate it. I don’t know what I’d do, and it’d be all because of you guys. I don’t have a choice, remember?”

Merely speaking of the potential of this sends a grave pulse of adrenaline through your frame, and you begin to shiver even in the warm of the room.

Will takes off his jacket and puts it around your shoulders.

“Relax,” he says. “There’s not going to be a baby, alright?”

Hannibal stands to tend to the fire, though it scarcely needs the feast of logs he offers up to it.

“I can’t help but wonder, Will. How would you feel if there was?”

Will's face twists.

“There’s no place for an infant in this dynamic. It wouldn’t fit. She plays that role, some of the time. I’m fulfilled, if that’s what you want to know. Aren't you?”

"Of course," says Hannibal, to your relief. "I’m simply curious how you’d respond if a pregnancy occurred in other, hypothetical circumstances.”

You draw Will's jacket closer around you as his gaze steals across your body. With resentment you realise how he envisions you: his pretty young lover, full with his child, pottering heavily about his faraway residence amidst a froth of dogs.

He cannot bring himself to think how it would truly be, a sobbing, bloated servant, chained at the ankle to prevent her from dashing her head of its brains on the nearest dresser.

“I wouldn’t plan it to happen," Will says, still thinking of his domestic ideal, "but I don’t entirely hate the concept.”

Then his visage hardens, and he shakes his head.

“To have a child at a time like this would be ill-advised. It'd be an invitation to any circling predator to play their hand.”

“You think the Lover will continue to provoke us as he did with Amy,” says Hannibal. “That his interest is caught between his muse and the three of us."

Surely he knows, you think, if he has contact with the killer. What is this new game that Hannibal's playing?

“We’re taking a role in the narrative the Lover is creating,” says Will. “The love story. The investigation to him is like relatives standing in the way of forbidden romance.”

“That,” says Hannibal, “or being aware of our relationship through the rumours circulated by Tattle Crime he believes that our family emulates that which he aches to possess. He envies us our love. Amy’s abduction was an attempt to derail our charge’s treatment and destroy our bond with her; Little One would not have forgiven the death of a friend. Though foiled, his efforts are unlikely to end there.”

You recall the thunderous panic that had descended over you upon learning Amy had been taken and rub your damp palms dry on your dress, forgetting, temporarily, its value.

“So you think he’ll kill someone else I know,” you say. “Someone who isn’t even his usual type just to get at me.”

“We can’t deny the possibility,” says Will. “The only time we’re likely to see him break his pattern is to agitate you.”

“But hasn’t he broken it already? If the Lover’s victims are the same age as his target then she must be an adult. And the first muse had to have been a little girl— knowing what we know about guys like him, why didn’t he choose another child?”

A glance passes between Will and Hannibal that you cannot entirely dissect.

“He did,” says Will, at last. “The Lover chose his new target long before he started placing women into rubber dolls. There was a lack of access preventing him from abducting her when she was younger. His first muse would have likely been a relative, someone he could isolate and travel with freely without being questioned; he hasn’t had that opportunity with his new bride, or he would have taken her already.”

Will’s voice is low, careful, as though breaking the news of an incurable illness to some fragile patient.

“The Lover held off killing again for as long as he could to avoid creating a recognisable pattern. That’s why there were decades between the Mask Murders and the Lover killings; once he started again it was less likely the police would link the two cases together. The ages of the victims are just another change to throw off the scent.”

Another child grown up in the world observed and objectified by an adult engorged with power over them.

“Does the Lover know what happened to me?”

This directed at Hannibal, who has conversed enough with the killer to know.

“He’s aware that you’re unwell,” he replies, cautiously. “That being public knowledge, it’s not so farfetched to imagine that he has guessed the cause.”

In some subtle mode Hannibal is informing you that it was not he that told of this crime against your youth. But that your captor knowingly collaborated with a similar predator to your own folds your gut down into the smallest square.

You should never have expected more from him, yet you had thought him possessed of greater self-respect. His claim that the Lover’s continued life and freedom is to allow Will to capture him alone is tenuous to the extreme.

This line of brooding thought is disturbed by Will tugging his cell phone from his pocket to look at the screen.

“Is it Jack?” you ask at once.

Another killing, you think, of a person so close to you that you will feel the Lover’s darkness like wolf breath upon you.

“It’s Beverly Katz, actually,” says Will. “She’s been going over some of the evidence from the crime scenes. Maybe she’s found something useful.”

He rises, already grunting into the receiver with his usual absence of professional manners.

“There’s wine in the kitchen,” says Hannibal, as Will passes him by. “You may open it, if you like.”

“Generous as ever, Dr Lecter.”

A silence imbues the room in Will’s wake, the conversation having stained the air with its dun pallor.

Then in an abrupt motion Hannibal bends slightly to reach under his chair, his hand emerging around the handle of a ribboned gift bag.

“Now we have a moment of privacy,” he says, “there is something I’d like you to have.”

You accept the bag with apathy, too worn down by the discussion of the Lover case to muster even the remotest glee.

“What is it?” you ask. “Another present?”

You reach into a blossom of tissue and retrieve something of worn velveteen from within. Almost at once you attempt to return it to the bag, prevented only by Hannibal’s quick grip upon your wrist.

“How did you get that?” you demand. “Did you let yourself back into my house and steal it?”

A battered toy frog dangles from your throttling grip, its body worn almost through to the stuffing from past adoration. Once you’d cherished the early, half-formed memory of Leland Frost dancing the animal before you, giving it a voice that was merely an exaggerated version of its own.

Now you only cringe at the echo of his chatter. The frog’s glass eyes remind you of the porcelain mask on the dead face of Anaïs Foreau.

Hannibal says, “I asked your mother to find it and send it to me. She was glad to oblige.”

You glare at him in hurt and disgust.

“Why would you do that?”

“I believe Philippe represents the comfort that was ultimately tainted by the actions of another. In hiding him away you’ve allowed that arrow wound to fester and infect your blood with the taint of that historical abuse. I’d rather we heal the injury and cut out the flint entirely. It would hurt you far less to do so quickly now and discard at least some of your grief.”

That a man that hangs corpses in his cellar can speak also as a poet, calm and empathetic in his syllables takes you aback; you are as moved by his suggestion as you’d been by him tending you on your sickbed.

“You mean I should get rid of him for good,” you say. “Flip, I mean.”

“Yes. It would allow you a partial sense of closure in regards to the love you once had for Leland Frost. You may choose to give Philippe away, or to destroy him in whatever way you wish. I’d like it to be your choice.”

You hold Flip with both hands, knowing you cannot bear another child to cradle this thing with as you once did, and consider tearing it apart down the middle. Then you glance up at the fire, and see in its savagery a suitable end.

“I want to burn him,” you say. “Burn it.”

Hannibal nods, satisfied by your willingness to engage in the exercise.

“Very well. Go on, then.”

Without speaking another word you get up and throw the animal into the flames with such vehemence that you near unbolt your shoulder from its joint. The frog’s skin blackens into haggard twists, its eyes turning like the orb of some fell sorcerer into grim opacity.

As sparks spit like star falls from the pyre your misery and disgust sear away into a tired hollow, yet you feel somewhat cleaner for it, as though some poison has been turned out of the bottle of your heart.

Hannibal’s pale hand extends, palm up, towards you, and you take it, having no other to hold for comfort but that of a murderer.

“The burning of things has always held spiritual and emotional significance since its discovery by ancient man,” he says. “The charring of offerings as a gift to deities. The burning of the dead to transport them to planes beyond.”

“Witches burn things to cleanse energies,” you say. “Or to manifest something.”

“And of the two which is your purpose?”

He asks this quite seriously, without irony or teasing.

“I don’t know,” you say. “Both, I guess.”

Looking up into Hannibal’s expression you see for the first time something of what he feels for Will. It frightens you, and yet you wish to drink of it as though from an oasis.

“Thank you,” you murmur. “I’m glad we did this.”

Hannibal leans down to kiss the parting of your hair rather chastely, and you sit in an almost comfortable quiet together, your head nestled into his impeccably ironed shirt.

Abruptly you say, “Do you want to know why I thought about killing my Mom that time rather than Uncle Lee?”

You feel your captor straighten slightly against you.

“If you’re ready to tell me, then of course.”

Closing your eyes, you draw the strength to speak from your personal darkness.

“I loved my mom. I knew her so well. I had all these expectations of her and ideas of who and what she was supposed to be. So whenever she did something to hurt me or yelled at me it was easy to be mad at her. To wish that she was dead.

“But Leland... even when I loved him and he was my best friend I never really knew anything about him behind the act.”

Hannibal strokes the back of your neck, the rhythm of his touch like the rocking of a child to sleep.

“He had a mother that died, I heard,” you say. “A cousin, too, I think he mentioned once. He still has a lot of living family he never goes back to visit. Maybe all of that’s part of what made him what he is, but I don’t think so.

“They say you’re born with those attractions. I guess some people are ashamed of it and try to be better, but Leland obviously never did. He... relished what he was. Even before I knew what the dark shape behind the eyes of his mask was I always saw he had no shame in anything. And I couldn’t comprehend it, so how could I be angry?

“It’d be like trying to be mad at an animal. Or some kind of spirit or entity. I wouldn’t know how to kill something like that.”

Hannibal says, “It’s not an impossible feat to exorcise such a being.”

Even within the pain of remembered past you are amused that he is beginning to entertain your flair towards supernatural thinking rather than attempt to translate it into rational or psychological language.

“And how would I do that?” you ask. “Prayers and salt circles?”

“That won’t be necessary. All we must do is demystify your uncle’s past and the creation myth of his evil. Once we have before us the fabric of his becoming then he’ll no longer seem unknowable to you, only a mere mortal. A thing that can be killed.”

Opening your eyes you immediately glance aside, too conflicted by your gratitude towards the creature you most fear to meet his gaze.

“I’ve tried looking him up before,” you say, “going through all his social media and stuff. There wasn’t a lot. Fishing photos and dad jokes, mainly.”

“Leave it with me,” says Hannibal. “For now, I have one final question on the matter of Leland Frost. If you were to ever reach the point you were able to kill him would you do so in the same way you’d envisioned for your mother? It is a form of intimacy, the use of a knife. It allows you to feel every physical aspect of death as it occurs and to witness in close quarters the recognition of its approach in the eyes of your victim.

This again, you think with a weary resignation.

"I don't know how I'd do it," you say. "Just like I wouldn't know how to kill you. It's unthinkable."

"Is it?" asks Hannibal, and with a liquid motion he withdraws a knife from the inside of his jacket— not the little fruit peeler with which he'd threatened you on that night of revelation but a steel kitchen blade, half the length of his arm and cruel in the maintained evil of its edge.

You start away from him across the couch, halting only when he turns the weapon upon himself, offering you the handle.

“Show me how you’d kill me if you had the opportunity to do so.”

Anxious, incredulous, you accept the knife from him.

“You’re trusting me with this, Dad?”

“Yes. I hope that you appreciate the gesture. Besides, I’m confident that I could disarm you before you’d done more than graze the skin.”

The image of him snapping your wrist in his fingers elicits a shudder.

“I don’t want to do this," you say, and attempt to hand the knife back, which Hannibal refuses.

“If you fear and respect me as your father then you must obey. Demonstrate your instincts for me, Little One. Would you pierce my heart as you would have done your mother? Perhaps you’d slit my throat, as you’d considered for Will."

You don't like to be reminded of the evening your cowardice had shattered your just revenge like a spell, the hour that Will had taken you so spitefully against a wall behind which Hannibal had listened. Perhaps it would have been a kinder fate to have died for your attempt on him before you’d learned that there was no use in hatred against him any longer.

“You’d never let me kill you, Daddy," you say, aloud. "You’d kill me first, just like you said.”

“You’re stalling, Little One," says Hannibal, with a certain fondness. "Is it the honesty of the act that perturbs you? So much else in you is performance or secrecy; this, even in theatre, would be true to your desire.”

Exasperated, you set the blade down beside you, careful not to slit the cushions and induce Hannibal’s controlled wrath.

“I don’t want your blood on my hands. Or on my face. What if I swallowed it? There are calories in blood, and I don’t know how many.”

Hannibal’s brows rise.

“You’re serious.”

It’s certainly one reason for your hesitation, and you are more than happy for him to latch onto it if it gets you out of this sinister play of his.

“I worry about a lot of stuff like that,” you admit. “Gum. Toothpaste. I used to think maybe just smelling food would make me gain weight, but then sometimes I’d walk past restaurants or through the kitchen just to breathe the food in and pretend I’d eaten it. I’d watch cooking shows or make Pinterest boards of meals so I could look at them and eat them through my eyes.

“But I’m scared to have it touch my mouth. Even when I chew and spit food sometimes I get mad I even let myself go that far.”

“I wouldn’t allow you to spit any blood of mine,” says Hannibal. “You’ve already consumed parts of me; whatever change would come of it is already in motion.”

His semen, his saliva, particles of him altering you each time they pass the forbidden frontier of your throat— will they make you like him, you wonder, by the process of biological assimilation?

“You’re right,” you say. “And I’m scared of that, too.”

Hannibal takes your face in his hand, tracing the round of your cheek as he might some delicate ornament of glass.

“You’ve been driven by your experiences to view any sort of evolution in a negative light. I understand that, and so I don’t ask that you become identical to Will or I. That’s why we allow you to remain a child and manage all the responsibilities that would otherwise overwhelm and inhibit your progress. We would protect you with our lives if we had to.”

With shock you realise you believe him. The logic of their violence is beyond your comprehension in its uncertain borders, yet that they would guard you with it as surely as punish you cannot deny.

“Still, I don’t want you to be helpless,” Hannibal continues. “Try as we might, there are dangers even Will and I cannot anticipate or prepare for. It’s pertinent for you to possess the ability to defend yourself under those circumstances, should they ever occur. So, with the knife, please—"

“Not today, Daddy,” you interrupt, and again tuck the knife into one of his loose hands. “I’m too tired for this right now. But I’m wondering... if you were forced to kill me, even if you didn’t want to, where would you cut me?”

For a moment Hannibal’s face registers surprise, and you are almost proud that you are able to elicit this emotion in him. Then his free hand goes to your neck, holding your face at a distance from his before slowly enclosing your throat in its cravat.

“Here,” says Hannibal, in a husky undertone, and as he kisses you the blade falls away in place of a new hardness against you.

You feel Will’s returning presence as a dog does an intruder in the house, turning to see his glaring jealousy pierce the distance between you. Proud and resentful— and, perhaps, still uncertain of the sexual aspect of his obsession with Hannibal Lecter—he does not invite himself into the triad as he has done before.

He would rather abstain, sneer in absence of reconciliation, make an outsider of himself in the most unnecessary fashion.

“Is this a private moment?” Will asks as you reverse with a guilty velocity from Hannibal’s lap.

“Certainly not,” says Hannibal, pushing the knife out of sight. “How was your call with Beverly? Did she have anything of interest to say?”

Will, regarding you with an unreadable expression, only says, “We’ll talk about it later.”

Meaning after you’ve gone to bed, either disinclined to let you in on their private gossip or having judged what he has heard too foul even for your seasoned ears to perceive.

Whatever the case Will is choosing to hide something from you, and you do not like it.

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