#i personally believe it was sometime during one of their late nights in hannibal's office when they're drinking wine or something

[ahhale-werewolves]

my own personal little headcanon that just makes me giggle and kick my feet is that in S3b when Will asks if Hannibal is in love with him to Bedelia, he 100% always knew this man’s been in love with him. he just wanted to be a shit and make bedelia say it.

[prurientpuddlejumper]

Don’t Look! [Part 3]

<- Part 2 | Part 4 ->

Frederick Chilton x Reader

Once again, transformation AU by @we-are-all-just-a-bit-crazy, I’m just making a fic with it! (Going to try to wrap this series tomorrow; we’ll see if I can keep up the pace). Mutual pining + Chilton having trust issues. 

2,160 words

The door opened a crack, and Dr. Chilton’s eyes appeared, searching up and down the hallway. Your pulse quickened. Finally, you were going to get answers—some logical explanation for what you’d seen last night. At least you could show him support this time instead of leaving him trembling in the dark.

He seemed to be human again. You found yourself checking and rechecking the texture of his skin for lingering signs of spikes and swirling darkness. A chill ran down your spine at his proximity, like it did when you saw a spider. You wished it wouldn’t. You didn’t want to be afraid of spiders. You didn’t want to be afraid of him.

Finding the coast clear, Chilton opened the door another few inches and stepped out wearing your grey hoodie and sweatpants. His hair was a mess, the hood pulled down to hide it.

“I cannot be seen this way. If you need me, I shall be at home. You have my personal number. Please call Nightengale Restorations and have them fix the office. Tell them I will pay a fifteen percent bonus for having it done this week,” he prattled in his professional tone as if this were just another workplace matter. He walked away, a slight hitch to his swift gait, but turned after three steps and met your eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

***

There was no confrontation after that. Dr. Chilton resumed work the next day, and things simply went back to normal. That is to say: awkward silences, reading novels into every word, and the simmering tension of pretending everything was normal when, in fact, nothing had been resolved.

Questions burned in your eyes, but fear restrained your tongue. The answers would only make you more afraid, and so Chilton did not volunteer them.

You didn’t run away, but you didn’t ask, either. Chilton was satisfied that you were just as in denial as he was.

The daily routine went on exactly as it used to: you would arrive at 7:30 am, knock at his office door, hand him a coffee, and take the file of paperwork he wanted done that day. Only there was hesitation in your knock, and you waited for him to say, “Enter,” instead of sauntering in like you owned the place. He had you put the coffee down on his desk so you would not risk brushing his fingertips as you sometimes did. When you took the file, you stared at him like he might bite.

“That will be all,” he said, dismissing you before your stoic mask faltered and you showed your true disgust.

***

Chilton’s skin crawled beneath his suit from his arms to his feet, and his scar throbbed for the first time in weeks. Having Abel Gideon back under his care was disconcerting, but a necessary part of Will Graham’s therapy—or rather, another clue in the case Graham was building against Hannibal Lecter.

He was skeptical at first. Graham was a lunatic—a sociopathic manipulator. Delusional. Yet, even a sociopath could not fabricate such elaborate lies with that much sodium amytal running through his veins.

The nightmares would be worth it when he was the man famous for bringing down the Chesapeake Ripper.

“Hey.”

Chilton looked up, eyes rimmed with red from hours of staring at a computer screen, working late yet again. You held up a bag of takeout, a weak smile on your lips.

“Need a break?” you offered, moving to sit across from him at his desk. Everything in the office was tidied up—you had cleaned most of it yourself the day Chilton went home in your sweatpants. The damage wasn’t as bad as it looked. Most of the furniture was simply overturned, not broken. Only the antique in-wall shelving waited for professional repair.

“No. Thank you,” he said, waving away the food. His lips thinned wanly. “You may help yourself if you like.”

He was equally surprised and suspicious when you stayed, unpacking the container of vegetarian pesto tortellini. He watched hungrily as you lanced one with a plastic fork and brought it to your lips. His stomach growled.

“Are you alright?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, straightening defensively in his seat.

“With Gideon here. That must be difficult.”

“I manage.”

You chewed another pasta in silence. Finally, he couldn’t help it and grabbed the second fork, stealing a tortellini off your platter. It was rich and flavorful—a bit heavy on the salt, but obviously from a fine restaurant. He held the bite in his mouth. No strange aftertastes. He did not feel woozy after swallowing. There was always a chance you were willing to drug yourself to get to him if you had an accomplice waiting to spirit him away to some secret facility.

“All right,” he snapped, chair shooting back toward the wall as he stood. “What are you after?”

You gave a startled “Mmph?” around a mouthful of pesto.

“What is the catch? A price for your silence? Why are you here, bribing me with dinner?”

“I… I’m not—what? I was worried about you.”

“Unlikely, considering the circumstances. Tell me what you want.” His eyes locked onto you, cold and piercing.

“Fine!” you broke. “I want you to forgive me!”

“For what?” he sneered, half believing your words were a veiled threat.

“I’m sorry, OK? Please—what can I do to make up for it? I tried giving you space, but now you look at me like I’m going to kick you, or”—your eyes widened at the plate of food he only touched after you ate some—“poison you! I swear I never meant to hurt you. I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” he asked in an entirely softer tone. He sat back down, hunching forward across the desk to search your face.

Your head hung low, and you murmured quietly, “I know I didn’t handle it well. I should have left when you asked. Now I understand… you didn’t want anybody to see that. I invaded your privacy. And then I freaked out!” Your voice broke. “And I’ve been trying to… to make up for it. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but—dammit, I’m pushing you again! Sorry.”

The urge to hug you overwhelmed him. If there wasn’t a deliberately massive table in between you—meant to keep others at a distance—he would have hugged you.

“Are you not afraid?” For once, the broadness of his desk seemed obtrusive.

“I could never be afraid of you.”

Your arm crossed the divide, reaching for his hand. It touched, warm and easy, and gave a sympathetic squeeze that set his blood racing. Then it retracted, and his skin ached for the lost contact.

“I just got scared because I didn’t understand what was happening. I still don’t. Maybe I am still afraid, a little. But not because—! Please, just… tell me what that was. What happened to you?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed. Eyes narrowing, he answered cagily, “First, what do you think you saw? Light can play tricks on the eye, especially after long hours in a morbid environment, possible exposure to hypnotic drugs… Let us be sure we are on the same page.”

“Are you seriously going to gaslight me now that we’re finally talking? I’m not an idiot. You still owe me those pants back!”

While he floundered for words, your eyes squeezed shut, and a hissing laugh burst from your nose. A red flush crept up his neck, under his shirt collar. It was inappropriate to laugh in this situation, but perhaps that was why it was so contagious—it had been too long since he’d seen you laugh, and even longer since he’d done so himself.

“Those cheap, scratchy, torture devices? Consider it a favor that I tossed them,” he quipped. (Forget the fact that he had been sleeping with his face buried in them for the past week and simply did not wish to return them before wringing them for every drop of your scent.)

“And yet you wore them, which means I saved your ass. Checkmate, doctor.”

“Please. It is barely a Vienna Gambit.”

Laughter felt foreign in his throat. It was soft, and only lasted a brief second, but it was cleansing. You smiled at him, rolling your eyes, and his soul lifted.

“Very well,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Ask your questions.”

Your eyes darted to the windows. Another late night. Stars appeared (the handful not blotted out by Baltimore’s light pollution). You chewed your bottom lip.

“Are you going to transform again?”

“Only on the night of the new moon, when twilight gives way to the black of night. No need to worry.”

“Just once a month, then? Werewolf rules?”

He shot an offended glare, though you weren’t wrong. “Sometimes two, near the aphelion. And during an eclipse. It… hates sunlight. Even the reflection of the sun. It wants to be in darkness.” The thought disturbed him—the way the beast called him to the shadows. He always fought it to stay indoors, locking himself away from any nocturnal roving. It frightened him what might happen if he gave in. The coppery taste of blood haunted his dreams.

“Then… would you transform if you went spelunking? You know, in a cave? Or a submarine?”

“I have not tried. A darkened room is not enough. I would not tempt it.”

You swallowed and thought. Your lips twitched, building to the important question: “Is it still you in there?”

“Yes. More impulsive—I would never have smashed the decor—but I am still there.” It brings my true self to the surface, he thought, but withheld this. A slimy, dangerous, unlovable wretch. He looked at you, sitting across from him in front of a container of food you brought to share, and wondered what you were doing there after seeing it. How could you bear to be near him?

“But you’re not going to… eat me or something?” You were embarrassed to ask, and he gave you a fittingly scathing glare.

“No. I would not eat you.” He stabbed a tortellini and popped it in his mouth.

“Then I want to see it.”

He choked.

“I want to get a better look. To wrap my head around it. Besides, it seemed painful—next time I could bring you a hot towel, or… a cold pack, or… I don’t know, some tea? An ibuprofen?”

“There is no next time. You were never supposed to see that in the first place.”

“Please? If it’s going to happen again in two weeks, I want to be there. Prepared this time.”

“This is not a zoo. I am not some freak show to be gawked at! What happened to you being sorry?”

“I just want to get to know you,” you answered, and your voice sounded so small his heart reeled. You snapped your head up, “I mean—I want to be there for you. You shouldn’t be alone.”

He scoffed, defensive again. “Why? Because I might do something dangerous? I am more than capable of controlling myself.”

“Because you deserve to be comforted when you’re in pain.”

Your words struck him like a nuclear bomb of basic human decency. Deserved? Comfort?

“Does anyone else know? Does anyone… take care of you when you change?”

Only his family knew, and they certainly did not take care of him. Bringing him that bag of clothing in the morning was the first time anyone had done something thoughtful for him—helped him with his condition. Even if you had run away at first, you wanted to be supportive. To know his dark side.

Why?

Was it possible? Did you feel the same way about him as he did about you? His hand still felt warm from where you had briefly touched it.

He had to admit, it was nice having someone be there for him. Even a small gesture like old, loose-fitting sweatpants in a bag made a world of difference. Or dinner at his desk. He imagined you pressing a steamed towel to his forehead, and he did not hate the idea—doting on him like a spa therapist, taking the edge off the pain as his hair fell out and skin split open. Or watching him become hideous. Vomiting at the sight of him. Losing all interest you might have had. Realizing it was a mistake to be there.

“Thank you for dinner,” he announced in curt, clipped syllables. “That will be all.”

“Frederick…” Your voice was low, personal. Pleading. He did not like how personal it was. How you were giving him everything he wanted, like you were baiting a trap.

“Fascinating as this must be for you, I still have work to do. Your shift ended an hour ago. Go home.”

“OK. Right. I’ll see you in the morning.”

You didn’t see him trembling as you left, clutching his hand over his fluttering heart.

• ● • ━━━━━─ ••●•• ─━━━━━ • ● •

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[zacharybosch]

Playing God - chapter 2

the continuation of my hannigram vampire AU~

chapter 1 on tumblr or ao3

read Playing God chapter 2 below or on ao3

Will hadn’t been quite prepared for how it would feel to reveal himself to someone outside of the FBI. When was the last time he’d revealed himself? Over a hundred years ago at the very least; he’d handed himself over to federal agents in a fit of suicidal righteousness shortly after the Bureau was established in 1908, fully expecting a swift execution and instead finding himself chained up in a basement cell for twenty years while they figured out what to do with him.

He hadn’t been expecting Hannibal to leap from his chair and invoke the name of Christ against him, but nor had he been expecting the calm, slow-blinking acceptance. A raised eyebrow, perhaps, or a brief slackening of the mouth. In all his long years, Will had never met anyone so infuriatingly placid.

He said as much to Miriam, and she smiled knowingly. He’d been familiar with her, in a rather vague sense, ever since she’d first begun her training at the Academy. And then he’d seen her, afterwards, shut up in the witness protection unit, trying to use an arm that was no longer there. Will had seen many people go through many horrific things over the course of his life, and none of them had been so resilient to those horrors as Miriam. When the opportunity to become Will’s handler arose, she had been damn near ready to fight people for it.

“Makes you want to kick him in the balls just to see if he’ll even wince, right?” Miriam said. “Not that we don’t have reason enough to kick him already.”

“I don’t understand how you can be so blasé about him.”

“Well I know everything is terribly dramatic and overwrought for your kind--”

“Oh god, don’t--”

“--but that’s just not me. He’s already got two years of my life. I’m not giving him any more. I’ve got better things to do.”

“Looking after a middle-aged vampire is a better thing to do?”

“Well I’m getting paid for it, so yeah, it is,” said Miriam. “Look, deep emotional turmoil aside, how was it physically? Did you feel anything? Any... twinge that might turn into a problem later on?”

Will closed his eyes and thought of Hannibal, the sandalwood scent of clothing that contained so much hot skin and blood beneath it. He felt a twinge, true, but he was constantly getting these ‘twinges’ in varying degrees from every person who saw fit to stand within a three-foot radius of him, so it was nothing new. He was very well-trained in denying that which called to him.

“No,” Will said. “No twinges. I’m fine.”

***

On a desolate and windy beach in Virginia, Will watched as a decaying totem pole of bodies was carefully catalogued and photographed.

His first thought was that he hadn’t seen any kind of human monument like this in a very long time, and this one particularly was quite impressive in its ambitiousness. His second thought was that it might be useful to say as much to Hannibal; it might make him jealous and provoke him to a misstep.

His third thought was that he should probably make a few shocked or appalled noises, like the other people attending the scene. There was a certain amount of nonchalance he could get away with, and which was indeed expected of him as an employee of the FBI, but a totem pole of bodies was apparently one of those things that you shouldn’t have become used to, and so Will turned away and shook his head as if to try and dislodge the image from his mind. One of the crime scene techs caught his eye and grimaced in solidarity. Just two humans together, doing the appropriate emotions.

The case quickly became boring after the initial excitement of the totem pole, although Will was faintly amused to discover that their killer had unwittingly murdered his own son. It reminded Will of a man he had known at some point in the nineteenth century - perhaps 1820 if he had to guess, or thereabouts - who had also mistakenly murdered his son. That man had in turn reminded Will of a similar man before him, and he of yet another man, on and on, back through the years. Same hubris, same ruin, same patterns cropping up again and again.

Will discussed the case with Hannibal at their next appointment anyway, careful to dress it up as more personally intriguing than it really was, but Hannibal seemed unmoved. Clearly it took more than that to make his jealousy spike, if he even entertained such an emotion as jealousy in the first place. Hannibal’s interest these days seemed to lie far more in the nature of Will himself than in the nature of Will’s reactions to the horrors he bore witness to. He’d made a valiant attempt to be light with his questioning in the intervening weeks since Will had outed himself, but their therapy appointments now frequently ended with what was essentially a vampire Q & A session.

“Do you eat?” Hannibal asked abruptly. “Besides blood.”

Will got up and stretched. The incessant questions had rankled at first, no matter how cool Hannibal tried to play it, but annoyance and feeling like a spectacle quickly gave way to a comfortable sort of indifference. And it wasn’t like Will ever had much else to do with his evenings; his subsistence appointments at Quantico were always scheduled late at night, and it was nice to be able to talk casually with someone about these things that no-one else wanted, or was allowed, to hear.

He wandered over to the window and peered out into the gathering dusk. “Sometimes. When I want to, or when not eating would seem suspicious. There’s no nutritional value in it for me, so it’s a largely pointless exercise.”

“And here I was hoping that you’d declined all my dinner invitations for purely physiological reasons.”

“I try to avoid close personal situations as much as possible. It’s, ah, easy to get bitey, you know.”

“I can imagine. But would this now not count as a close personal situation?”

“You’re my therapist. It’s different.”

“Am I, and is it? I’ve found that we both seem to have some trouble drawing the line between the professional and the personal, when it comes to each other.” Hannibal glanced briefly down at his watch. “Our appointment ended thirty minutes ago. Both of us were fully aware of that, and yet neither of us made an attempt to close the discussion. Why is that?”

Will turned away from the window and met Hannibal’s eyes across the room. “You tell me.”

“My reasons are entirely selfish. I would keep you here to talk with me indefinitely, if I thought you would let me get away with it.”

“That sounds awfully possessive, Doctor.”

Hannibal gave a gentle shrug. “It’s all I can say, it being the truth. I’m sure you’ve had similar sentiment directed towards you before.”

“Not for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Are you asking me how old I am?” Will said, and it came out sounding far more flirtatious than he’d intended, but maybe that wasn’t so much of a problem. “Rude, Doctor Lecter.”

Hannibal picked up on it, of course, and shaded his reply with the same coy tone. “Are you willing to tell me?”

Will had lived to twenty eight in human years, with an extra six hundred and seventy three vampire years on top, but that wasn’t really any of Hannibal’s business. “Maybe another time. I should go. I have a date with a bag of blood.”

***

Will’s subsistence appointments were grim affairs. His Keepers still believed that he was at his most dangerous when ingesting blood, so they strapped Will to a modified dentist’s chair and fed him the blood through a tube taped in place over his mouth. No opportunity to lick his lips and savour the taste, no chance for a stray drop to land on his skin and let him remember how it felt to be covered in it.

The blood was administered by feeding technicians, trained only in the processes of applying and removing the tube; taking measurements and readings before, during, and after; and setting up four separate cameras to record the whole appointment. They were not told what the measurements were for, or what happened to the videos. They were not permitted to speak to Will beyond a short list of approved instructions.

It had been humiliating at first and Will had thought the whole ritual to be needlessly cruel, but over time the feeling faded along with everything else, and now these subsistence appointments were just one more low buzz in the background noise of his life.

When Miriam started in her post as his handler, she took it upon herself to meet with Will on Friday evenings to go over his subsistence reports for the previous week. It gave Will a sense of involvement in his “ongoing care,” or so the official line went, however more often than not the meetings consisted of five minutes on the reports and forty minutes exchanging mildly-interesting office gossip. It was the closest thing Will had to a normal friendship with a normal human being.

Miriam downed half of her mug of cold coffee and grimaced. “Hmn. All looks more or less okay. Starting temp was a little higher than usual today but still within the allowed range. A little hot and bothered, were you?”

“Well I saw them bringing in a bag of B-neg and I just couldn’t help myself,” Will dead-panned. “What’s new?”

“Bev had a couple of days in the lab this week. Just a few hours.”

“How is she?”

“Impatient to be out of the secure unit and getting on with the rest of her life. You know she’s in the same suite they put me in? We’re calling it the Hannibal Lecter Trauma Centre.” Miriam eyed Will over the top of her mug. “Maybe they’ll have to put you in there eventually. Or is the noose tightening already?”

Will shifted about in his seat and thumbed at a non-existent crease in his trousers. “Not exactly. Plan’s shifting a bit.”

“I knew this was a bad idea. He’s getting to you, isn’t he?”

“No,” Will lied. “I just… I think it needs a little more delicacy than what we originally planned for. He’s not a giddy teenager, Miriam, I can’t just pop my fangs out and expect him to immediately fall at my feet.”

“Has he said anything yet?”

Will levelled his own flat look at her. “What do you think? He’s operated undetected for years. Don’t hold your breath for a result any time soon.”