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Hannibal sees things and keeps them as a chronicler would, in every facet of his senses. He has aligned every aspect of his life to be given into the things that give him the most pleasure, from the cultured hours of his vocation to the precise shade of red on his walls. Everything is attuned to fit the tastes of his senses, the taste of butter and the soft touch of the claret on his tongue. A fond memory once called him an aesthete, and another sighed that he was the incarnation of Dionysus himself and well, flattery will certainly get you somewhere. He has considered that his surroundings keep him protected and coddled like a child in the womb, and he has lost some of the edges he had when things were harder and he was younger and only just accepting that things do not have to be the way the dice fall. However, while he keeps a grudge and feels the most horrible behaviour keenly, he does his best to have it filed away and to let the beautiful things echo, visually, an afterimage that acts as if his eyes have been seared by beauty.
A problem can always be fixed, if you change your perspective.
Alana is exquisite in her chosen Diane von Furstenberg dress, a suit of perfectly-woven armour straight from the pages of last March's Vogue. The dress is carefully expensive to those in the know, a nod to fashion and taste, but it is the cumulative fraction of those geometric prints obtained from frequent association with her professional side that tells the tale of her practice's success. He is happy for her, and feels reflected glory as she refers people to him, speaks warmly of her affection and admiration for him.
The sillage of her perfume, the long notes that linger after she leaves his sight, is luxurious and well balanced but not obscure, could belong to a thousand different women who get seduced by the Guerlain or Chanel counter. She favours an oriental but wears a chypre to work, something she likes slightly less but is more work-appropriate and masculine than the heady incense of the orientals. He approves of her choices, however little thought people actually put into their perfume choices, he feels even more well disposed towards her. He once ate a woman who wore a vintage Chanel couture suit with Britney Spears Midnight Fantasy, and not a court in the land would convict him if they had smelled it themselves.
Her choice is not intoxicating, but no matter - Alana is intoxicating enough in herself.
She is an extraordinary case of competent, and he sincerely resents the day he will have to kill her. She is a perfect specimen, so intuitive, so trusting, so sure and so righteously correct. At the very least she should be pinned and displayed, perhaps mounted in a box in his study to look down on him when he gives into the indulgence of creativity.
Will Graham is a man who looks like his scent should linger the longest and should be musk and patchouli and other polite words for the way unwashed still manages to smell alluring. (Hannibal has never had time for clean smells that only cover but never cure). While Will is rumpled and sweats the sweat of the unwell, his scent, especially since he self-consciously stopped wearing Old Spice, he has the notes of old perfumes banned by cruelty laws and long forbidden for export. Hannibal inhales deeply and feels them - the animalistic and intoxicating stench of civet, and the pleasingly antlerine chypre of oakmoss. A throwback that science can never truly replicate. Will Graham is a man who defies reformulation.
Hannibal does not have a signature scent, seeing it as it is a pretension that is as dangerous as it is gauche for someone with his predilections, but a good cologne is as much part of dressing as a tie or cufflinks or other necessary parts of a man’s boudoir. It had taken him years to be able to abide a scent deliberately getting in the way of all the smells of the world that whisper synaesthesically to his other senses, but the olfactory it is a pleasure in itself, and he does enjoy taking pleasure wherever it presents itself.
Today is the suit by Rene, the Laotian tailor with the under-treated diabetes, and Tauer's masterpiece providing an extra trimming to the collar and cuffs. It makes the coffee girl gasp when she smells it, transported by the notes to the romance of the North African desert. In another life, he could have used a girl who could pick L'air du Desert Morocain out from the background stench of burnt beans and atomised sugar. However. Another life. Another taste. She comments on it with a flirtatious twinkle and her pronunciation betrays the fact her knowledge has only been read, her accent appalling and stresses on the incorrect syllable. He flirts back, and doesn’t correct her.
She gets his order wrong, lost somewhere between the deserts and his smile.
Hannibal has never had Alana, he has yet to have Will, and Will shall never have Alana, if Hannibal’s machinations succeed. It would be pleasant to see them together, in the way vanilla is an exquisite pleasure ruined by its ubiquity and overuse, but when sampled itself, without any pretense, is beautiful.
The vanilla orchid itself is odorless, which is somewhat ironic. The roots hold the scent, and lie hidden, stealing the life from the trees they are attached to.
It would be equally pleasant to take either of them but it is rare that he gives himself over to sexual pleasure. Hannibal can appear vulnerable when he needs to, a defense mechanism he has developed over the years in case situations creep too close to the point of no return, but actual vulnerability, the act of being nude and flayed of his fineries means that he so very rarely indulges.
He is a man though, in full working order. His hormones move around the body the way they do inside any man, no matter how good his tailor, or how well he holds himself.
He has always been a student of empathy, if not in its thrall, and when Will Graham bursts into his morning and declares that he kissed Alana Bloom, Hannibal eschews his usual mako pot and instead fills the house with vacuum brewed coffee to drown out the smell of arousal, shame, desperation and self loathing that trails after Will and fogs around him. It is a broth that he wants to sup at while it is fresh, and at the same time save to boil down into a soup for the laziest, most unwell of days.
The coffee beans are slightly spoiled and so very aromatic that they nearly drown out what he wants most, which is to tear the lugubrious look from Will Graham’s eyes.
He had suspected, as had anyone who had seen Alana Bloom’s poise undoing itself around stolen snatches of Will Graham’s attention, that they would give in to the fact of their attraction. Will is his experiment, the potential to be his greatest achievement and deepest friend. If it were anyone else Hannibal would order the special broad beans from his grocer and be preparing the maltaise, but Alana deserves more than that.
Hannibal does the only thing he knows how to do in order to get the upper hand in a situation that threatens to overwhelm him. He rearranges the universe so as to bring them to his dinner table.
What do you serve when trying to orchestrate, nay, conduct, a tryst? There is a language in food as much as there ever was a language of flowers when people took such a thing seriously. It would not be appropriate to serve obvious things, and Hannibal will not have oysters in the house on the best of days, living so far from a decent bed. Oysters are for air so fresh it catches in your throat and seasons your palate, and for companions who will not flinch when you introduce the slippery, orgasmic feeling to their throat as illicit as the most intimate touch, taken to the point where they barely flinch when you then sever the artery with the shell and finish the job with the shuck.
Oysters are for summer, and outgoing tides.
Caviar is something of scandal, and Hannibal these days bores of foie gras, the American diet, honestly, he has seen geese that are force fed less and it has quite ruined him for the delicacy, even on Melba toast and with Handel echoing in his ears, a favourite at a more pretentious time in his life.
While he delights in cooking them, sweetmeats are not traditional seduction foods. The meal he decides on requires nothing less than a politically incorrect cut of meat, one well marbled that will melt away into nothing but flavour and glutamic acid. A fatty cut.
He chooses one he’s been saving, to make it special.
He goes for coffee on a crisp morning where the air is so cold it stings, and guts his olfactory muse behind her shop. It is over quickly, in an efficient movement that looks like something else and barely raises a whisper from her lips, but he can see she recognised him before her eyes turned to him. There wasn’t even a whisper of suspicion even though the shadows are at their longest.
She was half way through Couch-to-5k when she died, according to her phone, so will be the perfect ratio of fat to muscle to make the d'agneau persephone sing the sins of heaven itself.
He stops at Starbucks on the way home, and it is to their great benefit that they hadn’t burned the beans that morning.
The pomegranates come from a man with links to the Palestinian smugglers who bring boxes from the holy land as disguise for the contraband nestled in the nooks. The box he buys in the docklands is adorned with Israeli stamps so good they could be real.
Hannibal has no interest in the politics, but the pomegranates are the best he’s ever tasted, a beautiful feast for the eyes even when they are whole, fitting for their reputation as the crown jewels of the underworld. They are even more delightful after they have been beaten with a wooden mallet until every jewelled seed is out and the pile of rubies are fit for a queen. His shirt looks like he has committed a bloody murder when he is done. He leaves it with the others, lest it raise suspicion.
He cooks the meat slowly in a sous vide water bath for days until all the bonds break down and the fibres go soft and deliciously anonymous. The chrome bath is top of the line and sexy in a way organic things can never be. He hadn’t intended to get one, but it was a wholly inappropriate gift from a client for saving the man’s life. Talk therapy really is such a wonderful tool.
While he shouldn’t have accepted it, for such a special occasion the longer and slower method is preferred. Cooking with the bath is a different experience to other times he’s cooked the dish. Normally, the smell pervades his clothes and whispers to him girlishly when he catches his own scent during sudden, dramatic movements. Now, he knows it is a secret simmering away in the kitchen, and only he can tell that the nutmeg is not traditional.
Inviting them is a careful dance in itself. They are wary around each other that only one with a trained eye can see, and an outright invitation can be difficult when Jack Crawford lusts for every dinner invitation going. The problem can always be solved by changing perspective, and taking into account the characteristics of the players. Will’s inadequacies make him uncomfortable around fine things. Alana will always come when called, and her magnetism is enough at this point to bend any will.
So, with a few careful words, Thursday at 8 comes around, and the curtain rises.
To his utmost surprise though, they arrive together, Alana feeling sticky with Will’s emotions and Will bring with him a jasmine note on his coat from being so close to her in the car.
Alana turns up in Stella McCartney, a dress of exquisite trompe l’oeil curves highlighted in an envious shade of green. Hannibal would have her in Herve Leger one day, before time catches up with her and the excuses she would drop become valid. Her vintage McQueen days are already behind her, sadly, but his lizard brain wants the ostentatiousness of the new season. Hannibal is not a connoisseur of women’s fashion, but there is a certain warp and weft that is better than the blunt instrument of nudity.
Will turns up in as good as he ever does, which is delicious and like a very specific kind of pornography purchased under plain covers. There are different criteria for men who know how to subjugate mechanical things. While Hannibal can kill anything with a heartbeat without a flicker of guilt, he has trouble letting the electronic go, even when half destroyed. Will saves injured animals from the justice of the wilderness but would not hesitate to throw a drawer of old cell phones in the trash.
Will is lucid and attempting charming, but either way Hannibal has his wine adulterated with something low dose and modified release, just in case.
With his guests settled with aperitifs. Tonight, something traditional in lighter than light Campari and soda, chosen to ensure the bitterness will incite any appetite and open up a palate better than his favoured tool. He excuses himself from the awkwardness of their proximity, and with a flourish, Hannibal goes to put on a show.
The first course is Imam Bayildi. The plate glistens with oil and the fat sumptuous slugs of eggplant make their attempt to ooze off their forks as he tells the story behind the dish. The nice version of the story of course, where the wife lives, and the Imam swoons from pure pleasure and not financial worries. The eggplant melts on his tongue, and droplets of golden oil catch in Will’s beard.
Hannibal loves when a table goes silent after the first bite. He loves the moans, and can tell always when they’re faked for politeness’ sake.
Instead, Alana looks at him sharply, as if he should be tortured for serving something so delicious.
(A promise, then. He feels a thrill spark up his spine.)
He presents the main course with the flair of a leading man in the decisive scene. The dish is the story of the rape of Persephone, and while he told the story of the Imam and his decadent wife with words and well placed laughter, he lets the flavours and textures of the meal speak for him and weave the myth around them through their most interpretive senses.
The flavours unfold in this way. First, tender flesh opens, that of the vegetation goddess seduced and tricked by the otherworldly beauty and taste of the pomegranate into becoming queen to the misunderstood Hades. Her husband appears as a flash of heat in the heart of the second mouthful, but Persephone herself is the queen of the underworld, and so the succulents and nightshades rise up and present themselves forward, served with a touch of dark sweetness as a hint to her reputation, her past, future and family connections. The dish ends with the addictive histamine response of honey, a soft, implacable soreness that demands another mouthful to dismiss, leaving a sensation that refuses to end with the dish, and leaves the diner physically sated but neurochemically addicted.
By the end of the meal he can feel that the balance of power has shifted - they are his more than they are each others. It was a meal consumed in near silence, the swell of the music as a quiet murmur of background noise, no more offensive than the rustle of wind through leaves, the rest being the polite sounds of teeth grinding and mastication, the thrum of throat muscles massaging the food into the stomach. The whole chemical reaction of acids squirting punctuated with the gasps of pleasure and machinations of mastication.
Hannibal doesn’t as a rule believe in dessert as the final play of a meal. If pushed, a cheese course is acceptable, but only if something special had crossed his path, unpasteurised and primal and soaked with the subtle melon taste of the best milk, served with a good bread and perfectly ripe figs. It required a very special dessert for him to consider ruining his palate with sugar after a beautiful sacrifice made to the gods of flavour. The satiation after umami and starch is far superior to anything mere saccharine, fructose or simple sweetness can ever do.
He relents with the panna cotta, set just to a point where when penetrated with a spoon it gives a psudogelatinous wobble, reminiscent of the movement of a buttock at the peak of pleasure. The flavour is the spreading warmth of cardamom and spiked with more of the intoxicating honey, a reminder in a final coda to the lamb and the promise within it. Alana’s lashes flutter close and in the low light, cast shadows so long she looks otherworldly, a spider queen with her glamour fading.
Throughout the meal runs the river of wine, which works to wear down the sharp edges of resistance to proprietary. His sommelier was right: a half-dried Amarone was the right weapon for the job. It toes the line between exquisiteness and rot, and so the old man declared it perfect for one of ‘Mr Lecter’s famous soirees’.
The fullness of the wine from the half rotten grapes sits on his tongue even after everything has tried to wash it away.
The main bottle, and the evidence of the damage caused by them lies in his recycling bin while they sit splayed and partially satiated on his sofa, moving closer and forgetting why they cannot touch each other. The lack of water, the deep red bells of the food and wine and decoration poke holes in the most sterling of resolve.
He waits a few minutes longer than it would ever take to load the dishwasher, straightening everything in the kitchen for a final time to hold himself in the wings waiting for his cue, the slick-snick of mouth on mouth - and emerges with a digestif to find them curled around each other, kissing like there is nothing in the world that can possibly stop them.
They sense him watching them, and emerge sheepishly in a mess of limbs. He can sense the moment that excuses begin to spill over their wet lips, and so strides across and takes Alana’s hands where she is smoothing her dress, her hands travelling the stretch of perfect green, and, holding her in a position where Will can see every angle of his dominance, kisses her. She is soft and moist from Will’s lips and the fourth glass of wine, and melts beautifully on his tongue.
He slides the zip down her back, each tooth undoing with an audible click in the pin-quietness of the room and he exhilarates in the feeling of sliding the jade green cap sleeves from her perfect arms. She is small and perfectly formed, his fig on the edge of overripeness, so perfect and yet so fleeting. He wishes to consume her, to confit her thighs, to eat her cunt until she screams, to feel the unctuous smear of her bone marrow on his tongue, to feel her clench around him as he slits her throat at the peak of orgasm.
All delicacies come with time, though. For now, Will is behind her, his stubble a tenderising force to her smooth neck as he kisses her earlobe to hear the hitches of her breath against Hannibal’s mouth. He cannot help but tear himself away to look at her, to catalogue everything for later.
She telegraphs her ache to be kissed across every twitch of muscle, her lips bitten and swollen and neglected. Alana Bloom knows what she wants, and she angles herself for it, presents herself towards them. The wine has not compelled her, but has suggested that there is a thirst, an itch, that must be indulged, scratched, given in to. Hannibal follows the line of her dress as it falls, unforgiving enough that it only allows for gossamer stockings and little else beneath it, her breasts cupped into a feat of engineering of a bra so thin he feels she could vibrate out of it.
Where Hannibal wants to consume Alana, he wants to take Will inside of him in a more fundamentally carnal manner. Yet, Hannibal knows the danger of eating diseased animals, he’s read of kuru and conspiracy theories, and he knows instinctively that there is a wrongness within Will Graham but it still fascinates him, and he knows that it is not the kind of wrongness that can be passed on when its rubbing insistently against his prostate.
(Hannibal knows the citrus smell of HIV anywhere and has stopped liaisons based on the amaranthine of herpes and even the more minor bacterial infections have their own scent.)
When he kisses Will over Alana’s shoulder and feels her lungs fill against his chest in arousal and shock, it is ultimately a test of Will’s intent. Alana’s responses are a given, she is obviously a woman of good taste and open mind, but it is the thrill of Will enthusiastically kissing him that wakes him up fully, as a man. Will kisses with more power than Hannibal would ever have expected, his wide, mechanically adept hands pulling Hannibal’s head where he wants it, Alana panting and amused between them as Hannibal seals his hand over her cunt, just resting there, a preemptive move of the pieces. He feels Will’s left hand try and breach her as he rolls his tongue against his, and feels shudder run through him when Will feels the cup of Hannibal’s hand already there, blocking him from taking what he wants. He surges, ruts against them as much as he can, shuffling his feet and groping . His movements shift them until they start to topple. Hannibal reasserts his dominance, breaks their scrum, letting Alana escape under his left arm and kisses Will again, his arms full of him while Alana undoes him to her best ability around them, all the buttoning and unbuttoning going on while he licks the last taste of dinner from Will’s soft palate.
He insists on taking them to bed, even though in their desperation would be happy to be bent over the arm of his chair, or tear their knees open on the carpet in a chain of fucking. Another time, he will have them in that configuration, and all others, whether in reality or in his mind. But for now, they are all in a state of undress, smiling with teeth showing and eyes wild, and Hannibal wants desperately to ruin his sheets in good lighting.
He leads them through the house, legs pumping up stairs, hips snaking round corners and all the while losing his suit as he strides and finally takes his place on the bed, every movement choreographed to be another light layer of sensuality over the whole sordid affair. They follow, and he can feel their eyes on him until they go back to each other, relieving each other of the last fragments of their clothes, the unsexy ephemera of socks and watches and fiddly clasps of bras. When they begin to kiss and touch each other again, Will giggling and Alana grasping the scallops of his hips, the little bit of fat the clusters there on his otherwise perfectly lean frame, all sinew and shit, he gives in and enjoys them for a minute, his prick lolling against his stomach as they get the humour of the situation out of the way. Hannibal gets the accessories of sex from their hiding place, and then breaks up their liaison with just a cough.
They join him on the bed and then they become a mass of grasping limbs and greedy mouths, delicious and base and everything you could desire.
They arrange it so that Hannibal has Alana in his lap, and she is even managing to make this noisy fuck seem like something less seedy by the way she moves and the sensuality of her body and desire. She looks perfect, a goddess, and he becomes more fond of her by the minute he spends inside her. It is to Will, perched by his side and enjoying the view, that he whispers, a quiet muttering that he wills that in the cacophony of his hips to be too quiet for Alana to hear, ‘I wish for you to be inside me’ with enough guttural emotion to make it sound like he is losing control, watches Will shudder and become frantic and alive behind the eyes.
Will grunts low and primal to himself as he prepares to fuck. They rearrange so that Will can get first his long fingers into him, and the promise of his deliciously fat cock that follows, as Hannibal valiantly manages to bounce Alana on his cock. She makes the most delightful noises under the dual shocks of their thrusts, and winds her hands into her hair, looking even more like the goddess in whose role he wishes to cast her. His indulgent musings abruptly stop when Will manages to get one finger into him, and so Hannibal responds by sliding two of his own either side of his cock and into Alana, and grinds the heel of his hand into her clit harder than a gentleman should (a hardness that with it comes the treasured memory of bashing her head into a wall) until she gushes her orgasm around him, soaking and screaming as she flops dramatically back onto Will’s collarbone, still grinding her hips onto him and riding out the orgasm’s haze.
She lies as a buffer between Will and Hannibal as Will shoves himself into him and then methodically fucks him. Will will never have her, but Hannibal will always get what is inevitable. Will’s prick manages to feel rough even if his strokes are as smooth as silk, an indication of just enough lube to make it work, but not enough to make it a frictionless pleasure. He can feel every vein, the plush of the blunt head and he knows he will feel this for days, a phantom cock that will never be sated as Baltimore’s high society pour their emotional guts out into his soft furnishings. He will feel this until he no longer does, until the ache is a memory and the memory is locked away tight.
With no warning Will grimaces and comes, at the same point Alana comes again from riding the ridge of scar tissue on Hannibal’s thumb he’d kept tucked just over her clit. He already had a fond memory of that callus, a souvenir of a great victory and a great meal, and now to feel Alana twitch and shudder over it, his fingers wrinkled all the more to make it stand out, just a delicious feeling that he will treasure. Coupled with Will Graham pulling out and swallowing his cock down inexpertly far, enough to bring his hand down into Will’s curls and take the pleasure of his own orgasm into Will’s mouth and then finish over the scratch of his beard as he pulls off, a beautiful picture of a man choking with wet eyes and an insulted mouth streaked with semen. He looks half strangled and half drugged, and Hannibal could not feel more convivial if Will was bleeding out over him. Will licks his lips, an acceptable form of cannibalism being taken away by the rough pad of his tongue.
His lovebirds came together, but apart. A technicality of his original plan, but one he feels he can live with.
They sleep in his bed, on either side of him. The air clears as the pheromones settle, and their bodies cool with the marinade of clean sweat, cowper’s fluid and plasma upon them. Alana’s breasts press against his arm all night, but Will sleeps as separate as he can, trembling even through the orgasms, alcohol and stabilisers that should leave him still as the dead.
Hannibal dreams of having a house full of them, of having a semblance of normality even if it is tinted green with greed. Of sharing Alana with Will and Will with Alana, of letting them have each other as a magnanimous gesture of droit de seigneur. He would eventually, when the time was absolutely right and he nothing else to lose and no more need for an experimental pair, would give in and practice the warmer rite of droit de prélassement, digging his feet into their slit open bellies on a cold winter night and feeling them pulse and wither around him. A waste of good offal, but this is the realm of fantasy where he is king.
Nevertheless, if he is Hades, and he can accept that he plays that role well, Alana is not his queen. The corruptible innocent who is seduced with a morsel of forbidden perfection is not a part she plays well. Will is destined to be his Persephone. Alana is the hero, and he knows he should be careful to not forget it.