Disclaimer: I don't own Hannibal, but all original characters are mine. Much of this takes place before and during the course of the series.
Pretty Little Things
Chapter One
August, 2006.
The name of Claire Sawyer's daughter had been splashed all over the tabloids and newspapers, was the topic of every conversation on the twenty-four-hour news networks, was on the lips of every gossip-loving fool.
Claire Sawyer and her third husband left their posh Beverly Hills digs to stand in support of the girl. They did what they could to avoid the journalists and paparazzi, going so far as to take the third husband's private jet to a small airport outside of Washington, D.C., and renting an inconspicuous car from there. The Hollywood lawyer was there that afternoon.
It was the Hollywood lawyer, Louis Berman, who called Dr. Hannibal Lecter, begging him to come to Washington, D.C., and to the psychiatric hospital at which the girl was ensconced.
"She won't speak to me or to her stepfather," Claire Sawyer remarked, her heavily Botoxed brow hardly moving. "She'll only talk to Lou. She told me..." Her voice trailed off, and she clapped her hand over her mouth to muffle a sob.
"What did she say to you?" Hannibal Lecter asked her, keeping his voice as measured as possible.
"She told me to go to hell."
Victoria Landry. Aged twenty-five. Working toward a master's degree in English literature at Georgetown. Until tonight. Until she had shot the man who had been stalking her for six years. She looked so young—much younger than her years—with her damp hair pulled back and her face free of makeup. She was lying on the bed, dressed in the hospital scrubs that served as the facility's uniform. She watched warily as he walked in, and she slowly sat up, her dark blue eyes not leaving him.
"Is it all right if I sit down, Miss Landry?" he asked her, indicating the chair close to the bed. She seemed to be appraising him, his well-pressed suit, his polished air, his professional detachment. She nodded, and he settled into the chair, folding his long hands together, meeting her gaze levelly.
"So you're the doctor, then, the one they called in all the way from Baltimore?" Her voice was soft, a little hoarse from fatigue and shock.
"Yes, your attorney called me to come speak with you and to give my professional opinion," he replied, and she inclined her head.
"So will you say I'm crazy?"
"That depends on your contribution to this...session, Miss Landry. Victoria."
She blinked twice, then began to chew on her thumbnail. "Is he dead?"
"From what I've heard, he is still in ICU and in critical condition."
"Do you think I'll be charged with anything?"
He shook his head. "I can't say, Miss Landry. You should ask your lawyer that question. Now will you please answer mine?"
She drew a trembling breath. "Go ahead."
"Robert McCarren. Why did you shoot him?"
She licked her lips. "He broke into my apartment. I was asleep, and I heard the noise, and it spooked the cat...Oh, God, the cat! Is...is she okay?"
"Why not ask your mother about your cat? I'm sure she's taken pains to make sure Pussy is well cared for."
Her eyes narrowed then, and he could see that he'd hit a nerve. "Your mother says that you asked her to leave and told her to go to hell. I've always heard she was a terrible actress. It seems that she was overdramatizing this little scene as well," he went on, and he saw her lean forward. Now that she wasn't hidden by the half-light of the room, he could see the souvenirs of her altercation with her stalker. A split bottom lip, a bruised left cheek, the purple marks of fingers on her otherwise pale neck.
"She told me I shouldn't have been nice to him all those years ago, the summer I was home from freshman year of college. She told me that going to the police and the restraining orders and the arrests only made it worse. Like I asked for this—like I fucking asked for this," she scoffed. "It was him or me...and I chose me."
"And he's in the hospital with two bullet wounds to his torso."
She took the styrofoam cup from the bedside table, sipping at the water contained in it. "So?"
"And you don't care?" he pursued, and she watched him as he unfolded his hands, as he placed each one carefully on the plastic arms of the chair.
"I do care," she insisted. "Because I now I know he'll get off with a light sentence or plead out, and as soon as he's out of jail, he'll come back for me to finish what he started.
"So you wish for an alternate outcome?"
She was honest. "Of course I do."
"And what outcome would you have wanted?"
She said it calmly, as though she were just talking about the weather.
"I wish I'd killed him."
"She is perfectly lucid now, but she may have been in a dissociative state when she shot him," Hannibal Lecter told Louis Berman, who took down notes on what he said in earnest. "It is comparable to the state of mind of a battered woman when the last beating is the straw that breaks the camel's back...and she kills her abuser, her husband."
"You saw her bruises?" Berman queried, and Lecter nodded briskly, wrinkling his nose at the reek of overgenerously applied Polo cologne. "Pretty bad, aren't they?"
"Reprehensible." The cologne, more than the bruises.
"Yeah, I'll admit it shook me up, too, to see them." Berman shook his head. "I've known Victoria since she was a teenager, and that creepo was sleazing around the property trying to get a look at her when she was in her senior year of high school. He was the next-door neighbor's fuck-up kid. Nothing wrong with him, not mentally, not physically. But he was really twisted—you know?" Berman twirled the forefinger of his left hand by his temple to indicate craziness. "If Gus Landry were alive, he'd have already gotten shit taken care of."
"And the man she shot—the cree-po?" Hannibal Lecter asked softly, the word alien on his tongue. "What is his condition?"
"Stable, not in a coma. She got him in the shoulder and stomach. She should have aimed higher."
"She'd been beaten, almost strangled. Her response was only natural."
"So you think it was self-defense, too?"
"I would say that it was very obviously self-defense. And Mr. Berman..."
"Yes, Dr. Lecter?"
"She asked about her cat."
He returned to her hospital room about an hour later, his face alight with some secret mirth. She turned down the volume of the television and watched him as he took a few steps toward her, coming to the side of the bed.
"Your mother," he told her succinctly, "says that your cat is in good health."
She smiled. "Thank you," she said. "My mom...she's..."
"Difficult?" he supplied.
"To put it mildly."
He chuckled at this, seemingly amused. "Has she always been this way...Victoria?"
He called her by her full name, like she'd always preferred, not like how her mother had tried to make her into a Tori or how McCarren had called her Tora (where he'd come up with that she couldn't say and didn't even want to think about). "We've haven't been able to understand each other since my father died," she explained.
"You were fifteen," he surmised grimly, his lids half-closing over his dark eyes. "It must have been a shock."
She crossed her legs, sitting Indian style. "Since then, it's always been, 'Who's going to take care of me?' with her. My mom is...needy. She wants someone to take care of her, she wants to depend on someone. She needs that kind of validation."
"She didn't get it from you, did she? Does she hold any resentment toward you, the kind that you hold toward her?"
She deliberated, brushing her blond bangs out of her face. "You're right. I don't."
He wandered to the chair he had appropriated earlier, sitting down in it. He frowned up at the movie she was watching for a moment. "Then you're a rare creature. Victoria."
The conversation that ensued was...so easy.
He asked her about what she was studying, why she had chosen to get a master's degree in English literature.
He explained to her that her attorney was pleased at his opinion, that no doubt they could pursuade the judge it was self-defense.
She found some of her anger and frustration with her mother dissipating.
They shared a passion for art, though, unlike him, she couldn't draw to save her life.
She told him of how scared she had been, how she would shut herself in her apartment for days at a time, how some nights she'd seen McCarren standing below her bedroom window. He tutted at this, asking about how her boyfriends took it.
"They didn't last long. He scared them away...or I got skittish and told them to go."
"And for how long did this go on?"
"Six years."
"Six years that he stole from you."
She murmured an assent.
"Six years during which you should have been living life to its fullest. And he locked you in a cage."
You're mine. Why can't you see that? I want you, you're mine. I'll fucking take what I want...and you'll like it and tell me you love me...
She felt the squeezing around her heart, felt her throat constrict. Her hands began to shake, and her heart began to beat more quickly.
She heard the words again, whispered in her ear, his hot breath inches away and his hand around her neck—squeezing, threatening to break the delicate bones-until she'd reached and dealt him a blow with the heel of her hand, breaking his nose. He'd let off then, and she'd felt blood spill onto her neck as she'd writhed away from him, grabbed his hand as he'd reached out to grab her, bending three fingers back until she'd heard a sickening crack and his howl of pain. She'd stumbled up, reached under the side table for the gun, and shot, not once, but twice, and she'd been ready for a third time, if the police hadn't stopped her...
"And now you'll be free...for awhile. How does that make you feel, Victoria?" Hannibal Lecter was beside her, proffering a Xanax from one of the medicine bottles that had been brought from her apartment. She took it, her fingers just briefly passing over the smooth, reassuring skin of his palm, and he handed her the cup of water so that she could sip.
Focus. Calm yourself.
She closed her eyes, letting the air fill her lungs, slowly exhaling it out.
"Good girl. Keep breathing."
He stood there beside her, his face impassive as her panic attack passed, as the Xanax helped bring her down.
Six years.
And all that time I didn't know.
"You want to know how it makes me feel?" she quavered, wiping the tears from her eyes. "Terrified. Absolutely terrified."