Hannigram + dub-consent, + murder mysteries with cannon typical violence and cannibalism. Duck out now if that's not your thing.
Chapter 1
Will is tense when the Soprano floats on stage.
An apparition wrapped in white, face as pale as bone, her voice cutting through the eerie lilt of the flute.
She is splattered in red, and he isn't sure she's not Elise Nichols. Lithe and pale, sad eyes framed by smoke and nightmares.
"Donzetti wrote Lucia's aria for the glass harmonica. A sound unrivaled in it sorrowful lament." Hannibal's steady whisper curls around Will's ear, a shadow shifting out of the corner of his eye. "It fell out of fashion when the musicians suffered lead poisoning and descended into insanity – la vie imite l'art."
Will does not wonder about insanity now. Now that the Soprano playing Lucia glides on the stage, splattered in red, clutching the knife close to her bosom. She is heavily rouged under the lights, the round moon of her face cut harsh by grease pant and grief. Her voice opens as if to scream. Will thinks she looks strangled.
Il dolce suono mi colpì di sua voce!
Ah, quella voce m'è qui nel cor discesa!
The English translation lays unfurled in Will's lap. Hannibal would not hold it, considered it lewd, and ultimately unnecessary.
"The sweet sound of his voice struck me." Hannibal has leaned closer, the ghost of his breath seeping from the gloom. "Ah, that voice has entered my heart."
Lucia spreads her arms wide, arching up like a crescent moon. She has just stabbed her husband to death on her wedding night and is instead singing to her lover Edgardo.
Edgardo! io ti son resa. Edgardo! Ah! Edgardo, mio! Si', ti son resa!
fuggita io son da' tuoi nemici.
"Edgardo! I surrender to you, oh my Edgardo." Hannibal's voice is a sibilant sigh in the blackness, dark and supple. "I have escaped from your enemies."
Will is in the footholds of the mountains in Maryland, deep in Appalachian logging country, miles from the nearest town and the remnants of civilization.
There is a dead woman wrapped in silk, propped up between the roots of a willow tree. The silk is dark blue, embroidered with white cranes, their wings wrapping around her face and breasts, her legs buried in deep drifts of snow. They are on the banks of Wilst Creek, the sloping ridge behind them thick with a brier patches and rhododendron. The thorns and dead branches of the thickets poke through the snow like the downy of a baby bird.
The forensic team has photographed her and then unrolled her, spreading her naked body on the snow like a newborn. A starburst has been cut into the base of her spine back like a red poinsettia.
"He wrapped her up like a present." Crawford remarks.
Will sees the beginnings of the yellow pendulum in his mind. It is the first time since his release from prison he has been invited to a crime scene. It has become easier since then, easier since sending a man to kill Hannibal to slip into this.
"Not a present," Hannibal demurs, coming to stand beside Will. Even as the visions take hold, Hannibal is here. "A funeral shroud."
Crawford's disembodied voice drifts towards Will, the yellow pendulum having erased the detective from the crime scene, his voice muted as if underwater. "The fabric isn't anything local. The nearest town is Cumberland, they wouldn't carry something like this."
Will walks towards the body, the pendulum erasing the surrounding FBI, their cameras and navy jackets wiped clean. Only white snow and the willow tree remains, flanked by the hulking shadow of the briers like some terrible thorny sentinel.
"He ordered the fabric just for her." Will kneels knee deep in snow, staring at rumpled silk beside her body. "His final gift to her."
Hannibal kneels beside Will, gloved fingers tracing the embroidered birds. "In Japan, the crane symbolizes eternal youth. The original crane's lifespan was fabled to be over a thousand years."
"While hers was cut short in her twenties." Will adjusts his glasses and turns her head. Her hair is dark brown and her eyes are blue, and for a second she looks like Abigail Hobbs, pale and freckled in the snow.
Will jerks back as if bitten, his vision blurring, the ring of dead branches becoming a lattice of pulsing black veins, the stag circling the clearing in the shadows.
Will shuts his eyes.
"In Greek mythology the cranes dance was a celebration of life. The crane was the bird of Apollo." Even now, Hannibal's voice reaches him. "The sun god was said to have disguised himself as a crane every time he visited the moral world to walk amidst the dying."
"Apollo was a god of healing." Will see's himself carry Abigail here, crossing her white arms over her chest like wings. Wrapping her in silk, closing her eyelids and kissing her forehead. "He didn't heal her."
"He walked amidst her." Hannibal voice is a distorted whisper, curling around the edges of Will's mind. "And does she not live eternally in his memory now?"
"He knew her in real life." Will see's Abigail under the willow tree in the spring, daffodils growing around her thighs and white foxtails tickling her ankles. "Knew her and loved her."
"And do we not covet what we love?" Hannibal's voice is a low murmur. Impossibly close, settling in the marrow of his bones.
Will opens his eyes.
The ring of dead branches have become a thicket of black antlers, framing Hannibal's head like a crown of thorns.
There is no salvation here.
They are walking to the opera. Will has come to be cultured armed with a pressed shirt and a bottle of aspirin. He feels slick with perspiration, rivulets of his past sweating out his pores, making his jacket sticky like a Louisiana summer. He is a mechanic's son, an uncouth fisherman who reeks of cheap cologne and self-loathing.
He watches Hannibal proffer the tickets. The teller is an older woman, sporting the puff of blue grey-feathered coiffure all women over seventy default to.
She hands Will a pamphlet - Lucia di Lammermoor – The English translation quickly curling around Will's sweaty fist.
"English," Hannibal drawls softly as he leads Will inside, "The guttural consonants, the Germanic roots – harsh with Ostsiedlung history and exacting gerunds – words of Celts and Gauls rooming oak forests and worshiping pagan gods."
Hannibal guides to Will their seats, eyes shifting in the warm glow of refitted gas lamps. The theater twinkles with them, heavy laden from the ceiling like candles at Catholic mass. They have a private box to the right of the stage, opulent and secluded.
Will seats himself and opens the program.
"Donzetti never meant English to tarnish these words" Hannibal watches Will as he slowly plucks the transcript from his limp fist. "Only Italian, the language of the Divina Commedia, is fit to carry Lucia's lament."
Will pops a dry aspirin and cracks a smile. It feels like plaster peeling from his lips.
"Not a comedy then?"
Hannibal grins, shark eyes black in the flickering light.
"No."
"What do you think is the significance of the bones?"
Will is standing by the window in Hannibal's office. Tufts of snow are falling outside, frost clinging to the glass. This morning he tried to shoot Hannibal in his kitchen. This evening they consulted on a crime and now he is at his old therapy appointment.
He should have killed him.
He still might.
Hannibal walks behind Will, the deliberate steps of a man who can be silent but choses not to.
It is meant to put him at ease, Will thinks.
"She was missing her lower vertebra." Will keeps his eyes on the snow, his voice professional. "He carved it out of the base of her spine with a hunting knife while she was still alive."
"That is what was done." The footsteps stop, Hannibal is behind Will now. "Not what it means."
"He wrapped her body in raw silk and left her under sitting upright under a weeping willow." Will frowns softly. "He loved her. He was trying to honor her."
Outside Hannibal's window there is a small courtyard with a Japanese garden. A single willow tree drooped over a koi pond with a small bridge, a stone lantern, and a winding path. Jagged rocks jut out of the snow-drifts like crooked teeth.
Hannibal shifts to Will's right, his hand descending on Will's shoulder.
Will suppresses a flinch. He will not give Hannibal the pleasure of seeing his discomfort.
"My Aunt once told me a ghost will appear wherever a willow grows." Hannibal's voice is close and warm. "That one is for my sister."
"There is no need to memorialize the living." Will shakes his head slowly, resisting the urge to bolt. "Our killer would not need her ghost had he left her alive."
Hannibal nods in Will's periphery, his hand moving to slowly clasp the back of Will's neck.
Will freezes.
"Do you know the names of our bones?"
The air of the room feels indescribably warm and thick. Will feels his stomach roll with nausea, his legs tense as if to run.
"No."
Hannibal's hand slowly drift down Will's spine, pressing lightly over each curve. Will is overwhelmed by sudden déjà vu.
It is dark and familiar, clawing desperately inside Will's head, like frantic mice trapped in his skull.
Hannibal's fingers are drifting lower, his voice congenial.
"You have thirty three vertebrae divided into five regions." Hannibal stops at the base of Will's spine, his fingers gently pressing on either side. "Our killer took the sacrum, from the Latin os sacrum – holy or sacred bone."
Hannibal leans closer, his breath wrapping around Will's neck like a coil.
The mice are screeching now.
"The sacrum was the part of the animal offered in sacrifice." Will closes his eyes, the noose tightening. "The Greek's believed the bone was indestructible. It was thought to be the seat of the human soul."
The clawing feels like a memory. Something desperately important, something frightened and hungry.
Will deliberately turns his head, meeting Hannibal's eyes. He can play this game. He can retrieve what is lost.
"You think our killer meant to take her soul."
Hannibal smiles, a slow unfurling of lips and teeth.
"Have you never wanted to possess someone?"
Jimmy Price is humming Katy Perry's "California Girls" as he retrieves a latent print off the victim's pupil.
Will had come in to see Beth LeBeau's body again, come to redeem himself after mucking the crime scene and theatrically losing time. But team sassy science is occupied with other corpses.
"It's a partial." Price chirps, waving his left hand in exuberance. "Probably a fragment of a thumb and a bit of the palm!"
Will shuffles stiffly besides the sterile work station, the notes of saccharine pop music still ringing in his ears.
"Lucky bastard" Zeller laughs, nudging Price in the ribs. "You should have never seen the sucker. Stood out against the eight ball hemorrhage from the gunshot wound."
Will swallows audibly. At least audible to him.
Everything is audible to him.
"You know how it goes." Price starts singing again. "Mur-dered Gi-rls, they're unfor-get-able..."
Will stares at the girl laid out, blue and cold, eyes unflinching on the table.
"fine, fresh..." Price gives the corpse's arm teasing squeeze "fierce..."
The body turns her head towards Will, her disembodied voice echoing from her upturned mouth. Tongue cocked like a revolver, the whir of cylinders spinning behind wide eyes.
"The boys, break their neck, trying to creep a little sneak peek"
Will shifts again. The girl is grinning, tongue cocked in that empty chamber.
Always smiling, just for him.
Just for him.
Pendulum orange and he has backed up, has knocked over a drawer, metal instruments crashing to the floor like so much shrapnel.
Will feels shot.
"She's smiling." He gasps, words hurling to the floor like the litter of broken instruments at his feet.
Every face turns towards him now.
Price is no longer singing. The silence stretches thick, labored breathing on the other end of the call, the pregnant pause of the audience.
Will's audience.
"She's slack jawed." Zeller coughs, eyes darting to the side.
"Yes." Will turns and the girl comes into focus, stiff on the table, eyes wide and mouth forming a perfect hardened oval. "what I had meant..."
Will stares.
There was no smile. No Glasgow grin. Or was that Beth LeBeau?
Bleeding Beth. Smiling next to her bed, face cut ear to ear, grinning on the hardwood floor.
The floor isn't hardwood here. It's linoleum, cold and sterile.
The drawer is still in place.
He can feel the fever coming, feel its yellow pulse in his skull throbbing with the swinging pendulum. Always the pendulum.
"What you had meant?" Price parrots, his own mouth falling open in a mocking O, matching the corpse, that grinning corpse.
No Glasgow grin. Or was that Beth LeBeau?
"What I had meant" Will looks up shifting, shifting against the current of the room. "Was what if she was smiling before death. A smile for him. Could we...tell?"
"No." Zeller elongates the vowel as if speaking to a child. "Muscles release after death. Body goes slack. The jaw goes slack."
Will nods.
The corpse is smiling at him again. Water dripping from her eyes, falling to the puddle forming on the floor, running down the morgue drawers.
Will nods, pops 2 aspirin, and leaves.
"I'm going to remember, Dr Lector." It is his second therapy appointment since release. Will's back is as straight as the spine of the girl under the Willow tree. Unmoving, unyielding, set by rigor mortis and betrayal. "I'm going to remember what you did to me."
Hannibal leans across the chair, black eyes shining like a reaper.
"And when I do..."
Will clenches his fist, feeling his breath hitch and his legs burn.
"There will be a reckoning."
Hannibal smiles at this, a flicker of his tongue, his head reared back like a snake regarding it's prey.
Regarding his meal.
"My dearest Will," Hannibal lilts, savoring the familiarity on his tongue. "Memory is a funny thing. Much like Prophesy, our mind speaks in riddles."
Will chokes, sudden déjà vu stealing the air from his lungs.
Hannibal rises, slowly circling around Will's chair to the bookshelf on the wall.
"The Greeks believed prophesy was the gift of madness." Will resists the urge to turn, to track the predator at his back.
Hannibal leans down, breath ghosting across Will's left ear.
"And in madness there is always truth." The words are a serpent's hiss. "as well as lies."
Will's stomach churns lightning, his fists clenched in his thigh. Something bubbles under the surface of his skin, pickles inside his mind.
He is not afraid.
"The phantoms you recall may not be their true form." Hannibal's voice is closer now, threading through his hair, through his veins. "Do not mistake forms for the essences they represent."
"And what are those essences," Will resists the urge to turn, to bare his teeth at the devil at his back. "Dr Lector?"
Hannibal smiles, placing his hand on Will's shoulder, a hot brand scalding through cloth and flesh.
"The essential ones,"
His fingers flex.
"The human ones."
Kneading into Will's shoulder, through tendon and bone.
"Courage."
Hannibal leans closer now, impossibly close.
"Hatred."
His hand sliding up Will's shoulder.
"Lust"
A single finger brushing Will's neck.
"Fear."
And there is a riot of fire behind Will's eyes, a boiling in his blood. And if he does not move, does not snarl and crush this demon against the wall, fingers around his neck, he will surely implode.
"Love."
The offending word tastes like bile, the body's betrayal, something half consumed and rejected.
"Hunger."
And Hannibal is gone, his fingers leaving the sensation of a scar as prominent as the line around Abigail Hobbs neck.
And Will sits silent, alive and tormented.