Sangservi

The bright light of the refrigerator stands out in the darkness of the house. Will stands in front of it, drumming his fingertips on the top of the door. He should get rid of the thing and buy a mini-fridge. He doesn’t use all this room any more; it had been packed to bursting back when he needed to feed both his own human body, and the seven canines of his pack. Now it’s just him and Winston. Enough ground meat and vegetables to keep a single dog happy doesn’t take up much room, and neither do enough blood bags to keep a single fledgling vampire-- well, if not happy, exactly, at least satiated.

He reaches his hand toward the top shelf, as if he was going to convince himself to choose one. Pig, cow, goat, horse. The horse had sounded a bit exotic at the market, though it doesn’t really taste much different from cow. A little more protieny and less rich, perhaps. Almost gamey. But cold and dead, all the same.

Will sighs. He could go hunting, if he had the energy for it; catch a few squirrels, maybe a rabbit. Enough for the night. But his head aches, hell, his teeth ache with tiredness and hunger, and the idea of putting on his boots and tramping out into the woods to find dinner is exhausting. He tries to remember what day it is. He teaches class in the afternoon and evenings on Thursday, and yes, today is a Thursday. One more day, and then he’ll have the weekend, unless Jack drags him somewhere. He can go hunting then, maybe even something larger-- get out the shotgun and bring down a deer. He can drink enough to leave him at least able to remember the feeling of warm blood on his lips for another week.

He closes the fridge, even though he’d meant to choose something out of it. Winston looks up at him, like he can tell what Will is thinking, which is that Winston smells fucking delicious. Will bends down to scratch his hears. “Sorry, buddy,” he mutters, though he’s not sure what he’s apologizing for. The fact that the smell even registered as potential food is enough to make him retch, though he still hasn’t ascertained if vampires can vomit. He hasn’t yet, but there’s a first time for everything.

He sits down on his folded-out bed, and Winston follows. Winston always follows. Will watches him settle at the foot of the bed, and wonders for the thousandth time if it wouldn’t have been better-- kinder to Winston, though not to himself-- to re-home him too. Winston misses the rest of the pack. He’s here out of loyalty, and Will wishes he could reward that loyalty more than he has.

He pulls out his phone, stares at the home screen, then thumbs it dark again. He’s hungry. He’s going to have to eat something, and soon. He’d never been tempted to order takeout when he was a human; he was always too acutely aware that whatever poor gig-economy sucker ended up driving it out to him was highly unlikely to be compensated properly for his efforts. It hadn't seemed worth it for a limp pizza or whatever else you can order online these days.

He pulls out the phone again and thumbs over the app. Sangservi, a little white logo with a tastefully abstract red centre that could have been in the shape of a droplet with a fang entering it, or could not.

If it had been cheap and exploitative, the vampire equivalent of ordering a hooker off of craigslist, he probably would never have tried it in the first place. There were plenty of other places that human blood could be bought and sold, after all, both fresh and bagged; and although none of them were strictly illegal, so long as the vampire controlled themselves and didn’t accidentally turn the transaction into a homicide, they had an air of general skeeziness that Will didn’t particularly want to deal with. Or perhaps it was just the people he didn’t want to deal with: asking for what you want, paying for it, wondering how the human offering their body for consumption feels about the whole thing, if the cash is worth it for them.

Sangservi is different. It had gotten attention from the legit media, for one, when it opened: New app brings meal delivery to the night set, the headlines had ran. And unlike most meal delivery, as Will had discovered scrolling through the documentation for potential human workers, it paid well enough to make a good living off of. The humans-- servers, they were called, like they were waiters at a restaurant bringing out something other than their own blood-- interviewed in the media all seemed genuinely happy with the job. When Will tentatively signed up for the app, curious but never intending to actually use it, he was required to upload two forms of government ID and the certificate of workplace safety that most employers require before even considering hiring a vamp. And in the terms and conditions, he’d been informed that servers are required to check in via video call not more than fifteen minutes following the conclusion of each appointment, and failure to do so would trigger prompt police contact from the app’s head office.

He’d been drunk the first time he tried it; he’d simply hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button on the app, used to order a random server instead of scrolling through profiles and choosing a specific one. A motherly-looking woman had shown up at his house forty-five minutes later, supremely confident in all of the ways that Will was not, setting up at his kitchen table with a small plastic sheet and gauze for afterwards. He’d wanted to protest that he should take care of her after, but she so clearly had her own plan and method that he felt himself released from the responsibility, and had taken her proffered wrist without so much as a word. The first long pull of blood from a real, living, breathing human being had been so good that he’d found himself flushed, panting, and a little turned on by the time he’d sucked as long as the little timer on the app allowed. “Sorry,” he’d muttered, and she’d returned “Nothing to be sorry for, sweetheart,” nearly businesslike, as she wrapped her wrist in gauze. He’d realized with a jolt that he had nothing to offer her to eat, but she waved him off and pulled a juicebox and a large chocolate chip cookie wrapped in plastic out of her purse. “I’m all set,” she’d said as she made her way back out to her car. “You have a nice night, now.”

He had had a nice night, for the first time in recent memory. So he’d ordered again, a few times; always allowing the app to send him someone at random, always ending the session feeling better than he thought possible, despite the edge of hunger that always accompanied an incomplete feeding session. No matter. He has his woods for animals to drink dry; Sangservi provides humans with no expectation of human contact. Which makes sense; to them, he isn’t human. Just a thing who hungers for their blood, politely and with a good price attached. It’s easy.

Now, his finger hovers over the app. He shouldn’t, or at least, feels like he shouldn’t and isn’t entirely sure why. Perhaps his inner voice is just the mother he never had, saying such things as you don’t need to order takeout, you’ve plenty of blood in the fridge. It feels wasteful. It’s expensive, but it’s not like he doesn’t have the money; he doesn’t have much else to spend it on, no marked vices or expensive hobbies. But it’s late; even if there was a server willing and able to drive out to his isolated corner of Wolf Trap, he would still feel bad about making them do it. Will’s eyesight is now nearly as good in the dark as it used to be during the day; but he’s aware that that isn’t the case for the servers, who would be running the risk of hitting a deer, or worse, just by coming to satisfy his hunger.

It’s strange how this much, at least, feels so much like being a human; it’s perhaps the most human thing about him. Eventually, plain old hunger always wins out over good decision-making. He hits the button to order a random server, and chooses wrist bite from the drop-down menu. It takes about five minutes to match, waiting for someone to check their phone and accept the job. Then a little map appears, with an icon of a car, an estimate of the time remaining, and the text, “Server Hannibal Lecter is on his way!”

Will looks at the map. “Oh, fuck, the poor guy is coming all the way from Baltimore,” he mutters. His finger hovers over the “cancel” button. The guy must be really desperate for money, if he’s going to drive from Baltimore to Wolf Trap at this hour. The location is only approximate for the first leg of the trip, to prevent any clients using the map to figure out where their servers might live, but Will does notice that he isn’t coming from a particularly run-down area of Baltimore; rather a nice one, actually. Maybe he’s coming from a previous client. Servers are allowed to do up to two a night, though it seems that most stick with one. Lecter would still be paid for the driving he’s already done if Will cancels now; he’s guaranteed a small flat fee as soon as he accepts the job.

Will doesn’t cancel the order, but he does go to the fridge and pull out a blood bag at random to take the edge off. It’s better not to be really hungry for the server; it’s easier to be polite, to stop right away when the timer goes off and not try to cram in one last pull. Fresh human blood should be savoured like dessert, not guzzled, at least in reality while the human is right in front of you.

Will’s been on the subreddits, the discord chat groups. He knows he’s not alone in what comes after; that when the server has left, is far enough away that he couldn’t catch up to them if he tried, the floodgates of his mind open and all he can think about is devouring them. It’s normal. That doesn’t mean he wants them to know about it.

He cleans up the living room a little, folding the bed back into a futon, then sits down and tries to grade papers, which is a strange aspect of his job he hadn’t exactly been intending for himself when he’d first joined the police force. He always imagines his father sitting in the corner of the room, drinking whisky and laughing at him, a schoolteacher reading student essays with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose. His father would probably find the blood bag by his elbow and the willing human on his way to be sucked significantly less funny, but luckily Will Sr. isn’t around to see that part. The papers are drivel, as per usual, but then he hadn’t really expected much more than excited frothing when he’d given an assignment on the Chesapeake Ripper’s latest sounder. Most serial killers either stuck to vampires-- in which case it could be assumed they were a vampire themselves-- or to humans, in which case the species of the killer was usually obvious in autopsy. The Ripper takes both, and his designs are something beyond anything Will has felt before. He wasn’t expecting insight from his students, perhaps just hoping that their incoherent flailing would knock something loose in his own mind.

By the time he sees the flash of headlights through the front window, it’s past midnight. He lets the server knock on the door, instead of going to meet him; it’s less intimidating, he figures, to follow regular social protocols. He waits a few moments before getting up and answering the knock, as if he hadn’t been sitting here waiting anxiously for this all night.

Server Hannibal Lecter certainly doesn’t look intimidated. He’s slightly taller than Will, lean but with a coiled strength in his body that speaks of heartiness and man Will really wishes his first reaction to every human he meets wasn’t to evaluate their physical appearance for clues as to their nutritional value, but apparently that’s just how it is now. He stands aside and gestures to welcome the guy in. “Thanks so much for coming all the way out here,” he says. “I really appreciate it.”

“You’re very welcome,” says the server, and holds out his hand to shake. “I am Hannibal.”

“Um. Will.” Will shakes it. Most of the servers don’t actually want to do this kind of stuff, human introduction stuff. It’s probably easier for them if they don’t think of him as a person, which is completely fair, since he isn’t.

Hannibal looks down in surprise at Winston, who is sitting at his feet with a hopeful expression. Will snaps his fingers. “Winston, no,” he says. “He doesn’t have anything for you. Sorry,” he adds to Hannibal. “He doesn’t usually do that.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Hannibal says to Winston. “Had I known you were here, I would have brought nourishment for you as well.” He says to Will, “I had been engaged in making sausages immediately before I came here, and I’m sure he can smell it.”

Will smiles a little at Winston’s hopeful expression. “That’s probably it, yeah,” he says, then points towards the dog bed next to the space heater. “Go lie down,” he commands, and Winston does, somewhat forlornly.

Hannibal carries a leather supply-bag, which he places on the table and unzips, although he doesn’t sit down. “In my experience it’s unusual for your kind for live with animals,” he says. “Or is there more to Winston than meets the eye?”

“He’s not a werewolf, if that’s what you’re asking,” says Will. Now that would be an odd pairing indeed. “I used to have a whole pack of dogs, before I was turned. Most couldn’t stand the smell of me after. Winston was the only one who stayed.”

“Loyal,” says Hannibal. “I will have to bring some sausage next time. Where would you like me?”

The insinuation that, firstly, Will will order Hannibal again, when he’d chosen randomly this time, and secondly, that Hannibal will want to come again, is so understated as to almost slip under Will’s defences. Almost. Instead he just stands gaping, trying to answer the question. He’s never had a server who asked that before; they’ve always just settled themselves at the kitchen table, the most convenient and impersonal place to do it. He would never have asked for something else. “The table is fine,” he says, but it comes out sounding like a question.

“Very well.” Hannibal sits down at the table, and pulls out a square of thin vinyl, which he places on the table, and then a microfibre towel on top of it. Will can see into the bag, and gives in to the probably-too-invasive desire to know what someone like Hannibal considers essential supplies when getting his blood sucked. He makes out a tumbler of what looks like orange juice, and a glass container of food that he can’t quite see. He can also see a foam pad, like the kind that gardeners use to kneel in the mud, and he can’t stop his eyes from flicking over to the chair beside his folded-up bed. He can’t imagine what else the foam could possibly be for, and now that the thought has occurred to him, he can’t erase the image of Hannibal kneeling in front of him, presenting his body to be consumed.

No. He can’t do that. There’s no way. It’s too-- intimate. Too much like paying for something that ought not to be bought and sold.

Hannibal’s soft voice interrupts his panic. “It’s your time, Will,” he says. “You may drink wherever it suits you.”

A high, nervous laugh escapes Will. “You sound like a shrink.”

“My apologies. That is, in fact, what I am, though I usually try to disguise it better than that.”

“You’re-- really?” Will sits down in the upholstered chair, feeling like he needs to settle somewhere. He’s never asked a server about their life before, never wanted to. He probably shouldn’t now, either. They have good reasons to not want their clients to know too much about them, and the power differential in between them right now might make Hannibal feel obliged to answer.

“Really.” Hannibal just sits at the table, the corner of his mouth turned very slightly upwards. He looks as if he’s waiting for something. He’ll be happy to answer the question, Will senses, but only if Will finds the nerve to ask it.

“I... don’t mean to be rude,” Will tries, “But why... if you’re a-- psychologist--”

“Psychiatrist.”

“Psychiatrist,” Will corrects himself, “Why do you...?”

“Sell my blood?” Hannibal takes pity on him after a moment of pause. “I find that both of my lines of work benefit me in similar ways, through different channels: I provide something of value to someone else, and am rewarded by the chance to witness a tangible change that I have caused.”

Will doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t miss the fact that Hannibal has said someone else; as if his vampire clients are just as human, just as worthy of being provided with help and nourishment, as his human ones.

He also manages to tactfully avoid saying And I’m sure the money doesn’t hurt out loud, but apparently Hannibal reads it in his face anyway. “And while the extra income does not have a direct impact on my quality of life,” he adds, “Payment is also a marker of value and respect in society, and I treat it as such in this line of work. I am happy to do for the fees commanded by Sangservi”-- he pronounces it like it’s French, which was probably the intention of the app’s name but Will’s never heard anyone actually say it that way-- “things that I would not do for paltry sums.”

Will nods. It’s odd how this makes him want to establish himself in Hannibal’s eyes: that he’s not just some lowlife looking for a suck wherever he can get it. “I’ve only ever bought human blood this way,” he says, and it comes out sounding much more vulnerable than he’d intended. “All of the other markets for it are-- I can’t do it.”

“It is a fact I have observed both in my professional practices and my daily life that the things most usually done for free are the things that ought to command the highest price when bought and sold,” says Hannibal. “Art, sex, and blood.”

Will swallows. Hannibal is looking at him, appraising, head tilted slightly to the side. Will allows himself to smell him, really smell him like he tries to close himself off to when he’s around colleagues and students and had only ever barely allowed himself to savour before tasting a server. Even from several feet away, Hannibal’s blood thrums underneath his skin and his scent wafts into the air like perfume, deep and rich. He smells like the inside of himself more than anyone else Will has ever met. Will wants to bite him, of course, but an even longer-suppressed urge is also rising inside of him: he wants to get inside of him. He wants to understand him, and that feels more dangerous than the fangs pricking against his tongue.

“Have you ever had a... bad experience with a client?” Will asks, then quickly clarifies, “One of us, I mean. Not your patients. Surely some must be...” He’s not sure how to finish that sentence. Boorish? Violent? Then he starts wishing he could stuff the words back into his mouth, despite the genuine curiosity behind them. He’s asking Hannibal if he’s ever been assaulted. Possibly that’s not information he wants to share. But now that Will is talking with a server, really talking, he can’t help himself.

Hannibal doesn’t look offended. Instead, he actually smiles, a minuscule twitch that nevertheless seems to light up his entire face. “I assure you that any bad experiences inflicted upon me by your kind have been, in the final calculation, entirely mutual,” he says.

Will stares. That seems kind of unlikely, but the more he breathes in the scent of Hannibal’s rich blood pumping away underneath muscle and sinew, the less unlikely it seems. He wonders if there’s a stake hidden away somewhere in his supply bag, and only barely manages to restrain himself from asking.

“Okay,” he says instead. “This... here would be nice. If you don’t mind.”

Hannibal looks amused, and he stands to take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves. His forearms are strong underneath the expensive fabric. Will wonders if anyone’s ever stained his shirt with blood, and how he felt about it. He’ll have to be careful. It also occurs to Will that the kind of person who works for a vampire blood delivery service and doesn’t even need the money probably, on some level, enjoys being manhandled by vampires. It’s not like it’s exactly an uncommon fantasy, though it tends to dissipate pretty quickly in the presence of an actual vampire who actually wants to bleed to dry. But Hannibal clearly has confidence in himself, warranted or not. So when he picks up his slightly ridiculous foam kneepad and steps towards Will’s chair, Will gestures at the floor to his right, and says, “Here. Kneel.”

Hannibal sinks to his knees gracefully, and nerves explode in Will’s stomach to the exact same degree that hunger aches. It had felt so damn good, just to relax that much-- to tell a human to kneel for him, and have his order obeyed. He hadn’t even glamoured him, at least not consciously, but he hadn’t needed to. Hannibal wanted to obey, or at least, he has a strange kind of philosophical respect for the mechanism by which Will is paying to have him obey. It makes him want more. He shouldn’t feed the hunger inside of him that wants to rip Hannibal apart, but he also wants to trust that his resolve will hold. Hannibal, it seems, trusts him. Will wants to trust himself.

“Left or right?” he asks, and Hannibal raises his left arm; usual, since most people are right-handed, but it’s still polite to ask. Will grasps it and pulls Hannibal’s wrist towards him.

His arm is tanned but the wrist is pale, veins standing out blue-tinted through the skin. Will holds it in both hands, one at Hannibal’s wrist and one at his elbow, and brings his nose to the skin. He smells like iron and a little bit like wine-- not boozy, but earthy, carefully fermented. Will closes his eyes and just lets himself smell. He’s never done this before-- not with a server, not with an animal kill. But Hannibal’s framing-- art, sex, and blood-- has turned this from a simple meal into something else. Hannibal knows the value of what he’s offering. He wants it savoured.

Hannibal is still and pliant, until he speaks softly: “Tell me, Will,” he murmurs, “Why did you choose a wrist bite?”

Will opens his eyes. The app offers two options, wrist and neck. Neck is more expensive, naturally, as it’s more painful and taxing to the server, and requires closer proximity.

“It’s less personal. I’ve never bitten anybody at the neck,” he admits. “I’d be afraid of...”

Of never stopping. That fear doesn’t seem like a tactful thing to bring up with Hannibal’s arm in front of his fangs.

Hannibal doesn’t move his arm, really, but it twitches in a movement that gestures towards Will’s neck. “Is it how you were turned?”

Will brushes a lock of hair over the scar on his neck, a little self-consciously. It’s not like he needs to hide it for any particular reason-- all his current colleagues know what happened-- but he’s glad that his hair had been relatively long when he’d been turned, since it will never grow again. He’s pretty sure he’ll never cut it; as it is, it covers the mark from most angles. Apparently not the one Hannibal is currently kneeling at.

He puts Hannibal’s arm down resting on his lap, one thumb stroking over the pulse point at his wrist. Hannibal’s eyes flick over to it from their search of Will’s face, but he doesn’t seem to mind his limb being temporarily appropriated. “I work for the FBI,” says Will. “It was a bad case. There was--”

He stops. Normal people, he reminds himself, don’t want to hear about the bloody resolution to serial murder cases. “Sorry. Never mind. You probably don’t want to know.”

“I would very much like to know whatever you wish to tell me.”

Will laughs a little. “Right. Shrink. Okay, there was a serial killer-- a vampire. He was turned recently, and had a human family, which is why it took so long to catch him-- usually vamps pretty much only live with other vamps. We have a tendency to. Well. Family units tend to break down, afterwards.” He gestures vaguely at Winston, alone by the space heater where there used to be a pack.

“Newly turned vampires who remain in close proximity to family are at high risk of consuming their loved ones,” Hannibal says. “The line between love and consumption is very thin even for some humans. I imagine it must disappear entirely, in such circumstances.”

Will swallows. “Yeah. This guy Hobbs, he found a release valve. He avoided killing his daughter by taking scores of girls who looked just like her. He drank them dry and fed the rest of their remains to his family. Our-- my-- profile was wrong. I didn’t think he was a vamp, and we went in unprepared. The wife and daughter didn’t survive. I did, I guess, depending on your definitions.”

“You survived, changed. As do we all.”

“Yeah.” Will stares at the veins in the forearm resting on his lap, then says, “I’ve never told that to anyone before. I was supposed to get a psych eval, around the time of that case, but somehow I never got around to making the appointment. Since then I’ve had the standard workplace vamp screenings, but they’re pretty much just a rubber-stamp unless you literally tell them you want to rip your colleagues’ throats out.”

Hannibal chuckles. “Do you?”

“Most of the time, yeah,” Will admits.

“Do you want to rip my throat out?”

Will flinches, and instead of shrinking away, Hannibal turns his left arm over so he is cupping Will’s thigh with his palm. It feels so warm, full of blood and life.

“That’s why I don’t order neck bites,” says Will tightly. He abruptly wants to get this over with. He picks Hannibal’s arm off of his thigh and is about to turn it over and bite into it, then realizes he’s forgotten something. “Shit,” he mutters, “The timer.”

The bite timer has to be run on the server’s smartphone; a vamp who bites without the timer on is likely to lose their app access. Hannibal pulls back entirely, his left arm slipping from Will’s grip, and kneels slightly higher in order to pull his phone out of the pocket of his pants. He taps the app open, then pauses for a moment, blond hair falling into his eyes as he hovers his finger over the screen.

When Hannibal stands up suddenly and positions his phone to show Will the screen, it takes Will a moment to even understand what he’s looking at. When he does, he very nearly goes for the man’s throat there and then: Hannibal has tapped on the timer and is running it down just out of Will’s reach.

Will doesn’t murder him, but the possibility is still very much present. Servers are free to leave at any time if they don’t like the looks of the client; Sangservi has a well-earned reputation for trusting the judgment of its employees. There is, technically, no obligation even now; although without the bite the server would get only the flat fee and travel compensation, still a decent amount. But the assumption is that if there’s no bite, there’s no timer. There’s no precedent, no instruction for this situation: nobody had ever considered that a server might try, or be able to, deny their client the bite in this particular way. Surely, Will thinks, his vision rage-addled, he would be within his rights to take it by force now.

“What the fuck?” Will says, his fingers digging into the upholstery hard enough that he feels the wood underneath creak. Hannibal takes the tiniest step backwards, an insanely small concession to fear of the livid vampire in front of him, then returns his attention to the screen of his phone when it chimes, and presses the button that’s supposed to indicate to the company that the bite is finished. He puts the phone back in his pocket. “There,” he says. “If you will excuse me for a few moments, I am required to make the final post-appointment call off of your property. Then I will return, my employers may lay their weary heads to rest knowing they haven’t lost one yet, and our conversation can proceed unobstructed by gig-economy safety measures.”

Will just gapes. Hannibal is clearly insane in some way, but now that the first burst of anger has passed, Will recognizes that if Hannibal is trying to swindle him, there isn’t much that Will can do about it right now. Attacking Hannibal wouldn’t just lose him his app access: it would lose him his job, possibly land him in jail, and ensure he’d never be eligible to work in a mixed-species environment again. It’s not worth it.

He must produce something that looks like a nod, because Hannibal takes his car keys from his bag and swiftly exists the house, leaving the rest of his things on the table. His scent lingers as his headlights make their way down the gravel road, and then Will can’t stand just sitting there any longer, and jumps up to pace around the room. Winston raises his head and whines at him. “What the fuck is going on, buddy?” Will asks him, his voice feverish-sounding in the quiet house. But then, he knows what is going on. Or at least, he can guess. Vulnerability. Vampires get off on the vulnerability of others by definition. Hannibal, will is beginning to suspect, might get off on it too; not just his own vulnerability, but Will’s. And Will had given him some, although he can’t figure out why or how it happened.

When his unlocked front door opens again, Will doesn’t consciously decide to pin Hannibal to the back of it the instant it’s closed behind him. He just does it; his hands on either side of the man’s shoulders, one knee in between his legs to keep him in place. Hannibal’s breath leaves him with an audible whoosh. He doesn’t fight back. In fact, he goes right ahead and buries his nose in Will’s throat, like he’s the one with fangs.

Will freezes. He keeps Hannibal pinned where he is, but his grip is loose enough that he could probably be knocked over if the man really tried. Hannibal is nosing over the scar on Will’s throat where Hobbs had attacked him, breathing deeply. Then Will feels wet warmth on his cold skin; Hannibal is licking him.

“Stop it,” he says, somewhat uncertainly. Hannibal does, and Will wishes he hadn’t. He inspects Hannibal’s throat instead of admitting it. There are a few tiny pinprick scars that could be the polite bite marks of Sangservi clients, or could just be normal discoloration of the skin. Will runs a finger over one. “Have you had a neck bite before, then?” he asks.

“Many times.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Occasionally. It doesn’t trouble me.”

Something in his voice makes it sound like there’s more to the story. “Do you like it?” Will asks.

“Yes.”

Will exhales slowly, his breath shaking. Some vamps drop the unnecessary habit of breathing on purpose, but anyone who works with humans is better-advised to keep it for the comfort of those around them. Breath still grounds him, even though he doesn’t need it. He needs grounding right now. Hannibal likes it, he wants Will to pierce his throat and drink his blood. They’re far beyond the polite constraints of buying and selling, now-- this bizarre, almost frightening human had made sure of that.

“Have you done this with a client before?” Will asks. “Gone off-the-record, I mean.”

Hannibal hesitates a moment, then admits, “No.” Will can hear the truth of it, and wonders if he’s starting to regret stripping away all of the layers of safety that the app puts in place. Will could kill him now, and nobody would know it was an appointment gone wrong. In a way, he hopes Hannibal is afraid; not because he wants him to feel the fear of prey, but because Will is sure as hell afraid, and he doesn’t want to be the only one.

“Why did you do it with me?” Will asks, and feels Hannibal shift underneath him. Will pins him tighter, and the human stills. Apparently, that was what he wanted.

“Curiosity,” says Hannibal simply, and Will leans back in. His fangs ache, all this blood in close proximity. He scrapes them over Hannibal’s skin, light enough not to draw blood, and watches the pink welts they leave in their wake. Hannibal shivers.

Will doesn’t know who starts the kiss. One moment he’s staring at Hannibal’s face, the way he eyes are closed in pain or maybe in bliss, and the next their mouths are pressed together, hesitantly at first and then harder. Hannibal’s tongue is so warm Will can scarcely believe he had been walking around with all that heat in him, like his humanity is a furnace at the heart of his being that Will is now trying to touch. He groans and presses in harder, Hannibal’s legs slipping apart to let Will stand entirely inside of them, and Will can feel his erection pressing up against his own hip. Will is getting hard too, little by little and then all at once when his mouth is suddenly flooded with the tang of blood. He swallows it immediately before pulling back suddenly gasping “sorry--” to see that he’d pierced the soft inside of Hannibal’s bottom lip by accident. Hannibal looks dazed, his eyes half-closed but pupils enormous, holding his now swollen lip out carefully. Will can see the blood pooling in between his lip and teeth. He doesn’t swallow it or spit it out, which is as good as permission; Will leans back in to take Hannibal’s lower lip in between both of his own and suck gently, Hannibal’s tongue pushing the extra blood forward to deposit it in Will’s mouth.

Hannibal tastes so rich Will has to take little pauses between swallows; a sensation he only barely remembers from human food, the occasional work-sponsored restaurant meal with food so good it was physically overwhelming to eat it quickly. He doesn’t suck directly on the cut or try to open it farther, just takes what it has to give him, and every drop of blood that enters him seems to go straight to Will’s cock. He groans and ruts up against Hannibal’s leg, shameless now in his want. “Hannibal-- will you--”

“Please.” Hannibal manages to sound marginally composed when he says it, but his whimper when Will pulls away for a moment is more revealing. He looks absolutely desperate, wrecked, like Will really could rip out his throat in this moment and he would barely notice, let alone object. That thought shouldn’t make Will hotter, it should make him terrified, but he is beyond terror now.

He stumbles over to the bed, folded up into a futon in an attempt at some semblance of a normal living room, now abruptly an inconvenience. The urge to apologize for his strange habits and living space is ever-present, but Hannibal watches him yank out the mattress with an undisguised hunger that makes sit clear he really couldn’t care less, at this point. Or perhaps he’s just relieved that Will has a bed, and doesn’t sleep in a coffin in the basement. (He’s considered it; it sounds kind of cozy.)

The brief break in contact lets Will clear his head just enough to sit down on the edge of the bed and take a deep breath. Hannibal, despite is confidence and his having somehow engineered this exactly to his liking, is not truly the one in control here. Will is the one with the fangs. Will is the one who gets to decide how this goes, and he should-- he should make it good for Hannibal, he thinks.

Hannibal lies down beside him looking similarly a little less feverish than he had when they parted at the wall, and says “Have you taken someone’s virginity before, Will?” as if he could actually read Will’s thoughts.

Will snorts. “Oh my god, please don’t put it like that.” Then he blinks. “You do mean... having-sex-while-being-bitten virginity, right?”

“I’m afraid that’s the only sort I have to offer you tonight,” Hannibal sounds amused, “But I was asking about your experience with the other kind.”

“Uh.” Will flops down beside him, strangely grateful for the lull in the desperate pace that he’d set when Hannibal first came back to the house. “Yeah, I guess, when I was in high school. I had a girlfriend for like two weeks. I hadn’t done it before either, though, so seems sort of patriarchal to assume I took something from her.”

“Not at all. She took something from you as well. The vulnerability of a new experience is a reciprocal gift.”

Will licks his lips. They still taste like Hannibal’s blood. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Slower now, the boil under his skin turned down to a simmer, he pushes himself up and looks at Hannibal’s body spread out on the bed. He reaches over and starts unbuttoning the man’s shirt, and Hannibal reaches down to undo his own pants, but Will slaps his hand away. “Let me,” he says, and Hannibal does, allowing himself to be unwrapped like a gift.

There are scars on his torso and arms that don’t look like bite marks. Will looks at them as he undresses himself, then gives in and runs a finger over a dark, circular one on his inner arm that could be a cigarette burn. “How did you get this?” he asks.

“Much of my childhood was spent in an orphanage, far from here. Life was not always as easy and pleasant as I find it now.”

It’s not really an answer, but it’s an answer to the unspoken question of how much of an answer he’s willing to give. “Is that how you find life?” Will asks. “Easy and pleasant?”

“Rarely both at the same time, but most often either one or the other.”

“Must be nice.”

“It is. Do you not find your life to be so?”

“I’m dead,” says Will, and thinks he might catch sight of just a slight eye roll on Hannibal’s end. He’s not sure why it’s such an important distinction for him, between then and now; he’s still here, after all, still walking and talking and apparently, fucking. It feels more like he ought not to use the word alive for the sake of those who really are; like he might be appropriating something important, something that no longer belongs to him. Maybe that never belonged to him. (It had never occurred to him to want to sleep in a coffin in the basement while he was a human, but he probably would have liked it just fine then, too.)

Naked, Hannibal looks older than he had clothed; though his head is blond, the hair on his chest and curled at the base of his cock is grey. It’s not unattractive, but it makes Will stop and look at it, think about the younger version of this man who had come before. Hannibal’s experiences are written on his body-- subtly, but still legible. The only experience written on Will is his turning, frozen in time. Everything that has happened to him since then, even this, will go unremarked-upon by his physical form.

Young vampires turn others because they can’t help it, or because they think it’s sexy. Middle-aged vampires, as a rule, don’t turn anyone. Old vampires turn others because they’re lonely, and it’s either make a companion or go for a stroll in the noon sun and make it all stop. Will is young by vampire standards; he should still be in the ravenous stage where immortality is a novelty, not a sucking void of horror. Only none of the pamphlets ever say what’s supposed to happen if you were in the sucking void of horror phase before you were turned. He’s well aware that making himself a companion would be a curse, not a gift. It could only ever be someone worth cursing, someone with too black a soul already to feel badly about ruining them.

Hannibal beckons him down and Will goes, lying down on top of him and fitting his legs in between Hannibal’s. Their cocks press together, hard enough to feel good but maddeningly vague as stimulation. Hannibal is worrying at his lower lip and for a moment Will thinks it’s a nervous habit, before he realizes that he’s reopening the cut in his lip. He thrusts in between Hannibal’s thighs languidly as he leans back in to lap up the droplets of blood squeezed from the small puncture. “Yeah,” he murmurs, only half-aware of himself but too pleased, too turned-on and wanting and content all at once, not to give voice to it. “Yeah, fuck, this is so good.”

Hannibal’s nails scratch over his back, digging in a little when Will sucks a little too hard on his split lip. Will does it again just to feel the welts form and then disappear on his own skin, and then Hannibal’s fingers trail down over his lower back and into the crack of his ass.

He immediately understands the intent behind it; not just the sexual act, but the reciprocity of it. He pushes himself up a little, letting Hannibal’s fingers slide smooth and warm to brush over his hole in implicit permission. Will licks the remnants of blood from Hannibal’s teeth, then pants, “You penetrate me, I penetrate you. Even-steven.”

“Just so.” Hannibal strokes the puckered edges of his entrance, and it feels strange and all the more blindingly intimate for its strangeness. “Do you have lubricant?”

Will does; odd how some mundane necessities of the body remain the same after the body is dead. There is a side table beside the bed with a tube of lube in the drawer. Will reaches over for it and hands it to Hannibal, then just relaxes back on top of him, rubbing their cocks together languidly. He’s never done this before, but any nerves he feels are definitely centred around the idea of biting Hannibal, not around being fucked. It occurs to him as Hannibal slicks his fingers, and he manages not to completely ruin the mood by saying it out loud, that it’s not really like his rectum is being used for any other purpose these days. He’s pretty sure he remembers excreting the last human food he ever ate some time after being turned, and he’s had nothing but tasteless bagged blood, the occasional fresh animal kill, and even rarer Sangservi orders since then. It’s probably squeaky clean in there. He thinks for a moment that Hannibal actually might find that funny, but is distracted by the man’s hands back on his ass, pulling his cheeks apart with one hand and slipping a single finger into his hole with the other.

“Oh.” Will raises himself up on his elbows, staring unseeingly down at Hannibal’s chest, letting Hannibal watch his face as he’s penetrated. The spectrum with pain on one end and pleasure on the other seems inadequate; he just feels invaded. He feels like he’s not alone in his body, and unlike his work where he unwillingly opens the doors of his mind for the afterimages of murderers to crowd him out, now there is room for him too. Room for Will, and room for Hannibal inside him. Hannibal looks curious, pumping his index finger in and out very slightly, just enough to give Will a sensation to make a judgment on.

“It’s good,” Will says, and as soon as he says it it’s abruptly true. Hannibal slides a second finger in, and will leans back a little to take them deeper. He gasps when Hannibal uses the pads of his fingers to stroke over Will’s prostate; it feels like a deep ache, the best ache he’s ever felt.

Hannibal plants his fingers where they are. “I’ll stay still,” he says, low and gravelly. “You open yourself up.” Will doesn’t need to be told twice, rocking back and forth on what quickly becomes the too-scant stimulation of two fingers. He can’t take what he wants like this.

“Your cock,” Will forces out, and he feels Hannibal get stiffer and involuntarily thrust up into his leg at the naked desperation in his voice.

“You’re so desperate. Hungry. In more ways than one.” Hannibal sounds almost reverent.

“Yeah,” says Will, wincing minutely as the two fingers inside him slip out. “And you made me that way. Does that turn you on?”

In answer, Hannibal just reaches down and lines his cock up with Will’s lube-slicked hole. Will shifts, then stares down at him, and wonders if this is the closest a human can feel to the moment before a bite. He stays still and lets Hannibal push in himself, his eyes closing in concentration and pleasure.

Will opens and lets him in. He’d on some level expected this to be fast and passionate and brutal; Hannibal fucking him raw, him biting savagely at the moment of orgasm. That would have been good too, but instead Hannibal wraps his arms around Will’s shoulders and starts thrusting slowly, almost tenderly, and that is better and completely unexpected. It’s ludicrous to assume that a vampire needs or wants tenderness, but as Will relaxes into the feeling of Hannibal’s cock spearing him open, so much bigger and warmer than his fingers, he finds he is glad for it.

He’d never really expected anyone to treat him tenderly as a human, but certainly any expectation of gentle or even humane treatment had evaporated when he’d been turned. And he’d been right: Jack Crawford had been worried about breaking him as a man, but he’s now relieved of the responsibility. Will is already both broken and now unbreakable. It’s not like he thinks he deserves better; he’s lucky to have kept his job teaching now that he’s like this, and even luckier that Jack still wants him after his first foray back into field work went so disastrously awry.

Hannibal’s lovemaking-- for that is what it is-- is the exact opposite of the casual assumption of indestructibility levelled at Will at work. He hadn’t been so crude as to ask if he is in any sense taking Will’s virginity with this act, but it feels as though he is keeping in mind that he might be. The vulnerability of a new experience is a reciprocal gift. He rocks gently into Will’s body, and rubs circles into Will’s back and shoulders with his hands, and makes low moaning sounds in his chest like he can’t help it. When Will brushes a finger over the join of his shoulder and neck, a silent question, Hannibal nods.

Will no longer feels nervous at the prospect of biting Hannibal; he’s certain now that he won’t lose control. He’ll go at the pace Hannibal is setting, and stop when he’s come; as good as a timer, really. He leans down, then squirms a little as the angle causes Hannibal’s cock to brush more agonizingly lightly against his prostate. Hannibal shifts to compensate, thrusting in a little harder, and Will sinks his fangs into Hannibal’s shoulder.

They go in so easily, and Hannibal makes a tiny hurt noise, like an animal that needs gentling. Will brings his own hands up to run through Hannibal’s hair, and murmurs “Shh-- there now, that was the bite--” and Hannibal squeezes their pelvises together on the next thrust, like he can’t get far enough inside Will’s body, can’t get enough of them pressing together. Will soothes the bite with his tongue first, picking up the first oozing pinpricks of blood, and Hannibal moans.

Will knows, theoretically, that a vampire’s bite can release substances into the victim’s bloodstream that act like opiates, leaving them pliant and wanting nothing more than to keep being sucked, even if it means their own death. With the bite timer, or with a violent turning like Will’s, there is neither sufficient exchange of fluids nor enough time for the effect to kick in. It will now, though, Will realizes, as he feeds his own druglike saliva into the wound.

Maybe he should be more careful about it than he is being, but he wants this to be good for Hannibal; and with each lavish suck, Hannibal seems to become more and more focused on the bite, gasping and moaning in time with Will’s pulls of his blood instead of his own thrusts into Will’s ass. And it feels so good, for Will to use what he is to give someone pleasure. It feels like it almost might be worth it. They rock together, giving and taking in equal measure, two parts making up a single creature joined to itself like an ouroboros. The obscene sounds of skin slapping on skin and the slurp of blood fill the room and they sound like holy music.

Hannibal’s thrusts start to come faster, less controlled, more unconscious. They pound against Will’s prostate and it feels so good he can barely concentrate on what he’s doing, the pleasure coming too fast and hard from too many places; he accidentally pricks Hannibal’s shoulder with his fangs again. The shallower but messier puncture wounds seep blood immediately, and Hannibal cries out at the fresh sting of pain and then grabs Will’s ass and pounds in a final time, holding himself there as he comes. Will can feel it, warm and alive inside him, and all it takes is one more long pull of blood before he is following Hannibal over the edge.

Will stays, holding himself over Hannibal’s body, panting. He knows intellectually he could stop breathing any time he likes, but it doesn’t feel that way. He sucks in air like he’s run a marathon, like he needs it. Like he’s human. He doesn’t feel human, though; for once, he actually feels better than human.

There are still droplets of blood beading on Hannibal’s shoulder. Will licks them off as gently as he can, noticing how the skin around the messy second bite is slightly puffy and pink. Hannibal will have a bruise tomorrow. Will should feel sorry, but he doesn’t. He wants to have marked him. He wants to leave evidence.

“Please--” Hannibal says, and Will cuts him off, fists clenched.

“Don’t ask me to keep drinking. Please. I won’t be able to say no, right now.”

Hannibal takes several deep breaths, as that clearly is what he has been about to ask. “I was merely going to ask you to hold me,” he lies after a moment, a dignified and obvious untruth that probably, Will recognizes, saves both of their lives.

Will lies down on his side. The other effect of a prolonged bite, written about dryly in the literature and evident in the autopsies of vamp victims from their usual lack of any sign of a struggle once they ought to have realized they’re going to be bled dry, is a nearly painful need to be close to their attacker. Hannibal hides is well, but the moment Will holds out his arms he buries his face in Will’s chest, and Will can feel his entire body trembling lightly. It should feel awkward to cradle the larger body in his arms, but perhaps the aftereffect of the bite is getting to Will, too: he wants to hold him impossibly tight, merge their bodies together until they can be one being forever.

Hannibal stops shaking slowly, in increments, and without their body positions changing, it suddenly seems to Will like he is the one being tenderly held. That should feel wrong, like he is stealing something that doesn’t belong to him. But from Hannibal, it doesn’t. A previous thread of conversation returns to him, and he breaks the silence by asking softly, “Hannibal, what did you mean that your bad experiences with clients are all mutual?”

Hannibal pulls himself up a little, enough that he can stare into Will’s eyes. Will lets him do it for a moment, then breaks away.

“Not fond of eye contact, are you?”

“Most people aren’t fond of eye contact with me. The red irises tend to put them off, for some reason.”

“Come to dinner at my house,” says Hannibal, as if that were the answer to some previously asked question. He seems very pleased with himself.

Will just raises his eyebrows, his eyes flicking to the bite marks on Hannibal’s neck.

“Both kinds. I also enjoy cooking. Can you eat?”

“I haven’t actually tried,” Will says. “Most vamps get sick from anything other than blood, but apparently you can build up a tolerance. But mostly it just hasn’t seemed all that attractive. About as attractive as drinking blood seems to a human, I guess.”

Hannibal grins, and for the first time Will sees his teeth, crooked and pointed-- not real fangs by any stretch of the imagination, but they might be described that way in comparison to the carefully arranged mouths of today’s orthodontics recipients. Will remembers the orphanage, and decides he will ask about it later. Perhaps at dinner. “It will be my pleasure to experiment on you,” Hannibal says.

It’s both presumptuous, and slightly creepy. But Will feels warm inside with the idea of someone thinking about him, designing recipes for him, wanting him to eat and drink and take pleasure. He turns his head into the pillow. He wants to accept. Hannibal knows he’s already accepted. “I don’t understand you,” he says, meaning to to come out with a laugh. When he hears his own words in the air, though, they sound more like a prayer.

“You will,” says Hannibal.