#lukyanenko

He shouldn’t be out after dark. He shouldn’t be out when he felt like this at all, and yet his feet took him the familiar route to the square, the usual place, and Will had barely called up a Shadow before another was in his way.

“You are growing reckless.” There was amusement in the tone, a coil of pleasure that Will felt to his very bones.

“Then do something about it,” Will breathed, grasping fever-warm hands against Hannibal’s face and kissing him deep. He didn’t belong here. He shouldn’t be here. This was too open, too stupid, too obvious, and yet Will couldn’t bring himself to care. He kissed Hannibal until cool tendrils of shadow, of Hannibal’s mind and essence, tightened over Will’s wrists and throat and pulled him away.

“You know what you tempt, offering that.”

“Yes.”

The tendrils tightened, cutting Will’s breathing off to a hitch, holding his arms tense at his sides. He didn’t struggle. He smiled. Teeth flickering between sharp fangs and human canines like a badly tuned television as Hannibal watched. Will blinked, allowed his eyes to glow golden, shed the last of his humanness like an old coat.

Hannibal reached to touch him with cold fingers, Will’s lips parting at the sensation of a dead palm against his face, eyes hazy, narrowing to half-mast in his pleasure.

“Have you stopped fighting your nature?”

“Just my choices,” Will replied, throat half constricted by the tendril Hannibal hadn’t yet released. In a blink, Hannibal was closer, face to face, nose to nose with Will, and the younger lifted his chin to him.

The shadow choking him faded to nothing, reconstructing itself from surrounding mist at the hem of his hoodie to slither beneath and Will groaned, wrists twisting uselessly where he remained restrained.

“You want more than this, take it.”

Hannibal’s eyes flicked to Will’s, down to the pulse humming at his throat. He could smell the moon on him still, sour and painful, a hated transition and an inevitable one for the rest of his life. He could smell more. He could follow Will around the city by scent alone, he was so intoxicating. He had, several times, certain Will was aware of it and allowing it nonetheless.

“I want all of you.”

More coiling shadows, twisting tentacles of ichor and smoke slid beneath Will’s clothes, tormented his flushed skin with icy touches as Hannibal leaned nearer, just a breath away from Will’s parted lips. Will’s sigh trembled from him, his eyes now slits in his surrender. He offered his throat again and whimpered when Hannibal’s teeth grazed it, tempted.

“Then have me,” Will breathed. As shadows wound over his ankles and up to his knees, slid along the panes of his chest and dripped to his navel, slithered between his thighs, to his groin, higher still - “If you want me. You’re the only one that does.”

Oh, but he was wrong. The young man still so bold in his relative youth, still new to the life that would take him over several human lifetimes into cynicism and indifference. He was wrong because he was very wanted. He was needed. He was praised and spoken of and emulated by his Watch. His name was known to Geser. His name was known to Zavulon.

He was very wanted, was Will Graham.

But he had offered himself to none of them. He never would.

So Hannibal released his wrists, relished the strength with which Will wrapped his arms over him, against him, pressing and aching and tired. He brought his own hands to tilt Will’s face to his own as he kissed him, his shadows doing an admirable job dissolving from Will the last remnants of all things not of the Twilight. He wrapped Will in his mind, safe and sound, and vanished them.

They would be found and condemned, and they would find each other as particles in the Twilight and form and reform together over and over in a coiling dance of lust and anguish.

But until then.