Beaten

by K.A. Rose

This fanfic involves two male characters in consensual adult situations. The author makes no inferences that the views held in this fanfic reflect those of the authoring parties that originate the story on which this is based, nor implies that the views of this fanfic should be held in equal or higher regard than its source. Furthermore, the author of this work is basing her arguments, such as they are, on evidence only as provided in the film version of Red Dragon, and therefore cannot be held accountable for any and all inaccuracies based on book-film discrepencies.

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    It takes me a bit to find the light switch.
    My hands are shaking. It didn't start until I was on the plane back to Atlanta, like some sort of delayed response system. Like the body hadn't had time to be properly scared before, and it wants to take its time with it now. Build up slowly, explode in small tense bursts, sudden spikes on some internal seismograph, leave aftershocks that sieze up your body in tremors for days and days.
    The light switch is found, and after a few attempts I get it to flip, let a pair of lamps flicker on and illuminate the hotel room in sickly nicotine yellow. Let it light up the stiff and stale hotel bed, the blank television, the couch with all my used clothes and suitcase heaped up on top, the photographs from the Leeds' house still arranged in a semi-circle on the floor, like I left them.
    I told the cleaning service not to touch my room. I honestly didn't expect them to comply. If I was in a better state right now I might feel gratified.
    Instead I drop into bed. Don't set my briefcase down, don't kick off my shoes, don't loosen my tie. Just fall, as from a great height, let the weight of the briefcase lodge itself from my grasp as I land, let my face bury itself in overstarched bedsheets, let myself feel the sweat and grime make its presence known for the first time as a full entity, some outer-casing under which the hard-pressed might just find a human form.
    I'm lying stomach-down, and I shift a little to pin both my arms under my chest. I'm still shaking.
    I breathe.
    They told me this would help me relax, back when I was in therapy. Breathe in. Breathe out. Let all the tension just ooze out of you, like steam rising off your body. Let it radiate out and away. Breathe in. Breathe out.
    It doesn't work.
    Maybe it would, for other things. Lesser things. I wouldn't know. I know it doesn't work for this, for this person, for this indominable dread and terror that sends electricity through every cell of your body.
    You can't share this sort of thing with people. There isn't a support group you can go to for people who've had near-death encounters with Hannibal Lecter. There are no twelve-step programs you can hide yourself in. No one's chanting We Shall Overcome. There's just you, your mind, and the fumbling, impotent psychiatrists, against Lecter. Lecter. Should be written in all caps, some great imposing stone monument against a storm-strewn sky. Indominable, irrepressable, omiscient. Lecter.
    Oh God.
    Did I really go and see him today? Did I really sit down and have a chat with him, no introductions, formality, foreplay, just him smelling my scent, dear god, before asking me what I wanted, even though he already knew? Did I really go down that hallway and watch him in that little gerbil cage of his and talk to him? Talk to him?
    I run a tongue over caked and gritty teeth. I should brush my teeth before I fall asleep. Which should be very soon now, god I'm so tired, so why don't I get up and go to the bathroom? It's right over there. It's ten feet away.
    I don't move.
    I need a drink. Jesus Christ, I need a drink.
    I don't move.
    "Do you dream much, Will?" he had asked. He'd've died to know, for the satisfaction the knowledge would've given him. But he doesn't need to die for it, he doesn't even need to ask me. He probably knows anyway. He just wanted to hear me say it.
    You can't say there's no sense in talking to Dr. Lecter, when he knows everything you're going to say at any rate. There's perfect sense in talking to Dr. Lecter, for just that very reason. Sense, yes, not sanity, in knowing that he can predict you ten times from Thursday and that you hold no secrets from him, and any that you might have become his property as soon as you open your mouth anyway.
    "This is a very shy boy, Will. I'd love to meet him."
    He kept dancing around with what he'd figured out about the case. That was our foreplay. Fucker. Couldn't pass up an opportunity to twist and tease and stroke with all the same methods and tools as when he did it to me in friendship and affection. Did I really used to like that about our talks? Did I really used to enjoy that almost tantric mental torture he inflicted on me just to watch me all tied up in knots, like an infant struggling to orient his hands and feet to begin to crawl? Such a sick game of domination and submission you used to play, Will. Want to play it again?
    "Is there something about your relationship with Dr. Lecter that you haven't told us?" Dr. Roark at the hospital had inquired. More than once. More forcefully with each repetition.
    "No," I told him. "We were friends. I came to him for advice sometimes. On cases. That's all."
    "Did he ever offer you counsel on any other subjects? Emotional? Psychological?"
    "He was a shrink. He'd've helped me if I asked him to, but I didn't, no."
    "Mrs. Graham said sometimes you'd come home very late at night, and drunk."
    "We had a few drinks sometimes. He handles his liquor a lot better than I do."
    "Sometimes you wouldn't come home at all."
    "I spent the night once or twice, that's true."
    "Did anything... happen?"
    "What do you mean, did anything happen? Did what happen?"
    I should shower. I should get out of these stinking, filthy clothes. I should move and let the feeling come back into my arms.
    "Fear is the price of our instrument," Lecter had told me, "but I can help you bear it."
    Yes, I had thought. Please.
    Given in. Submitted. Admitted my weakness and acknowledged his strength. He might be the one in the gerbil cage but I'm the one that's trapped.
    Please, please help me.
    Not a thought in the classical sense, really. Thoughts come in two forms. There's your inner monologue, the actual words you form in your head, and then there's the feelings. The words not formed, but more potent then, as sheer unadulterated thought and emotion.
    Please help me. Teach me. I need you for this.
    He'd seen it on my face. My submission. And he'd loved it.
    Need a shower. Need a drink. Need to move. Jesus, just let me move, let me turn over into some more comfortable position, so I'm not aching all over when I wake up.
    And quite surprisingly, my body obeys, shifting painfully onto my left side. Staring at the featureless bedside table and the plastic phone, letting my hands twist and flex to work the blood back into them, though they still shake a little. I find that my shoulders are shaking now too, something I hadn't noticed before while pressed down into the unyielding mattress, and that they make my sides ache.
    Let my fingers work at their own command and undo my tie, thank you, shrug off my jacket, unbutton my shirt that smells like cigarettes, like the hospital, like Chilton's office. Ease off my shoes and let them fall where they may.
    Let the fingers crawl over weak and tender skin, scratching small itches and easing out small aches settling into the joints. Not even realize at first as they graze the scar running like an ugly tear down my left side.
    Because I do want to play that game again. And I don't want to want that, because it might kill me.
    This way lies madness.
    I found that out the hard way.
    "Mr. Graham, me and the rest of the staff have expressed some concern that you might yet be holding something back about-- about what's troubling you."
    "I've already told you, I have nothing else to talk about."
    "I don't quite believe that, Mr. Graham."
    "Your job is to get me past Lecter, Dr. Roark. And I'm past him. Anything else I've got to deal with is on my end."
    "But you're not past Lecter, Will. I was hoping you could tell me why."
    "I'm fine, goddammit."
    Dig my fingers into the groove of that scar, feel the blade cut through and sieze up all thought and feeling to focus on the pain, oh god, the pain. Filling everything, the whole world.
    "I regret it came to this, Will, but every game must have its ending." So calm. Too calm, deliberate, to irk. "You're a remarkable boy." Pride then. That was unexpected. Logical, but it'd've been better if he'd tried to rationalize his murder, if he'd told me I was worthless and stupid and too young to know better. People find it harder to destroy something they appreciate.
    Heh. Appreciate.
    Pull off my shirt, leave a moment for confusion involving the tie that I'd loosened but not removed. Stretch muscles that had gone stiff. Unbuckle my belt, use my feet to pull off my socks, wonder why I can exert enough energy to undress but not enough to go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Mom wouldn't approve.
    "Did you get my card?"
    "I got it. Thank you."
    It hadn't been much of a card. Haunting in its innocence. Crime lab hadn't found anything in it they could find threatening, so they let me have it.
    Inquiries as to my health. Molly and Josh. Where am I living now? What am I doing? Why don't I write?
    That had been a joke of ours. From before.
    "You never call or write," Lecter had said from over a refined crystal glass of refined whiskey which was held, yes, quite refinely. "Are you cheating on me, Will?"
    I'd laughed. Reminded him that I was married, after all.
    "So, an affair?"
    He'd looked so charming. Some relic of a long-lost aristocracy. Didn't belong to this century. Belonged to the Senate of Rome, belonged on the throne of kings, and yet just as appropriately here in his study, talking over drinks and photographs and case files heaped on top of poetry and an ancient copy of Doctor Faustus.
    Memory works in strange ways. I can remember every detail of that study. Of that particular evening. But he seems sort of run together, blurred, all of his flattery and teasing and little affectionate mind games all coming out at once, as a singular wave. Every smile and warm glance and appreciative chuckle.
    Quite charming.
    I find a way to get my pants off, kick them away and struggle with them around the ankles for the moment. Then lie still, stretching, shifting, burrowing under the crumpled sheets, reminding myself that the lights were still on and that it didn't matter, not my electricity bill.
    The sheets are cold, but I was shivering anyway, so it doesn't matter much. I rub my shoulders a little, rub my ribs and back through the cloth of my undershirt, trying futily to magic out the tense ache in the muscles there.
    Darcy Taylor, the third victim. Just been found. I went to Lecter right after visiting the crime scene. I showed him the photographs, talked rapidly about what I suspected, while he glanced without looking at the pictures and the police reports, listening to me with hardly any attention paid at all, and when I found myself out of breath and things to say but still jittery and pacing, found a glass of brandy pressed into my hand and a request that I sit down.
    "You're treading a very narrow line, Will," he'd said kindly, but firmly, refilling the glass when I'd emptied it. "Keep running along now as you are and you'll find yourself headed toward irrecoverable collapse. When's the last time you slept?"
    "I don't know."
    "That's generally a sign."
    "It doesn't matter right now, doc, I'm doing fine. Really. It's just that now this is the third and I think we're running out of time." He'd started rubbing the back of my neck, something you'd expect a father to do now and then, moved on to massaging my shoulders as I spoke. He'd never done anything like this to me before, and in fact we'd scarcely even shook hands since meeting, but it seemed natural and it felt so nice, the way his fingers found their way along my skin and unlocked all the little knots of tension.
    "That may be, but damaging yourself in the process will come to no good end."
    "It's just-- this one, this lady--"
    "Shh."
    I'd felt the breath on my skin at that hush, and then, as I did now in this stiff hotel bed, a shiver of electricity went up and down my spine. Felt it intensify, siezing my throat and lungs into a stifled gasp when his lips pressed against my neck, down to the crook between neck and shoulder, back up and along my jaw, while his ministrations with his hands continued down my back, those small muscles that always hurt just by standing erect, and now for the first time ever didn't.
    In the hotel bed, eyes closed, I swallow, echoing my movement from years before when I found that fixing my eyes on the ceiling wasn't enough, and I'd turned my head, and kissed him back.
    'I'm not drunk,' I had reminded myself. 'Maybe I just wish I was.'
    Eyes fluttered closed then, I'd let myself be immersed in this moment, this strange, alien sensation that didn't make sense and didn't need to.
    Pulled back at the last possible moment and had stood up suddenly.
    "I, heh, I think we've had too much to drink."
    "Possibly."
    "Well, I'd better go anyway. It's late."
    "True."
    "Will you mind? I'll-- come back and work on the case with you tomorrow."
    He had shrugged. "If you like."
    I had frozen, like an idiot, stupefied, halfway in the process of putting on my coat. Suddenly at a complete loss of what the hell I should do.
    I run a cold hand over my chest, under the tight shirt. Massage my collarbone, run down along the center of my rib cage, brush a nipple and bite my lip to fight down the shudder. Then I do it again.
    "I told you, I'm fine."
    "Waking up screaming in the middle of the night is not fine, Mr. Graham."
    "I don't have anything else to talk to you about."
    "Yes, you do. I think you know what it is."
    "Shut up. You don't need to hear me say it. You read the fucking doctor's report."
    "The medical end of it, yes, I'm well aware. But I'm a doctor of the mind, Will. If you'd like to talk about what happened between you and Dr. Lecter that merited that extra note from your examination--"
    "Shut up. Just shut up."
    "Being honest with yourself is--"
    "Shut up!"
    "Just tell me, for God's sake, if nothing else, was it consensual?"
    Let a hand creep down over my waist, under the elastic of my boxers, unconscious and instinctive. Heart rate up, breath shortened. Think only vaguely that this is obscene, and that I don't care.
    It had been so romantic, the way he'd gone about it. He could've bent me over the desk and been done in five minutes, and I'd've let him do it without thinking any less of him afterwards. Instead he had resumed the massage, had whispered little bits of poetry, had led me to his bedroom, put a record on while I undressed.
    I suck in breath, stroke a growing erection. Too lightheaded to feel guilty about masturbating in a hotel room bed.
    He had come up from behind me, suddenly naked though I don't remember him disrobing, and had stroked broad masculine hands down into places no man had ever ventured, nibbled the crook at the bottom of my neck.
    I'd asked him not to leave any marks so Molly won't find out.
    Please.
    "We'll see," he'd said.
    Wrapped his arms around me like I was a girl. Made me wonder for a second if he was going to pick me up and carry me over to the bed, before remembering that his back isn't what it used to be and anyway, I'm kind of heavy.
    We had stood there standing for a long time. He did things with his hands that made my knees give out from under me and made me beg to sit down on the bed.
    I nearly come right here, in memory of those hands. Bite it down, fight it off, prolong it to the end. Come on.
    "He raped you," Dr. Roark had concluded.
    "No, it wasn't rape."
    You idiot. Seduction is seduction. Falling under his spell doesn't mean I regretted it afterwards.
    He'd drawn out the foreplay as long as he found he was able to. Brought me right to the edge and then stopped until I'd calmed down, confused, only to begin again with a new unfamiliar tempo, new tricks up his sleeve. It had been a new torture to inflict upon me, to spin me in circles and witness my agony in self-possessed amusement.
    He didn't ask for reciprocation but I gave it anyway, stopping only when I discovered I was too much of an amateur for him to derive any pleasure from it.
    "Don't take it too hard, Will, I'm a hard man to please."
    I'd resented his ability to still form coherent sentences at that point.
    Then he'd put one hand on each of my shoulders and pushed me back down on the tousled mattress, and the glint in his eye was nearly too much to bear.
    My bed is soaked with sweat. It drips down into my clenched eyes, over gritted teeth, slicks my hand whose pace, independent of any thought from my brain, quickens on its own accord.
    He'd made everything as easy as possible for me. God knows where he'd obtained the lubricant, or why I'd had the audacity to feel proud that it was unused before then.
    "But why?" Roark had asked, flabbergasted.
    "He's like Sean Connery," I had explained. "He could've seduced anyone and everyone, and instead he seduced me."
    Sean Connery. Did I really say that?
    "It will hurt, regardless," Lecter had warned. "I could explain the physiological reasons for it but I'm sure you're more or less aware."
    "Go slow," I'd begged him.
    He hadn't. At least, it hadn't felt slow. He went in stages but had given barely enough time for me to adjust before he pushed farther. And farther still, unreasonably far, for the same reasons that a small pebble in your shoe will feel big as a boulder because of how it manages to magnify itself through pain.
    "Oh God," I'd managed.
    In my hotel bed my legs jerk involunarily, feeling the ghost of that sensation burning my flesh away, that pressure filling me up inside that has no equal anywhere.
    I gasp for air.
    Hadn't had the decency to bring it up today, when we met. Could have easily made a complete mockery of me by a single utterance for Chilton or the other staff to hear. Didn't. Why, because being a feared cannibal was enough without the guards worrying he'd jump their bones too?
    Instead he'd smelled me and told me I stunk of fear. A rejection, kind of. Lecter dumped me.
    I must be the only one to think that's even worse.
    I had run my voice raw, crying and shouting in tandem, begging and ordering, both ineffectual because he did what he wanted regardless, and it was better for me than the things I'd asked for. He'd known what to give me in the same way he knew what I'd say before I spoke.
    It was terrible and wonderful and left no room for thought, focused the world down to the singular sensation, the bitter-sweet pleasure-pain you can't describe in any words that man has yet formed, just a string of curse words from which someone could pick up meaning through implication.
    I swear to God I hit climax the same time Mozart's symphony did.
    Clamp my eyes shut, try to shield the ejaculate from getting all over the hotel sheets and end up messing my boxers instead.
    And in both times, and even in Roark's office describing it all to him, I fell silent, and still. But the thoughts swimmed rabid, ferocious, unrestrained.
    "You promised," I'd reminded Roark. "Don't put it in your report."
    He hadn't. And he was the only person to ever be told. I'd half-expected Chilton to know, sitting in his office while he looked imploringly at me to help him do the job he couldn't do on his own.
    But he hadn't known, and Lecter did not mention it in our conversation, and what innuendo existed was only for my benefit. What good does propriety do you now, Doctor?
    Instead, told me that he could help me bear the fear lurking behind every thought in my brain. And I submitted to him. Yes, you're still master over me, Lecter. And if you asked enough I'd tell you what dreams I wake from in the early morning hours. If you asked enough I'd kiss you through the glass of your fucking gerbil cage, pretend I'm still in your arms, beat off to you in cheap hotel rooms while remembering our first time, even forget that you tried to kill me, for single seconds at a time, but even that being monumental. And terrifying.
    Don't call this love.
    "Do you do this often?" I'd asked Lecter afterwards, when he'd recovered.
    "What do you think, my dear boy?"
    The closest we'd ever gotten to pet names, and it sounds like he's addressing his grandson.
    "Rosencrantz."
    "And now pop culture references as well. I do applaud you."
    "I'd've figured you for the Stoppard type, actually."
    "Stoppard's pretentious. He thinks a singular idea can carry him through an entire script without refining or actually addressing it along the way."
    He might've said more, but I was asleep by that point. I found out later that that was actually his method for getting me to go to sleep after sex, so he wouldn't have to stay up and talk to me.
    "Like a woman," he'd said, in something approaching distaste.
    If you escaped, would you simply kill me, or would you do other things first?
    Can you still eat my heart afterwards?
    I should clean myself off.
    Fucking pervert.
    "In ancient Greece, it was widely believed true love could only be expressed by two equals," Lecter had said once. Another time. Conversationally. Before or after the night of Darcy Taylor, the third victim? I can't remember. "Of course, women weren't believed to be equal to men, so the notion of heterosexuality as a vehicle for love in the greatest, purest sense was automatically negated."
    Don't you dare call this love.
    Don't.
    Ever.
    A distant buzzing I can scarcely hear manifests itself as the ring of a telephone.
    I pick it up. With my unsoiled hand.
    "Hello?"
    It's Molly.
    "I'm sorry, hon," she says, sounding guilty. "Were you asleep?"
    "No," I say, with effort. "Just... thinking."
    "Are you all right? You saw Lecter today. Did anything happen?"
    "He gave me a few ideas to go on for the case. It might be a good start."
    "No, I mean..." She struggles with the words. "Did anything happen to you? Did he say anything or-- or-- do anything, bring up the trial at all or--"
    "No. He was fine. I'm fine, Molly. How's Josh?"
    "He's asleep. Are you really all right? You sound exhausted."
    "I am."
    "Look, if--"
    "No, I'm fine. Listen, Molly, I love you. You and Josh. You know that, right?"
    "What? Yes, of course. We love you too. But why--"
    "Nothing. Just-- nothing. I just needed to know that, that's all."
    Her voice grows hushed. "Come home soon, Will."
    "As soon as I can," I assure her. Then add, without thinking:
    "I might have to see Lecter one more time, though."
    And I know, irrevocably, that I am beaten.

Not that there was ever any doubt.

end

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finished at exactly: 21:45 07 February 2004

No (probably-)heterosexual actors were harmed in the making of this fanfic.

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