Everything belongs to Thomas Harris and that adorable mad genius Bryan Fuller.

When he finds her again she's in Sugarloaf Key because she dislikes summer and heat, and she's drunk.

She's always drunk now.

She looks up from the boat engine she's viciously taking apart

(ripping is a lot easier than mending these days)

and sees him standing there, and without warning it all comes back, slashes her cruelly across the face, and how she remembers. Remembers what it felt like to kill with him. Remembers the tearing of flesh; the blood, the ecstasy. The dark power. Remembers being an apex predator alongside him, slaying a great dragon together. Invincible.

Oh, the thrill.

...and Hannibal's mouth quirks just so when he takes in her blown pupils, the hazy lust on her face.

Of course he does not look at all out of place here, standing impeccable and tall in her filthy workshop, with his 5000-dollar suit and his immaculate hair and the lazy death in his eyes.

That fucking bastard.

"Hello, Will."

The past echoes all around her as she allows her glasses to slide down her nose, denies him full access to her eyes because she knows it will irk him, and because she refuses to give him a fast way into her mind. He'll take what he wants anyway, but she doesn't have to make it easy. She looks out the open door, at the white sand and blue skies and sunshine, and she detests it all.

"My name... it isn't Will any longer. Not here." And she puts her wrench down, slowly, so that he sees her hands at all times, then wipes them on her greasy jeans. She enjoys the infinitesimal twitch around his eyes at her crudeness. "What do you want?"

His face remains blank, even as she knows her own betrays everything. Especially to him.

Always to him.

"I'm calling on you to see how you are doing now. After."

Ah, yes. After. After they had felled the dragon together, after he had finally made her understand, see.

("it's beautiful")

After they had embraced, covered in each others blood, and after she had thought about kissing him, but hurled them both from the clifftop instead.

A noble, feckless, failed attempt to rid the world of both of their evil.

She would - should - have died cradled by waves, and she is still quite put out that he had refused to allow it. Selfish. He was always so selfish.

They were both still healing from the fall when she limped away into the night. She was too filled of self loathing and terror of this new understanding to be anywhere near him. She didn't kid herself that he didn't know she was leaving, but for whatever reason he had turned his back, had let her go, and she has been busy drinking herself into an anonymous grave ever since.

He, on the other hand, she is certain that he has been living lavishly and lasciviously somewhere opulent and exotic, never one to deny himself.

Now, however, it appears his infinite patience is wearing thin.

She decides to stall for time. She grabs at the open bottle with almost steady hands and drinks deep swallows that she makes deeper still when she notices the ghost of a fidget that betrays Hannibal's distaste. Then she wipes her lips on her sleeve and decides to stall a bit longer.

He knows her, yes, but she knows him too. They are, after all, identically different.

"Jack?"

His sigh is silent, but it is there. He does, however, decide to humour her. For the moment. "Uncle Jack, and his brethren with him, remains unaware of our current whereabouts, and in addition our good health. I imagine both of us should like to keep it that way."

She doesn't answer, but instead rolls her next question on her tongue even though it burns like acid, is afraid to ask it because she knows, she knows, that Hannibal always keeps his promises.

"Alana?"

"Safe. For now."

She recognises that for what it is: a bartering chip (hers). Blackmail (his).

"Bedelia?"

He licks his lips, and his smile is monstrous. "Delicious."

Will flinches, even though she herself had informed Bedelia what fate would likely befall her, even though, really, she finds that she doesn't care.

Enough with the stalling. "Why are you here, Hannibal?"

He stills, the way she used to see him do so often. When catching a scent, be it blood or an emotion for him to exploit or manipulate.

"I came to see about the teacup. However, I fear I find it more broken than even before."

She can't stand it anymore. Her entire being is reaching for him and recoiling from him at the same time, and she is being ripped apart as she is always being ripped apart when he is near, and she wishes she had more than one bottle to hand.

"You cried for me. Do you recall? You spilled my guts in your kitchen, and then you wept. One tear. Even as I was dying I wanted to lick that tear from your face. Keep it inside of me forever, just as you wanted to keep me. And even though we forgave each other as only we can forgive each other

(harpy knife, bone saw)

I don't want to see you. I don't want anything to do with you." God, she's slurring, and her lips burn of whisky and motor oil and death. She shakes her short messy curls out of her face and runs a grease-covered finger over the scar traversing her cheek.

There are more scars on her body, scars hidden under her unflattering, shapeless jeans and plaid shirt. Many from him, but not all.

He lowers his head, his voice deepen, and she cuts herself bloody on his purpose.

"I tire of this, Will. This is beneath you. Though I am benevolent" and here he studiously ignores her snort, "and will give you one chance. Run, Will. Run. I will give you a fair head start. Should you truly escape me, then you are free to continue as you please. Drink yourself to death. Live out your life in obscurity. However..."

Here his features sharpen, and just like that he becomes Hannibal the otherworldly god of death, a demon, Satan, and her breath quickens.

"...if I catch you, then you are mine, as you have always been mine, Will, and you will submit, you will accept

(me, you, us)

and we will be together. Do we have an agreement?"

Her mouth is too dry for sound even though she wants to laugh when suddenly she thinks of Faust. So she simply nods.

He inclines his head and his eyes are hell.

"Then run, Will."

She heads for Louisiana, some kind of fucked up need in the hinterlands of her mind steering her back to the swamp whence she came. As soon as she gets there she remembers why she left, why she grew to love winter.

Even so she haunts her childhood and adolescence for a while, flits like a ghost between the places that meant something when she grew up. The bayou where her daddy fished for catfish, the ruins of her old school. The fishing shack where she lost her virginity, the lonely stretch of road where her mama died.

She drives into New Orleans, the place where her mind first began to truly fracture, and she walks the streets of the Garden District to the beat of a voodoo drum only she can hear. Inhales magnolia and gardenia, sweet like summer and rot.

She doesn't stay long. Hannibal will have guessed that she'd come, probably knew before she did herself.

She leaves, and she doesn't know where she is going next.

It's best that way.

She goes to the mountains, desolation and starry skies and fly fishing. The wind up here is as sharp and keen as Hannibal's linoleum knife, and she wades into streams but can find no peace. There wanders elk across the water, and she averts her gaze.

The peaks are covered in snow even in summer, and she would have liked to be able to stay, but she feels like a flower in glass, only more breakable still, and she can sense how threadbare her mind is becoming, more threadbare even than when she was wholly with him.

The absence of him is spreading cracks all across her, has for some time now

(she can feel them creeping across her breasts and her face and her eyes and her soul, she is turned into a mosaic, yes a mosaic, all fractured pieces forming the eeriest pictures)

and she heads down the mountain lest the winds shatters her into a million pieces.

The note he leaves her when he nearly catches her down in Boulder shows her that, as always, their minds are never far from each other, how their minds are straining to meld.

"There are so many colours of you, Will. You are so like an opal, precious, full of flashes and ancient mysteries.

Opals, Will, have the density of glass."

She loops to Baltimore, back to familiar skylines and familiar places but no familiar faces. She couldn't bear seeing them.

She stands on the pavement outside the house on Chandler Square, right where Alana once lay crumpled and broken by her feet. She thinks of Abigail inside that house, how Hannibal extended her as a gift

(mended teacup; precious daughter)

then immediately took her back and shattered her all over again.

Oh Abigail.

That night she found out what it meant to break the heart of a man who thought he had none, and she can still remember the smell, the feel, of hers and Abigail's mingled blood. He'd gutted her, body and heart, and he had left footprints made of her blood as he'd walked away into the rain.

She runs her hand along the scar on her stomach, and she doesn't go inside. There are no ghosts left for her in there anymore.

How she misses talking to her ghosts.

She leaves Baltimore again when she starts seeing the black stag weaving in and out of traffic, watching her from dark corners of seedy bars.

Hannibal is close.

She's in a convenience store while passing through New Jersey when she meets the eyes of a man across the candy aisle, and she immediately knows that he is a killer.

She smiles at him, and flirts awkwardly, disjointedly, but with determination.

They head back to her motel, both of them day-dreaming of killing the other, and it feels almost comfortable, this, but excitement and heartbeats rushes in her ears.

She allows him to kiss her so that she may gain a better understanding, and she manages not choke on his tongue as the pendulum swings and she sees.

(he hates his mother and he hates all girls and women and he likes to suck blood from hearts as they beat. He likes small hearts the best)

She wants to kill him with her bare hands but he's so much bigger than her. Instead she slips her harpy knife into his lumbar, paralyses him, then is free to work on him with abandon.

She makes patterns of him, discernible only to her, and looks with fascination at all the blood on her hands

("beautiful")

even though she's not yet ready to give in.

But Hannibal is closer.

Much closer.

In Savannah she befriends a stray dog. It's an ugly thing with kind eyes, and she feeds him cheeseburgers from the diner on Abercorn Street.

He takes to following her around, pads quietly behind her wherever she goes, and she finds herself listening for cloven hoofs on the hot tarmac instead.

She stays longer than she should, roams with the gentle old dog, Spanish moss caressing her face.

Walks into fall.

She longs for winter.

When she moves on again it hurts her how easy it is to leave the dog behind.

It is as she is holed up in Nebraska, in the shower stroking cheap motel soap into her skin

(because Hannibal would hate it)

that she knows for certain that she was never intended to win. The mongoose skull waiting for her on the bedside table when she steps out of the bathroom helps her reach that conclusion.

He did this, didn't he, set her loose as prey in a hunt entirely by his design. So that she would run and flit around her own history, and finally realise she has nothing and no one but him.

Oh his manipulations, his infernal puppeteering. He has never played fair, has he? Never in the past, and definitely not now. She knows that she is too important to him for him to play fair. He will cheat and he will tear the world apart to have her, because he is a glutton, and he's never denied himself anything in all his life.

She sits in her towel, drinks deeply and watches the snow fall quietly over the parking lot.

Winter at last.

She knows that if she is still not willing to accept them when - not if - Hannibal catches her, no matter what he might be saying, he'll kill her. No gutting as a means to gently chide. No sending animal-men after her as a vexed, half hearted reciprocation.

("Now we're even. Even stevens.")

No. This would be real, true, like nothing he had ever tried to do to her before. Of course, he had once attempted to eat her brain, but she had tried to kill him with her forgiveness first, so that one was perhaps understandable. Hannibal did have an inclination towards overreaction when his romantic overtures got rejected.

She smiles wryly at her distorted reflection in the window, then she gets dressed, and then she heads back to Wolf Trap.

She doesn't go inside her old house, she can't bring herself to do that. Instead she heads towards the treeline, to the dark woods that not even snow and moonlight can illuminate.

Heads towards the vault of her hallucinations, walks among them and smiles softly in familiarity.

She wanders among the trees, through the darkness where Randall Tier once hunted her before she hunted him right back

(and she displayed him so beautifully, didn't she, turned him into the finest work of art, allowed him to become)

and the dark feathered stag walks before her, leads her deeper and deeper, and she feels honestly, truly home.

Then the stag disappears into shadows, she steps into a clearing, and she feels Hannibal before she sees him, a solid, unworldly presence behind her

(is this what Beverly felt when she stood in Hannibal's basement, ravenous death at her back?)

and she closes her eyes, breathes, exhales, then slowly turns around.

He is standing in among the trees, impossibly still, impossibly large, looming, a shadow swallowing all light. She swears the branches and the writhing shades form antlers on his head, make twisted wings grow out his back. He is a black hole, and she feels the impossible pull, the gravity of him tearing at her limbs, and it's a struggle to stay still.

But she does. She stays still, and their eyes meet, and she knows she has lost.

Is lost.

He knows too, and he comes for her, faster than she would have thought possible even though she knows him, a blur of teeth and death and reaving intent.

He slams into her, and then slams them both into the trunk of an ancient tree

(she knows this tree from her hallucinations, yes once she killed him by this tree)

and just enough moonlight filters through its twisted branches that she can see his face. The dark sharp lines and greedy, cruel mouth and glinting predator eyes. He has rid himself of every last stitch of his human veil, and there is only a primal, ancient monster pressed up against her.

Oh, there have been many names for him, throughout cultures and times, and he has survived them all.

She feels him, all of him, and their eyes meet and their hearts beat in tandem, beats in time with the pitch black river drowning them both

("Ever seen blood in moonlight? It appears quite black.")

and she keens then, loud, because there is nowhere to run to, nowhere to go, and she doesn't want there to be.

He smiles at the plaintiveness of her voice, grabs both her hands in one of his and wrenches her arms above her head, presses her wrists against age old bark, and he isn't gentle. Her back arches this way, her throat bares for him, and she offers it up, soft skin and thrumming jugular.

Appease the beast.

His teeth immediately at her throat, nibbles, sucks, doesn't tear, is careful not to draw blood, and she thinks, no she knows that this close to his trueness he might not be able to stop if he scents its copper tang.

Then he moves up again and finally, after so long, he finds her mouth with his and it hurts more than it should but then he always was a predator, was he not. He savages her lips, nips at her, growls low in his chest. With his free hand he finds the rushing pulse at her throat, and he taps his fingers in rhythm, smiles against her mouth, seems to find pleasure in the life inside her veins. She licks into him, tries to take as much from him as he is taking from her, and fancies that she can taste the blood of all his victims on his tongue.

Over his shoulder she sees the stag standing in darkness, and she meets its steady gaze with wide eyes and a trembling smile. It starts moving towards them both, across the clearing, sure of step, so beautiful and full of horrors to the brim. She sees a multitude of black shades in its feathered hind, she sees antlers sharper and thornier than Hannibal's mind, and she sees her own reflection in its terrible, solemn eyes.

It comes to a stop right next to Hannibal, who pays it no heed. Instead he steps back just enough to gain the space to wrench her clothes apart, rips open her shirt, pushes her bra up and pants down, and removes as much as his own clothing as is necessary. Will wants to run her fingers across the scar from the bullet he took for her, but he still holds her wrists manacled with his hand. Then, it's naked skin against naked skin, his chest pressing against her nipples, tender from the cold and all the insanity of this.

He lifts her one-armed, she is held up by his hips and the trunk of the tree, oh, she will wear the imprints forever. With one forceful thrust he is inside her, and he smiles briefly at her pained gasp.

Then they settle into each other, and she falls in earnest.

She has spent her entire life inside the heads of monsters, but never before has she had a monster so physically, so viscerally inside her.

But now, as Hannibal is thrusting deep within her, and his eyes glow maroon in the dark above her, then she sees. She sees everything he has ever done. All the beauty, all the evil, all the blood. Everything. It pours into her from him, becomes something shared. Every deed, every death, every little miracle, becomes a small pearl of Hell held delicately on her tongue before she swallows it whole.

Suddenly he pulls out, away, and she doesn't recognise the wail at the loss as hers. But he simply swirls her around and down, down into snow and earth and twisted roots, pushes her to her hands and knees. His hand is heavy between her shoulder blades, ensuring she inhales the rot and rebirth of the soil beneath her. And he snaps inside her again, savagely, surges her forward before he holds her still for him with one hand tangled in her hair and the other bruising her hip. It is more this way, unbearable, painful, not enough.

The stag moves to stand right in front of her, so close she can smell the musk and forest and death in its pelt, so close she can feel its steady breaths on her face. Hannibal wrenches her hair harder, forces her neck back, and again she sees.

How the stag's antlers grow larger and higher, up into the ancient tree, twisting and bending, turning to shadows, shadows merging with branches, until animal and tree are one. The creature opens its mouth and bellows, a call of pain and rage and rapture, and she is prostate by its tangled feet.

Hannibal is rutting into her harder and harder, is shaking the very bones of her loose, she hears her marrow slosh, and all of her is reaching back for him, reaching around him

("It's all starting to blur. You and I...have begun to blur.")

and then it's explosion before implosion. He roars with the stag, above and behind her, holds her so hard she shatters, the broken pieces of her time travelling along with him. Back…back… back before time, before the universe, the atoms of them wrapping about each other then merging, white-hot and eager. Whiplash as they hurtle forward again. Lava, fire, ash. Then greenery; lush, damp, and enormous creatures roaming the earth. She sees fire again, destruction, the end of times, Ragnarök. Then light once more, humanoids leaving trees, forward forward, accomplishments, inventions, prospering, forever forward, but she sees how everything is heading towards dusk again, another end.

As a steady (forever) presence next to her, inside her, he smiles indulgently at her delight, her astonishment, her terror.

He's seen all this before, after all, this eternal cycle of death and rebirth.

The two of them will survive the next end too. Together they will.

("We're conjoined. I'm curious whether either of us can survive separation.")

They are eternal, now.

Reversed in time, gathered back together.

Then they're back in the now, here, she pressed deep into the ground with him on her back, sinking and soaring, through snow and earth, air and sky, and she tastes decay and life, him, deep down in her throat and her heart.

They seem wrapped in roots and each other, at the base of this ancient tree, offerings in a ceremony of his that she cannot name.

At last he pulls her to her feet, wraps his arms about her, kisses her forehead, her eyes. His voice is still deep, a growl, the beast of him unwilling to entirely retreat, simmering just beneath the surface. His words, however, are clear and refined.

"You are mine now. Truly mine. And do not fret, Will. You are too rare, too fine, to kill. You would be wasted even in the most decadent, exquisite meal. No. Rather... neither of us will ever be alone again."

("Even as the possibility of free will dissipates, my experience of it remains the same. I continue and feel and act as though I have it")

She is still mostly naked, standing there in the snow with her torn clothes and aching nipples and bruised mouth, but she isn't cold, because he is near her, against her, and he burns. "Where now?"

He smiles, and it is cruel and full with honest delight.

"Everywhere."

a/n: Well. To be frank I just felt like trying my hand at some good old descriptive smut, but despite my best intentions I balked at going TOO much into the nitty gritty, because apparently I'm a prude. Can read alllllll the smut with feckless delight, can't write it myself. Hey ho. Maybe next time. Meanwhile this turned into an unholy mashup of mythologies, with some smut on top.

As usual: English is not my first language, and no beta, so please let me know if you spot mistakes (seriously, DO. Every time I reread something I've written I cringe and blush at the mistakes I see. I need a beta. Anyone wanna be my beta?). In addition, the English I speak and write is UK English, and so I might've tripped up trying to "Americanise" this.

I'm thinking a Show!Hannibal and Clarice next. Perhaps Will Graham too. A jolly, fucked-up triad.