cynoclept

f e a t h e r s t a g

The stark, ugly landscape—Hannibal found it too industrial and barren, the backwash of a spillway rather than nature in its most minimal form—matched the set of Will’s mouth and the bitter angle of his tensely-bunched shoulders. Somewhere in the back, one of the dogs was barking cheerfully at another. Hannibal smiled and peeled the paper back to reveal fresh, crisp bread and the salty scent of good ham.
“You have already identified what I am, what part of your past I represent. I would like you, Mr Graham, to consider coming back into the world for but a single season.”
He bit into the bread, his teeth sharp and sure, and chewed carefully.
“You are not part of this place, just as you are not part of the ballet world any longer. You straddle the line between function and destruction. You have allowed others to forget about you, and you have almost forgotten yourself.”
Hannibal smiled lightly.
“I would like you to dance alongside me. I would like you to remember what it feels like to wrap a role around yourself and forget, for a few brilliant hours, your own fallibility.”

Will’s laughter could be sudden and delighted, still childish despite his years, but more often it caught him against the grain: a cynically sound hitched to doubt and self-deprecating frustration. The scoff, high and amused, almost stuck the bite of ham at the back of his throat. Will swallowed it down around his (un)surprise and buried bitterness – touched his knuckles to his tightly closed lips, and held his fingers up to stop Hannibal like he’d heard this one before.

(He hadn’t, and that had followed him around from podunk city to podunk town, like a disappointed parent who called too often.)

“Function and destruction,” Will repeated, when he could finally speak; weighing Hannibal’s words for their humor in the unimpressed swallow of his throat. “Very poignant, Mr Lecter. –very poetic."

He unwrapped the next half-inch of sandwich, peeling the paper back until it lay flat and overly tight, a perfectly symmetrical ring of agitation. He didn’t hear the high-pitched scuffle over the ridge, or the staccato of his heartbeat overrunning the time-limit of a casual pause.

"Why?” The word was more accusation than question; deliberately curt. Hannibal wore propriety and semantics like a suit, and it made Will want to be ornery in his syntax.

(He wanted, as no-one in his place could possibly not, and he knew it.)

“I haven’t been on a stage in ten years. Unless you’re planning on pushing me off it."