The air has turned to liquid lead in your lungs, each breath a laborious dredging of poisoned atmosphere through collapsing alveoli. Hannibal’s presence is not merely a weight—it is the slow, deliberate compression of a hydraulic press, the inexorable closing of a Venus flytrap’s maw. He sits ensconced in the wingback chair, the firelight licking the angles of his face into something both divine and grotesque, his pencil whispering across the page like a scalpel parting flesh. The sound is obscenely intimate, the creak of graphite on paper syncopated with the arrhythmic stutter of your pulse.

Let Jack Crawford play at confronting the Ripper; let him posture and preen and pretend this is a hunt rather than a courtship. The decision will be made, yes, but not by you. Never by you. You lost that privilege when you first looked into Hannibal’s eyes and saw yourself reflected back, not as you were, but as you could be: flayed open, gloriously ruined, a masterpiece of his making. The fire is a living thing, its tongues lapping at the hearth with carnivorous hunger, casting shadows that writhe like hanged men twisting in the wind. The heat it emits is a mockery, a pantomime of comfort that only serves to highlight the permafrost creeping through your veins. Fear is the currency of this relationship, the medium through which all your transactions are conducted. You lie to each other compulsively, weaving tapestries of falsehood so elaborate they could hang in the Louvre, but every so often—in the liminal space between heartbeats, in the hush before dawn—you trade in brutal, unbearable truth. It is in these moments that you are most vulnerable, most his.

“Achilles did not survive either,” Hannibal murmurs, his lips grazing the shell of your ear. The words are a velvet-wrapped blade, a history lesson and a threat and a love letter all at once. “In his grief, he painted the plains of Troy red, stacked bodies like cordwood until the rivers clogged with the dead. He dragged Hector’s corpse through the dirt, defiled it with the rage of a man who had lost his mirror, his other half. And when the arrow found its mark, when Achilles finally joined Patroclus in the underworld, they mingled their ashes in the same urn. A reunion. A consummation.”

The firelight catches in Hannibal’s eyes, turning them into pools of molten amber, and you realize with dawning horror that he is not merely recounting a myth—he is offering you a blueprint, a promise. The scent of copper floods your nostrils, thick and cloying, and you cannot tell if it is memory or premonition. Your madness and his are twin serpents coiled around your throat, their fangs resting against your carotid, their venom already circulating in your bloodstream. Press down, and it will overflow. Press down, and you will drown in it.

The dead do not die, not really. They linger in the hollows of your ribs, in the spaces between synapses, in the way your hands still reach for him in the dark. They do not shed tears, but you do—hot, shameful things that scald your cheeks as you kneel at the grave of your former life, clutching lilies like a penitent clutching rosary beads. You want to forget.

God, you want to forget. Forget the way Hannibal’s smile could split the world in two, forget the hours spent dissecting Euripides over glasses of wine that tasted like communion, forget the press of his lips against your scars as he whispered I love you like it was a curse, like it was a sacrament. But memory is a stubborn thing, and love is a cancer, and you are terminal. “Are you scared?” he asks again, and this time, you do not answer. You don’t need to. The truth is written in the tremor of your hands, in the way your breath hitches when he steps closer, in the terrible, glorious certainty that even now, even after everything, you would follow him into the dark.