Friend Who Is Having A Bad Day, I’m not sure I’m ever going to write this prompt from a while back as an actual fic, but can I cheer you up with some thoughts on how it would play out?
Half Incubus Will Graham is half-demon on his mother’s side. She more or less dropped him off on his dad’s front porch once he was old enough to be separated from her. Daddy Graham came home from the boatyard to find Baby Will, who was about 50% giant blue eyes at that point, strapped into a carrier on the porch charming a small squadron of birds and squirrels that had gathered around him. He got about as far as What the fu– before Will blinked up at him and every question he had vanished from his head completely.
Half Incubus Will Graham’s mother probably appeared in his life sometime around age 12 or 13 to explain what his heritage was all about. It clarified a few things about the previous many years of being chased around the playground by basically everyone, but it was still an Incredibly Weird moment in his already kind of weird life.
Half Incubus Will Graham was, let’s be real, never going to be a social butterfly. That’s just not how he works. But he definitely got crankier and more isolated over the years, every time he made a vague effort at letting someone in as a friend and they went from Let’s Be Friends to I Just Know You Are My Soulmate, I’m Having Your Name Tattooed On My Ass Tomorrow in about ten seconds flat.
The number of people who thought they were either straight or gay but discovered their latent bisexual leanings when they met Half Incubus Will Graham is frankly alarming and probably should be studied by scientists. Will comes pretty close to disproving the Kinsey scale, although there have been a few stalwarts on either end who really truly are just not interested in him that way and when he finds one of those people he clings to that friendship like a drowning man, sometimes so much that he ends up putting them off instead. Bless Beverly Katz, Solid Kinsey Six, who says only that she would maybe consider giving Will’s twin sister the time of day if he had one. But since he doesn’t, she would much prefer they just be gun-range bros, and Will has rarely been so relieved in his life because he actually likes her and was not looking forward to the brushing-her-off conversation.
Half Incubus Will Graham occasionally wonders if he has some sort of incredibly bizarre pheromones that play a part in this. The aftershave is a protective measure in case that’s true, just like the glasses and the clothing.
Half Incubus Will Graham tried colored contacts for a while as a brand-new professor in case they helped any. They did not help, except that the anonymous sonnets that periodically appeared in his faculty mailbox temporarily switched from comparing his eyes to the river, to comparing them to coffee, sable, or chocolate. It wasn’t an improvement.
Half Incubus Will Graham is entirely unimpressed when Hannibal Lecter imprints on him like a duckling and shows up at his motel room door; he’s seen that move before.
Half Incubus Will Graham begins to be reluctantly impressed when Hannibal Lecter demonstrates, therapy session after therapy session, that he’s as interested in Will’s mind as he is in Will’s body.
It makes the betrayal all the worse when the cell doors slide shut and he’s on one side, the trapped side, and Hannibal is free on the other.
The one small silver lining in the whole godforsaken disaster is that the half-incubus blood may be strong enough to make up for a whole lot of Will’s cranky off-putting behavior, but it doesn’t quite stand up to being a suspected murderer. A lot of people who used to pant after Will no longer do. Not a single member of the jury bats their eyelashes at him. The bailiff doesn’t try to slip him a phone number. It would almost be a huge relief, if it weren’t for the whole prison thing.
(He does get a steady stream of completely bizarre correspondence from people he’s never met who want to marry him and bear his children, but he’s been in his line of work long enough to know that might have nothing to do with his stupid pretty face on TV. Some people just like murderers that way.)
(Some people, he thinks, as if his own feelings about Hannibal had stopped cold the way they should have once he knew what the man had done. He tells himself they’ll stop any day now. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Surely they’ll stop, sooner or later.)
Half Incubus Will Graham gets free, eventually. And he has a plan.
Half Incubus Will Graham slinking into a witchcraft store is completely hilarious, and let’s hope Freddie doesn’t see him there, but he slinks out again with the things he needs for a summoning spell. He summons up his mother, who is startled to say the least to be summoned for a family chat after so many years, but who has a lot to tell him about the finer points of using his bloodline rather than hiding it.
Will takes a lot of notes.
I’d like to resume my therapy, he says at Hannibal’s door, the timbre of his voice just exactly the way he practiced it, and his mother (who’s probably watching somehow, her child clearly needs some help) couldn’t be more proud if she’d raised him to adulthood herself.
