Chapter Text
The barred door clicks shut behind him, and then the hall is silent.
Hannibal closes his eyes and breathes in damp, stagnant air. On the surface, the facilities appear well-scrubbed and thoroughly maintained, and they are, to an extent. But no amount of cheap cleaning products or sickly-sweet office incense will ever be able to sweep away the prison stench buried underneath, layers upon layers of stale sweat, hidden mold, and heavy sewer smell rising from poor sanitation systems.
Nevertheless, it is a good day.
Not so very long ago, he had watched months of meticulous planning fall into place with a beautiful, mathematical precision. Alana, Abigail, Jack and the ever-hallowed Bureau of Investigation… their behavior has conformed to his prescience like a well-tailored shirt. He has pioneered exoneration without preliminary blame, and the invention has further reaffirmed his insurmountability, his conviction that he is a step above the murderous rabble.
If there is a negative to be found — as there is in all things — then he supposes it truly is a shame that Will Graham had to take the pitfall.
A high aria rises from somewhere deep below, moves up the steady columns of Hannibal’s legs and through his lungs. It reaches through his ears with a timbre so clear that he almost startles, and he lingers to catch each lucid note, standing victorious, a conquering general. It occurs to him that he could stand and listen all day, but eventually, the pause drags just long enough to be considered unusual by the leering guards, and he hears clothing rustle as the one to his left shifts impatiently. Frowning, Hannibal files the moment away. He will summon the same melody in his palace tonight, free from scowling witnesses.
Here at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, he has holy work to do.
Hannibal continues down the hall.
Polished heels on gray tiles. Dull yellow lights flickering overhead, on the doorframe behind him. There are other inmates jeering distantly in this corridor, but as far as he is concerned, there is only one man here, who has been stashed at the end of the hallway like an unwanted gift his keepers have been trying to forget. Hannibal slows as the cell’s sole occupant comes into view.
Will Graham sits on a bench, motionless, clothed in cheap blue twill.
His eyes are closed. What scents waft over the stream of Will’s mind, Hannibal wonders. What lovely, terrible sights?
“Hello, Will,” he says.
Through the bars, blue eyes blink open.
“Dr. Lecter,” says Will. His tone is tempered, not quite opaque — Hannibal squints through and finds contempt, weariness, and injury, woven into a thin, fragile thread.
With the small acknowledgement having been given, Will turns away again, less a gesture of dismissal than a cursory display of indifference. I don’t care what you have to tell me, his body is screaming out in plain text. In fact, I don’t want to have met you at all.
Unfortunately, Hannibal very much cares what Will has to tell him.
“Lost in thought?” he asks, unwilling to resist.
“Not lost. Not anymore,” Will murmurs. “I used to hear my thoughts inside my skull with the same… tone, timbre, accent as if the words were coming out of my mouth.”
Hannibal clings to each word like a baby’s fist to its mother. “And now?”
“Now my inner voice sounds like you. I can't get you out of my head.”
Does Will not know that this will only please him? Thrill him, even, to hear how deep his influence has reached. He imagines holding Will’s brain in his palm, squeezing his fingertips into gray matter until their tissue cannot help but fuse together.
“Friendship can sometimes involve a breach of individual separateness.”
“You're not my friend,” Will snaps, rising to his feet. It feels as if he has grown taller in the last few weeks. “The light from friendship won't reach us for a million years. That's how far away from friendship we are.”
“I imagine it's easier to believe I am responsible for those murders than it is to accept that you are.”
“Sure is.”
“Your inner voice can provide a method of taking control of your behavior,” reasons Hannibal, borrowing Doctor Lecter’s dry, didactic baritone. “Accepting responsibility for what you've done. Giving those thoughts words encourages clarity.”
“I have clarity,” Will says. “About you.”
Hannibal blinks, silently tuning his tack, but before he can speak, Will meets his eyes again.
In the space between two breaths, an urgent sensation washes over Hannibal, like a layer of hot steam gathering beneath his epidermis. He blinks, adjusting. Although his temperance in all areas of life is a force to be revered, his heart is beginning to race with a sudden, inexplicable fury that must show on his face because Will’s mouth moves, questioning, but the words are rapidly swallowed by the blood roaring through Hannibal’s ears. Stop this, he urges, expecting the tide to swiftly recede, except it only swells and swells until he must consciously school his features into a placid veneer. He thinks he says out loud There will be a reckoning, only Will Graham in front of him shows no reaction, and he finds that he cannot trace the declaration back down a path of clear thought as if it has been implanted by a foreign, occupying force.
“Your innocence is faltering, Doctor Lecter.”
Will’s voice comes from far away, a near-incomprehensible warble. Hannibal breathes once, twice, focuses on the sharp stink of the iron bars. Calm again.
“My tolerance is faltering, Will. You’re accusing me of terrible deeds. Terrible to many, many people. And to you.”
Will huffs, mouth twisting. “You can set down the facades, Doctor Lecter. What you did to me is in my head. And I will find it. I’m going to remember, and when I do, there will be a reckoning.”
A wild, irrational excitement creeps through him, mingling with his slowing heartbeat.
A reckoning … are Will’s words a coincidence, Hannibal wonders, a byproduct of his own extended intimacy with the other man’s thoughts? Or… what, exactly, would be the alternative? Perhaps his natural skill set has finally stretched past the spectacular and into the impossible.
”I have huge faith in you, Will,” he says quietly. “I always have.”
Will does not offer a response. Today, there is nothing more to be said.
On the way back, the hall feels as if it has shrunk. As much as Hannibal thrives under suspense, it is a much longer path to uncertainty than it is to security.
Listening to his heels click, click, click in quick, decisive succession, he replays the last few minutes in his mind, details that his unconscious self had absorbed while his rationale had been clouded by unwelcome sentiment. He is fervid to make sense of what has just transpired. The light from friendship won’t reach us for a million years. He sees blue eyes in vivid detail, glittering with unrestrained spite. Dry lips murmur, there will be a reckoning .
And then the sudden assault of deja vu, returning again to hurl Hannibal in tight circles around himself. Despite society’s harsh categorization of his more homicidal confrères, he has always been perfectly capable of empathy under his own mandates, but this dizzying rush spans far beyond the simple descriptor. His head reels. His vision doubles. One one plane he watches the BSHCI guard pulling out his key, making a grim attempt at a half-smile, and overlaid just as vividly: damp gray stones below iron bars, shadowy antlers growing like a thornbush.
Only by the time he’s halfway out of the door does Hannibal decisively conclude that the anger, beyond uncharacteristic, had never belonged to him.
It had been Will’s.
Halfway through the short drive home, Hannibal surprises himself by reaching over to switch off Gounod’s Faust . He has never really felt the need to deny himself of his simple auditory pleasures for the sake of internal clarity, but for the first time in… possibly his whole life, he finds that he needs physical space to think.
He is confused. He can admit that much to himself.
It is rare that he stumbles upon a question that cannot be answered by a quick foray into his mental encyclopaedia, and at the present moment, he is not even sure which question to ask. The feeling evokes as much exhilaration as it does frustration. While speaking to Will Graham, his emotions had slipped from his fingers for the first time since his early adolescence. Why now? And why that burning rage, when he has reason to feel anything but?
The former could be solved easily enough, though he hesitates to supply the exact language. Will is a catalyst in his life. That much is nearly indisputable.
The second, though… he will need to dig into his library, maybe consult with colleagues under vague terms if that does not amount to anything. I hesitate to ask this as it borders on doctor-patient confidentiality, he will begin without an ounce of hesitation, and then he will thread words around each other until a radiant, glimmering tapestry looms before them. When he so chooses, he can paint a vibrant picture indeed.
Nevertheless, unless more data springs up, he sincerely doubts that he will stumble upon an answer, at least one he will be willing to embrace.
As Hannibal unlocks his front door, he adds dinner to his already ambitious list of considerations. Since he first began feeding two on a regular basis, he has also begun designating several hours each weekend to meal preparation. This afternoon will be spent in the kitchen. He parses through the sketches beginning to form in his mind, pages of heart tartare dished with salade Mesclun and prime rib au jus adapted to his favorite game. Of course, Abigail insists that she would find just as much contentment gnawing on thawed chicken nuggets and unsalted fries — but why would anyone order fast food, Hannibal wonders, if there is time to cook?
9:15, screams red, boxy numbers, burning into her retinas. The colon flickers with each second that meanders by, and Abigail rearranges the line segments in her head like toothpicks. Five becomes a three, nine morphs into six. One crumples into itself and folds again into nothing.
She glances again at the laptop open on the coffee table. Dr. Lecter’s done the courtesy of downloading and numbering all of her courses for her. He’s even shoved them into a series of folders that make her vision blur as she goes down the list. Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra, reads the little black text under her vacantly drifting cursor. Above that: Foundations of Brain, Behavior, and Cognition. He’s in one or two of those. They aren’t too bad.
Abigail sighs and stands, pacing the length of the carpet. She thinks she’ll ask Dr. Lecter for another book next time he comes by, whenever that might be. Probably soon; it’s been a while, and the meals in her fridge have been quickly dwindling. Novels seem to be her sole company, recently, when she’s not squinting at a spiral notebook. It’s either that or solitaire. There’s no internet, obviously.
Too risky, he’d said, though for him or for her, she hadn’t been able to tell.
Knock.
It comes from the foyer. Abigail’s breath catches.
Knock. Knock.
She gets up. Slowly, on her tiptoes, she eases across the carpet. The countertop knife rack is just within sight.
“It’s me,” comes a pleasant, lilting voice from behind the door, muffled only slightly by the wood.
She relaxes as a key clicks in the lock — there’s no mistaking that accent. Still, she waits for his sharp, distinctive shadow to appear before she slinks around the corner and into the living room.
Dr. Lecter, dressed to the tee in a violently blue shirt and yellow tie that she can’t help but wish she could pull off, gently dumps two large rectangular bags onto the kitchen counter. From one, he begins to unload no less than a dozen containers onto the kitchen counter. Each movement is precise and uncannily methodical; it’s easy to imagine him as a surgeon. From the other bag, he removes another two flopping fabric totes brimming with fresh produce.
“You’ve been neglecting your classes,” he greets, and she does all she can not to scowl.
“I’ve been keeping up. You can see my notes if you don’t believe me. It’s just hard to concentrate sometimes, with… everything else going on.”
The Doctor smiles. “Endurance is a muscle. It needs exercise.”
“Not much motivation to exercise when I can’t understand half of what I’m watching.”
Abigail isn’t being entirely truthful. Yes, she’s been having a hard time applying her mathematical foundations to a third dimension — too much of a visual learner to extract much from rows upon rows of crowded formulas — but she hasn’t exactly been trying that hard, either. Each time the numbers and graphs begin to blur in her vision, she simply closes the laptop and red notebook and wanders aimlessly through the house, picking up objects and setting them back down without any real thought behind the motions.
It’s not that she doesn’t recognize the importance or necessity of her continued education. In fact, she’s always found comfort in academics. She still does. She wants a future, after all, and as mind-numbing as her digital lessons can be, they’re a tangible first step. It’s just that if she focuses too hard on anything these days, her brain seems to take off on its own, accepting no input from her as it loops off to a cabin of grisly keepsakes, Dad’s guiding hand, and a circle of pale, pale girls chanting her name in a righteous, vengeful refrain. She’s gotten better at managing it all, but even so, it seems like every time she triumphantly quells one ghostly voice, a dozen whispers rise to fill the vacuum.
Dr. Lecter could help if she told him. Each day she spends in spectral company, becomes more painfully aware of that particular truth. Throughout the past few weeks, there have been a number of times she’s come very close to giving in, to crumpling into his warm, open arms and sobbing out her torments. But then without fail she remembers his blank eyes and deathly stillness from not too long ago as he murmured, many more than your father, and I’m so sorry, Abigail, and the resurging terror from the memory always jolts her back to her senses.
Strange then, how easily she’s sunk into her new life up here, one of luxury and house arrest and partial derivative worksheets, unfinished as they are.
“You could’ve asked me for help,” Dr. Lecter rebukes. “You know I’m always happy to be of help to you, Abigail.”
“Math and physics aren’t your area of expertise.”
“On the contrary. Though one might argue expertise isn’t necessary to comprehend high school mathematics.”
He grins, almost teasingly.
“It’s a college class,” she snaps, pride smarting.
Even to her own ears, the words come out a little whiny. She can’t help it, though. The Doctor’s perpetual condescension gnaws at her nerves like ocean waves lapping away at loose sediment.
“A rather dismal reflection of the current school system, isn’t it? I mastered this mathematical field before age seven,” he muses. Before she can politely interject that none of this is helping, he holds up a soothing hand. “I don’t mean to egoize, Abigail. I had an early start. A good tutor. But bright minds like yours and mine work best divorced from tedious linearization. Grade levels, schools. We are more sponges than file cabinets, Abigail, do you understand?”
She does, in a loose, abstract way. She tries not to be flattered by the comparison.
“I have great faith in you,” he adds.
She nods, trying to ignore the warmth blooming in her chest.
There’s a pause that’s probably only awkward for her. Her hands twitch at her sides. Suddenly, she feels like she should be doing…something, so she joins him in the kitchen to help fill in the fridge shelves.
The next half hour is silent. She focuses on sorting the food, occasionally peering through semi-translucent tupperware to see a variety of tiny dishes that she knows by now are invariably delicious. She tries not to think of Dad’s home-cooked meals — Dr. Lecter is a monster, she’s sure of it, but he’s a different breed than the one she’d grown up with. He doesn’t have the same pathology, the same obsession with honoring his victims. He has no reason to feed her pieces of dead girls.
Only by the time the sky has darkened and the sea is a glassy black does she finally work up the courage to ask, “How was Mr. Graham?”
Dr. Lecter stills.
“Faring well enough, though I would be happy to see him eating more. He’s become quite thin. I’m considering having a word with the current hospital administrator.”
“They’re starving him?”
“Not likely. Loss of appetite can be a physiological response to emotional stress. Our Will is very likely stuck in a perpetual state of ‘flight or fight.’”
“He’s in there because of me,” Abigail says, and Dr. Lecter frowns.
“No. He’s in there because of me. Because I want the best for you.”
“Same thing.”
“Not the same thing. The world has cast you in a passive role. Your father, the FBI.” He averts his eyes. “Even I am now guilty. Soon, Abigail, I would like to give you back your power.”
“You don’t need to pretend to care, you know,” she says before she can help it. “Around me, I mean. I already know that you’re a… that you like to hurt people.”
She braces herself for his anger or scorn, but Dr. Lecter only hums, thoughtful.
“Plato once wrote that the soul is a charioteer driving opposite steeds: one of nobility, the other of animal savagery. He seemed to find this task rather challenging, but I have always disagreed. I don’t believe it’s so hard at all.”
“Why restrain your nature?”
“Exactly,” he says, clearly pleased. “See? You’re a clever girl. You have a very bright future ahead of you.”
Abigail isn’t so sure that she’s said anything interesting at all, but she isn’t exactly going to press the point, so she nods and does her best to look appreciative. That seems to do the trick. The hums of the refrigerator fill the quiet room, and abruptly, she realizes she’s getting hungry again. She picks out an unnecessarily intricate pudding-like dish that Hannibal informs her is best eaten hot.
As she bends down to pluck a spoon from the dishwasher, the Doctor tells her he needs to head home because he has a project that he’d like to begin tonight. The microwave trills. She tries not to visualize the poor person probably gagged and hog-tied in his basement.
“Nothing like that,” he assures her. “Merely academic, I’m afraid.”
“That wasn’t what I was thinking.”
“Of course it wasn’t.”
With that, he unfolds his coat and strolls to the doorway. He’s been urging her to make the house into her own, but his ease of movement gives her a necessary reminder that her name is not the one on the deed.
“Have a good evening, Abigail.”
“You too,” she responds, because as much as she’s gotten away with saying so far, she knows better than to shed her manners. A fragrance wafts up from the dessert in her hand — vanilla and lime over a fresh, herby tang that she isn’t a hundred percent sure is cilantro — and she thinks it just might be the most delicious thing she’s smelled in her whole life.
From the distance, Baltimore could be a rough-surfaced painting, skillfully smeared with thick-brushed blue-black buildings and gold leaf lights. Though Hannibal’s thoughts are restless, he marvels the whole way home, craning his head at each turn so that he can see through the bobbing branches obscuring his path.
Without daytime traffic to honk and stall in his way, the drive takes half the time. He steps onto his portico with a thorough conception of the next two-and-a-half hours.
In his adulthood, he has rarely resorted to other men’s thoughts when it comes to philosophical matters, but now he delves into his palace library, running his finger over the scrupulously configured collection, across the yellowed folders and leather spines of monographs, controversial studies, long-ago-read philosophical anthologies. It takes him no longer than a minute to retrieve a handful of promising ‘jumping-off points,’ and he promptly goes to fetch the same materials from his home library. He quickly discovers, however, that some will require a sojourn to his office, others an invitation to rare book rooms, and others still an elementary breaking-and-entering that will inevitably stroke his ego even if his stomach sits empty. For the most part, they are books that he has not opened in decades.
He sets aside the texts for the next morning. He would have liked to get started, but he knows it is best to give himself some time to process the day’s events, so instead he finishes drafting his most recent article for the Northern Medical Journal of Psychiatry. It is a simple musing on early manifestations of psychoanalysis in Dante, and to those who read with their brains, a thinly-veiled critique of the modern practice. He has not spent very long on this particular piece. He will also revisit it in the morning.
Deciding that he has done enough for the night, Hannibal settles into his bed with his new read, a modern horror-thriller novel riddled with the author’s projection and a truly horrific quantity of anatomical inaccuracies. It had been brought to his attention by a New York Times review that had called it ‘chilling and darkly captivating.’ On his iPad, Hannibal pulls up the journalist’s profile photo so that he can better imagine carving out his larynx.
When he has tired of reading, he completes his evening routine by readjusting the two seconds his watch has lost during the day, then lays back to sleep under its gentle ticks. His eyes do not drift shut until well past two.
That night, he dreams from beneath the ground.
A thousand tons of dirt press back onto him, heavy and stifling. Wet clods tangle in his eyelashes, seeping past the seam of his lips, and as he looks up, the world is dark — not bleak, never uneventful, but suffused with a blackness that can only be explained by light’s complete, willing recession. It is a soothing place to be. Even in the earliest memories he can fish from his mind, he cannot recall a time during which he feared the dark or the solitude that arrives with it, by the single virtue of its unpopularity. This dark cannot be defined by emptiness. He rests here, after all.
But then a flash in the not-quite-void: knowledge, pure against the tainted dark, arrives with the suddenness and poignancy of misfortune. Events enter his mind, infinitely vivid, the barest, most essential concepts distilled into more emotion than imagery.
A wooden city on fire. Smoke swathes the sky. Tiny grains of dust crowd in the air, coat skin and wood and metal. Directly above him, a young woman crouches in rags, cradling her daughter against a wall that sheds stones onto the bobbing heads of the crowd. Screams, war cries, hoarse pleas for mercy — they all meld into one high note, ripe and sweet.
Save me , he hears, whistling through the air like an arrow. Save me, save me.
In the distance, beneath a jagged stone wall, scattered defenders stumble against their foe. They are few and far between, and he knows beyond the scantest doubt that there are too few of them and too many… attackers. Beasts. Barbarians. The city will fall before dawn.
Save me, pleads the mother again, and Hannibal finds himself reaching out from his tomb of soil. His proffered hand sprouts by her feet. Her hesitation, though present, is fleeting. The baby wails by her feet.
As soon as she takes his hand, he pulls , and she is brought into the ground inch by inch, second by second. Fragrant black soil meets her knees, then her hips, then folds over her head. He can feel her struggle even as her body goes slack. A gibbering wave of regret washes through her, envelops her frail bones in a roiling, crushing desolation, but by now, it is too late. She belongs to him.
Hannibal preens at a job well done. He feels lazy, half-sated, like he has just finished the first course of a warm meal. His fork and knife are poised over the once-mother’s temple, ready to carry on with the feast. But the moment he blinks, her face shifts into Will’s, her soft curves meld into Will’s firm body, Will’s pained grimace. She wears his hatred, too, and even though Hannibal cannot burn, he has suddenly been doused in fire and the pain is all-consuming.