#vylingas

50 TYPES OF KISSES  /  ACCEPTING

   𝚆𝙸𝙻𝙻 𝙿𝚄𝚃𝚂 𝚃𝙷𝙴𝙸𝚁 𝙼𝙾𝚄𝚃𝙷𝚂 𝚃𝙾𝙶𝙴𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚁,  and thinks of the can of peaches suspended in syrup that he’d wanted to crawl inside of as a child, of the honeybees who’d once made a hive in the walls of their rental house in Cohutta, GA. How the honey dripped out from under the trim boards for days and days even after they bees had been removed in a slow, gold-and-effervescent stream. Their mouths taste of the digestif: blackberries and caramel. It’s a dark flavour. Dark, sweet, and analgesic. The kisses that result have a tempered viscosity, a thickness. Expressing the magnitude of a rich internal friction.

   Hannibal’s eyes are sharp and lucid, but glossed, and Will looks at them rather than into them when he pulls back by a fraction, observing while holding a hand against the way he’ll be swallowed down eventually. Will is sharp and focused now, direct, and dangerous. He has something in his possession. Not caught between his teeth, or between his thighs, not under him, pinned down—just on him, over him, freely given. Impossible for it to have been withheld from him, even though he didn’t have to fight or lie to get it: an absolutely undivided attention.

   Not anyone’s attention. Hannibal’s attention. Will finds, with a strangely pleasant sensation in his throat, that it does make a difference to him. That’s curious, and rewarding. Hannibal’s hand skims his throat admiringly as if he can sense it there, Will’s pleasure; his momentary and casual acceptance of their singularity. Their accord. Will had been the one to cross the room to him, to bend over him, to put one knee between his legs on the chair, the other beside his hip, arms caging him on the armrests.

   He kisses Hannibal again and lets their bodies sink close until they rest curved together, heavy with their own weight. Hannibal touches his spine, his hair, cups his skull—all with the attendant confidence of a man who knows the Eucharist intimately, a man who has been in the first pew every morning, preparing for this moment all his life. The consecration of idolatry. Real adoration. The whole beast, not just the bones. Will sags into the touch, and draws his knee around Hannibal’s hip until he his fully straddling him, fully in his lap.

   When he pries his fingers under the back of Hannibal’s neatly-laid collar, Will is happy with the sentiment that they are sharing. He’s happy with the way Hannibal sits still, sets his forearms back on the armrests of the chair, and allows Will to pour over him like water. Like a scientist. Like a dog with a delightfully foul-smelling thing, ready to roll in it. He imagines that every time the eagle comes back to devour Prometheus’ liver, his mouth waters anew. The taste is just as stirring as the first time, and he’s just as ravenous for the texture. After he’s finished, he’s always just as sated. One time or a thousand times, the thrill is all the same.

   Will ignores the fact that, in this scenario he’s constructed in his mind, Hannibal is the Titan and he’s the one whose hungry—who between them has given humanity more? not Will, he can acknowledge that even as he resents it—and pushes his fingers into the hard muscle between Hannibal’s diaphragm and abdomen through his shirt, knobbing the inner ‘v’ of the final four ribs. He presses against the place where his liver would be swelling out if he were opened by a beak. Hannibal doesn’t startle, or tense, only watches him curiously, utterly absorbed, relishing.

   “The Greeks believed the the liver was the seat of human emotion.”

   Hannibal hums in acknowledgment of the fact. Prometheus was punished for his passion. His destructive generosity. Zeus’ eagle is sustained for eternity by devouring the place of that passion every morning; sleeping with a belly full, nurtured by it every night. All he has to do is tolerate Prometheus’ agony—though maybe tolerate is the wrong word. Maybe, like the first little draw of blood, the pain becomes a Pavlovian bell for the both of them. Signaling the start, the end, and the start again. Classical conditioning.

   Arguably, it’s a pretty good life for a bird of prey—until the end.

  He can’t stand to look at Hannibal’s beatific smile. He’s pleased, so pleased, and it fills Will with light. The residual awareness that he inspires such delight just by being present, by willfully engaging, makes Will feel sharper than he has since childhood. Being looked at usually makes him feel muddied. Not now. He’s a wash of still water, reactive and rippling under the anticipation of touch. There’s a simper in Hannibal’s eyes—like he knows what Will is thinking; knows the punishment Will has metered out for him in his mind, and would hold himself in chains just for a chance to make it happen. To witness it. To be put in the stars with it once its over. Hannibal is generous, isn’t he? Hannibal is unerringly generous. Just hours ago his house was full of people. They’d left sated, every one. 

   Will’s breathing is spiking slowly but he settles his weight back easily on Hannibal’s legs and looks at him, hearing his own blood in his ears, measuring the abnormal reaction of his body. Lust is teenage behaviour, love is deeply, glaringly abnormal for him, but he’s glad the other people are gone. For no reason other than bargain-brand petulance, he pulls the silk kerchief from the breastpocket of Hannibal’s now open jacket.

while the body in his arms drops to the floor, frank watches the way lecter’s face changes, considers going for the gun tucked in his hip holster, but doesn’t. instead, he raises his hands in what appears to be surrender.

“ - this was the only way i could get to him,” frank says like it’s enough to suffice as an apology. the body of peter cooley, the son of an irish mobster, lies on the floor between them, his face turned like an owl toward him from his broken neck, wide dead eyes staring up at the ceiling. frank’s head cocks.

“i know you might be thinking of calling the police, but -” but what? something in him had urged him to do this, something more dumbly instinctive than logic, but that part of him’s never faltered, for all his shortcoming. frank glances back up at dr. lecter, squints, “i don’t think you want to.”

          ❛     how do you do, dr. lecter? ...sorry- fell. dr. fell- very 𝒃𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒗𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒆, by the way. anyway, i'm a big fan-,     ❜

Anxious Munday Meme! + @vylingas

The waiting room is much more lavish than one might expect from a mental health practice, even a private one such as this. Of course, Armand is no expert -- in fact, the office of a psychiatrist is one of the very last places that he thought he might find himself (regardless of the opinions of many of his peers, who seem to think that it is the only place he should find himself.) Naturally, therapy is not his main goal here, but rather more of an inconvenient side-effect. 

Quite unexpectedly, he finds himself in this waiting room on a leisure trip... not that the good doctor is aware of it. As far as morbid curiosities go, this has the potential to be Armand’s most extreme pursuit in the last decade or more. Generally, current crime does not catch his interest, unless he can make money enough out of it to fund his eternally comfortable lifestyle. However, something about the Chesapeake Ripper had left him craving a mystery to be unravelled -- the brutality of the postmortem displays alone, perhaps. For someone with his unparalleled talents for the Mind Gift, it is not particularly difficult to solve such a crime -- and solve it he most certainly had, the trail of psychic evidence leading back to the foreign doctor, a fellow European with a most peculiar taste for blood. 

He’s eating them. 

It had been crystal clear as soon as he had loomed closely enough, though without detection, of course. A mortal preying upon his peers, feasting in a way so strikingly similar to a vampire. At first, Armand had decided that this brand of evil would make the ideal feast and he’d had every intention of completing the circuit and feeding upon Hannibal Lecter... until he had looked a little deeper. The history and horrors that he had found buried beneath that well-polished exterior had been enough to halt that plan in its infancy -- for now. 

Instead, he had forged some documents, reclaimed his old surname, and booked an appointment with the psychiatrist for an eighteen year old ‘Armand Petrov’ in order to sidetrack any awkward requirements for a guardian. 

“   sexual   sadists   can’t   feel   love   .      it   ,   uh   ,   chemically   involves   brain   elements   called   monoamines   ,   dopamines   ,   norepinephrine   ,   and   serotonin   .   Love   chemicals   controlled   by   phenylethylamine   are   also   found   in   chocolate    ———   peas   ,   too   ,   it’s   also   found   in   peas   !   ”

BELLADONNA OF SADNESS PROMPTS  /  ACCEPTING

   “My soul?”

   His patience for poetics is thin today.

   “It was my brain that was on fire—not my soul.”

   Three soft ticks of silence, in which Will can hear Hannibal begin to smile. Can physically hear it, even with his back turned: not the drawing tension of the muscles in the Doctor’s face, not the coiling of skin or the slick of teeth or the smooth, articulated click of an anticipatory swallow, no, but can hear the gradual warming of the feeling beneath it, the thoughts that precede it, the surprise, the delight. He turns his back because he feels no credible threat. Because Hannibal likes that he turns his back. Because it delights him, if it doesn’t surprise him, that Will feels no credible threat in his presence, even still.

   Whatever Hannibal had imagined about the system of restraints Will had in place at the time of their first meeting, they weren’t involuntary. Hannibal probably would like to close his eyes and imagine Will’s soul calling out to him. It would make a theatrical excuse. Hannibal, helpless to resist coming over the side of the ship into the treacherous cool of the dark and deceptively beautiful waters roiling underneath. Will snorts, but switches course and decides, momentarily at least, to cooperate. His brows jump, and he glances back.

   Anything that’s kneaded can be stretched.

   “Who shall from this dungeon raise a soul enslaved so many ways?”

   Are you trying to surprise him or delight him?

   The emotions are not the same. There was a time when Will suspected they might be the same, for Hannibal, or close enough that he might exploit the proximity by always eliciting one when eliciting the other, a psychosomatic two-for-one sale, but he’d been wrong. Maybe not wrong. Deliberately ignorant. It had been difficult to gauge when he refused to accept the increasingly obvious reality that there seems to be very little he is capable fo doing with genuine feeling that wouldn’t elicit some measure of delight from Hannibal.

   Will focuses his eyes across the room, and takes his time in doing it. This is the first time he’s been in Hannibal’s study. The room is predictable, maybe only to him, but he still takes pleasure in seeing it, and the act of conducting a mental catalogue serves the fried nerves fizzing at the base of skull, at the back of his neck, where Hannibal is looking, now, not staring because staring is unintentional but looking, at the back of his neck where Will carries the tension of his bad shoulder and the receptive buzz of anticipation when he’s standing like this, with his back to Hannibal. It doesn’t look like fear because it isn’t. It’s expectation—the expectation of attention.

   Attention that he’s currently receiving.

   For a moment, Will feels insane. Or ecstatic.

   But he isn’t. His head is clear, without pain, and his mental acuity feels razor sharp, sharp as it has ever been, perhaps sharper, honed to an impossible edge by frequent, full, and necessary use. He feels sharp, yes, but liquid and honey-dark, sleek, opaque or transparent at the flip of his own switch, adjustable in shades. Absolutely and comfortably equipped, the way he’d been when he was younger and more engaged in curiosity with the world. He hadn’t anticipated allowing himself to feel this way again.

   Rather than follow that train of thought further, Will turns across his shoulder, one hand slipped into the pocket of his trousers, the other loose around the lip of his wine glass hanging near his hip. He shouldn’t be holding the bulb of the glass, of course—it will warm the wine. Letting the gesture to be visible, Will tips his head back a little, lengthening his throat.

  They’re discussing souls, which is stupid. What did Tennyson say?

  Since we deserved the name of friends—

  “And thine effect so lives in me—”  He feels fine and sharp, still, and he allows that to be intoned; visible, too. They’re looking at one another, and it’s easy, and Will sweeps one finger back and forth across the smooth, hard-but-brittle surface of the glass to keep himself from moving into that all-important middle distance, from being pulled into it, before it’s really time.  “A part of mine may live in thee.”

  Before Hannibal can respond, Will turns his back again. His head dips when he puts his nose into his glass, breathes, drinks, and then breathes again. There’s a thick, affectionate silence growing between them, but the hook needs a barb, otherwise the fish is too likely to fight its way free. That one last fantastic show of strength must be circumvented before it’s allowed to happen.

   It’s one thing to hook a fish. It’s another entirely to land him.

   Will makes a soft, unhappy sound and sets his glass aside.