A/N: If you haven't seen Julie Taymor's adaptation of Titus with Anthony Hopkins in the title role (and are not too averse to the sight of maiming, orgies, and blood - well, you are here reading Hannibal fics, after all), you should definitely check it out. This is just a short vignette, b/c I love the Hannibal films, and am really rather disturbed by the fact that I would like them so much. Usual disclaimer applies!
Thou shalt not sigh, nor hold thy stumps to heaven,
Nor wink, nor nod, nor kneel, nor make a sign,
But I of these will wrest an alphabet
And by still practise learn to know thy meaning.
- Titus Andronicus
Wrest an Alphabet of These
A full year passed before she stopped carrying around the knife. Before, she had hooked it onto a loop especially sewn to in the inside of her winter coat, where it swung against her rib cage with every step she took, and banged against her painfully whenever jostled. So after a year of persistent bruising on her left side, Clarice decided enough was enough.
After all, she still had her .45 on the hip holster, and her first blade strapped tightly against her right calf.
Better safe than sorry. Or rather, better paranoid than dead; this much she had learned at least.
And it wasn't him she's afraid of; the thought of an extra knife being adequate defense against the return of Hannibal Lecter was almost laughable. Besides, the incident with the cleaver was enough to convince her that he had no wish to hurt her; indeed, he had every desire to see her live, all appendages in tact, so much so that he was willing to take the blow himself.
It was something else.
The agents FBI were not readers, to a man, but a couple of weeks after she filed her report a milk-faced recruit had come up to her, swinging her short cropped shoulder-length black hair, and said that in Titus Andronicus the title character had hacked off his own hand in a similar fashion, to spare the lives of his sons.
"And did they live?" asked Clarice, though she could guess the answer. And watching the intern skip off to fetch coffee, Clarice wondered if the allusion had run through his mind as the cleaver sliced off his thumb. He was probably amused, then, when he did it.
She had to read the play, of course. Though Shakespeare hadn't been a part of her curriculum since middle school, she still remembered fondly the way Mrs. Blackwell insisted reading Romeo and Juliet aloud, somehow forcing an English accent on a pure West Virginian twang. So Clarice readTitus, Shakespeare's most disregarded, black-listed play, and found herself giggling, in appalled, hysterical horror. But when the part came for Titus to sever his hand she had fallen silent, because perhaps no one was supposed to understand another being so well as she thought she knew Hannibal Lecter, in that moment.
The rational side of her brain intruded with a vision of him picking up his own thumb and sealing it in a bag of ice – no doubt he had reattached it by now; no lasting harm but a scar. But another corner of the brain, the one that had never ceased to quail at darkness said, that was not done; such things were not done, but for reasons of madness.
Or love.
And it was the thought that she was loved by Hannibal Lecter that made Clarice strap on those two switchblades and her .45 every morning for a year while invisible birds sang in the hedge. It was her own madness against which she takes arms; against the horror of that love, and the accompanying, flying thoughts of golden invincibility.