Here We Go Again

“When I imagined us, I didn’t imagine it like that.”

Will has imagined them before tonight, and likely more than once. “It can be different from that, between us.”

Will’s fingers tighten, a pressure at his hip that hovers on the edge of unpleasant. “I know.”

“Would you like it to be different?”

“Sometimes. Yes.”

Sometimes. More confirmation that this isn’t just tonight, that Will intends to return for more.

Now that I'm done with editing and posting fics, I can go back to writing new ones! I've given up on calling this Six Sentence Sunday, since they never are, and I'm back with the Hannibal Murder Family WIP once more:


“Is Abigail still asleep?” Will asks from behind him.

“It seems likely.” He had heard nothing from her room when he passed.

“When I was her age, I could stay in bed for twelve hours straight after I missed a night’s sleep.”

“Indeed. As a student in France, I did so more often than was advisable.”

“I believe you still do,” Will says, and the familiar dry humour has crept back into his voice. “Far more often than most professionals your age.”

Affection curves Hannibal’s lips into a smile as he pours coffee into his mug. “The ability to remain awake and preserve concentration through long and hectic nights is a desirable skill in an emergency room surgeon,” he says, and turns back to face Will. “It’s one I chose to maintain after I changed my practice to psychiatry.”

“Useful for intercontinental travel, among other things.”

“Among other things,” Hannibal agrees, and his amusement survives the need to add sugar to his cup from a crumpled paper packet.

Impasto is my entry for the Eat the Rude Bang challenge. It's an AU take on Will’s journey through Europe in search of himself Hannibal. Or alternatively, Tiggy has way too much fun playing with the many layers of imagery in the show.

Words: 9300

Rating: Mature

Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter (non-explicit)

I started writing this fic as a one-shot, but about a third of the way through, I realised I was actually writing the version of season three that would have happened in the Bad Connections universe. So while it is a belated, accidental sequel, it also works perfectly well as a stand-alone story.



Thank you once again to the wonderful whispers-in-the-chrysalis for her lovely art. Whispers’ art post is here on tumblr, go and support her 💗


Hannibal’s peering down into the giant platter of molluscs, watching them crawl over one another in endless circles. “The snails could get out, if they wanted – they could crawl beyond the lip of stone and explore the vast acreage of forest – but they don’t.”

Will’s mouth twists at the edges, bitter with knowledge. “They feel comfortable and safe in what they know, despite the ever-present predator.”

“There are predators everywhere, in every level of this world.” Hannibal’s eyes are back on Will, unblinking and quiet. “The only difference is whether we choose to see them.”

There’s a smile tugging within him, impossible to resist as it seeps into the muscles of his face. “Some of us see them and invite them inside.”

“Many people do that, Will.” Hannibal’s voice is soft, a low rumble whispered through the mist. “Humanity saw the wolf and admired his strength and cunning, and then we brought him into our homes.” His humour fills his expression, as gentle as his words. “One might say it’s in our nature.”

“By the time he comes inside, he’s no longer a wolf,” Will says.

“The wolf adapts, the human adapts.” Hannibal’s head tilts, that perfect, minute movement that’s so unbearably familiar. “Is it possible for every predator to change to accommodate another, if it’s something they both desire?”

Impasto on AO3.

Sex scenes and fight scenes are always the ones that are a real slog for me to write. Dialogue comes to me in a flash when I'm hiking, or in bed, or doing yoga, or driving to work, whole scenes with words and setting and the nuances of the characters' mannerisms, and then I have to rush to scribble it all down before it escapes again. Mental stuff like dreams and imagery and characters' thought processes magically arrive in the same way, and it's all so easy and fun.

There are a few components of sex scenes and fight scenes that do that - any bits of conversation during sex, or the initial concept behind it, like the idea in Direct Current that this is an angry sex scene with Will trying to provoke Hannibal into fighting him so he can remind himself he's doing this to catch the Chesapeake Ripper, not falling in love with him. But in the end both sex scenes and fight scenes come down to the minutiae of physical detail, of exactly whose hands are where, how undressed they are, or how someone moves around an injury. There's no way that's coming as divine inspiration - it just has to be worked through, step by step, move by move, one sentence after the next keeping track of exactly what stage we're at and trying to make it all sound interesting and exciting at the same time. It's hard work!

Unsurprisingly, that means those scenes tend to be written towards the end, after all the inspirational stuff is done. I have these great, glaring gaps staring at me, that I then painfully add 200 words to over the course of an hour, then another couple of hundred the next day.

I finally finished the last sex scene in my current WIP last night, and it's such a relief to have that done and out of the way. I ended up with one more sex scene than I originally thought, because my annoying brain decided it would better illustrate character progression and how Will changes around Hannibal.

I still have the big fight scene waiting for me, though. And I'm working through all these stills of Hannibal's house, piecing together where everything is, and OMG, Hannibal, why do you have so much stuff? Multiple weird objects on every available surface, and I have to look at all of them through the eyes of a character who canonically weaponises a tea towel....

A new life on the run can't just happen - there are plans and negotiation, and Biblical references, because it's Hannibal. Written for the Red Dragon Con 5 micro-fiction zine After the Fall, organised through the wonderful efforts of trashbambi.

He turns off the faucet and habit has him reaching for the razor, until his eyes meet his altered reflection.

Soft pad of bare feet on tile, and Will appears behind him in the mirror.

“It suits you.” Will runs his fingers along the line of Hannibal’s jaw, dragging slow over the lengthening stubble.

Here on AO3.

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago for @bluecaliessi's Amuse-Bouche proverb challenge over on tumblr. The prompts are designed for people to create drabbles, or double drabbles, or triple drabbles, short vignettes up to a maximum word count of 500.

Oops? So I failed the challenge, but I did stick to a multiple of 100 at least!

Post-TWOTL, written in a couple of hours, not beta'd due to the last minute nature of my inspiration and the challenge deadline. I managed to keep two rules out of three :-)

Fic here on AO3 if you prefer to read or comment over there.


He closes his eyes and tips his head back against the curved wood of the chair. Relaxes into the hands manipulating his body, his arm slack within a firm grip. “Your spinatus muscles are tight.” Fingers press deeper around the ridge of his scapula, working in concert either side of the bone. “Have you been doing your exercises?”

He takes in another breath, full and slow, lets it seep out, the tension leeching away with the ebbing air. “Every day.”

Delicious, rhythmic movements probing above his collarbone, warmth seeping through the thin polycotton blend of his T-shirt. “Don’t overdo it, Will. The muscles and fascia have been repeatedly traumatised, and they haven’t healed well in the past.” A transition, a pause, the fingers sinking harder, the brief pain of a knot surging high.

Will inhales sharp, a moment so heavy it’s almost a burden, and then it crests and melts away in a wash of relief, and he’s close to laughing, the humour parched in his words. “It might heal better if people would stop stabbing and shooting me.”

Too much, he knows, even before the hands cease their work. A single second, frozen, the weight of time dragging like pins over his skin, and then there’s movement again. Movement with no words, no response to his flippancy, only the touch, silent, methodical and entirely professional.

There’s no honest conversation at these times, no human interaction or connection. There’s only necessity.

Necessity and the flood of endorphins, the heightening swell of his senses. The fingers moving lower, beyond the cloth and onto his exposed arm, the brush of them dry and slightly rough as they exhaustively explore his musculature. The flow of breath from a figure leaning close, the rich scent of apples and onions sliced only minutes before, and the hands, always the hands, the touch, the absence of boundaries. Careful, delicate, firm, testing, glorious hands, beautiful and vital, and then gone.

His eyes are closed and he still sees the change, the influx of light as the shadow pulls away.

When he sucks in enough air to open his eyes, Hannibal has already withdrawn, leaving Will to stare at the neat wave of his hair edging over the sharp collar of his shirt. Follow the pressed line of his sleeve down to his hands, to the long fingers and thick veins that moments ago kissed electricity over his skin.

“Hannibal.”

Hannibal stops and turns back, meeting his eyes. “Yes, Will?” His face is still and shuttered, his hands curled tense by his thighs.

It’s Will who drops his head, breaks the gaze. “Nothing.”

He’s not watching any more, only hearing the tap of feet on boards and the creak of leather as Hannibal sinks into the armchair across the room.

When Will was a kid, his dad would pretend not to see when he sneaked a cookie out of the jar, a trail of crumbs scattered across the kitchen. Later, he’d wink at him and say, “A little of what you fancy does you good.”

A little never did cut it for Will. It only ever whet his appetite, left him eyeing the jar from across the room with the sweetness lingering on his tongue, wanting more of the vanilla-chocolate flavour bursting out when he crushed down with his teeth.

Hannibal’s hands rest on the arms of the chair, fingers spread; a twitch, the lightest tap against the hide before they fall into calm.

Will scrunches his eyes shut to stop himself looking. If he looks, he’ll want to take, and if he takes, he’ll destroy.

He doesn’t need empathy to understand.

Hannibal doesn’t trust him, can’t trust him, always that cool layer of frosting sprinkled over the cookie. The dusting of doubt that maybe one day Will’s going to reject him, might move to kill him.

Only ever one cookie, the rest of the jar forbidden, out of reach.

The ache through the muscles wrapped around his shoulder is nothing to the ache suffused between his ribs.

“We’ll work more on your range of motion, tomorrow.” Hannibal’s voice, accented and rich, snaps his attention across the room. “We should begin exercises with the tension band.”

Will’s muscles twitch within his thigh, within his chest, air forced from his lungs.

Tomorrow. There’ll be another cookie tomorrow.

Hannibal will keep working on Will, and Will’s going to keep working on Hannibal, keep working until the day he can finally shatter the glass and feast on everything inside.

They’ll get there. He knows they will.

He tips his head back once more, slides into the saturated pigments of his mind, lets the fingers press into his skin once more. Lets them glide and spread over the contours of his body.

They’ll get there, because otherwise it’s all been for nothing.

Direct Current is now complete on AO3, and that wraps up the fourth and final part of the Bad Connections series, my Hannibal season two AU.

Bad Connections was a smutty one shot last September, and then it somehow got irradiated and grew and mutated and went on a rampage through Tokyo my brain. A finished series is a good series!

I've been telling people for the last few years that season one of the Hannibal TV series is basically Tokyo Babylon, and season two is Death Note. Then last night someone pointed out to me that Hannibal is also Pet Shop of Horrors, and OMG, how the hell did I miss that?

Lets see - Immaculately dressed, exquisitely mannered prissy perfectionist with a sideline in murder falls in love with a scruffy, lonely law enforcement guy who lives like a slob, and while said law enforcement guy is supposedly trying to entrap the murderer and get evidence to arrest them, they actually spend a lot of time hanging out with a killer and being far too friendly. Oh, and there’s a sort of informal shared custody arrangement with a kid who isn’t theirs. The only difference is, in Hannibal it's the detective who hordes animals, not the killer.

Writing fanfic has always been a disjointed process for me. I have no concept of how some people can start at the beginning and write through to the end. I write scenes in the order they solidify in my head, piecing the whole lot together bit by bit as more of the gaps fill themselves in. And through all the fandoms I wrote in for so many years, there was a pretty clear pattern that the hardest sections to write, and thus the last to get written, were the action scenes and the smut.

Except for the Hannibal fandom. The action-heavy sequences still get written last, and they're definitely perspiration, not inspiration. But apparently with these two guys I'm all about the porn. The sex just writes itself effortlessly, and it keeps on writing, until some kissing and 69-ing grows to over four thousand words. Worse than that, I'm even writing sex scenes for scenarios I'm never going to actually put in a fic, because they camp there in my head, and I can't get back to writing the plot for my WIP until I've got them out of my brain.

I've been trying to figure out why this is, and I think it's because these two guys are almost never just having sex. One or both of them always has an agenda, an ulterior motive that goes beyond an enjoyable orgasm, and sometimes it's successful and sometimes it's not, but they never stop digging in one another's brains. It's practically a compulsion for them to poke at each other and see what happens. Even when you've got them shacked up together in domestic bliss with too many dogs, they don't stop playing games. Maybe they would after five years or so when they've finally run out of corners to dig in, but it's interesting to play with the ideas inbetween!

In a fit of total self-indulgence, I added an unplanned and very belated third chapter to The Depths of Trust and doubled the length of the entire thing. My brain was having way too much fun playing with these two guys trying to figure their way around each other. Because after years of mutual obsession and emotional and physical damage, deciding to stop all of that and fuck like bunnies doesn’t automatically mean they can have an actual relationship…

And now I can get back to writing part five of this series, which was what I started doing before my brain took off at a tangent.