Clarice Starling irritably threw her sweat-soaked towel down on the rumpled remains of her bed and fell gracelessly into the chair beside it. Her day had been long and uninspiring, as all of her days had been since her rapid rise during the Buffalo Bill case, and subsequent tumble from grace in the days after the fallout at Chesapeake Bay. She buried her sweat-bathed face in her hands and dragged her too-slim hands through her autumnal locks as her breathing returned to normal even if the race of her thoughts refused to do the same.

Krendler, she thought viciously. This was all his fault. He was a ruined man now, reduced to drooling in a corner and playing with infant's toys, but Clarice sometimes thought, on days like this one when she was most prone to feeling sorry for herself, that his misfortune would be more acceptable than hers. Long ago, someone she trusted, and to whom she had looked for wisdom and guidance had told her that anger was counter-productive and would get her nowhere. He had been attempting to teach her to run with the flow of the politics that invariably came along with the job description – even his seemingly-lowly title of Section Chief had borne its share of political wrangling and ass-kissing sessions, but it had been one area in which Clarice Starling, both a protégé of the stoic, late Jack Crawford and Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, had failed.

And what about Doctor Lecter? What is he doing now? It had been a year since the fiasco that had essentially sealed her fate within the Bureau as no more than a two-bit paper-pusher onto whom the least-taxing cases were occasionally transferred. Ardelia sometimes called on her skills to help with her own cases, but they both knew it wasn't the same, and the pair of them had been drifting apart for some time because of it.

Gone were the frenzied study sessions for 'one last test' that spilled far into the night, or the early morning runs around the campus tracks at Quantico for a final cram session. But people changed and moved on with their lives, Clarice thought.

Or some of us do, anyway. She thought of one man in particular who would never change. Everything about him was exactly as he liked it, and he'd spent far too long crafting that image to let something as trivial as time change that now. When she realised which track her thoughts had taken after departure, she groaned, and her voice seemed uncomfortably loud in her little apartment. "Dammit, Starling, can you get through an entire hour without thinking about him?" But he'd gotten under her skin, and she'd let him into her head in all the wrong ways, just as Jack had warned her against. Jack... There was a man she missed. A heart attack in his home office, she'd heard. She hadn't attended the funeral, even though she'd wanted to. Too many people had heard the rumours and slander that pressed his tired, worn body against her supple mind.

She hadn't wanted to dishonour him that way.

Her mind, her mind was tearing her apart. It was the swift, always-moving current that had pulled her through the grueling classes and seminars as a student at Quantico; it was her inexhaustible supply of flowing thought processes that had garnered her Jack Crawford's favour, and it was that mind, coupled with reflexes that had been trained out until they were nearly as fast, that had erased Jame Gumb's stigma from the world.

It was that mind, coupled with her innate refusal to bow to the petty demands of internal office politics and alter her moral code to appease The Powers That Be, which had also drawn the intense displeasure of her superiors. Men like Krendler had once been, they resented her entry into the exclusive inner circles of the FBI – she was too quick, too good, too much more than they were on too many levels, and while she'd been useful – and while they'd been under Jack Crawford's constraints – Clarice had remained. But Crawford was gone, and so were the high-profile headlines. Now, she was a scapegoat for their ill-advised decisions. It was infuriating, but ...

But at least they never knew about the refrigerator. That fridge, that damned fridge. Sometimes she would wake in the close darkness of her bedroom, remembering the scent of his expensive aftershave mingling with the aromas of wine and good cooking spices on the monster's lips. Torn between something she could not name and a towering fury she could not touch for fear it would consume her, she had been trapped then as she was now. Helpless then to resist him, and helpless now to resist his memory:

She felt the cold metal, almost cruel against her back, and winced as she felt her stitched shoulder tear open. Blood trickled into the expensive fabric of the dress he had brought her and she gasped silently at the pain. He was snarling, was an only inch away from her face, and abruptly, with a power she thought was inhuman, wrenched the handle off the door, catching her long ponytail in its metal clasp as he slammed the door shut with her in it.. He bared his teeth and snapped at her as if to bite –she didn't flinch, she couldn't, not with him so close, - but kissed her instead. His lips had not been cold or repulsive; behind their touch had tremoured such soaring promises of sensuality that her very soul had trembled.

Sometimes, in her dreams, she kissed back.

Sometimes, time stopped in her dreams, in that place.

Sometimes, she would wake, with the sheets clinging to her naked body, her flesh afire with the notion that they had done more and gone to those forbidden, hidden places in her mind where her darkest desires were kept.

Sometimes, she wished she could stop dreaming.

But, in the end, she had attempted to fulfill her duty, like the pathetic dog she was. She refused to consider the notion that she had cuffed him there, with her, against that fridge, not to resign him to a windowless, graceless world of terrible food, worse television choices, and guards at least as twisted as the inmates whom they kept contained but to ...

No. She wouldn't even consider it. She didn't miss him, and there was nothing to the tabloid writers' gleeful exclamations that she'd followed him to the shore where he'd taken his final leave of her, his blood black in the firecracker-speckled dark, to murmur her lover's goodbyes. She'd gone after him in the hopes of apprehending him, in the hopes of finishing her job and

finally getting their respect

putting the monster where he belonged.

Stop it, Starling, stop it! She reprimanded herself, rising and slamming into the shower. Twenty minutes later, cleaner, cooler and in fresh clothes, she wore a more acceptable appearance, if not a suitable frame of mind. She stalked down to her meager kitchen and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, absently noting that it was the last one and that she'd have to do some shopping soon or risk starvation in this hellhole of an apartment. Swigging the cold liquid, she wandered out into the front room right as the postman began dropping the mail through the slot. Retrieving his leavings as though they were the fetid droppings of a misbehaved dog, she dropped the lot of it on the sad conglomeration of wood that passed for her coffee table and perused her daily mail. An electric bill, a magazine telling her she wasn't shapely enough for summer without its help, her telephone bill…

The familiar, elegant scrawl on the heavy envelope that comprised the final item of her postman's generosity numbed her fingers and set her pulse on a race to break free of her skin. Her water splattered on the carpet as she let it and the envelope drop, but her stasis was only temporary. Turning aside, she hastened to the kitchen and pulled on plastic evidence gloves, ignoring how her fingers trembled in their latex casings. Her gut told her it was far too late to bother with such formalities, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation did nothing if all was not done according to The Protocol, and she'd taken enough of her boss' acrid sense of humour to want to be on the receiving end any more than she had to be. What did you think this was, Starling? he'd demand. A letter from a friend? Is Lecter some kind of freakish pen-pal to you now?

Forcing herself not to think, she excised the neatly-folded letter with far more caution than was really necessary and delicately opened it with one hand, slipping the envelope into a plastic Ziploc bag for later examination with the other. The contents didn't surprise her. More of the same elegant handwriting adorned the thick, expensive parchment, and the ink in which it was written was fine and well-blended.

She almost smiled. He hadn't changed a bit.

Dear Clarice,

I see this letter finds you well, if somewhat dismayed at your sudden tumble in the hierarchy of your precious FBI. Who looks shamefully down upon you now, Clarice? Is your daddy staring up at you from his grave, or scowling at you in your dreams? After all, the tenuousness of your current circumstance is a long fall down from the high pinnacle of celebrated Special Agent, Clarice.

I would imagine even now that you are still practicing your tricks like an obedient little girl, checking for fingerprints, noting the postmark and calling the letter in. They'll make nothing of it, you know. Ah, you've no doubt noted by now that it's a United States postmark. Ingenious, my dear, but no treat. I must regretfully inform you that I simply could not be present to deliver this letter personally from my hand to yours. Minor disappointments keep us primed for the good things in life, though, wouldn't you say?

The tabloids are screaming as loudly as your lambs do, I've noticed lately – pairing the forgotten Beauty with the terrible Beast. Laughable, really. The unfortunate Mr. Krendler may have found my gifts of artwork to be romantically inclined, but I assure you, it was not meant to be.

For some reason she couldn't quite fathom, she found that flat, outright dismissal of soft feelings almost hurtful, and once again, could not bear to examine the reasoning behind it. Ignoring herself, she read on, but there wasn't much more. She wondered what he'd say if she ever told him how predictable he was becoming.

Though I am sure you are sorely wracking your brain for a reason behind my sudden communication with you, you will not find one more compelling than, on my last foray past your domicile, I noted that your living conditions were in dire need of something with which to cheer them up. I do hope the flowers help.

It is my fondest wish, Special Agent Starling, that this correspondence lightens your day. It certainly brightened mine to write it.

As always, Clarice, my fondest regards,

Hannibal Lecter, M.D.

Flowers? Her telephone shrilled, startling her into fumbling for her gun. After a few moments and two more irritating rings, she composed herself enough to pick it up. "Clarice Starling."

"Hello, this is FTD Florist calling, and we'd like to confirm your address for a delivery."

Her skin prickled, and between mouthing something unquestionably unladylike in the doctor's general direction, she managed to stammer out the details of her address to the cheerful receptionist. Her mind was screaming at her to call headquarters, but she denied it, pacing the confines of her small apartment for another hour, waiting, waiting.

When the flowers came, there was no note, of course; he was not a man prone to burdening the harsh bite of his intellectual superiority with needless repetition. She stared at the blooms in silence as they regarded her from their expensive crystalline vase.

Calla lilies, sometimes recognised in various parts of the world as arum lilies, have long been known to festoon the heads of pure, young brides and garnish the shining caskets in which the dead begin their final return towards the earth. Symbolism was not easily lost on Agent Starling, and she looked away from the blind, white stares of the flowers with a shudder.

And what was the game now, she thought? There were no false bargains to be made, no Senator's daughters to rescue. Any situation without a game of cat and mouse to keep his interest... She shook her head. There would be time enough to consider his motives later.

Good things come to those who wait, he'd said once. She'd been waiting a very long time.

She called headquarters immediately.