#wotl

The notion that the herbal infusion would have enough time to circulate and flavor Will’s tissues was a blatant excuse for being able to blow on the spoon, cup Will’s face, try to bid that dream goodbye when it had already settled in to stay. Despite his preternatural empathy, Will can’t really read minds. He rejected Hannibal because Hannibal had rejected even the specter of vulnerability and openness. “Will Graham deals with huge amounts of fear,” Hannibal tells Jack after their first meeting. In this, too, they are the same. And he is alone again. He meets Molly, they get married quickly in that limbo of the three years apart. And within that time he began wearing his hair more like Hannibal’s, gelled and combed back. Combing forward would’ve covered the thin, pale scar that matched his skin tone well enough easily, but instead he displayed it to a world that would look on it with distrust or pity, a world of people he’d once looked to for care and acceptance when it could never be given to him as he was. “It excites him to see you marked in this particular way.” “Why?” “Why do you think?”

Bedelia could only ever see the surface of Hannibal’s demons, of his fears and buried wants, her own reflection making a warped and inaccurate mirror of them. She only saw the fact that he wants to be seen a certain way, to do things a certain way, she could never see the true reasons why that is as Will can. It was easier to face a myth than the truth that her captor has weaknesses, just not ones she could exploit. Bedelia only saw the euphoria of possession and the gravity of desire where Will came to see the raw, unglamorous truth of their shared ache. She saw a fairytale monster in the shape of a man, Bluebeard with his doors and keys. But Will saw a man who has a vast capacity for the monstrous, who locked things away because he knows deep down he can’t be impenetrable and striving for it makes him less and less so. Even with a ring on his finger, there was only ever one emblem of belonging Will displayed openly on his body during those three years and after his isolation from Hannibal ended.

Desires to posses or be possessed are, at their cores, facets of that universal human desire to be unconditionally embraced with veneers of power and control over it to make it seem less personal and more comfortable. Will and Hannibal belong to each other because they have only ever felt as if they belong without exception when they’re with each other. “No one can be fully aware of another human being unless we love them.” “I’ve never known myself as well as I know myself when I’m with him.” “Freeing yourself from me and me freeing myself from you… They’re the same.” “We’re conjoined.” That scar is the white string that ties them together on a soul-deep level rather than a red one, it’s the line that divides and unites them in their struggles over and realizations about how their many conflicts have only ever been conflicts of self-realization and self-examination through the lens of the other.

A wheeling noise circled its way into the shores of his mind. The draft made it impossible to decipher even the roughest shapes of words. Only some shadows cast by all things he previously knew by name.

“Will”

Salty soundwaves rippled through a once well traveled coastline. Harsh wind and a nauseating pulse made it difficult to focus in the midst of this violent and confusing environment.

From the pull and release of the tide, concepts began to take form, grain by sand grain. At a painstakingly slow pace.

“Will!”

Repetition, as if to remind the ocean that the sum is greater than its individual parts. The more it made sense, the more it hurt. Currents of water glistened with flickers of sour-tasting lights.

“WILL!”

Sharper and colder this time. Droplets of water surged through him like needles of painful clarity. Will, a name. His name.

The idea of concepts felt overwhelming, nauseating and salty. A tide of realisation made its presence known. In his stomach. Will, his own name. The clarity washed over him as a swelling stream of awful-tasting water. 

Then he actually tasted it as reality surged into him. Through his stomach and up into his mouth and nose, spilling over all the way into his body and hands. 

It took him a moment to get to his senses. Vision, hearing and feeling all turbulently trampled their way into his conscious experience again, like a stampede of savage stags. 

“Will, can you open your eyes? Talk to me, Will!”

Hannibal? 

He tried voicing the words, but his body had a hard time still fitting together the puzzle pieces of how to function as an organism. He tried reaching out his hand while he gasped for air. 

"Eromenos/Erastes" by Epsilon Sagittarii

It is literally my favorite s4/post-fall fic. It was everything to me on first read, and ever reread cements it.

Albeit I was scared by the lack of like indication tags, but I was so pleasantly surprised

Read it. Read it. Read it. Read it. Read it. Read it. Read it. Read it. Read it.

who up yearning anatomically, obscenely, and metaphysically