Full Summary: In the wake of the death of Abigail Hobbs, Hannibal finds himself wanting to rebuild the bridge that burned the night she died. Two like minds does not always mean two like reactions; both men struggle to heal from the death and from the betrayal. Hannibal has built walls for others to climb his whole life. Now that Will has built a wall around himself, Hannibal's fight to knock it down changes things irrevocably for both of them. Will contain dark and mature themes.
Author's Note: Rated M for dark themes including character death, murder and cannibalism as well as language and sex (M/M, implied and written out). Story will update every Sunday.
These characters belong to NBC's Hannibal, and I make no profit by writing of them...although I would love it if you'd review!
Also, this first chapter has very sparse dialogue. All future chapters will have plenty of it.
Doctor Lecter awoke with a jolting, disturbed start.
The very first awareness that the psychiatrist noted was that he felt slick; there was an odd, slimy sensation that he could feel all over his skin. Hannibal raised a hand to his forehead, noting the way his pajama sleeve stuck to his arm, and discovered that his face and hair were dampened with sweat.
Frowning, he propped himself up against the headboard, and it was by this that he made his second observation, much more alarming than the first. He was incredibly dizzy.
Pressing a hand to the side of his head, Hannibal ran three fingers into his wet hair and closed his ecru eyes for a moment. It took only a brief moment to assimilate that the cause for the dizziness was not only a headache and an inexplicably warm body but a bizarre feeling in his stomach. There was a fluttering, yet also vice-like sensation in his belly, as if his stomach was tightening shakily. Hannibal moved the hand from his head to his belly and discovered that was exactly what it felt like. The man gave a slight frown; he was starving. The issue with that was quite a bit broader than simply getting up and cooking, too.
The previous evening's dinner was supposed to consist primarily of a choice cut; a very fresh bit of meat. A kidney. Hannibal's taste for the organ was one he did not share with most of those who he had over for dinner, and so he was quite used to dressing and arranging the meat to suit the palettes of his guests, a rather time-consuming work. This particular evening, however, was his and his alone to enjoy, and so it had been a clear choice which of the meats he'd prepare himself to eat. He had found, to his shock, that upon laying that bit of meat on the butcher's block as so many other slabs before it, that he could not lower the knife and begin to cut it. Hannibal had assumed that perhaps he just wasn't feeling well, perhaps his appetite was delayed. And so the doctor had waited nearly three hours and then returned to his cooking, once again laying out the organ and once again finding he could not cook it.
This morning, he hoped, would bring some sort of finale to the situation. Hannibal was very hungry, and perhaps his fierce appetite would be able to drown out whatever had gotten in to him, whatever had convinced him he did not want to begin to prepare his favorite variation of meat. Drawing himself up from his bed, Hannibal Lecter walked down the oaken staircase and to the large kitchen which was the centerpiece of the first floor. The man paused at the sink, turning on the faucet to cleanse his hands. Steeling himself, the man cast a downward glance into the sink and found it to be soothingly empty save for a few suds around the rim of the drain. In spite of the fact that the occurrence of the ear in the sink had not happened in his own home, he considered it every time he was in his kitchen...
"She didn't come back with me," Will told him, body and words shaking from the cold winter weather.
Hannibal winced at the words, not only because he could sense the agony in Will's stare but because he knew exactly where the girl in question was. Of course, there was no way he could confide that bit of information to Will. Not now, if ever.
So instead, he extended his hand to his patient; Will crushed the doctor's finger's like a vice, as if holding on tight enough would remove the irrevocable, erase what both men knew to be true...
Several minutes later, Hannibal was standing over Will's kitchen sink, gazing at a bizarre and rather repulsing mixture of what appeared to be both blood and vomit...but that was not what captured the psychiatrist's full attention.
No, what snared Hannibal's focus, capturing it like a steel trap, was the presence of a human ear in the sink.
Abigail's death had been quite unsettling for all those involved in her new life; from the FBI to the hospital staff to Will Graham and to Hannibal himself. For the latter, it was a shock and not a shock.
Following his revelation to the girl about having taken more lives than her father had done, Hannibal's bond with Abigail was sealed in a way that he could not explain. It was parental on one hand; he wanted the best for her, to guide and safeguard her. On the other it was a villainous companionship; an unspoken allegiance between two killers solidified by admission. Two killers who knew the secrets of one another. A rather dangerous mix, akin to electricity and water, gunpowder and a leaping flame.
Of course, that simply would not do.
Two killers were now under a roof together. And a peaceful coexistence between the two, no matter the circumstance, no matter the bond, was no longer a permanent possibility. No, the removal of one, in one way or another, was certainly imminent. It was the natural order of things, an absolute truth. Were a lion and a honey badger caged together, in the end only one of them would survive. Despite not being natural enemies of one another, inevitably they would begin to grow hungry. But rather than work together on a solution to escape, perhaps by combining their strengths, they would resort not to teamwork but execution. One animal would be slain. And the other would walk free. Such was the way of nature. And such was the way of Abigail and Doctor Lecter.
Abigail was not made to be the enemy of Hannibal. And in truth, she was not his enemy. They were two very different brands of killers. One was a former accessory whose desperation to save herself from an assailant had pushed her to violent extremes. The other, a meticulous, calculating, and, when it came to the killing of others, emotionless mass murderer. And so, while vastly different from one another, they boiled down to the same; they had taken lives. It was by that sinister truth that the need to remove the threat of Abigail Hobbs was born.
Abigail and Hannibal's knowledge of the deeds of one another had placed Hannibal in a situation he had always disliked, not unlike the one he had been in with Tobias several weeks prior; someone had gotten close enough to know what we was hiding. He had not, initially, wanted to kill the man. However, the string musician's eyewitness to his actions had given Hannibal no real choice. Tobias posed a very serious threat to his secrecy, his liberty, his very livelihood. It was natural, then, that Hannibal would take those things from Tobias. Permanently.
There was something about Abigail that made her an even greater danger to Hannibal and his secrets; her connections. Abigail had formed bonds with two women, Alana Bloom and Freddie Lounds, within which she confided much of her hopes, fears, and secrets (the darker ones, of course, had been reserved for Hannibal). Her association with these women made it incredibly likely that she'd spill the beans. And there was only one surefire way to be sure that wouldn't happen...
It had been so much more than that for Hannibal, too. It had been about something entirely different.
Two years ago, Hannibal became the weekly therapist for a sixty-something woman named Miss DeTray. Never married, no offspring. Well, technically none anyway. Hannibal recalled that the woman owned at least ten cats, which she had referred to as her 'fluffy children.' Hannibal had asked her during one of their sessions what she feared most, and her response surprised him. It was not dying, not loneliness, not blood or heights or fire. (He'd had her pegged as an arachnophobe prior to asking the question.) No, it was not the sort of fear he was used to. She had answered instantly,
"Having to put one of my cats to sleep."
And she had proceeded to cry for nearly all the remainder of her appointment. The idea of euthanasia, of killing someone or something for it's own good, had stuck with Hannibal for a long time. He had mulled it over for a while after his precise, swift killing of Franklin. Under what circumstances was euthanasia necessary? After a long while pondering that, he had though of a few. Suffering. Pain. Despair. Illness.
Abigail Hobbs had certainly been suffering. After the death of her father, Garrett Jacob Hobbs, or as he was notoriously labeled, the Minnesota Shrike, her downfall began- a swirling darkness, a painful crumbling. Her pain was emotional, certainly; having lost her mother and her father within a ten minute period, but it was physical. She had been left with a quite literal scar from the harrowing incident. Hannibal recalled several instances where he had been able to hear her crying from the next room, but for the most part she was stiff and silent on matters around him. She did not want to discuss the murder she'd committed, did not want to discuss her father. Abigail Hobbs was sick, too, but not in the traditional sense. She was homesick, she was heartsick, and occasionally, Abigail would wake up from her nightmares so haunted she'd throw up and Hannibal would have to clean it out of the carpet. Something had cracked inside of her; something deep, primal, and excruciating. However, Abigail had kept those grievances as separate from her relationship with Hannibal as she could, keeping things impersonal in the midst of an intensely personal falling apart.
And so the fate of Abigail Hobbs was sealed.
Her death had been simple, really, far less theatric than its predecessors. Hannibal had arrived to the cabin where she and Will were staying in Minnesota. As she had slept, Hannibal had pressed a pillow to her face until the fight her limbs put up ceased; she never saw the face of her killer, but if she had, perhaps she would have fought just a little bit harder. He death had been much less agonizing than those typical of Hannibal Lecter.
It was, after all, a mercy killing.
It was what happened posthumously that was more characteristic of the man who took her life. She was carried out into the thick of the woods, a light burden in the doctor's arms. In addition to Abigail, Hannibal carried with him a satchel containing a knife, a plastic bag, and a sponge. He laid her upon a snowy patch of earth, her petite hands unfeeling of the chilled soil she laid upon. In those moments, she looked as if she may still be sleeping, as if her life had not just been stolen from her by one of the very men sworn to nurture it.
Abigail was stripped of her nightgown directly before a butcher knife was plunged to the hilt at the base of her neck and dragged down to her navel with surgical straightness and barbarian brutality. The skin around the wound was peeled back, a single organ stolen from her body, and then, the final touch.
There was only one person Hannibal could think of who was close enough to Abigail Hobbs to be able to commit an act so personal, only one person unstable enough to be believed as the killer, not just by law enforcement but by the man himself...
Hannibal sliced her ear off.
The execution was much more sloppy this time, much less precise. Her death had been recent enough for blood to still flow from the wound, and so the gaping hole at the side of Abigail's head was met by the sponge. As he held the object to her once troubled skull, he was reminded of their meeting, wherein he'd held her neck like a high note, trying to keep the blood inside her body. Now, though, Hannibal was pulling it from her. He left the sponge there until it was positively saturated with the oozing, red fluid. The ear, the organ, and the sponge, all of which glistened morbidly in the dusky light of the moon, were sealed away in the plastic bag before Hannibal hid her body. Abigail received a proper burial; after bringing the satchel with some of Abigail's remains back to her father's old cabin, he returned to her body and buried her, six feet underground.
Then it was just a matter of waiting.
When Will awoke that morning, Hannibal saw a very familiar look in his cerulean eyes. They were glazed with a void her could not fully explain; Will Graham was not really present in that moment. There was no sense speaking to him, Hannibal knew, because there was no way Will would recall a thing he said...or did. He realized that later bit with devilish delight. Hannibal had already intended to pin the crime on Will, but now that Will was utterly detached from the present...
It would be the easiest double-cross that Doctor Lecter had ever pulled off.
Hannibal fed the ear to Will. To his surprise, Will was so removed from the present moment that he offered no question to the offering...nor did he bother chewing it. Hannibal ran Will's palms through the organ and the sponge, making sure they were bloodied sufficiently, and then accompanied Will back home, being sure to have Will remain barefooted as often as possible before finally tucking the man back into his own bed. The sponge came in handy then; Hannibal used the blood that remained within the porous object to create a red, streaky mess in the kitchen before leaving Will to wake up to the planted disaster in his home. All that remained now was the organ.
Her death had been a shock and not a shock. It wasn't a shock because it was his doing; it was a shock because for the first time, it stuck with him. However, at it's core a mercy killing was still just another means of killing, and so it was only natural that the stolen organ would make it's way in to dinner soon.
In spite of that, though, the killing had been the most personal he'd done in a long time, and as Hannibal sat in his kitchen, looking down at the uncooked kidney, he once again found he could not bring himself to cook it.