I've been down the Far Cry 5 rabbit hole over on That Other Fanfic Site for so long - and I'm still very much there - that I needed to write something slightly more sane and normal. And "slightly more sane and normal" turns out to be 'Hannibal' stuff, so prayer circle for me pls.
I own nothing. People with more talent in their pinkie fingers than I have in my entire body own everything. This is a bit of mash-up of canons, but will follow the TV show - I've mainly taken liberties where Clarice is concerned.
Chapter 1: prelude to capture
The first time Clarice sees the stag she is walking in the woods around Will Graham's old Wolf Trap home.
She arrives too late in the day; it's almost dusk. She parks her car way down the drive, out of sight of the house, and walks the last few hundred yards.
She does not go inside the house itself, it is long since repossessed and sold. She briefly stands before it and takes it in. The chipped wood, the homeliness, the faded comfort so at odds with whom Will turned out to be. She looks at the old porch and imagines him sitting out there with his pack of dogs, she glances at the barn and wonders if he butchered and arranged Randall Tier in there.
Then she turns her back on it and heads for the river, walks along it for a spell. It's frozen over, fervent motion frozen to ice, but she conjures up Will here in summer. Standing thigh deep in the stream with his lures, being happy, quiet, somewhere else. She sees him pulling out fish after trashing fish, gleaming in the sunlight with their struggles.
She doesn't know Will Graham, but she can imagine him fishing all the same.
Clear as day.
She moves towards the treeline. They are dark, the woods, but they are calling out to her all the same. So she heeds, wanders beneath laden pines, and her breath is frost and her vision is white. All is silent and she feels weightless, otherworldly, she fancies she leaves no footprints in the virgin snow.
She is here just trying to get a sense, perhaps just a faint whisper on the wind, of the troubled man who once lived here. But all she gets is eerie stillness, and that stillness is moving her deeper into the woods, away from the house. Darkness is falling, slowly at first, a sinuous beast made of shadows, stretching and yawning and rubbing about her ankles. She knows about winter dusks though. Soon it will pounce, and all will be dark.
But that is not important right now. There is a beating susurrus, the shadows curl and spiral, but she is not afraid.
She moves deeper. And she loses track a little bit, perhaps she is walking in circles, perhaps it doesn't matter.
And then suddenly, caught right between two seconds, she sees a dark stag looking at her from beneath an enormous tree. Maple, she thinks absently, and ancient. The stag does not seem afraid of her, it meets her gaze steadily. It stands so very still, a statue carved out of petrified lava. But she can see its flanks moving, can see its breath billowing in the frosty air, can see planets and stars orbiting its antlers.
They stand in the quiet looking at each other, and she's about to lose her grip on time Then the creature slowly backs away into the shadows, and she lets out a breath she hadn't realised she'd held.
Only later, on her drive back to Quantico, does she really reflect on the feathers.
But by then she is sure she is wrong, saw wrong.
There is nothing left.
She's got nothing left.
Her career is over thanks to the Evelda Drumgo fiasco, that botched arrest, bullets flying all around a screaming baby. Scapegoated, pushed out, ostracised, thrown under the bus. Whatever you want to call it, and her loathing for Paul Krendler burns white hot and eager.
Jack Crawford - mentor, father figure, rock - is rotting in a too-early grave. His heart gave in, and she blames Dr. Hannibal Lecter just as much as she blames Bella's death. More. She blames Lecter more. She doesn't have all the details, was never privy to all the intricacies of Jack Crawford's machinations, but she is convinced whatever transpired with Lecter, Will Graham and Francis Dolarhyde killed him just as surely as his broken heart.
She had asked to interview Dr. Lecter once, back when she was a trainee and he was incarcerated under Dr. Alana Bloom's care in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. When Jack had her working the Buffalo Bill case. She had asked because she knew Lecter would be able to provide invaluable insights. He'd done it before, after all, albeit out of captivity.
And she had asked because of her need to be better, always better, than from whence she came. Better than her past, better than her blood. The belief that only when she's become the very best ...that's when the pleas of victims everywhere will quiet down, silence. Die.
Jack had refused her request, something like real horror in his eyes, and in the end she had caught Jame Gumb anyway. Afterwards she had heard the talk about Miriam Lass, and better understood why he had said no.
But she regrets his decision now, just as she did then. Because had she stood before Hannibal Lecter, seen him, exchanged words with him...then she might have a piece of him now, the way he himself collected pieces of people. She might clutch a shard of his mind in her fist, jagged and vicious, her palm bleeding red but it would be worth it to hold him. She might have known him just a little bit, have more than the fractured mosaic she's gained by illicitly going through transcripts and boxes of evidence and video interrogations and newspaper clippings.
As for Will Graham...he had quit as a lecturer before her arrival at the academy, and by the time the Tooth Fairy happened she was working different cases. Jack never brought her in. She had caught some glimpses of Graham at Quantico though, when Jack brought him out of retirement and on to the case and back into Lecter's clutches.
But she hadn't truly paid much attention until Lecter and Graham disappeared into thin air.
Now she's reading his papers. She devours his case notes. She's watching video recordings of his lectures over and over and over. She can't stop looking at him.
A slight, twitchy man, handsome but hiding. Eyes always faraway and inward at the same time, and mind a knife stabbing straight through every single crime scene.
She's jealous of his otherworldly ability, his empathy. She thinks of the people she could save if she had it, she could silence so many pleas.
And no one knows where he is. No one knows if he's alive. If Lecter is alive.
Well. She's got will. She's got a small cache of savings, stubbornly squirrelled away since forever. She suspects that with the way things are going she will soon have nothing but time. She will find them, or find out what happened to them. She will. She will.
For Jack.
Alana Bloom refuses to have anything to do with her, but Clarice manages to catch her unaware and scrounges a short phone call. The line sounds tinny, crackles, as if Alana is far away. In a different country. Clarice rather supposes she is.
Alana's voice is cold, flat.
"Listen. Sure, the first protégée of Crawford's that went after Lecter did come back, but minus one arm and her entire mind. The next joined him. Think carefully, Agent Starling."
She pounces at that, near delirious at this whiff of something tangible.
"So you think they might be alive? Both of them? Lecter and Graham? The theory around here is that Lecter killed Graham, then escaped for good."
Alana is quiet for such a long while Clarice thinks she might have hung up. Then her voice comes back, and it is not dull anymore. It is full of hurt and betrayal and broken bones.
"I'm not sure someone like Hannibal can die." Her voice cracks, becomes more splintered still. "And if it is possible for him to keep Will alive, then he will. He...cherishes Will. In his own way. And Will can't be happy without Hannibal. If there is a way for them to be together, then trust me, Agent Starling, they are."
Then her voice goes emotionless again. Void.
"I strongly advise you not to go near this. Remember Beverly Katz."
Then she hangs up.
Frederick Chilton next, and he is much keener to see her, to talk.
A pity only that he's without his lips.
His lack of lips does not stop him from trying to communicate, and she doesn't understand how he's still alive. He will never again leave the hospital. He clings to his life support, reclines as if on needles in his hyperbaric chamber, graft after graft after graft, and yet he burns to tell her things. And after some time with him she learns to better understand his lipless words, even as fervent and pained and cut off at each end as they are. Because he wants someone to listen. He wants someone to know. How he came to be ruined. How Will Graham and Jack Crawford set him up, tossed him into the fires of the Great Dragon. How Hannibal was always a monster, and Will Graham became one too.
She leaves knowing that Chilton is another one thinking that Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter disappeared together.
It's when she steps outside the hospital she sees the stag again. It's standing across the road, between two parked cars, and its gaze is solemn and inscrutable. The feathers on its legs and hind and neck are clearly visible now, in daylight; a shimmering black with darkest purples and greens and blues, like rainbows in oil, where the dull afternoon sun hits the plumage.
The light hits something else too – she strains her eyes and sees. Dark scales, like fish scales, scattered on the creature's flank. Ricocheting and bending light with each breath the beast takes.
She can't breathe.
It looks at her, and there is archaic history in its eyes, ancient tales and life and murder.
Then it turns and walks away among the cars.
A hallucination, she realises. Not here. It had not been real in the woods in Wolf Trap either.
She is so familiar with all the different case notes by now, with the photographs and the transcripts, that it doesn't take her long to piece a broken, incomplete picture together. Garett Jacob Hobb's hunting room. Cassie Boyle impaled on the head of a stag. Hannibal Lecter's office.
Stags and antlers everywhere, and no wonder that her busy, tired mind might conjure one up. But she doesn't understand the feathers or the scales. She doesn't understand why she is seeing things that aren't there. She feels in freefall, violent and unchecked, snagging on antler tines on her way down.
What is the significance?
She drives home, and she doesn't tell Ardelia anything. She doesn't tell her anything at all.
She can find no trace of Dr. Bedelia du Maurier. None whatsoever.
She shivers, but she keeps going, because she has chosen her path.
She finds Hannibal's beach house almost by accident.
She had of course figured that he had more properties than just his Chandler Square residence. They had all figured that. He hadn't kept Miriam Lass in a hole all that time, he hadn't kept Abigail Hobbs permanently in the basement. The FBI had searched fruitlessly, and Hannibal had given them nothing at all during his trial or his stay at the state hospital.
Miriam Lass refuses to see her, talk to her, and Clarice doesn't persevere. She might be single minded in her quest, hardened, but she can recognise that the other woman has been hurt beyond endurance and then further still. If she doesn't want to talk then Clarice won't insist on ripping open her wounds. Likely she can't remember anyway, don't have anything left but the false memories Hannibal gave her.
She refuses to think about how she could end up like Miriam if she continues,
Perhaps lose a lot more than Miriam did.
Abigail Hobbs won't ever talk to anyone ever again, and Clarice studies her photos with sadness. Surrounded by predators all her life, chewed up and spat out, large blue eyes brimming over with secrets taken to the grave.
She will get nothing from Miriam and Abigail.
But then, while going through the same boxes of evidence and old possessions as everyone else, she comes across a crumpled old receipt recovered from Hannibal's house. From six years ago, petrol from a gas station in a little town in Delaware. At the time it had probably seemed an inconsequential piece of information, particularly with Hannibal having turned himself in.
But now...
She remembers how five years later the last confirmed sighting of Francis Dolarhyde had been in Delaware, after that botched transfer that saw several FBI agents dead and Lecter, Graham and Dolaryhyde vanished into thin air.
She brings up a map, pores over it, goes entirely on feeling. She doesn't turn around, but she knows the stag is standing in one of the corners of the evidence room. She can hear it breathe, she can smell the musk and the forest and the darkness on its pelt as she glides over towns and villages and nature reserves. Vaguely she wonders if the beast will warn her if someone's coming. Her already precarious position with the FBI will be further jeopardized if someone catches her with evidence she's got no business handling.
Then she forgets all that when she hits upon a name on the map that speaks to her.
Slaughter Beach.
The next day she drives out there because she doesn't think Hannibal could possibly resist.
It takes her the best part of three days of driving up and down the coast, venturing onto private driveways, trespassing, looking, searching searching searching before she finally comes upon the house. Secluded and tucked away and perched precariously right at the edge of the cliffs, about to crumble on down into the Atlantic.
She sees the police car half tucked away on the drive. The front door is unlocked. She walks through the house, runs her hand along the partly covered furniture, so expensive, so lush, so dusty and abandoned. She takes in the shattered wine bottle in the living room, the wine long since dried into the expensive rug.
Then she steps through the broken patio doors out onto the terrace, and she finds the Dragon.
Salty winds and sunshine and rain have permanently altered the once fearsome, insane being. But she stands before him with something akin to esteem. She studies the shape of his wings made of blood, forever etched into the flagstone by weather and time. She travels across the parts of him turned to bone, bleached white by the Atlantic sun. She considers what she can see of his wounds.
At least now she knows what happened to Francis Dolarhyde.
And it looks as though he gave Hannibal Lecter a run for his money.
She stands on the very edge of the bluff looking down and out at the water, letting the wind blow her hair and her thoughts and her doubts every which way. She considers the crashing waves and the stag, the stag stands alongside her but about ten yards down, and it is looking at the waves too.
Francis Dolarhyde's remains are sprawled behind her and there's the faint smell of something she can't name.
But perhaps that is just the mysteries tangled up in the pelt of the stag.
She walks back into the house and takes one last look around, looking for the detail that had scratched at her mind during her first walk through but eluded her. She stands stock still, and in her peripheral the stag out on the cliffs, as still as her and as focused, dark and forbidding and holding so many answers without telling her.
Then it hits her.
Two wine glasses.
Two.
She calls in the find, then she books herself a trip. She knows that her unauthorised digging in the Lecter mess will be the last straw, the ultimate excuse, and she accepts it. And so the expected suspension becomes a reality and it's a large piece of her identity attached to the badge that is no longer hers, so large. The largest part of her. She would be lost without this new purpose she's given herself, it gives her the strength to ignore the gloating on Krendler's face.
And one day, one day she will get him.
She flies to Italy for no other reason than that Hannibal had once fled here followed by Will and she wants to walk the streets they both walked, together and apart.
And anyway, she hasn't had a vacation for years.
Her budget is meagre, so she boards in a small village outside Florence, hires a beat up Scoda and drives into town every day. She walks slowly around the city, jostled by tourists and propelled forward by an inane conviction that she will know what she is looking for when she sees it. She tries to catch feelings and thoughts and clues out of thin air, and now the stag is there, always there. Behind her, before her, alongside her. Disappearing into crowds, reappearing again.
Always in the corner of her eye, and she's stopped being scared of it and she can't remember when.
She haunts the Palazzo Capponi, asks questions no one wants to answer, stirs memories no one wants to remember. Considers the courtyard, where Hannibal gave a policeman the death of Judas.
She wanders around the Uffizi, sits in front of La Primavera for hours and hours.
And she carries a letter to Ardelia in her pocket. One that explains everything. She hasn't posted it yet, because that would make this...real. Right now she's on vacation. Once that letter is posted it will be an acknowledgment that she has truly departed. That she's on a hunt. That she might have found a lead, a trace, a scent. That she might be in danger.
That she might not come back.
She drives through the night all the way down to Palermo. To the Norman Palace. To the Capella Palatina.
She arrives with morning light awash on the ancient stones, with the intensity of smell and impressions that might not be her own, rather of those that have gone before her here. She breathes in Byzantium, she breathes in saints, she tries to burrow through the cracks in the mosaics for answers. How long last the memories of stones?
It might be foolish, but how could she not go to the place where Hannibal Lecter once left Will Graham a Valentine? She'd seen the crime scene photos before she got suspended. Hannibal's origami heart was something horrifically beautiful to behold.
The stag stands atop the memento mori on the floor, looking at her, waiting, and for the very first time she considers touching it.
But she daren't.
The call comes through on her long drive back up to Florence. Unknown number. She grapples with the cell phone, the steering wheel, with exhaustion, but manages to answer.
"Starling."
"Clarice? Starling?"
That voice. A man's voice, kicking at her brain, lodging deep inside. She wedges the phone more securely between her shoulder and ear, eases up on the gas.
"Who is this?"
"Listen to me. Stay away. You get any closer, I'm not sure I can convince him to leave you alone. I'm not sure I'd want to."
Of course she recognises his voice. How can she not, after listening to it for hours? Recordings of his lectures, his interrogations, his trial.
"Will? Will Graham? Where are you? Tell me! I promise I just want to talk."
His answer is immediate and his voice is hard.
"Forget it. End this now. I'm warning you only out of consideration for Jack."
Olive groves are flying by, streaks of greens and blues and her heart tapping out a rhythm she's never felt before. She thinks that might be blood in her mouth.
"Jack is dead."
A silence that crackles, a voice gone soft. More like the voice she can remember from all the tapes. A little forlorn.
She likes his voice like that.
"I know."
Then a long silence, and she's terrified she might lose him, that he'll hang up and this will be the closest she can ever get.
"Just one thing. Please? Will? Are you there?"
His voice comes back, and so hard again, like the stones in the Norman Palace, like the blade of Hannibal's linoleum knife.
"What is it?"
She breathes, considers, but she must ask. There was never a choice.
"What does it mean?"
"What does what mean?"
"The stag. The black one. I see it everywhere. It follows me."
Stuttering breaths, a sound as if he's clutching the phone.
"Oh Jesus," he says, then he hangs up.
When she comes back to her boarding house a wreath of flowers is waiting for her by the door to her room. She picks it up as she unlocks the door, steps inside with an armful of blooms.
She gingerly sets it down on the rickety old bedside table, considers it. It's an artful yet wild arrangement, muted colours against dark greens. Belladonna and hemlock. Henbane and moonflower. Monkshood.
It's very beautiful.
"Hello, Dr. Lecter," she whispers into the poison, and she thinks she will have to post the letter to Ardelia now.