Author's Note: If I do say so myself, this chapter gets hot as hell towards the end. So get in the van, losers. We're reading romance.
Hannibal and Alana staged an intervention on Will, with Alana taking the lead. She insisted, with almost reckless courage, that Will had to determine the truth about his status as a murderer in order to move forward.
It was something of a surprise when Will lifted his dark head and murmured to Hannibal, "I felt so betrayed by you."
The cannibal let his own hurt show, creasing his face.
"Betrayal was the only thing that felt real to me," Will continued. "I trusted you." His voice was starting to break, along with his expression. "I needed to trust you."
"And you can trust me," Hannibal replied, as sure and firm as the ground beneath them.
Will ducked his head again, wavering in his lucid conviction. "I'm... so confused."
"Of course you are," consoled Alana soothingly.
"Will, let us help you," Hannibal pleaded. "Let me help you." I will put you back together, Hannibal thought. In showing you who you really are, I will mend what is broken inside you. Don't you see? You're in this cage because your false self shattered. The idol of yourself that you worshiped has been cast down and destroyed. You are confused, my friend, because you have never formally met this new you.
I am more than pleased to make the introduction.
Will dissolved into beautiful sobs, begging with wet eyes, "I-I ne-ed your help."
Hannibal's heart broke for the man he'd found kinship in, while he simultaneously rejoiced. In Will's most desperate hour, in his most blank-slated and mentally chaotic state, Hannibal was the one he turned to. When Will couldn't find which way was up, he asked Hannibal for help.
Hope lifted the cannibal's heart. Maybe there was some salvaging for the wreckage of their ship, after all.
Will snuffled all the way to his cell, even when he backed up against the bars to let the orderlies remove his cuffs. He stutter-stepped to the bed in a haze of tears, cradling his face despondently as the orderlies' footsteps retreated down the hall.
Only then did he allow the guise to fall.
He would sacrifice everything it took, right down to his sanity (which he valued more highly than his soul because he fought harder for it), to remove Hannibal from the populous. Call it revenge, call it duty, call it civic concern: it would come to be, no matter the label on the motivation.
Will wasn't married to either way he might achieve that: be it Hannibal's death or incarceration.
As he lay back on his cot, drying his crocodile tears on his sleeve, he let his mind wander to what was colloquially known as his happy place. Usually it was his favorite bend of the river near his home. Sometimes it was in his armchair, with a warm dog over his feet and another in his lap and the rest snoring softly on their blankets in front of the wood fire.
This time, though, it was a garden.
To call it a garden was to overstate the human input: it was seamless and neat, but that was the only indication of bipedal encouragement. The grand, tall trunks of hemlocks gave off their resinous scent, and underneath them were heuchera of all different shades; green and red and purple. There were hostas ranging in size from pinky-width leaves to elbow-high swaths. Entrancing flowers born of the forest's understory bobbed under the weight of the occasional bee.
One of the transfixing little creatures landed on his knuckle, flexing gossamer wings and thorax in its queer dance. He brought it closer to take in it's vivid detail: every hair, every grain of clinging pollen, every facet of its eye. Eventually it buzzed off, leaving Will to wander.
He knew whose garden it was. He didn't see her, but he recognized her handprint on the earth as readily as any artist's. He found it fleetingly strange that his mind chose to seek refuge in this construct. But then, it had to be subconscious worry: she was dead in the crosshairs of Hannibal's sick and twisted games.
Eyes closed, Will shivered. But no matter how long he stayed in these particular woods, the stag or the wendigo never found him.
Doctor Bedelia Du Maurier's visit was unheralded, unexpected, and disappointing. Hannibal was puttering around his office, filing paperwork and cross-referencing a certain patient's diagnosis, when she knocked.
"We don't have a next session," she stated simply. At his befuddled pause, she continued, "I am no longer your therapist."
How apt it was that it was Fregoli Syndrome he was researching. Bedelia had started to sense that he was not one, but many personas; able to change amongst them like a chameleon. Bedelia had only ever caught glimpses of those personas, seen through the stitches of the person-suit that he wore. She might very well have been suffering from Fregoli herself. From her first fleeting sight of his monster, when he'd aided her in covering up her self-defense murder, to this very moment, Bedelia had been crafting a visage of him in shards of stained glass: a disjointed portrait of him in puzzle pieces. To a degree, Hannibal was angered that she had presumed to know him through the lens of psychiatric inquiry. She would have been better served to know him as a swan would know a wolf. What candle could mismatched and cobbled mosaic tiles hold to his true image? It was the comparison of a shattered window to a Van Gogh.
It seemed that Will was the sole holder of the completed print.
Hannibal enjoyed approaching her, step by step, as she retreated in equal measure on the heels of wobbly pumps. She reached her reasoning's conclusion as she reached the end of her withdraw. "And the conclusion that I've drawn is that you are... dangerous."
The hint of the predator he had allowed to creep into his bearing slipped away like a fish released. "I'm sorry you feel that way," his person-suit mouthed. In truth, Bedelia's body language was the real disappointment. Hannibal had grown somewhat used to Maryann challenging his lion's posture, looking his monster square in the eye even when it threatened her very body. Bedelia was a cold, lifeless echo of that. Maryann would not have retreated, in body or spirit. If anything, she would have insinuated her body against his, ever-mindful of her stitches, and purred in his ear. She would have tempted him with her carotid inches from his teeth, the firm slope of her bony shoulder. His beast would have turned from bloodlust to simple lust.
Bedelia inspired no such passion. "Please don't come to my home again," she said in her low husk, roughened by fear but no less methodical. "I will see myself out."
She paused at the door when he spoke, "I am resuming Will Graham's therapy." Come now, Doctor, are you going to leave me to my devices with such an impressionable mind? Especially when you were getting so adept at fathoming my hidden intentions, and starting to fumble your hands at the reins?
"To what end?" she queried. "Besides your own?"
"He asked for my help," replied Hannibal staunchly.
A glimmer of a wry smile mocked her face. "Then maybe you deserve each other."
Then the door shut and Doctor Du Maurier was gone.
Hannibal allowed himself a sigh. Aside from Will, Bedelia was the nearest thing he had to someone who understood him. Now, one was imprisoned away from him and the other had separated herself.
Hannibal pulled back one of his curtains to watch Bedelia roll down the driveway. Maryann stopped her work with some kind of multi-tined fork and waved, but Bedelia did not return the farewell.
The car disappeared around the corner, leaving the gardener alone in her kingdom. For a minute, the cannibal watched her absently rub her stitches, hair escaping her bandana to caress her face in golden tendrils. With a roll of her shoulders, she bent to her task again.
Hannibal moved away from the window and back to his own work, suddenly feeling the loss of Bedelia less keenly than before.
It is a sunny, warm late spring day in the country as Hannibal strode around the corn farm. The husky rasp of the leaves was a chorus of whispers, and the smell he'd picked off Roland Umber's body swirled around him much more strongly. It was dusty, toasted, and made him think of summer.
He took a certain pride in thinking as he imagined Will would think, poking around the farm in his plastic suit. It was that line of thought that caused him to climb to the top of the silo with the shiny new padlock, and gaze down its chute straight into the eye of God.
The color pallet was flawless. Every preserved corpse pinwheeled along the bottom of the silo was perfectly complimentary to the next. But the brute aesthetics were not what stirred Hannibal's soul.
The cannibal saw. He understood. The man that the BAU chased was an artist of the most elevated quality, the most advanced media and style. Hannibal had a deeply seated respect and appreciation for the most expensive things of the world. Be they costly in time, money, or effort to procure or create, it never failed to elicit a tingle at the base of his skull. This art took its value from sheer volume of human life. It had to have taken weeks, if not months, to compose.
It was awing, inspiring.
These dead things had been raised to an art form. The artist used them as tools, toys, brushstrokes. The finest of paints, arrayed in a stirring theme.
The eye of a man, set upon a large stage, to look upon a large God like a satellite launched into deep space, plumbing depths never before traveled.
The door to the silo opened beneath Hannibal, and in walked the prodigy with a backpack sprayer of resin.
"Hello!" greeted Hannibal warmly. "I love your work!"
Your eye will see, Hannibal promised, plucking a vein from the artist's arm and slowly filling it with heroin. The man's eyes dilated, rolled back as he rode the high... right into the arms of the God he sought.
Hannibal sewed him into his own mural as an homage to such a thought process. He took the killer's calf as an homage to his own.
Cutting it up into hock-sized chunks with his butcher's mechanized blade, he discarded the foot like offal and set about creating a sumptuous bed for the meat.
Maryann helped him find carrots that were large enough to use. Her clever index finger rounded the shoulders of each root, judging by instinct and experience what the soil hid below. Almost every root she pulled was ideal.
"I have a ritual," Maryann began, removing the green top on one slender root and polishing it to a bright orange on her shirt tail. "A tribute to the bridge of seasons: we eat some of nature's fruits raw and wild and dirty, as God intended." She snapped the carrot in half crisply, handing the tapered end to him. "Salut," she cheered.
They took brave bites that were rewarded. The carrot was sweet and finely textured, juicy. Hannibal observed the way the inner vessels of the root formed an eye shape and smiled to himself.
"Good?" asked Maryann around her mouthful.
"Perfect," Hannibal answered.
Onions were next: the savory scent making the cannibal's mouth water. White, yellow, and red onions all differed subtly, lent themselves to the song individually like a tenor, bass, and soprano might intermingle their voices.
Baby rutabagas, potatoes, leeks, and turnips all made their way into the pot of rendered fat from the 'ham hocks'. Maryann came into the process after Hannibal had floured and seared the cuts, smelling of her shower soap and her fingertips still faintly scented with onion. Hannibal paused what he was doing to press his nose to her palm. She hummed at the affection, and he fantasized how he might season pieces of her.
He would discard nine of every ten vegetables to find the perfect ones, and take tiny tastes of each to ensure quality. He would not use his mechanized blade on her delicate, dead flesh. No, she deserved the knives and bone saws. She deserved effort.
He decided he would even go so far as to grind the flour himself to bread her, and import the best olive and sesame oil to sear her in. He would use Wagyu beef as the base for the stock, heedless of the pricetag or the delicacy of the meat. Fats brought upon the cow by years of barley, sake drinking, and massages would render to a succulent, soft broth to simmer perfect vegetables in. The holy grail of most plates, usually eaten only once in a lifetime, would be a stepping stone, a second fiddle to his personal goddess.
He would combine the broth with her own blood to thicken it, cloy it with decadent salt, iron, and sugar...
"Something wrong?" Maryann asked, breaking Hannibal from his trance.
Hannibal took one more luxurious inhale of her intoxicating scent and interlaced their fingers, dropping her hand from his face. "No, nothing is wrong."
"Good," she sighed, laying her cheek on his chest for a moment.
"You smell divine," he told her. Like God's eyes and onions.
They were sitting down to dinner when the conversation took a memorable turn.
"You have never," Hannibal repeated with an air of understated dumbfoundedness. "Even tasted meat?"
Maryann gave him a humored smirk, scenting her wineglass. "A meat virgin, if you will."
Something about that phrase sang in Hannibal's blood like killing, drinking the best wine, and a Beethovian crescendo all at once.
"It bugs you that I don't eat meat," Maryann continued, with a lighthearted laugh at his countenance. "I can tell. You're a little sad around the eyes every time you put a plate in front of me."
Hannibal paused, his fork halfway to his mouth for that first magical bite, and regarded her in his closest right hand seat contemplatively. She was not one to pick an argument: evidently, she had something to work through. And he was nothing if not eager to lap up whatever bodily fluids she lost, metaphorically and physically speaking, going toe-to-toe with some demon. "I do not question your motivation for your lifestyle," he began, taking her hand over the pristine tablecloth. "In fact, I admire your dedication. I could not do what you do."
She smiled down at their conjoined fingers. "But you still think I'm missing something."
Hannibal couldn't lie to such a gentle assertion. "Yes," he replied. "I enjoy all aspects of an omnivorous diet, and suffer no ill effects whatsoever. I live life to the fullest in regards to my diet: I simply want that for you. You are no less than beautiful," he assured as he thumbed the back of her knuckles.
Maryann's eyes were still soft when she looked up at him. "I've been a vegetarian for... shoot, literally as long as I can remember. Almost my entire conscious life."
It was a perfect cosmic joke to the cannibal that he, carnivore extraordinaire, would romantically attract and manage to keep what equated to a rabbit.
"I know, it sounds unbelievable," Maryann continued. "But my parents were too, and they supported me. I was never tempted by meat until I met you," she murmured. "But you make the things I was told were horrible and bad look so damn good."
Hannibal's lips twitched in a smile. "I'm the devil on your shoulder, hm?"
She chuckled. "Exactly."
"It is fairly common for children to have periods of vegetarianism," Hannibal said. "Their pallets and tastebuds are just waking up. Most heed their instincts and influences to take up animal protein again. Why did you not?"
Maryann wrinkled her nose. "Mom and dad - before the car crash, God rest their souls - were armed with Masters' in Nutrition Science and opinions. When they no longer could reasonably control my meals, they didn't exactly discourage eating meat, but they posed a very good argument why not. As I got older, I did it because it made me unique: you know how teenagers are. And when that faded it was partly because of money, and partly because of health. My boyfriends ate it. I could cook it for them. But I appreciated how I seemed to be healthier, mentally and physically. In my heart of hearts, I turned up my nose at the bloated, lethargic public." Maryann gave him a heavy once-over. "Then I met you. The picture of health. The finest physical specimen I've had the pleasure of meeting."
Hannibal could not deny that his temple was almost as perfect as a human body could be. He maintained it as such for myriad reasons and appreciated it dearly in the clutch of a kill, or staging one of his many scenes for the BAU to find. Before that weighty, sultry gaze of his gardener, he could not remember appreciating his body more.
The cannibal allowed the moment to pass (they were regrettably at the table, after all), and Maryann's fingers tightened. "After... my foot - "
"Black Sheep's name if Kevin," corrected Hannibal, squeezing back. She'd told him about her last lover, and the traumas he'd heaped on her. Since then he'd encouraged her to confront her fears.
Maryann hesitated but repeated, "After... Kevin the old aversion to violence came back. I couldn't stand the thought of eating another previously living creature that had been murdered for my plate, not after what he did to me. I was perpetrating violence by proxy." Her eyes flickered up to his, testing. "With Gideon, you helped me get over that, tout suite." The dress she wore he'd bought for her, and its open shoulder flaunted her stitches and pink-tinged wounds. (She had yet to let on, if she noticed at all, that he liked her to air the injury at the dinner table.)
Hannibal's beast's smirk glided onto his face, but left just as quickly.
"I guess what it comes down to is," Maryann sighed. "What is there keeping me from meat now? If you are my example, I have more to gain than to lose."
At a quick calculation, Hannibal realized his pulse was at 85, instead of his usual 75-80 BPM. Practically thundering, for him. As he slid his fingers to the soft-worn underside of her wrist, he had to swallow before asking, "Would you like to gain that 'more' now?"
Maryann's expression was indecisive, warring between decades-old stigma and habit and everything Hannibal represented. "I don't want to bite off more than I can chew, so to speak."
Hannibal's visage was a picture of restraint: his inner predator stuck to the forest floor in a completely coiled pre-pounce crouch, eyes ablaze with desire. He tugged on her wrist until she heeded his beckon, rising to allow his hand at her waist. He rose, too, to overpower her with a kiss, melting her knees and resistance in seconds. Her whimper punctuated his withdrawal, and when he sat down again, he balanced her on his knee.
He felt like a king on a throne. Though it was simply his dinner chair, and the setting far from the splendor of a throne room, when a queenly woman draped him with her warm form and graced him with her delectable willingness, he despised even the finest silks and fabrics on the planet. Yes, with Maryann in his lap, he was dressed finer than royalty.
"To shirk the confines of the past and elevate your thinking is admirable," he murmured, caressing her spine with a large palm. "To act upon it is true bravery. You certainly have employed the correct pilot in this venture."
"Don't I know it," she replied, a saucy but breathless tilt to her mouth. Maryann shuddered as his other warm hand covered her navel, but spoke with an even tone. "I'm ready to try it."
Hannibal's poet's mind kept finding tangents between virginal qualities and his decadent little gardener: robed in white (though a dress of his choice and gift) as though she were a blushing bride; curiosity tempered with trepidation reflecting in her trusting eyes as though he were the first man to claim her; knowing that he would be the first to sully her palate with flesh, fat, and bone.
Resting a thumb over her belly button, which he could feel through the fabric, wrought another shiver.
Looking to his plate on the table brought her headily scented hair closer to his nose. "Which would you recommend?" she asked, for his plate had a two-bite portion of 'beef' tartare, and seared marinated strips of 'steak' arranged like a rose.
Hannibal considered both dishes. The strips were aged and tender, from one of his earlier kills in the year. There was nothing noteworthy about them.
But the tartare was made of the muralist James Gray's kidney.
Hannibal fully realized that he could take his time in this: he could adjourn, promise her the most delicious dish crafted especially for her immaculate mouth. He could select a victim with her in mind: someone young and healthy and beautiful. He could write a new recipe just for her.
But it seemed more fitting to let the flesh of the artist whose eye bridged this world and the next be what conducted Maryann through, arguably, the most polarizing meal of her life.
So Hannibal resumed his fork full of tartare, but instead of bringing it to Maryann's lips, he brought it to his own. The normalcy of the act of chewing was given a new context under the gardener's watching gaze. Slowly, sensuously, Hannibal licked his lips, painting them in a thin layer of meat juices.
Maryann's lips fell open and a very small, very sincere groan issued from her throat as she understood what he meant to do.
"Start slow," Hannibal whispered.
Maryann's expression was one of hopeless arousal, wrecked by Hannibal's wicked ways. How could she have a prayer of resistance? She bent her head to capture his loose lips, lightly but then more bravely running her tongue along them. As her boldness grew, she pressed her tongue into the iron-steeped cavern of his mouth, tentatively seeking and then chasing the taste of him, then the taste of the meat, and back again.
Hannibal and James Gray took her virginity with one exquisite thrust of tongue.