#Daily manna | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theredofoctober · 12 days

Text

MANNA- CHAPTER TWENTY: PUMPKIN SOUP

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

TW for eating disorders, noncon, abuse, Daddy kink, cannibalism mentions, murder mentions

Read after the cut

---

For two days you persist in your begging for a hospital stay, seizing feebly at the improbable chance of liberty through that once feared institution.

You’ve read of women escaping their keepers through a word in the ear of some sympathetic doctor or neighbouring patient, fantasising at length that you might mimic such simple ingenuity.

The obsidian eyes of cameras in their probing fleets, your blood family surging forth to embrace you, weeping in regret at their heartless desertion— in want of it you indulge in an even greater exaggeration of illness to the extremes of near losing your voice to the performance.

Yet for all that you moan and cough and writhe in the clutches of muscle cramps and drenching fever Hannibal rejects your pleas with minimal reply.

He works shifts at the office around your care, bathing you and changing sodden bedsheets twice daily by duteous hand.

You’re fed medicine and light stews when you’re too frail to take the spoon yourself, and scarcely hungry enough to swallow, have throbbing joints chafed between his palms at your slightest complaint of suffering.

All your favourite music and filmography is set up on a timer so that you need not leave the bed at the end of each recording; like a slovenly youth you loll, watching Hammer Horror pictures back-to-back, and think your captor’s house far more lush than even those lurid sets.

When you waver between frigid and overheated your jailer adapts the room to either need, exchanging one thickness of blanket for another, training a fan upon you until you cannot help but squirm luxuriously in the breeze.

It’s on the third day, held through an attack of coughing in Hannibal’s arms, that you disintegrate and softly weep with the shame of your gratitude towards him.

He lifts your chin up in his palm, his eyes moist with empathy.

“Dear one,” he says. “What is it? Are you in pain?”

“I just don’t understand,” you say, rubbing a tear from the stinging corner of your eye. “How can you be what you are and still be so kind to me?”

Hannibal smiles, all fatherly goodwill, unruffled by the gauche enquiry.

“I am many men, and one. You knew this from the moment you sat before me in my office, kicking your foot in dislike of what you saw there. With you I’ve always been open with that aspect of myself. Some among us in society define themselves primarily by the sport they favour; I, however, embrace my multitudes, as should you, Little One.”

He strides across to your window, letting in a rope of umber light like the hair of a tower-bound princess.

“Yeah,” you say. “I get that. We’re different people with everybody. That’s how we survive: by being who they want so that they’ll like us. But what I mean is— this is real. Not just a costume, or a trick. You’re good to me because you’re choosing to be. But why do you want to do all this for me when I’m not like you?”

"I have faith that you'll come around,” says Hannibal, easily. “You don't wholly detest this life as you did in the beginning. Even what you consider the most unsavoury aspects of it will soon appeal to you, if only for the briefest moment."

You scent the inference behind his words and shake your head.

"I don't want to eat Uncle Lee. Even if I was like you, Daddy, I really don’t think I could.”

Hannibal’s visage, previously neutral, lightens with the solemn interest you recognise from therapy.

“Why is that?" he asks. “What would prevent you if you shared my tastes?”

“It’d feel... dirty."

You tense up, anticipating an airy dismissal, and are surprised when Hannibal appears to digest the answer quite as seriously as any debate.

“You equate the concept of eating flesh with sex,” he says. “A fellatio of sorts.”

Recouping from a startled coughing fit, you rasp, “I mean, not always, or that’d be super weird, but in this case— maybe? But even if I saw it as just degrading him the way he did to me, eating him would make me sick. Leland’s basically diseased."

Hannibal’s brows arch.

"If he were then I wouldn't suggest such a feast."

With a weak groan you shift to face the wall.

"You know what I mean. I just don't want to eat someone so disgusting. I mean, I don't want to eat anyone."

“Or anything, for that matter,” Hannibal comments; the quickness of his answer puts you in mind of Will.

“This isn't about that.”

"Yet it isn't entirely divorced from your illness, either."

You don’t reply, wishing he’d cut you free of the conversation and leave you to the consoling darkness of your chosen music to softly decay. He will never convince you to be what he is; you’ll only ever pretend until you’re loose of this house, or under the earth. You were not built to eat.

“What if someone else were to consume Leland Frost?" asks Hannibal suddenly.

Rolling onto your back again you find that he is the one now turned away, allowing you an enigmatic angle of cheek, the dash of his jawline, a noble in stasis.

“You'd do that for me?" you ask. “You’d eat Leland Frost?”

“Without question. It would be a token of my love."

A bashfulness comes over you, your heart stuttering in blighted rejoice that you, of all women, he would not have die in a doll.

Alana he would kill, you feel, though only through some necessity to silence or remove some object in her; Hannibal enjoys her too much to otherwise let her go, as possessive of his human toys as of the treasure box of life he has built about him.

You, the daughter-pet of the man that is his lover in all but the physical, are too vital to discard. This you have over Alana, the iron guard that is to be the favoured concubine of kings.

"I know I'm not the one you love,” you mutter, keen to pretend you hadn't heard Hannibal's wistful ruminations on the matter. “Will is.”

Hannibal sits down at your bedside, making the chair rather more elegant for his arrangement within it. You cannot help but glance at his crossed legs, feeling by memory the weight resting between them.

“I'm capable of ardour for more than one being simultaneously,” says Hannibal. “Would I have invited you into my home if I were not?"

Your mouth opens, then seals again without comment.

Once, you would have stridently declared you’d rather be detested by a cannibal than held in any regard, but being that such a claim is no longer honest you can only look at the ceiling and will yourself away from that coward’s longing to be loved.

"Do you still think that you’re unworthy?” asks Hannibal, with a certain sadness. “I selected you above others because upon reading your files and the many unhappy confessions made in private sectors of your online existence I saw your resilient heart, your keen perception of unspoken truths, and a compassion for those you hold close, few though they were, at that time.

“I saw, too, a proximity to darkness that bore a forbidden allure to you, that which you resisted through an oppressed certainty that you should.

“Your passion for it, your torment in the stranglehold of conformity— you were enamoured with your own illness and its extremes: the minimum you could consume, the lengths of time you could abstain from sustenance. The symptoms, even the most repugnant of them delighted you in the provision of security they brought to an unstable universe. That craving for discipline and your adherence to it I admired.”

Hannibal pauses, watching you take in his confession with a continuing want of acceptance.

“Ultimately you recoil from my habits as you do from all eating,” he says. “In you, the consumption of human flesh is made equal to that of all animals.”

With a jolt you stare at him, wondering if he is aware that you've come to so similar a realisation about him.

"I’ll never be a cannibal,” you say. “You get that, right? I don’t want to disappoint you, Daddy, but I would never eat a human being. Not by choice."

Your captor leans into your cheek, his breath stirring a tremble of horrid pleasure down your neck almost to your breast like the venom of an asp.

"Precisely,” he murmurs. “You’ll submit in the knowledge that you must."

The quilt shifts as his arm slides beneath it with a gentle cunning. You fasten your fevered thighs against him, aware that you have not bathed since the previous night and are ripe from your bedbound decay.

“Don’t,” you whisper. “I’m sick and dirty.”

“Then when I’m finished I’ll wash you and change the sheets,” says Hannibal, looking warmly down at you under lowered lids. “You’re taut from lack of release. I will unwind you from that knot; this, too, is care for you.”

His fingers form the simulacrum of a key, your entrance the lock he means to open for his amusement. You release a shivering gasp as he pushes into you, putrescent with the guilt that this deathmonger finds no resistance in the soaking welcome of you.

He touches you where the moonlight of forbidden nerve song waxes into silver life, and he does not release you until the phantasmagoric wilds of it reform at some mad height.

Twice he walks you there on well-trained fingertips, his face in the cave of your shoulder and neck, kissing the raised presence of a vein.

You feel his temptation to bite the flesh from that junction, and there is something erotic in his restraint, the tension in him as his breath smokes your throat. His teeth raise grooves there, flirting with the meat beneath your skin, his warm tongue taking the measure of your flavour.

You catch at him, push at him, feeble and defenceless. How kindly he absorbs this little violence, pressing your fists to his pursed mouth to soften them with his forgiveness.

He will not punish you for this, allows you this instinct to resist the hunter’s dominance. That he does not fuck you with his phallus is another proof of his strength; that form of sex he might have when you’re well, and a more even match against him.

His fingers in you curl like the neck of the swan over Leda, and you hear your tears fall upon the quilt, an errant rainfall.

“So beautiful,” says Hannibal, as you croak in hopeless admission of pleasure. “It’s a pity you’re unwell. Your voice is a joy to listen to at times like this.”

You think he’d like your death screams as much, the keen blackness of his eyes glistening with the satiation of the knife. He would study you, tanned head aside, considering how he might depict your agonies in graphite to commemorate their aesthetic peak.

What painting would serve as the base of this image? The Death of Marat? Saturn Eating His Son? You’re not educated enough to anticipate where so cruelly intellectual a mind would take root for inspiration. Hannibal has never conducted a human experiment quite like the one in which you are subject, this from the subtleties of his behaviour you feel, the satisfaction he takes from a new evil.

Killing and eating those that stain his world with imperfection is no sexual act to Hannibal as it is for others of his monstrous guild, but it may become sensual in recollection of what you once were to him. Should he slaughter you he’d stroke himself afterwards into religious ecstasies, a eulogy to all the hours emptied within you.

Even as he plays the scales of your bleak rapture in the present you are sure he pictures it, the murder that has not been. His hand, in thought, around your heart, letting it beat against his wrist like the lapping tongue of a wolfess dying in the snow.

You are beautiful to him in two realms: the real and parallel, the living and the dead. He would channel his love through your body, display you like the tortured beauty of some vanquished clan, whatever wound he’d killed you by presented like a brooch, some bright red gem.

After your death, what would become of you then?

Young people of the same morbid leanings you’d once indulged in would admire the images of the crime scene as they might some rare exhibition, unaware that the man that had posed you with such elaborate direction had fucked you with that same drive.

Yet perhaps they would learn of it, your organs examined for such sadistic tampering, and would pity you for your miserable life.

If only you were not so afraid to die: you must be his breathing art for all your days, and that may well be worse.

Your expression must glaze with this dark musing, for Hannibal takes back his arm from the quilt and slips noiselessly into the bathroom to wash his hands of your sour delight.

Later, when you’re washed under crisp plum and ebony sheets he comes to you once more with a glass of water and a pill in his hand.

“What’s that?” you ask, straightening against the mountainous stack of pillows. “I already had ibuprofen.”

“It’s a sleeping aid,” says Hannibal. “You were coughing through the night. This will assure you rest undisturbed.”

Miserably you contemplate the calories in the little capsule before you take it, hoping it will at least grant a dreamless sleep.

In this you are disappointed; your mind walks a road of memory, revisiting a September afternoon you’d watched Leland Frost work on your father’s car, his muscled body rolling under his shirt like an orca beneath a wave.

In the dream he whistles at a passing woman, a dimple creasing his grin.

“Ah, I need a girl like you, me.”

His blond head snaps up to look at you as you shrink back towards the house.

“No, no, cher. Stay. There somebody been asking about me?”

You scuff a white sneaker against the sidewalk, dirtying the sole.

“No, Uncle Lee.”

Leland wipes his hands on stained blue jeans and rises into a crouch, his smile like the coil of an eel in rivers deep.

“Aw, come on,” he says, cajoling. “I seen her runnin’ after you the other day. That lil, lil girl that live at the end of the street.”

“She’s just in my class, that’s all,” you insist. “She’s just a friend.”

Leland spits a brown liquid under the car and laughs.

“You got no friends but me. That girl, Hannah. She don’t like you. Still she come after you. I wanna know what she wanted.”

You look at your shoes, counting the eyelets. Leland’s eyes brand your bowed temple with their questioning.

“She asked about you,” you mumble. “And I didn’t say anything.”

“That’s good,” says Lee. “But you better tell me what she asked.”

“If I knew you were a bad man. And I said I don’t know what she’s talking about, just like you said.”

Leland winks, a conspiratorial gesture.

“That’s my girl.”

You’ve had worse dreams, yet you spring from this one as though from the top stair of hell, wishing with a sickened wrench of innards that Hannibal was in the room to calm you from its frightful squall.

Angered by your own wallowing terror, you get out of bed and force yourself to stand in front of the mirror in penance. You examine your body from all perspectives, fancying you see it narrowed by your lack of appetite while simultaneously convinced that it hasn’t changed at all.

Were that you were unwell always: you’d waste to the littleness of a Frozen Charlotte, a frail perfect thing, not the child darling lumped from clay in a killer’s hands. Neither Will nor Hannibal quite understand your fervent tenacity to achieve the quality of air, nor will either help you to achieve it.

There are limits to their madness, immune as they are to any folie à deux but their own. You are a soldier of one in your aim, ground down to lose faith in the war.

In a malaise you attempt a slow lap of the room, made pathetic by your coughing and quivering progress from one end of it to the next.

Hannibal’s car sends a lasso of auburn leaves up from the wet road as he rides in under your window; hampered by time, you return to the mirror to body check again, pulling up your nightdress in the hope your stomach has by the devil’s miracle become concave, your ribs closed in like praying hands.

Disappointed, you get back into bed and arrange yourself in a believable pose of just waking for Hannibal to find.

“How did you sleep, Little One?” he asks, setting a bowl of pumpkin soup down on a tray before you.

“Not too well,” you admit. “I had a dream about Uncle Lee again. Well, a memory, I guess.”

“You’ve remembered something new,” says Hannibal. “What have you retrieved from the galleries of time?”

It relieves you that he's so attune to your need to confess, seated at your bedside with such swiftness it is as if he never left.

“There really were other girls,” you say. “I know that for sure, now. There was this one girl, Hannah— I guess she wanted my help, and I told her to go away and that I didn’t know anything. I was scared, but still. It was wrong of me to do that to her when she needed a friend.”

“You were a child,” says Hannibal, soberly. “I’ll remind you as many times as is required of me. Leland may have hurt you had you struck out against him.”

You bow your head in rejection of his comfort.

“There were other girls that asked me for help when I got older, and I never said a word. I don’t deserve forgiveness for that, and honestly, I don’t want it, either. That wouldn’t help anybody. I just wish... well, it’s stupid, but I wish I could turn back time and do it all again.”

“The past cannot be reversed, as tempted as one might be to take it upon oneself to calculate some process of correcting one’s mistakes. You are not alone in that desire, however. I, too, have considered how it might be done. Alas, it is an impossible fantasy. There’s no benefit to ruminating on such things.”

You consider Hannibal in a kind of awe. What could such a being regret if not the act of murder?

A telephone knells in the gut of the house.

“Drink your soup,” says Hannibal, getting to his feet. “I hope to see at least half of it absent on my return.”

Resisting the compulsion to roll your eyes at him you say, with a falsely placid air, “Okay, Daddy. Sure thing.”

You make reluctant scrapes with your spoon about the bowl, swilling each mouthful about your teeth ten times before you swallow.

In five minutes Hannibal comes back to you with the telephone in his hand. There is animation to his face you’ve noticed absent since his companion left to sink himself into the case again.

“It’s Will,” says Hannibal, the expected answer. “He wants to talk to you.”

“He does?” you say, wrinkling your nose. “Wow. He’s a changed man.”

You take the receiver, waiting until Hannibal leaves to return your soup tray to the kitchen before you speak into it.

“Hi, Daddy,” you say.

It’s loathsome how eagerly the words spill from your lips, a breathless young girl’s gladness to hear from the object of a summer pash.

“Hey,” says Will. “How are you feeling? Hannibal told me you were laid up.”

“Yep. Chest infection. Listen to me.”

You cough to demonstrate, and Will laughs gently.

“That’s rough. Has Dr Lecter been taking good care of you?”

“Yeah. Sure. Just like he always does. When are you coming home? It’s Halloween in two days. It’ll be weird without you. It’s my favourite holiday.”

Will chuckles again.

“I’ll bet it is. I’ll try to get away. Jack’s got me pretty tied up, but I’ll do my best.”

You imagine Will in the mystery of his house, his free hand tousling the miscellaneous heads of many dogs. That home would smell of hair, and old books, of Will, the hermit fisherman; its scent is in your throat as if you were there, upon his lap again.

Certainly you seem able to do nothing else, your form enraptured with what once merely hurt.

“Have you missed me, Will?” you ask, coyly, and just as coyly he answers.

“Some of you.”

“Hey!” you protest, wriggling under your quilt.

The night Will had covered your mouth as he fucked his irritation up into you is like a sunrise of the womb, a burning, desirous giant. It is horrible what these men do, but like the snarling ache of starving you must love it against all that you know to be true and good.

“Just kidding,” says Will, a grin in his voice. “I do miss you. But there’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Something serious.”

The solemn shift in Will’s voice nips the smirk from your lips at once.

“What is it?” you ask. “What do you mean?”

“I got an MRI the other day. Figured it was time to get to the bottom of those seizures I’ve been having. Alana hooked me up; I guess somebody owed her a favour. Turns out I have encephalitis. I’ve been in the hospital for a couple of days. Probably going to be on medication for a while now.”

The hand gripping the receiver seems to run with fire over blood.

“Oh, God,” you say, breathless with nerves. “Is everything okay? Are you?”

“Okay isn’t the word I’d use,” says Will grimly. “You knew about this already, One. I want to know how.”

Panic drills you through with such adrenaline that you feel as though you’re above the bed rather than within it. If you expose the truth you’ll be punished severely, perhaps even lethally should it drive the two men apart.

You’d made a mistake in taunting Will over their friendship; you should have left well alone, endured their union in unstirring quiet as you’d done under Leland Frost.

“Um,” you mumble. “I know a lot of stuff before it happens. I just feel like it’s true, or guess, like you said. Or I dream about it.”

“This wasn’t out of any dream. The details were too specific. You said something about the food. Somebody told you what was going on, and what was triggering my encephalitis, because they were purposefully making it worse.”

Will pauses, and when he speaks again his tone is clipped, all controlled rage.

“It was Hannibal, and you covered for him. Not very well, but you did.”

“I didn’t know he was doing it on purpose!” you squeak. “He seemed worried about you, Will, I thought—”

“Don’t say anything else. Just listen to me.”

You chew at a loose whisker of skin on your lip, the same you’ve gnawed to the blood beneath a thousand times in conflict.

“I’m going to come home in a couple of days,” says Will. “I’m going to talk to Hannibal and you’re going to stay out of it, just like I asked you to. This is between me and him. Not you. Please don’t disrespect me by getting in the way.”

“He’ll be so mad at me,” you croak. “Oh, God. Please don’t say anything to him, Will. Just leave it. What if I’ve ruined everything?”

There is a protracted silence into which you both breathe like the winds at the end of the world.

“If anything’s ruined just know that it isn’t you that’s to blame,” says Will, at last. “Goodbye, Little One. I’ll see you soon.”

The line goes dead, leaving the phone a chill corpse in your hand.

#hannibal fic #hannibal lecter #hannibal fanfiction #tw noncon #tw rape #tw daddy kink #tw eating disorders #tw anorexia #hannibal lecter x reader x will graham #hannibal lecter x reader #yandere will graham #yandere hannibal lecter #will graham x reader

69 notes · View notes