The Game Is A Foot

The Game Is A Foot

<<Author’s Note

Warning: slight spoilers for Hannibal Series 2 episode 11, which you probably knew anyway. This is set during S2 Ep9 'Shizakana', which is where it begins, with dialogue taken from the episode. Spoilers from Sherlock Series 2, which you probably knew anyway, too.

And yes, I know that’s not how you spell ‘afoot’.>>

‘When you sent a man to kill me,’ said Hannibal, ‘were you imagining killing me yourself? Living vicariously through him as if your hands were tightening the noose around my neck? Or were you simply hiding?’

Hannibal gazed at Will searchingly. They both leaned on his vast, glossy desk, their bodies less than a foot apart.

‘I wasn’t hiding from anything the first time I tried to kill you,’ replied Will. His hands clasped the edge of the desk, the cords in his forearms standing out starkly.

‘You were hiding,’ Hannibal corrected him. ‘Behind the gun.’

His eyes were searching. Compelling.

‘You must allow yourself to be intimate with your instincts, Will.’

His hand reached for Will’s. His finger stroked the back of his knuckles, softly over the ridges and the valleys. Will opened his mouth to speak.

There was a knock on the door of Hannibal’s office. Brisk and authoritative and—if it were possible for a knock—impatient.

‘Pardon me,’ said Hannibal, rising from his desk. He held Will’s gaze for a moment, as if cementing what they had said, the touch, the emotion between them, before he went to the door and opened it.

Two men stood there. The taller, in a long black overcoat with a blue scarf wrapped around his neck, had dark curly hair, ice-blue eyes, and a steely glare that could fell a horse at sixty paces. The other, shorter with sandy hair and a military bearing, had a similarly grim expression, though his eyes were friendlier.

‘Sherlock Holmes,’ said the taller, immediately as soon as the door was opened. ‘This is my colleague Dr John Watson. You are Dr Hannibal Lecter?’         

‘I am he,’ replied Hannibal, with his customary courtesy. ‘I am also afraid that my office hours are over for the evening.’

‘And yet you have a patient,’ said Sherlock Holmes, pushing past Hannibal into the room. Dr Watson followed him, similarly unapologetic.

‘I consider it rude,’ said Hannibal calmly, ‘to enter a room without being invited.’

‘Politeness is irrelevant and boring,’ said Sherlock, tossing back the tails of his coat and sitting in Hannibal’s leather consulting armchair. ‘Usually, it is a cover-up for the truth. I am here, Dr Lecter, to talk to you about the Hammersmith Horror.’

John stood beside Sherlock, his hands clasped behind his back, but his stance and his expression betraying his state of alertness. Will, who had remained sitting on Hannibal’s desk, asked, ‘The Hammersmith Horror?’

Sherlock glanced at him. ‘Ah, you are Will Graham. The FBI profiler.’

‘Former FBI profiler,’ corrected Will with a grimace. ‘My official responsibilities were removed after I was incarcerated in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane on suspicion of multiple homicide.’

‘I fancy they were not quite removed,’ said Sherlock. ‘I perceive that the FBI is still making full use of your services, though perhaps in a more subtle way.'