She likes to be helpful - it makes her feel like she is useful. It's been hard to regain that sense of agency since Will Graham shot and killed her father. Like it or not, Garret Jacob Hobbs gave Abigail's life purpose. Luring unsuspecting teenagers back to their slaughterhouse had given her a high-stakes, high-pressure role in the twisted way he managed his own psychosis. She had been helpful. It had felt good, to help.
Recently, it's been difficult to do much of anything besides sit in a hospital bed and stare blankly out of the window. Read a little. Listen to music. She supposes that's what it's like to be a normal teenager. But being responsible only for herself - and barely even that - makes her feel like her life is in a state of atrophy. She's not useful, not to anybody. She's just a burden.
Except when she's with Hannibal.
Tonight, he's cooking for her, and it's as if he can read her thoughts when he asks her if she'd mind cutting up the vegetables while he deals with the meat. He's perceptive like that, she's noticed - he seems finely attuned to what people want. What they need.
Dr. Lecter's kitchen is a lot different to her own, the kitchen where she'd almost bled out on the floor. Everything is bright, polished, clean. The counter top where he sets her up is stainless steel and reminds her of a surgeon's table. She takes the knife he gives her. So odd, to hold a knife again. She turns it over in her hand once, twice, watching how the light catches on the blade.
As she starts chopping up the carrots, her mind wanders. How good it feels, this knife in her hand, how familiar and strange all at once. Unbidden, the memories resurface. A knife in the gut of a deer, rending fur, skin, muscle, ripping the carcass from belly to neck and back down, to the hind legs. She had become so used to the motion, though she could never make the incisions as quickly and cleanly as her father could.
The carrot disappears into pieces under the blade of the knife. She moves onto the next. Different, to use Hannibal's knife. They're obviously expensive, sharpened so well that they slide through the hard, dense vegetable as if it were butter. The knife melts through. The sound of the blade hitting the cutting board is hypnotic.
Nicholas Boyle. The look in his eyes, as her knife - so much blunter than this one, so small - pierced his chest. Weird, that such a small thing could do such a great deal of damage.
Hannibal's knife beats out a steady rhythm through the meat of the carrot. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
The first person she'd killed. The first person she'd killed by herself. And all that blood. All that blood on her hands.
"Fuck!"
The kitchen knife slices through the flesh of her thumb, the place between upper and lower knuckle. It's so well sharpened that, while she feels the sting of the cut, it takes a few moments for the blood to rise to the surface. At first, all she sees is the incision: layers of skin and flesh split apart, revealing (just for a moment) a window of white bone.
The blood comes soon enough, bubbling up through the open wound and over her thumbs, fingers, the back of her hand. More blood than she'd have expected, though she ought to have known better. It stains the silvery countertop. It hurts like fuck, yet somehow she can't take her eyes off the way her blood looks, pooled and dripping onto the stainless steel. If she leans close enough, she can almost seen herself reflected in it.