seven.
"concassé"

7.50 AM
Wolf Trap, Virginia

The dogs were barking, even though it had been only minutes since Will had let them out of the house – which could only mean one thing. He had a visitor.

Will did not like visitors.

A calm, even rap-a-tap-tap echoed around the house, and then there was silence, patient silence. And for a minute or two, Will considered the possibility of simply leaving his unwelcome visitor to believe that he wasn't at home – maybe if he didn't come to the door, they would leave of their own accord.

There was another knock, equally as even as the first, and Will stood up from his desk, groaning to himself and stretching. His car was in the driveway, anyway, so it wasn't as if the charade of him not being at home would hold up for long. There was nothing for it. His dogs leapt and crowded excitedly around him as he made his way to the front door, even as he pushed them all patiently away.

As he passed into the front room, he saw the familiar brown cat again – sitting on the windowsill, tucked neatly into the corner where windowsill met wall. It regarded him with amusement, tail twitching slightly.

"Go away," Will told it, exasperated. "You're not real."

It gave him a pointed look, as if it were disappointed in him somehow, and leapt off the windowsill to land lightly on the floor, without making a sound. The dogs ignored its presence – well, of course they did – even as Will shooed them all away and coaxed them into sitting quietly in the living room. The cat came right up to him and wove figure-of-eight patterns around his ankles, and didn't stop doing it as Will went to the front door, and opened it.

Standing in the doorway, looking absently out at the forest behind the property, was Doctor Smith. His strange question-mark umbrella was clutched tightly in one hand and he seemed to have been waiting patiently for Will to open the door.

"Ah," he said, turning to face Will properly. "Mr Graham – good morning." He smiled and actually doffed his hat. "Would you mind terribly if I came in? It's rather brisk out here, and we have things to discuss."

Will did mind. Quite a lot, in fact. But he had the distinct feeling that if he voiced that thought, Doctor Smith would find some way, somehow, and end up in his house anyway. He and Hannibal Lecter were quite similar in that respect. Instead of getting properly angry about this, he decided to cut out the middle part of this whole tired charade, and skip right to the end part. "If you must."

"Thank you kindly," Doctor Smith said with a tap to the side of his nose, and with that, yet another unwanted FBI consultant entered his house to talk to him about things that he'd rather not talk about. Will shooed the dogs back until they subsided, and hesitated at the kitchen counter for a moment, debating very briefly on whether to offer Doctor Smith something - coffee, tea, maybe? That was the sort of general pleasantry that most people seemed to care about - but in the end he didn't offer and Doctor Smith didn't ask, and they sat down at the tiny table next to the window without any words of discussion on the matter.

"I assume this is about the... last case."

"You assume correctly," Doctor Smith replied.

Will couldn't help huffing out a sigh. It came out rather more long-suffering than he'd have hoped, and maybe tinged with a touch of hysteria too. Not ideal. "I told you - I told all of you, already. I don't know, I just don't. It's like - "

"It's like you're walking into an old house that you know should be full of history and furnishings of all sorts," Doctor Smith interjected. "But every room you walk into is completely blank. And you have the suspicion that the rooms are being cleared out, one by one, before you can so much as set foot within them."

"I - yes. Exactly." Will eyed him with no small amount of suspicion. "Did I-?"

"You did say that," he agreed. "I'm not quite as psychic as all that to be able to pluck out metaphors directly from your mind. Not from all the way over here, at least."

"Well, then." Will folded his arms on top of each other, uncomfortable and without anything to fill his hands with. "If you know that I don't know, then why bother coming out?"

"As a matter of fact, I'm here to help."

"Really."

"Really." Doctor Smith's eyes were bright and genuine. Will felt the brush of smooth fur against his leg - too small to be one of his dogs, too solid to be completely imaginary, although it had to be. There were no cats in his house. There just weren't. "You have some sort of, ah... blockage, let's say. Mentally speaking. It's not at all conducive to our investigation, or your well-being in general, and I was hoping you might allow me to take a nudge at it - see what I can dig up, so to speak."

Will nearly laughed. Nearly. This was entirely too familiar for his liking, in more ways than one. "And what makes you think I want someone else poking around in my mind, Doctor Smith?"

"I don't think you want it, certainly; no sane mind does," he admits, cheerfully enough. "But I rather think it would be worse to leave things as they are. Don't you?"

Will was silent.

The truth was that Doctor Smith was right. There was something wrong with Will's head, even more so than usual, and he could feel it quite distinctly. Not something that he could put his finger on properly, not something he could even begin to describe. Just a nagging certainty of some distant incorrectness, that his thoughts aren't quite as they should be.

But. The thing was. The thing was - whatever was wrong with Will Graham's mind right now, it didn't want him to acknowledge it. Not to himself, not to any of his closer-than-comfortable acquaintances, and certainly not to this stranger with bright eyes and a penchant for sticking his nose into places where it absolutely was not wanted.

So Will did something he was getting very good at these days, and redirected.

"There's something not right about you," he told Doctor Smith.

"Ah, familiar territory." Doctor Smith twirled his umbrella around, pivoting it against the floor in perfect little circular arcs. "And as long as we're here... tell me, what do you think of the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes?"

Will supposed that this was meant to be some sort of joke. Or maybe a clever witticism, or a thought-provoking one-liner designed to make this Doctor person seem clever and mysterious. He wasn't too happy with this. Will Graham had just about had enough of mysterious, clever Doctors and their mixed, melting metaphors, and said as much, "Not to be rude, Doctor Smith, but I don't especially care."

"Ah." The smile, gone. Cool blue eyes - or grey? Hard to tell, and Will didn't much appreciate the eye contact anyway, so he looked away, gaze tracing along the whorls in the wood of the table. "I see. No need to apologize."

"I didn't," Will said. "Apologize, that is."

"I suppose you didn't. You're well within your rights to be rude; I'm being rather unfair with you."

Will's eyes found that of the cat's, lurking incongruously underneath the table, and somehow making eye contact with a cat felt even worse than making eye contact with Doctor Smith. "I'd say so, yes."

"You're not going to consider my proposition of checking your mind for you?"

"How would you even go about doing that?" Will sighed, and offered up a smile, half to the imagined cat and half to Doctor Smith. It wasn't genuine, it's wasn't even pleasant. But it was the done thing, he was led to believe, in these sorts of conversations.

Will was saved from having to listen to the answer to this by the unlikely deus-ex-machina of his phone ringing. The dogs didn't bark, he'd trained them too well for that, but they did stir and begin to move around restlessly as the phone's rings echoed out around his home.

"Shouldn't you be picking that up?" the Doctor asked.

Will just shrugged, and didn't move. The call went to answerphone.

" Hey, sorry to call like this – " said a familiar, chipper voice, and then, "oh, this isn't actually for you, Will, this is for Doctor Smith. Whenever he gets to your place, or if he's there already. I don't know. Anyway – I just realized; I dropped Ace off at Doctor Lecter's place. She wanted to talk to him about something, sorry if I shouldn't have done that, she was pretty insistent about it, etcetera, etcetera – and she probably doesn't have a way to get back. Jack's got me working on something right now, so you should go and pick her up at some point. 'Cause I can't. Sorry about that. " A slight pause, as if she was waiting for somebody to pick up. " Okay, ah, bye. Say hi to the dogs for me, Will. "

A click, and then silence.

The Doctor had suddenly gone very still and very silent, an absolutely horrified expression passing over his face. "Mr Graham," he said, snatching up his umbrella abruptly. "I'm very much afraid I will have to cut this meeting short."

Will didn't exactly object to this, but he was more than a little confused as the Doctor jolted to his feet, disturbing the dogs, and made a beeline for the front door. "But," he began.

"Stay away from Hannibal Lecter, if you know what's good for you," the Doctor snapped, whirling on him – eyes flashing furiously. "He is dangerous. More dangerous than you could possibly imagine, and I fear I have made the greatest mistake of my extraordinarily long life in leaving my friend alone with him."

He's raving, Will thought, and stood up, following him to the door. "Wait," he called after the tiny man as he more-or-less sprinted out, down the porch, and down the driveway, "where are you going?"

The Doctor didn't turn back, but his voice carried clearly on the wind back to Will nonetheless. "I'm going," he said, every word dark with rage, "to visit Hannibal Lecter."

And he was gone, and when Will looked over to the windowsill, so was the cat.

8.39 AM
Baltimore, Maryland

Somehow, Ace managed to get out of the kitchen and into the dining room. Her hand was throbbing in time with the sound of her heart thundering in her ears, and there was a terrifying amount of blood dripping from it that she just didn't have enough time to tend to. She kicked the door shut behind her, and glanced around as quickly as she could to find something to defend herself with. She had dropped the fork in the kitchen, when he had stabbed her right hand cleanly through, and she hadn't had time to grab anything else.

The door burst open, and Hannibal entered the dining room with a single carving knife recovered from their brawl in the kitchen, blood still dripping down its edge. She could already see the bruise forming from where she had socked him in the face – excellent. He was running at her with that shiny sharp knife of his pointed directly at her heart – not so excellent.

She took a running leap onto the dining table, and ended up sliding along on it on her knees, taking perverse pleasure in smashing all of the pretty ornamental bowls of fruit and flowers out of the way as she went. She shot off the far end of the table, twisting around to land nimbly on her feet, and then she just kept on running, crashing through the great wooden double-doors linking the dining room to the rest of the house.

"The front doors are locked," Hannibal called after her, almost playfully. She swore, and turned on her heel, changing directions. He might have been lying, but she couldn't take the chance that he was telling the truth – she'd be trapped in the foyer with nowhere to run, if so. Better by far to try for an upstairs escape route – jump a window, if need be.

The stairs; the stairs. She took them two at a time and risked a glance backwards. She couldn't see Hannibal anywhere behind her, and wasn't sure if that was a good thing.

The room to the left, the one closest to the front of the house; that seemed like a safe bet. She darted in, slammed the door behind her, and chanced a look around. It looked like some kind of music room. There was a harpsichord at one end of the room, and some other weird instruments that she didn't recognize, as well as pages upon pages of sheet music, covering the desk and floor – both handwritten and otherwise.

"Do you know how humans reached the top of the food chain, Miss McShane?" His voice drifted up to her from downstairs, and even through the closed door, she could hear the sound of his steady footsteps as he ascended the stairs.

Fuck, she thought, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Her dominant hand was injured badly enough that it was pretty much impossible for her to pick up or move anything accurately, so a chair wedged under the door handle was the best she was going to get as far as barricading herself in went. It wouldn't hold – not for long. She looked around frantically for something heavy to break the window with.

"Humans, on their own, do not have the stamina and strength to keep up with a wild animal for any reasonable length of time." Closer, now. "In order to run one down, a hunter must use his intellect and cunning. Hence, persistence hunting."

She picked up a book, hefted it, and threw it at the window. It bounced off. The window didn't even so much as crack. The footsteps from outside stopped, just outside the door.

"Pursue your prey until they are exhausted," he said. "They will undoubtedly, at some point, falter. Weaken. Slip up. A true predator will always have the upper hand."

There was a sudden, violent slam at the door, like Hannibal had just thrown himself bodily at it. The chair that she had jammed into place there creaked and groaned alarmingly. Ace tried smashing the window once more, but it wasn't budging.

There was another crash. This time, the chair slid away, fell to the side, and there he was. Knife in hand, slight amused smile on his face, like something out of a Stephen King novel. Ace looked around for a weapon, and saw plenty – but none within reach.

"You're planning on eating me, huh?" she said, and then, seemingly randomly, choked out a sudden, incredulous laugh. "Oh – oh my god. You've gotta be kidding me! You're a cannibal. Hannibal the cannibal – oh, that's hilarious –"

"I'm glad you see the funny side," he said, smiling wider, and flung the knife, and Ace heard the whistle of its steel blade parting through the air. She had a split-second of complete and utter smugness when she realized that a skill that she had learned several years back was finally about to come in handy and the look on his face was going to be priceless.

Ace stopped laughing and twirled neatly aside, stretched out her uninjured hand, and snatched the knife neatly from the air, before smiling at him with that particular look that only a person who had successfully perfected that particular art and put it into action could ever manage.

She had been right – the look on his face was priceless.

To his credit, he only wasted time expressing it for all of two seconds. Almost immediately, he snatched up a book from a side table, and hurled it at her with pinpoint accuracy. It didn't actually hurt her when it impacted, but it did succeed in its purpose – knocking the knife out of her hand.

She swore loudly, and located her next weapon. "You were the one that poisoned me," she guessed, snatching it up – an honest-to-god brass candlestick holder – from a side table.

To her surprise, he shook his head, even as he continued advancing on her. "Whatever you may think of me and my methods, know this," he said. "I had no part in the assassination attempt that took place on Wednesday evening." He smiled. It did not reach his eyes. "I would never do that to the food."

"That's really not as comforting as you seem to think it is," she said.

He lunged for her and she didn't manage to dodge fast enough this time – he spun her around, wrenched the candlestick holder out of her hands, drew one of his arms tightly across her throat, and squeezed hard, waiting patiently for her breath to leave her. She struggled fiercely for a second or two, and then her eyes flashed yellow briefly and she snarled, ripping herself away with in human strength. She launched herself at him, almost knocking him over, and raked her fingers across his face viciously, leaving bloody trails running down his cheeks. He kicked her in the stomach, and she skidded across the floor, crashing into the wall. Almost instantly, she pulled herself to her feet, glaring at him. The yellow was already fading from her eyes.

"You're full of surprises, Miss McShane," he said, sounding genuinely amazed. "I do believe I've grossly underestimated you." He didn't make any move to re-engage, instead staring at her with unconcealed wonder. "Have you been subjected to some form of genetic modification?"

Instead of responding, she made a break for the door. He neatly sidestepped, blocked her path, and grabbed both of her wrists, before twisting them both behind her back, rendering her unable to move.

"Answer the question, Miss McShane," he told her, a stern teacher lecturing a misbehaving pupil. "In ignoring me, you are being very rude indeed. I do not appreciate rudeness."

"You know what's even ruder?" Ace spat. "Feeding somebody human sausage, and then chasing them around the house with a bloody sharp knife! Feeling psychopathic, Doctor Lecter?"

"I would not have had to chase you if you had simply stayed put," he said. "Please. What is the nature of your unique abilities?"

"Oh, you mean the cheetah virus?" she said, and suddenly twisted her head sharply. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves at some point, which worked to her advantage. She bit his arm, burying her teeth, suddenly inhumanly sharp, into his exposed flesh.

She tasted blood and pulled back, disgusted at herself. She had been expecting him to exclaim in pain and let her go, but he barely flinched. Unsettlingly, a slow smile spread across his face. He seemed to be almost relishing the sensation.

"'The cheetah virus'?" he said, eyeing the blood that was trickling down his arm almost appreciatively. "An interesting turn of phrase."

"Not a metaphor." Ace writhed in his grip, trying to break free once more, but he wrapped his free arm around her torso, preventing her from moving. She growled; although since she had pulled the virus properly under control now, it was more human than animal, and decided to channel the most terrifying person she knew. Maybe intimidation was the way to go. "You see, Doctor Lecter," she said, forcing her voice down, bringing it into a simmering, tranquil fury. Channelling the Doctor. She hoped she was doing it right. "You've made a bit of a miscalculation."

"Oh?" He sounded faintly amused, like nothing she could do would surprise him.

Well. We'll just have to see about that.

"Yeah. Because..." She craned her neck around all the way so she was looking him right in the eyes. "I'm not entirely human." And she smiled – a hard, furious, alien thing, and forced the virus to re-emerge, to make her teeth sharpen in her mouth; to make her eyes glow with an unholy yellow light.

Incredibly, it had the desired effect. Hannibal Lecter's hands loosened as his face dropped into an expression of actual, proper shock, and Ace had the opportunity that she needed to scramble for the doorknob and make her escape into the rest of the house. She barely hesitated before going for the stairs this time. Going upstairs had been a stupid, stupid move – she was far more likely to find a way out via the lower level of the house. Maybe the front door was unlocked – she hadn't seen him actually lock it, had she? – or she could get out via the kitchen side-door.

If she survived that long, anyway.

He was already descending the stairs too, actually running this time. She was halfway down already. She decided to forgo the rest of the descent, and leapt over the side of the railing, falling the rest of the way down. The front door was closer, and more direct. That one first.

A swish and a thump behind her indicated that Hannibal had taken the same unorthodox way to the ground floor. A quick glance further indicated that he had retrieved the carving knife from before, although he was holding it rather loosely at his side.

"I did sense something rather strange about you," he confessed, voice echoing down the hallway. "Ever since our first encounter. I couldn't quite pin it down, which rather infuriated me, as you may well imagine."

"That's me," she called over her shoulder. The front door was in sight, and along with it, hope of escape. "Infuriating's pretty much my middle name!"

"It is rather a relief to learn that you are not of this world," he continued, as if she had not spoken and as if he was not pursuing her with the (apparent) goal of murder in mind. "Although it does, of course, raise some rather uncomfortable questions. Which I do hope you will be able to answer before I must end your life."

She all but slammed into the front door, and tugged at the handle once, twice, before realizing that it was as locked as he had threatened. She didn't waste any more time on it, and instead turned to face Hannibal as he entered the room. "Hate to break it to you, mate, but I'm more human than not."

He tilted his head as he entered the foyer in a decidedly reptilian manner. "You stated that you were not human."

"Not entirely," she said, eyes darting. Looking for a way out. "But I was born on Earth – Perivale, if we're being specific. If you're looking for real, proper aliens; there's a lot of better places to look."

"Such as?" His eyes were bright with curiosity.

"Try Mars," she said, and feinted as if she was about to try running left, then dashed right. It didn't fool him, of course, but then she hadn't expected it to. She dropped to her knees at the last second, sliding neatly under his outstretched arm before springing up again and breaking into a flat-out sprint in the direction of the kitchen.

She made it through the hallways and dining room, moving on pure adrenaline, terror, and the residual traces of the cheetah still coursing through her system. She could still hear him coming, as if from a long distance away.

She made it into the kitchen and slammed into the glass double doors leading out to the side garden of the house, tugging at the handles. Locked, she realized, just like the front doors. Had he been anticipating this? There was no time to think. She grabbed the nearest heavy object from off the counter – the wooden block used to hold knives; now empty – and threw it as hard as she could as she could at the glass. Satisfyingly, it shattered on contact.

She let out a wordless cry of victory, and dived for freedom – just as Hannibal caught up to her. She hadn't even seen or heard him coming. He wasn't there one moment, and then he was; grabbing her violently by the shoulders and slamming her roughly into the wall, pinning her there. She instinctively pulled at the cheetah, eyes flashing brightest yellow and teeth drawing back in a snarl; but he was ready for her this time – he grabbed her left forearm in one hand and her lower arm in the other, and in one short sharp movement, pulled. There was a sickening snap that jolted her through her whole body, and her mind went white with the most exquisite sort of pain. She howled in agony, thrashing. The cheetah disappeared, and she could not find it again no matter how desperately she probed – not that she was even able to think about fighting back at the moment.

"I cannot kill you," he said, "not yet. There is far too much to learn from a unique creature such as yourself."

She recovered enough of herself to spit out, "gonna eat me, then?"

"Yes," he said simply, without shame. "After a fashion. It is important, however, that I am sure the poison has completely left your system."

She choked out something that was barely a laugh. "Hannibal – the cannibal, " she hissed. "Did you change your name after you started eating people, or were your parents were just really hopeful?" And then she cried out, a loud, piercing scream, as he drove the knife sharply into her chest – not into her heart, not by a long shot, but it might as well have been with the amount of pain she was in. She coughed and choked, blood bubbling up over her lips, and then screamed again.

"You talk too much," he told her simply.

"...'re you gonna do," she gasped out, hands scrabbling frantically to find purchase on the wound, "– stab me 'gain?"

"If necessary," he said. "I would prefer not to, however. Keeping you alive will be enough of a chore as it is. I cannot purge your system if you die."

"I hope you choke on me," she breathed. Her vision was darkening around the edges and she couldn't seem to catch her breath properly. The pain was already becoming numb, distant, and she could feel her eyelids fluttering shut, unwillingly. She forced them open, and saw, through the darkness creeping in from all around her, Hannibal Lecter leaning into her vision. He looked at her, and a smile crossed his face as he seemed to see something within her.

"Yes," he said, raising his knife again, "yes, I think that will do quite nicely."

She tried to say something else – something witty, something biting; another taste of that McShane bravado – but it stuck in her throat, caught like a fly trapped in amber, and all she was able to do was let out a single, unwilling, blood-drenched sob.

Her eyes slipped shut, and this time they didn't open again. There was pain burning in her chest and her hand and now her other hand too, and she could feel every single vibration running through the house and ground and her. There was a distant roaring noise echoing through her or the house or somewhere, and she was sure that she should recognize what it was – somewhere in the remaining coherent parts of her mind, it registered as something vastly important – but she couldn't remember, couldn't remember, and the pain was growing more acute now and she couldn't hold onto a complete thought for a moment longer.

As consciousness left her, she realized was that the ground was shaking; almost rumbling beneath her. Footsteps , her fading brain supplied to her, although... no, that wasn't quite right.

She fell into blackness; endless blackness, to the sound of an oncoming storm.