Special Agent Clarice Starling does not enjoy going to the doctor.
She exercises, she eats healthy, she tells herself that she gets enough sleep. She can take care of herself. She likes taking care of herself, being independent, maybe even being alone.
She does not like people poking and prodding and telling her what is wrong with her.
The woman across the waiting room is re-applying her obnoxiously bright lipstick and the toddler three seats down is throwing a tantrum at his exasperated father, and Clarice knows it will be a long time before the doctor calls her.
She looks at the end table next to her chair. There are three beauty magazines, a Better Homes and Gardens, and a National Tattler. All of them are outdated. She reaches out mechanically and picks up the Tattler, thinking vaguely that at least it might be good for a laugh.
Underneath the obligatory cure for cancer and "shocking new evidence" that the President was an alien, there is a familiar headline. She gives a weary sigh and pinches the bridge of her nose. Better late than never, she tells herself. Do it quick, like a Band-Aid…
The article is a few pages, long by Tattler standards. It opens with a photograph of Hannibal Lecter, heavily restrained and facing away from the camera as he is escorted through the doors of the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Starling can see a bit of Dr. Frederick Chilton's face on the edge of the picture and she bites the inside of her lip in annoyance. Underneath that, parallel with the first paragraph of the story, is a picture of her. She finds it mildly interesting that they chose one where she's in the middle of something and she looks quite undesirable.
She starts to read, and by the third sentence, she can't bring herself to continue. Not because it's painful— because it's stupid. They didn't even get the color of Lecter's eyes right in the description, for God's sake.
She can understand that, much as she hates to admit it. Most people have not seen Hannibal Lecter face-to-face and lived to write about it in a tabloid, and in most of the pictures his eyes appear black due to poor lighting.
She has seen Hannibal Lecter face-to-face more times than she can recall, and lived to have the stigma of those experiences follow her everywhere. She closes her eyes and leans back in the stiff waiting room chair with a sigh.
They didn't even get the color of his eyes right. They never do.
It's either black or blue. Black for people who have seen pictures, blue for people who haven't and assume that he follows in the vein of H. H. Holmes. Jack Crawford's voice echoes in her mind for a moment: Don't assume, Starling. Makes an ASS out of U and ME both.
Hannibal Lecter's eyes are not black or blue. Hannibal Lecter's eyes are maroon, somewhere between the color of wine and the color of blood. They remind Clarice Starling of Coke bottles.
She becomes aware that she doesn't want to touch the Tattler anymore. She picks it up by a corner and tosses it back on the end table it came from. She hates that they got the color of his eyes wrong, and she hates that they used an ugly picture of her, and she hates the way her name looks in the stupid Arial Narrow font that gets smaller and smaller as the article goes on. It looks cheap and insincere, and makes her think of plastic dollar store flowers. It looks like people speaking too loudly at a funeral.
When Hannibal Lecter says her name, she remembers, it does not sound cheap.
He says it like it's part of some exotic language, like a dimming candle, like a piece of chocolate dissolving on his tongue. He says her name in his rusty voice and he smiles at her and he watches her with his Coke bottle eyes and she can feel a swooping in her stomach that is not entirely fear. She remembers that his hands are warm, warmer than she had expected when they brushed together.
She remembers going to Sunday school as a child, hearing stories of Satan and demons and sinners and the wrath of God. She remembers a picture called The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun from some obscure corner of Lecter's file, something from another case he had been consulted on, before she was at the Academy in Quantico; the animosity and the power in that picture, the sense that there is always someone bigger and stronger than you that can pin you to a wall and eat you whole before you even have a chance to say "Please." She remembers every bloody crime scene she has ever seen and she remembers the picture of the mauled nurse that Dr. Chilton is so fond of showing Lecter's visitors.
Special Agent Clarice Starling remembers all these things and she wonders for a moment if maybe she wouldn't mind so much if Dr. Hannibal Lecter remains at large somewhere, because there are some evils that we simply cannot let die.