Clarice is recovering.
After their fervent lovemaking on the floor in front of the fire, Hannibal had needed only a moment to regain his consciousness. He knew of the horror story told in the Baltimore hospital where he had eaten the nose of that repugnant nurse, that his heartrate had never gone above eighty-five. It had increased far beyond that when he had been thrusting madly inside Clarice Starling. It had been a long time since Hannibal had experienced sex—not too long, as he had indulged while living in Florence as Dr. Fell—but he was not so out of practice as to be desperate. He had not finished too quickly, he knew, and the exertion and excitement had certainly overwhelmed him.
His body, covering Clarice and still inside her, felt loose and relaxed in a manner he had not experienced in quite some time. The romantic notion of afterglow entered his mind, but Hannibal knew better that it was the surge of dopamine caused by his powerful orgasm. It was also masking what would surely be a number of aches and pains caused by such physical exertion on the hardwood floor.
He pushed himself up and his softened cock slipped out of her. She whimpered at the loss of him, likely the fullness inside her as well as the warmth of his body. The fire had kept the room at a pleasant temperature, but it had nearly gone out now, and as their bodies relaxed, the air chilled their sweaty skin somewhat uncomfortably. Hannibal did not wish for her to be uncomfortable. He bent and lifted her limp and half-conscious body into his arms. She hummed and nuzzled her head against his chest.
Hannibal carried Clarice through the house, both of them still entirely nude. He did not mind and knew she did not either. They existed alone in this world. Outside of time. But they each had roles to fill and rules to follow. Hannibal's role was to take care of her. To heal her. Body and mind. She had been fully healed from her injuries in the barn at Muskrat Farm for some time now. And he had, slowly and carefully and very deliberately, given her the opportunities and the tools to heal her mind from all the trauma and learned behavior that plagued her and kept her as a caterpillar all her life. This place was her cocoon. She entered her chrysalis to transform into the butterfly she would become.
He recalled her resplendence at dinner and just before their lovemaking, her power in offering her breast and the rest of her body to him. She was emerging already, spreading the beautiful wings in all her glory. Until now, Clarice had followed dutifully the tasks and rules he had prescribed for her, diligently doing what she was supposed to with the aid of lowered inhibitions and protections that his carefully administered drugs provided for her. But tonight she had acted wholly on her own accord. Perhaps with assistance from the drugs. Perhaps not.
They reached the en suite bathroom connected to Clarice's bedroom, and he held her deftly with one strong arm as he filled the bathtub. He stood and held her while waiting. They did not speak. Clarice's arms were around his neck as she held onto him. She was barely awake but awake enough to have some modicum of control over her muscles.
Hannibal considered whether to give her another dose of something, perhaps to keep her asleep for a while he tended to things that needed to be done.
"What're we doing?" Clarice mumbled, her eyes blinking awake.
"I am running a bath for you," he answered simply. Not only would the warm water prevent aching muscles for her in the morning but he was quite certain she would feel sticky and uncomfortable between her legs if not given the opportunity to clean off.
The water had filled to a sufficient level, so Hannibal gently deposited Clarice down into the bath. She looked up at him with shining eyes. "Will you join me?" she asked, a small smile playing on her lips. It was a sensual expression that filled her face, one he had not anticipated. It made him curious. But his own mind was not in a place where he could devote such concentration to unriddling her at the moment.
"No," he replied. "I need to attend to some things in the kitchen. Do you think you will be alright by yourself, or would you like me to return to help you out of the bath?"
A flicker of disappointment went through her eyes, but she managed to school her expression to one of strange neutrality. "I'll be fine. Thank you."
Hannibal nodded. "I shall bid you goodnight, Clarice."
He did not wait for her response, nor did he do anything further. He turned and walked out of the room, closing the bathroom and bedroom doors behind him. He considered how, in another circumstance, perhaps another time in the future, Hannibal might have left Clarice in the bath with a warmer expression. Perhaps he might have leaned down to kiss her, softly on her lips or her cheek or her forehead. Why hadn't he? Something to ponder after the work was done.
Back in the sitting room, Hannibal put his clothes back on, though he did not bother tucking in his dress shirt or wearing the ascot or jacket. It was not nearly warm enough to forego clothing altogether at the moment, and he had tasks to complete that required a certain ease of mobility afforded by being dressed.
The first item was to clean the kitchen. After all the dinner plates had been scraped into the empty skull cavity of Mr. Krendler and everything wheeled into the kitchen. It simply would not do for the dishes or Mr. Krendler to be left to the morning. He did not want to delay the chore any further.
Hannibal had truly not anticipated the way his evening with Clarice had ended. He did not delude himself into thinking that some kind of sexual encounter would never occur between them; on the contrary, he had eagerly anticipated the experience of sexual pleasure between them. But it had not been his intention for tonight. It was Clarice, once again, choosing a path he had not predicted she take. It had been her invitation he had accepted. Her breast bared and offered to him, the drop of wine shivering with each breath she took as it glistened on the end of her nipple. He was powerless to resist. He had not wanted to try to resist her, not when she initiated things between them.
Thinking back on it now, he was so very proud of her for what she had done. She had determined what she wanted and she had taken the affirmative steps to get it. Yes, she was emerging triumphant from the pupa now.
As he washed each of the dishes by hand and stacked them on a towel over the counter beside him to be dried and put away, Hannibal considered the circumstances presented to them. Krendler had been the last obstacle for Clarice to face. The culmination of all her work. He knew she would need to process all that had occurred in the confrontation, to explore what this new freedom from her father and from the screaming lambs and from Krendler would mean for her. He would coax the thoughts from her as he had done before.
That reminded him that he had not given her another dose of any of the psychotropics he had been considering to help her rest. Though she conceivably could rest well enough on her own. He would not disturb her, he decided. The bone saw was not so loud that it would wake her from a restful sleep when she was in her bedroom and he was in the kitchen on the other side of the house.
He continued on. The dishes were dried and put away. All that was left was to dispose of Krendler. That would not take long. And then he could finally sleep.
That had been his intent. But when he returned to the dark house after Krendler was long gone, Hannibal found that he had not properly cleaned the sitting room. The shards of the broken cup were still beside Clarice's armchair. The ripped ruins of cream silk that had been her beautiful dress were crumpled off to the side where Hannibal had discarded it. And the Chateau d'Yquem undrunk from their glasses still sat waiting on the side tables.
It was simple enough to sweep up the broken cup. He did not allow himself to ponder it, the fact that the cup remained broken, that the entropy had not been solved. He cleaned the mess and threw it and the tattered silk away. And then, instead of going to bed as he knew he should, Hannibal decided to sit with his wine.
The fire was long gone, and the room was dark. The moon outside shone brightly, illuminating his trip to the lake and illuminating pleasant shadow inside the house now. He sat alone and quiet, contemplating where to go from here, what possibilities he should explore. He sipped wine from his own glass and gazed at the half-full glass that Clarice had abandoned earlier in the evening.
Half-full. Even in his own mind, Hannibal caught himself with the phrasing. It was not like him to be optimistic in such a way. The figure of speech was perhaps inaccurate, as the glass had been filled and Clarice had drunk it down to its state of being half-empty. But as Hannibal looked at it here, it was a half-full glass he saw. Perhaps a symptom of the satisfaction he felt from Clarice's great strides. Perhaps an effect of the dopamine from their pleasurable evening on the spot where Hannibal now rested his feet.
And now that they had breached the barrier, had crossed the threshold into something more between them, what would the future hold? Hannibal needed to talk to Clarice, to know what questions and concerns she had, to find out the direction of her thoughts. For the first time in quite a long time, he found that there was no clear direction to his own thoughts. For the first time in longer than he could remember, Hannibal Lecter did not know what to do.