The Smoke [Hannigram]

Chapter 2. Love Is A Surprise At Your Door

When you close your eyes, what do you see?
Do you hold the light, or is darkness underneath?
In your hands, there's a touch that can heal
But in those same hands is the power to kill
Are you a man or a monster?

The night was surrounded by ungodly silence and thick air forthcoming with the mist. It was going to be a brand new beginning for some, a brand new experience of life and death alike.

A tall man took two steps forward, then he stopped and stood steadily, no movements to distract a prey confronting him now. It was only reasonable to attack and make it quick; no dramatic suspense, no performance, no theatre of powerful poetry which death itself could possess sometimes. Only the sharp edge of a knife and nothing more to cross the final line. He hesitated though.

"Will, do not make me take actions I don't wish to take on your behalf. Or on behalf of our union."

"Nobody can make us do anything. Your words, Hannibal."

"My words then." He forced his way. He moved forward with a purpose to catch, haunt, eventually kill. But he couldn't do it as he had always planned it. The frequency of an unknown source stopped him halfway through. Will sharpened his own blade. He even made an effort to do it with his hands. Like he had imagined many times before. He stretched out his fingers and violently twisted them in Hannibal's hair.

The epiphany of touch. The intimacy, the violence.

Hannibal gasped loudly, then asked without the unnecessary kindness, "What are you doing?"

"Killing you, isn't it obvious?" Hannibal's eyes smiled at that. Will was powerful. His method of channelling emotions incorporated the perspective of nowness, resonating with a prospect of forever-sweet eternity.

"Is it going to last?" The older man asked softly as his eyes turned into light when crashed with the dark depths of ocean waters; when splashed by that enormous wave of blueness he had come to adore so much.

"You?" The brunet enquired with a crack in his voice, which could be a sign of meaningless quavering or a thunder hidden underneath the crack, waiting for a friendly storm in his awakened darkness.

"You and I. The continuum of your crime and my time of dying," Hannibal answered quietly.

The roles had reversed. The crimes had become each other's twin sisters; indistinguishable, with no timeline, no horizon, no beginnings.

"Dying is a combination of time, attention and life itself. It is a constant thing of the present, never truly ending and never staying," Will spoke, voice cold and deliberate. "It changes everything in the dynamics of one's universe. If you could force death upon yourself constantly and permanently, you would live long enough to see the purpose of all the questions asked and all the answers you'd never got."

Will didn't use his voice again. The verbal conversation was over, for further articulation he used his sinful tongue instead; with full awareness, he wielded the carneous wet muscle. Not to put all the questions into question but to let them rest in the state of oblivion. He stopped thinking and converting useless abstracts of completely worn-out mind. He smiled unabashedly when he heard a relentless whine coming from the other; the quivering of skin was just one step too much.

Will gave in to the purifying etiquette of behaviourism.

He bit the predator and master of his becoming. The special sweetness of that metallic taste was beguiling. Steel and iron.