Something different, dear ones. I thank you all for sticking with me through the first two full fledged stories, and hopefully through the Interludes, as I do not yet know where those are going to go. Here, I've decided to stray back to Clarice. My take on the years between SOTL and Hannibal. Book canon, at least I'll try to do it that way. So much detail to work with there. I do so hope you will enjoy. Ta-ta.

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Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.

-Margaret Mitchell

*****

Five years. Five long almost unbearable years of being the perfect FBI agent, the pride of the agency. Hmmmph. That didn't really help a lot. Jack Crawford had worked his magic and managed to bring her into Behavioral Sciences, even though she was short on the experience side. Her claim to fame, the capture of Jame Gumb, and her interviews with Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Lecter. She shivered when that name came into her thoughts. There were times when she would wake up in the middle of the night, feeling as if she had just walked out of the dungeon once again. She didn't even have to try to summon up the first vivd mental image of him. Alone, behind the thick metal bars and the stout nylon net. Standing there, in the asylum issued jumpsuit, looking imperially slim. Dark head sleek under the lights as the maroon eyes drew her in. The mental image always summoned the voice with it, she could not have one without the other.

"Good morning." The cultured voice with the metallic rasp of disuse underlying it.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Noted psychologist and sociopath, murdering a number of people by the time the Jame Gumb case had been closed. In that time, she had allowed him to study her, like a bug in a bell jar. And then, he dissected her, carefully showing her what he did piece by piece. Five years ago, and he still affected her like this.

He had left her with a letter, and she picks it up now, looking at it. Quietly, peer over her shoulder and see what he has to say to her.

Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

You owe me a piece of information, you know, and that's what I'd like.

An ad in the national edition of the Times and in the International Herald-Tribune on the first of any month will be fine. Better put it in the China Mail as well.

I won't be surprised if the answer is yes and no. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judges yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.

I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy.

She sighs now, as we continue along with her to the next segment of the letter. She feels something resembling happiness for the doctor. Not true happiness, only resembling it. Read on, dear one.

I have windows.

Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be again before the year 2000. (I have no intention of telling you the time and how high it is.) But I expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.

Clarice

.

Hannibal Lecter

A sigh and a hand run over her eyes always accompanies the reading of the letter. Carefully, she folds it and slips it back into the linen envelope it arrived in. She traces the delicate copperplate script that spells out simply Clarice. He has no plans to call on her, but she finds herself during times like these, desperately wishing that he would. It comforts her slightly that she did not receive the same parting treatment from him as Will Graham did. She had finally met with Graham late last summer. She could stand and face cannibalistic murderers, yet she had drawn back at the sight of Graham's face. Putting it as bluntly as Mr. Crawford had, he looked like a damn Picasso drew him. Lecter had turned Francis Dolarhyde on to him, being attacked at his own home in the Keys.

It stuns Clarice to think of it, so she doesn't often, but she knows that Lecter could have done the same thing to her with Jame Gumb. She had barely made it out alive without the good doctor assisting Buffalo Bill. It was not a comforting thought to think of him turned against her. Graham was kind and courteous when she had met him, congratulating her on the case. Before he had left he had told her that she'd better hope to remain on Lecter's good side.

Good side. Well, the man had made a promise not to call on her. But how much is the promise of a madman worth?

*****