Gosh, I'm going to miss these guys. Every time I finish a story, I want to start another. Sigh...

Anyway, here's the swan song. Hope you like and comments welcome if the mood takes you. Thanks for reading.

Will opened his eyes. Hello Darkness, my old friend.

Moonlight spilled across pale skin.

"You're awake," Hannibal's sleepy rumble suggested he had woken only moments before Will.

"More to the point, Doctor, I'm alive."

"I feel obliged to point out my motives were utterly selfish in that regard."

"Aren't they always…." mumbled Will, raising a hand to his neck while the other ran absently over the scar that adorned his lower torso.

"Will raised himself on his elbows to get a better vantage point of the shadow sitting and watching him intently from the foot of the bed in his study. "Even now? Only selfish?" he asked with a small smile. "Not even a hint of emotion? A pang of want? A stab of the love that stayed your hand?"

Hannibal did not hesitate as he crawled out of his chair, pulling off his sweater en route up the bed to hover over Will. "All of the above and more. So much more…"

He rested some of his weight into the prone empath beneath him. "In the end, Will, you will die by no others hand but my own, and even then, it will be only as an act of mercy."

Beautiful, strong, and well-made, utterly male… These are some of the physical qualities that Will has come to appreciate about Hannibal. Dark, dangerous, with a sense of constantly coiled but always controlled just barely suppressed below the surface were some of the others. Will's present goal was to spring that coil.

"You've tangled my normally well-organised threads of reality into a shimmering mess, William. What am I to do with you?"

Will reached for Hannibal, pulling their faces close. "Show me."

"Show you?"

"What it means to have saved something you love…"

Hannibal walked around Will to grab the discarded chair as he took Death's hand.

"There is a school of metaphysical thought that theorises that in the second before a person dies, their entire life flashes before their eyes," Hannibal said, after releasing Will's lips.

"Not true," Will whispered, raising his lower body from the bed as Hannibal slid his hand down beneath their waists to free Will first and then himself.

He sat before him. Hannibal had seen Death take life firsthand before. But not like this.

"Oh?" whispered Hannibal warm and enquiring as he explored Will's form with gentle lips and a warm, smooth tongue.

As he watched the burning light slowly leave Will's eyes, he suddenly became that helpless boy again. The look in Misha's eyes burning his heart: they held fear but no sense of blame, only unparalleled love for her brother and regret that he had to watch her die, that this would be his final memory of her.

"Not for me at least," Will replied, struggling to put into words the experience while Hannibal gently roused his interest, all the while kissing the bruises around his neck, bruises worn and endured for him and him alone. "I imagine each experience is unique to the individual."

As he watched Will, he realised this was someone he loved as well, and here and now, he was far from helpless in preventing his death.

"I saw a collage of my most self-affirming, life-defining moments, stretching out endless before me, in lives lived and countless lives to come. I saw my mother when I opened my eyes for the first time; the first puppy my parents bought me for my birthday; I felt the churning in my stomach on the day I realised my mother was gone and would never come back…" Will whispered as he gently touched Hannibal's face hovering above him, rocking them gently together. Will felt his legs rise up and around Hannibal's waist, enveloping him in the life-force he had reignited.

Even in the last throes of life, as Will's body spasmed with the effort to take the breath that was denied him by the rope sharp and unyielding around his throat, Hannibal felt the colours around him fade.

"My second kiss…" Will said.

"What happened to your first?" Hannibal enquired, eyes closed, losing himself to the feel of the man beneath him.

"Oh she was terrible," Will said, running his teeth light along Hannibal's jaw, as he felt Hannibal slid beneath him. "All teeth and tongue. Painfully shy. Him, on the other hand…"

There was no choice.

Hannibal couldn't restrain a smile at the thought of his first real kiss with Will Graham. "Like this?" Breaking the contact and catching his breath after a few moments, Will said, "Actually, more like a close second to a shared moment on a certain clifftop."

A world without Will was no world at all. Hannibal rose from the chair, grabbed the machete from the nearby bed and swung.

Words, like blood, like bodies shared in the dark, cleansed by moonlight, were powerful and if permitted, bind us irreparably to our destiny.

Beast and lamb, as one, would know these little deaths many times before Death Himself came to claim his due.

"Tell me about Mischa."

"I loved her more than I loved my own life."

"But you ate her…"

"Unwittingly yes, but I did not kill her."

"The ugliness of her death is the driving force of your desire to rid the world of its own ugliness. You see it as your duty." Hannibal remained silent. No words necessary. "And saving me?"

"You are as beautiful as she was. In all ways. Losing you is unthinkable and affording me the opportunity to challenge death for your soul… Thank you, Will."

He laid his hand on Will's chest to feel the beat of a heart he had almost lost, imagining as he had earlier that night, reaching through his breastbone and massaging its eerily still chambers back to life. "I tried to make a family with you. With Abigail. But when the emotional price with which that came began to manifest, I knew too many circumstances would leave my control. I had to take control back. The only means by which I could achieve that, was killing you both."

Hannibal raised himself on an elbow to look down at Will. "You were not so much trying to kill yourself as trying to save me, were you Will?"

"Busted." Will gave a non-committed shrug in answer then smiled. "In hindsight, trying to kill each other kept failing in spectacular fashion. I thought a different tactic would be in order. A compromise. Taking lives was all you knew, knowing how to save them, my forte."

"Wounds of love lie as deep as the scars left in their place sit high and angry against all we do to try and heal them," Hannibal whispered as Will rolled him onto his back and silenced him.

Hannibal moved beneath Will like the sea, tame but untamed and so much still to be chartered. Will never took his eyes from his face and anchored his body to the motion, careful not to jar nor rock too hard, merely lull his body back to life, back to this moment.

"So. What now, Dr Lecter?"

"Well, I have a standing appointment with one Mr Brookes. Perhaps we should return for a second course…"

"Brookes…. I meant to ask why you had spared his life. Aside from wishing to avoid unwanted attention which I'm sure you would have handled with your usual skill."

The truth is, Will, I couldn't bring myself to kill him." He paused. "I couldn't bring myself to end him…" he trailed his lips across Will's shoulders, eyes soft and warm, "without you."

"Without you by my side," he continued across his cheek to take Will's lips in his own. "After the Dragon, the act lacked the dimension, colour and depth I had come to associate with the experience."

Will's eyes kept unwavering contact with Hannibal. "I predict the Chronicles of one Hannibal Lecter are about to turn a very interesting page…"

END