You're quite young. Not ten, not twenty, not five, but six years old.

You lie on your knees, which have the severity of toothpicks and your hands, your tiny, chubby hands dig into a damp, moldy bed of dead leaves and mud. The smell of pine needles and moulding undergrowth enters your nose and you will suddenly realize that you're in the woods. Somewhere between trees and incident sunlight and lack of civilization. Wilderness. Eat or be eaten. What you want to be, Willi-Boy; Predator or prey? it whispers in your head and you do not know who owns this inner voice, but one day you will understand that it represents your adult self. The part of you that later crawls out of his hole to corrupt your dreams, your life, your whole existence. You will call it monster. The monster nestling under your skin. And you'll hate this monster to the same extent as you'll learn to love it because it is just a part of you and from time to time it puts quite profitable advice to you.

But now the voice of the monster sounds as it will sound in twenty years - bitchy, cold and incredibly gleefully. A nasty voice. Especially nasty in the ears of a child.

You stand up slowly, feeling the ground beneath your feet a little sink in. The mud smacks next to your shoe soles and somehow it reminds you of the sounds that your stomach makes while digestion. Greedy, compressive, crushing sounds. A drop of sweat trickles down across your bare back like an instructive phantom finger. A light breeze tatteres the thin fabric of your khaki shirt. You have the need to scream, but even if you had tried it, you had not scrape a single beep from your vocal cords. You know this forest. You've been there before and you know what there is and what there happened. What your father has done here. What you saw. And you have seen Red. So much Red ...
At that moment a shot resounds to your right side through the branches and a few birds fluttering alarmed shrieking from their nests. You turn the head so abruptly in the offending direction that your neck joint ejects an indignant cracking, but you do not care. Your heart beats too fast in your tiny chest and the blood in your veins is frozen into ice water. Anxiety attacks such as fever over you, biting its sharp teeth in thy white, delicate skin.
No you whisper to yourself and realize that your voice is besieged by sobs, No, I do not want see that. Oh please God, not again.

But it is futile. An invisible power nudges you in the back, and commands you to go ahead. Leads you to the direction of the shot. The direction of the Red.
Blindly you stumble forward, through thorn bushes and grass pastures, through dead wood and fungal frigates and tree trunks. Step by step they clearly remind you of lean corpses. You run and you run and you run and actually you could close your eyes, you could blindly take this route, which leads you to your unloved destination. The way is carved into your bones, at least it feels like it. But you keep your eyes open, keep them wide open and barely blinking. Why? Because you do not know what images will appear to you, when your lids are covered with darkness and you tremble before your own shadow. And you do not wanna know. You just want to wake up, WAKE UP from this nightmare, but what if that's not a dream? What if all this correspond to reality? Or are you truly mad? Beyond Reality? You have often heard such things about you. Like the annoying buzzing of flies, drinking your tears and whizzing around your head. In recent days, there was no humming - it was more like a growl like that of bees that live in their hive. A dangerous sound, because bees have stingers and can sting. Although they die then, but they can sting and that's horrifying enough, isn't it?

You come to a clearing, which acts as the stage of a dramatic tragedy in your imagination. It is flat, it is covered by fragrant grass and little blue and yellow flowers and they all could not tell more cruel beauty. The uncontrolled twitching deer in their midst is the centerpiece of the macabre performance without a name and without meaning. You swallow hard. Your breath is itching in your throat. A hoarse laughter attracts your attention.

You come closer (you do not want, but you have to). Your father stands next to the deer. Black hair, like yours, chin paved with stubble, his eyes dark brown, the skin pale, but not diseased. You look a lot like him, but the eyes, the blue topaz under your lashes are from your mother. A mother you never met and still miss.

He has a rifle shouldered on his back. The barrel still smoking from the bullet with which he hit the animal. You step at his side silently, looking down on the bloody mess of fur, flesh and shattered bone. The terrible whimper of the dying deer whistles from its perforated lung. A hind leg is now in a abstruse angle to the other, seems broken. The animal, called the king of the forest in fairy tales, suffers under hellish torment. Your vision becomes blurred the longer you watch its suffering and you know there is nothing you can do, absolutely nothing, against it. There is no salvation to be made and well how you could save a deer, you are not God. Just a six year old boy, whose father is an avid hunter. Sometimes you hate him for it. And often, too often you find yourself almost wishing he would be the one lying in the grass, bathing in his own flood of blood and sticky entrails. But these are evil thoughts and if Daddy knew what evil thoughts Will had about him, he would have been very angry. Actually, he is a good person. A nice person. An absent-minded man. The exemplar of an average man trying to raise his son alone and to teach him the correct values.
But at this moment, in this dream (nightmare) Daddy is not kind to Will. He is not kind to anyone, so he takes his gun and shoots a second bullet into the deer's skull, right before Will's innocent, teary eyes, as the gurgling sound of the rasping breaths soon gets on his nerves. Will screams automatically, as the shot rings out so close to his ear and he screams because the deer pants as well, loud and deep in his head. Then it suddenly becomes quiet. Very quiet. The deer whines no more, no more moves. The deer is ...

It's dead! you cry out, It's dead! You have KILLED it! You're a MURDERER!

And that's all you can think of now. You feel nothing at all. Nothing but the overwhelming certainty of death that is now laid at your feet and will soon rot carrion. Your father looks at you with a look that would not may be harder. Hard as polished rock. You realize the contempt in his eyes, almost think to read What a crybaby. So pathetic. in his iris. You know that look and there is no moment in your life where you do not want to die of shame if you encounter this view. It tells you that you are worthless. Exchangeable. And a shame, a burden. You're quite young, but you're already capable to use the ability of your enormous empathy to experience all these feelings about your father. And it hurts, it hurts so much, but the time sews all wounds. At least until they break up again. Opened by cold fingers and a warm, sincere voice.

"Will? Will, wake up."

It's a whisper brought by the wind, you think. It's not real. Just an illusion in my illusion. You are wrong but you don't know it yet.

Suddenly the barrel of the rifle is directed on your forehead and you widen your eyes in surprise and terror.

Daddy? you ask, still in a silent, incredulous and yet sad voice. Daddy grins at you. Grins like the devil himself. Then a third shot echoes through the forests and chases the birds out of their nests.

In the next second you're wondering why you're not dead and why you were even born.

You glance confused, look around closely. The forest, the trees, the birds are still there. Only your father is gone. And his rifle is in your hands. Stunned you look at it, lingering with your fingertips over the cold metal. It takes a while before you realize that you yourself has now become the hunter. That you took daddy's place.

At your feet is no longer the deer, but the Wendigo, the creature who chases you every night and day. Dead. Mute. Bleeding.

And he is wearing Hannibal Lecter's accusatory features on his frozen face. Your world shatters into a thousand pieces.

Oh God. you whine I killed Hannibal. I killed…You start to tremble all over, as the horror unpacks and your limbs wrestling in its claws.

No. No. N -

"- O!"

With the scream on your lips and the taste of blood and doubt on your tongue, you wake up.
With panic flickering in your eyes you focus the ceiling, seeing the furniture of a room that's not yours. There are no windows and no alarm clock on which you could read the time. Disoriented and confused your fingernails claw into the soft mattress beneath you.
You are no longer young. You're not ten, not twenty, not five, but more than twenty, maybe even thirty years old. Your skin is wet from sweat, your blood pumping hastily through your veins and your heart beats, oh, your heartbeat is a single miserable cacophony of pain. Fear, boundless fear circulates in your mind and you want to cry, but you're too weak to do so. To emaciated. Adulthood prohibites it.

Right from you someone moves. A hand is laid gently on your naked chest.

"Will?"

One whisper. The same voice as in your dream. You turn your head and look directly into the face of your psychiatrist, eyeing you with mild concern. "William, are you okay? You had a nightmare." Hannibal Lecter seems hardly sleepy. His eyes are serious and unclouded as ever. In their depths you could drown and you'd love to do it. A fact that should cause you to worry, but you keep forgetting about it very easily.

You swallow. Now it seems very difficult to hold back the tears, but you're doing it, forcing them down your throat. Instead of crying, you instinctively lean over to Hannibal, directly into his arms. Your arms being entwined behind his scrag you bury your face in the crook of his neck and inhale his scent deeply, one that you can not describe but prefer over each perfume. You breathe from trembling as he silently pressed at you and give you the warmth, safety, stability, you'll never have yourself.

"Shht." He makes, his lips graze soothingly over your ear. "I'm here, Will. It's all right. I'm here. "

His voice is a mantra and lulls you in like a lullaby. His body supports you, covers you like a cocoon. His presence, as monstrous as gorgeous is intoxicating. The trembling leaves soon from you and eventually you drift off to sleep again, this time with your lips on Hannibal's collarbone and his parted mouth on your temple, gently kissing.

When you wake up the next morning, you're lying alone in bed and you feel lonely like never before. You call after Hannibal and it is responded with a noise from the kitchen, the sounds suspiciously reminding of sizzling fried eggs in a pan.
You get up, hungry, tired and longing, trot to the source of the noise and you lean into the door frame while you are watching Hannibal musing in the preparation of breakfast. It does not surprise you that his skin is black as onyx in the imagination of your exhausted eyes and a deer antler perches as a grim crown of thorns on his head. It reminds you just to take the medicine, which the doctor has prescribed to you to curb your visions.

And while Hannibal asks you to take a seat at the table and gives you one of the most wonderful, charming, honest smiles, you secretely ask yourself in gentle melancholy, whether nightmares have come true someday.

Hello :)

English is not my first language, so sorry if there are any grammatical mistakes in this story. Nevertheless I hope you liked reading it and maybe you want to leave a little (or even a big?) comment for it. I'd appreciate it very much.

Greetings,

Your Nathaira