Clarice Starling dreamt of blood.

At first it was her father, his clothes soaked in it as he sat with her on the porch swing. She was a small girl, cuddled against his side, her face pressed to his chest, heedless of the slick, cloying fluid staining her skin.

"I'm sorry, Daddy."

His hand stroked her hair, matting it against her skull in tangled, bloody knots.

"It's time to go, pumpkin. You have to save them."

"Save who, Daddy?"

But she could hear them now, her body trembling as she recognized the sound. The lambs still screamed in the barn over the rise.

"I can't. I can't." She shook with fear. Her hands clutched at her father's shirt.

"You have to, baby. There's nobody else can do it. G'wan, now."

He pushed her from the seat. The old wood boards were cold against her bare feet as she trudged across the porch and down the stairs. The house faded away behind her as she touched the ground.

"But they always die, Daddy. They die anyway."

The screaming filled her ears, and she clapped her hands over them to shut it out.

"Stop it! Stop it!"

But she ran, as she always did. The tears mingled with the blood on her face. The barn door beckoned, light spilling at her feet.

She stepped inside, knowing what was coming, unable to stop herself.

The lambs marked for death waited in a pen just outside the far end; it was from there she had once taken one to be saved. Failed, always, breath puffing in the cold, arms tiring, feet stumbling over every stick and stone.

And what punishment for failure?

The butchers looked up from their work – the man with the stunning stick, his partner slitting the lambs' throats before they hoisted them to hang from the beam overhead, blood draining into a trough below. The scent of blood lay so thick in the air that she could taste it on her tongue. She swallowed, gagging with it, and dug her toes into the straw.

She hated this part, hated it and loved it, because she deserved it, didn't she? She hadn't saved the lamb from its fate; it was only fitting that she shared it.

At the end of the line, nearest Clarice, a third man paused in his work slipping the skin from the flesh. He waved the flensing knife in greeting, gesturing her forward.

"Come along now, little one. It's no use to struggle."

And she didn't. Meek, obedient, she crossed the floor and took her place in line. No stunning stick for her, no; it was a mercy she did not deserve. The butcher stood behind her and grasped her chin with sticky fingers, pulling it up and to the left.

The knife slashed across her throat in one fluid movement. She fell to her knees, the straw prickly against her legs, her palms. Blood poured. Her vision blurred. Hands grasped her ankles, rough rope cinching tightly before the world tilted.

She floated in darkness. Waiting.

Silver flashed. Flesh split. Blood spilled.

Again.

Silver. Flesh. Blood.

Again.

"Stop. I want you to stop." Her voice was firm, adult, no longer the quaver of a child in distress.

The hand holding the knife paused.

"Is that truly what you want, Clarice?" The doctor's voice, calm and unemotional. He might have been asking the time.

The knife descended, blood welling up where it passed.

She shuddered.

"You have the power to stop this at any time, Clarice."

"Then I'm telling you to stop."

"Ah. You misunderstand."

The darkness pulled back with shocking abruptness, like a warm blanket cast aside on a cold morning.

Weeping slashes crisscrossed the doctor's chest and abdomen, blood oozing downward with slow, steady precision.

The hand holding the blade was her own. She inhaled on a sob.

"It's quite all right, my dear. You haven't hurt me."

"But I could. I could."

She woke in a cold sweat, body curled in a fetal ball, blankets kicked to the floor.

Her cry woke him from his rest – a thin, high sob like a child's, a hauntingly familiar sound that had him on his feet, arm outstretched, before he had quite realized he was awake.

He shook off the confusion quickly and dressed himself for the day, though the stars still rode the sky and the clock proclaimed it half past three. The cry came again, a suppressed scream, as he stepped swiftly down the stairs.

Outside her door, he paused. Harsh breaths and soft sobs met his ears. Did she yet sleep, or had her nightmare woken her?

Are the lambs screaming, Clarice?

He laid his hand to the wood. He could go to her, wake her, comfort her – this time. But what of the next night, and the next? Palliative care after the fact would not cure the disease that plagued her mind. Better to treat the problem itself rather than its effects.

But it was hard to deny himself when she struggled so mightily, alone, against enemies of her own making. Her conflict was a necessary one – a sign of progress – and the correct move, the pragmatic action, was to leave her to it. If he had been right about her potential, she would come to the correct conclusions in her own time.

And Hannibal Lecter was, in most regards, a highly pragmatic man. So it made little sense that he stood in the hall for the rest of the night, hand pressed uselessly against the door, a silent witness to every hitched breath, every rustle of the sheets, every choked-off scream emanating from her room. It served no purpose, yet he could not pull himself away.

When finally her panicked, slumbering cries gave way to true sobs – the suppressed utterances of a woman awake, aware, attempting to conceal the expression of her emotions – he slipped quietly down the stairs to prepare breakfast for them both. He would need to anticipate her needs with exquisite care this morning, to discover with some subtlety what new patterns of thought had settled in her mind by her words and actions.

If she had wrestled with the thoughts he expected – her fear of her own potential, of the part of her that was most like him – she would not accept comfort from him no matter what conclusions she had reached. Pushing too hard on the notion at this delicate juncture would either break her – unlikely – or drive her to rebel against herself by further conforming to societal expectations, seeking to bury herself in the rigid structures of the FBI.

Clarice smothered her sobs in the pillow and hoped it would be enough to keep from waking her host, as she couldn't seem to stop them entirely. He had more than enough levers with which to manipulate her emotions already; she'd be damned if she'd hand him another.

What had she been thinking? She hadn't even tried to talk those kids down. She'd just acted. Violently. Was that who she was without the badge? Was that who she was with the badge? Maybe the doctor was wrong; maybe she did need the black and white world of the FBI, if only to stop her from going too far.

What would she have done if he hadn't chased them off?

I'm a killer. Like him. Only he has self-control, and I have… rage. Fear. No idea what I'm doing.

I shouldn't have come here.

He wanted her to cut her ties to the FBI, to give up on the notion that justice could be found in an institution. To accept that she could make those decisions for herself, find her own boundaries and declare them right and wrong. Wasn't that what he'd been pushing her toward, all those months as she sat and talked with him? And she'd started to believe it, too, and here was the result.

She would have to be careful not to let it happen again, and that meant being careful in her thoughts about the doctor. The fanciful ideas in her head, the ones that suggested they had a future together, those would have to go.

She could have this week, she decided. This one week of what-might-have-been, and then she would go back to her rule-bound job and her narrow little life and be damned happy for it.

But you won't be. You won't be happy in the FBI anymore, and you won't be happy without him. You've already grown too much for that.

She climbed out of bed and headed for the shower, where she could at least pretend that the renewed tears on her face were no more than water.