Hello everyone! Instead of writing multiple fics for the same fandom, I instead shall be writing another Dictator-esque f/f epic in the Hannibal/Silence of the Lambs franchise. Hope everyone enjoys!
There's a single frayed book sticking out further than the others on Special Agent Jones's shelf. A detail Clarice Starling wouldn't be caught dead simmering on. Not when the clipped speech of Special Agent Jones flew through the stale autumn air, a swarm of lightening bugs speeding away from her hands before she even had the chance to clasp them shut.
"At this point, police have pinned the arson on local teenagers," Special Agent Jones says, pushing his glasses up his bent nose. "They don't seem particularly interested in looking into it any further."
Even with instinct telling Clarice to keep her energy up, her senses alert, she forgoes even the softest tap on the thick wooden conference table connecting her and the other eight agents in Behavioral Sciences for the her thigh. Fingertip only against the spot that'd sported a multi-colored bruise Pollock would've been envious of. Making the least noise possible. Yet another physical reminder of her time in Buffalo Bill's basement, a player in Dr. Lecter's game, now faded away.
It'd been three months since graduation. Enough time for cuts and bruises to heal, for Clarice to designate a spot in her left-hand dresser for her FBI badge, for a new cycle of final year FBI trainees to eagerly stare down their last semesters before stepping into the job. Months. Enough time for journalists to pick the carcass of Jame Gumb's story to the bone marrow, enough time for Jack Crawford's terminally ill wife to pass with Jack at her bedside. Enough time for Clarice to forget the last thing Hannibal Lecter said to her.
Should've been, anyway.
Sometimes, Clarice swears it'd only been a few days.
Or maybe that's the amount of time since she's had six uninterrupted hours of sleep.
The heaviness swooped in waves, changing second to second.
"There are some minors of interest. The neighbors want us to pay attention, anyway. Telltale psychopath signs, they're saying. History of bed wetting, animal violence, the like," Jones continues.
Psychopath. Clarice knows she should be listening to every part of what Jones is saying. Taking notes. Although, she sneaks a glance at Darla, Jones's secretary, as she scribbles notes with her mauve-colored nails. Someone else has that job.
Psychopath. Arson. Someone burned down a pub a few miles from DC. The building was old, and like most cars Clarice had rode in growing up, were inadvertent death traps. Eight people perished in the building as flames licked it up. The owner had dozens of theories of people in his small town to look into.
Psychopath. They were looking into if a psychopath set the fire. A year ago, Clarice wasn't so sure someone could be such a pure embodiment of humanity's worse impulses. Before Dr. Lecter. Before Jame Gumb. Before the skins on the mannequins, before the yapping dog and the pit and Catherine Martin, before the darkness.
A shiver shoots through her spine, but it's more a shock paddle on a corpse after their heart's already given out. But the movement is just involuntary enough for her to bang her hand against the wooden table.
Clarice clamps down on her tongue as the men's heads turn to her. Briefly. Jones even goes so far as to look back to his papers so fast she might as well have been a fallen file in the room next door. No, only Jack holds his gaze on her. He furrows his brow; you okay?
Clarice grimaces out a smile, lifting her hand above the table as if to show it isn't broken.
No, just marred by a thin puffed scar tissue from her cut on the night she found Benjamin Raspail. While the muscle and bone pulsed in residual pain, she takes a moment to rub her temple. There isn't any headache. No, she'd welcome pain to break through the fog collecting in her brain. Her eyes dart to Jones's face, hoping to follow his lips. But she can't hold her attention on the man, the generic salt and pepper close cut hair, the square jaw, the prototype of big brain men with soft enough faces to get questions answered but hard enough bodies to not be sitting ducks in the face of death. They're all the same.
Styrofoam cups littered the table, but Clarice had been just on time, unable to even grab a cup of the caffeinated sludge for herself. She isn't sure whether to check her watch or the door. It should be such a simple solution, excuse herself for no more than the amount of time it took to all but absorb the coffee through her eyeballs and slink back in the room. But everything about her stood out with these men. Her excusing herself led to snickers between colleagues. Women and their tiny bladders, huh? No, she wouldn't give them the satisfaction. One day, she'd bear through a UTI like the trophy it is. It's all she can do to get so much as an invite for drinks after work. After this meeting, in fact. They go to a shitty bar, but Clarice doesn't care.
It isn't going to solve her problem now, though. She clenches her jaw shut, eyes watering. God, they're so dry. How long had it been since she'd slept? It's so easy to visualize right then, more tantalizing than any sexual fantasy she's ever had. Drag herself back to the apartment she and Ardelia share, drop into bed face first without removing her coat. Or even getting out of this room long enough to make it to the secondhand couch in her office, drift away to the scent of musty leather. Bathing in fluorescent lights, Clarice almost feels comforted by the idea of darkness.
Her eyes flutter. No. She clearly can't entertain those thoughts.
"What do you think, Jack?" Jones asks.
She looks to Jack. The closest thing to a safe space in her new FBI lot. But there's no fighting it, like someone caught her from behind and injected her veins with molasses. She drops her elbow to the table, propping her chin up by her fist. It leaves her not exactly looking at Jack head on. Slight angle. An unfocused news reporter camera.
"We have to consider the methodology," Jack says. "Do we really think that a teenager, even one with psychopathic tendencies, has the ability to plan out something as intricate as this arson?"
Jack's voice feels far away. Like she's back in her and Ardelia's living room, trying to not get frozen dinner gravy on Ardelia's gran's handmade quilt, listening to Jack give interviews on TV. Cozy. She's so cozy watching Jack on TV.
Not like the night before. The night before that and before that and before that. Her eyelids grow heavy. Too heavy to fight. She's safe in this room. Not like the suffocating darkness. Not like—
"What do you think, Clarice?" Jack asks.
But it's too late. Jack reaches a hand as Clarice sinks, but she's too deep by then.
This darkness, the one behind her eyelids, is comforting.
For a moment.
Panic grips at Clarice's chest as she rockets up from the cold of the conference table. Hummingbird heartbeat as she pushes a few stray hairs out of her eyes. She can't have been out for more than a few seconds, but every agent's eyes on her make her think she's put on quite the show. In fact, her stomach clenches, some of the newer recruits are smirking. Tommy and Gill, the guys who ran courses with her, who said she should come out with them.
"You okay, Starling?" Jack asks, ever the caretaker.
She's thankful no one can see the red surely crawling up her neck. "Yeah. Just…tired."
Jones not-so-subtly rolls his eyes, but Jack gives her one more steadfast second. "Take care of yourself."
Jones sets his papers into a file. "Well, that's our cue. More later this week, everyone."
Clarice looks to Tommy, naively, expectantly. But Tommy doesn't even give her a second of false hope.
"You heard Crawford, Clarice," Tommy says. Everyone here interchanges her first and last name. "I think it's a little past your bedtime."
The senior agents slip out of the room, clearly uninterested in the fresh recruits and whatever they do once they clock out. Jack with them, Clarice's heart tugging as he goes.
Gill laughs. "I know they call you a prodigy and all, Starling, but you sure you're not lying about being twelve or anything? Gotta keep up."
Tommy smirks, looking her up and down in the exact same FBI dress code approved pantsuit. The one that leaves everything to the imagination. But these boys had quite the extensive one. "You've certainly got the kiddy height."
Clarice collects her belongings. Her notebook with more absentminded spirals than notes. "Considering how you ogle me, maybe we should profile you next."
She leaves with the sound of Gill's honking laugh echoing through the conference room. Finally, she's awake.
#
After work, still with the early fall light spilling through hers and Ardelia's apartment windows, Clarice manages to sleep for two hours in the La-Z-Boy Ardelia got from her dad. Enough that she feels like she's being yanked out of a dream when she hears Ardelia slam a brown bag of groceries down on the counter.
"Thought you were gonna go test your spirit with drinks with Tommy and Gill tonight," Ardelia says as she unloads some ironically phallic vegetables.
Clarice sighs. Despite every instinct telling her to sink back into the cushy leather, she stretches. Bones pop. "They bailed." Her heart twinges; usually she'd tell Ardelia everything, but embarrassment is too strong for the truth.
"Would've been a waste of a night anyway." A smile flashes across Ardelia's face. "Instead, you can stay in and help me study for my law exam."
Ardelia had always been at the top of hers and Clarice's class, worked four times as hard as their white male classmates. But at some point, Ardelia got so good at school that'd she'd opted for a fairly overwhelming load to complement her training with law classes. Clarice, branded nerd for years now, has been happy to help her with what little mental space she has left. Even if, sometimes, that means organizing Ardelia's brain for her while her own crumbles.
"When's the soonest test?" Clarice asks.
"Tomorrow." Ardelia smiles as she shrugs, already so at ease to shake off the anxiety. Clarice knows it isn't good study strategy, but she wonders if Ardelia has a more hospitable time living in her own brain. A pang shoots through Clarice's chest imagining it.
"Well," Clarice says, smiling for the first time all day, "guess we have some work to do."
Ardelia pulls out a kitchen knife with a flourish. "Guess so."
Clarice pushes herself off the chair and migrates over to the kitchen side of the room. She hovers over Ardelia. It's not that the Buffalo Bill case had ruined knives for her, but she still felt much safer not being the one handling them. Not looking at them too long.
"You have time to cook and study?"
"Yes," Ardelia says, her hand dropping on top of Clarice's. "It's called multi-tasking. Newest innovation in learning."
The burst of warmth from Ardelia's touch steals her attention. It'd been happening more and more lately. Staying up as often as Clarice did meant that she'd often talk to Ardelia at all states of sleep depravation. When Ardelia got tired, her tongue got looser. Made Clarice the same way, sometimes. When they'd rag dolled into each other on the couch with Charlie's Angels reruns humming at four a.m., when one of them had sighed saying Farrah Fawcett's name, there'd been an understanding. One that seeped into waking hours. The only good thing that'd endured from the night, if Clarice is being honest.
Still—Clarice pulls her hand back—not what they needed to think about now. The sun sets slowly from the window behind them. While Ardelia chops vegetables, Clarice knocks on the kitchen light, flooding the room before a single shadow could touch the room.
"There are pills if your insomnia is that bad," Ardelia says.
Another white lie. Ardelia could know that Clarice couldn't sleep; she didn't need to know why.
"I'll be fine," Clarice says.
The weekend is fast approaching, anyway. Like every other Saturday, Clarice will burrow under her comforter and sleep through the day hours. When she can safely open her eyes to light. Like her paranoia about Dr. Lecter taking a new interest in her, this childish fear of the dark would fade too. Clarice just has to ride it out. She's survived her father's death, the lambs, the homes that came after. She can survive one terrifying night that she'd emerged victorious from. Bruises take time to heal. And that's all Jame Gumb is. A bruise.
"Whatever you say, Wonder Woman," Ardelia says, the deadpan not lost on Clarice. "Start quizzing from page 356."
Clarice shakes her head and ventures into Ardelia's room for her study materials. Ardelia with her paintings she did in undergrad to complement her psychology degree, with her collages of family photos, with her oasis filled with mementos from a past and present she isn't hesitant to face at all times. She'd been trying to coax Clarice to do the same. A photo of her and Clarice from a trip to a summer carnival on Clarice's wall, some abstract art from a flea market, a bookshelf slowly filling with the "pretentious literary fiction" Clarice read to keep her mind off the grime of the job. As if a full present could make up for the void of her past.
But she leaves Ardelia's room before that heaviness can set in. It already smells like roasted garlic. The Diet Coke she'd been mainlining (to varying levels of success) for weeks had turned her appetite sporadic, but Ardelia always knew how to ground her back to her humanity. Whatever that meant.
Clarice opened the textbook to 356. "What's Rule 1016 of Title Ele—"
The landline rings, shrill as a batty old woman, a scream.
Clarice drops the textbook.
The trill of his deep voice, the promise, the sincerity in his insistence he wouldn't come after her. She believed him. She did. She knew how he thought, his code, his limits. But she also couldn't scratch away the images she'd seen bookended to their meetings—the nurse, the disemboweled guard, the one who had his face ripped off. Jame Gumb had skinned his victims after the fact, but Hannibal had the strength, the stomach, the lack of to take it as his victims could still scream. He knew everything, he knew her, he—
"Jesus!" Ardelia races to the phone. "You gotta calm down, Cardinal."
Ardelia takes the phone like it means nothing, as Clarice quakes in her wool socks in her locked apartment thousands of miles from Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill's basement.
She does. She knows. But slow breathing can only do so much. Not even Ardelia's little nickname is warming her the way it usually does.
Ardelia looks to Clarice after a couple moments listening to whoever's on the other line.
"It's for you. Crawford."
Clarice knows what Jack'll say before she can put the receiver to her cold skin.
A new case.