*  *  *

"Arma tuentur pacem.  Lesson one:  Arms maintain peace."

"I thought lesson one was fellatio?"  Her affected nonchalance failed to disarm him.

"You need no instruction in that regard."  His smile was precious to her, in that moment so intimate and honest.  The ties that bind began their woven pattern; a single strand glistened down one velvet cheek.

"Tears?  From the great and mighty warrior Starling?"

"No.  Just a woman," she said.  "One who's just learned she needs something she has no control over."

She tried to rise from the chair, but he held her to him.

"May I presume that I am that which you speak of needing?"

She kept her gaze on the pulse at his throat, her hands molding the shape of his shoulders, moving down, inch by inch, over the curves and plateaus of his torso, dragging the soft fabric of his shirt beneath the pressure of her caress.

"Is that what you desire, Clarice?  To control me?"  He grasped her shoulders and pulled her close.  He bared his teeth in a snarl a bare inch from her mouth, and Clarice shuddered.  "Is that what this is about?"

She suppressed the overwhelming desire to scream that she loved him, but she mustn't—not ever.  Instead, she reached down and grasped his sated sex, saying: 

"This is what we're about."  Then, placing one hand at each temple, she held him and stared deeply into his eyes.  "You are a madman in the eyes of the world.  But I must be mad, also, because I want you!"  She pressed his skull between her hands.  "I want to know what's in there.  You fascinate me—don't be angry.  I don't want to study you.  I want to know you.  I want to be the one person who knows your thoughts, who shares your world.  And yes, I want to own you.  It's only fair, considering your influence over me."

"And what of the lambs, Clarice?  Will they not scream in your absence?"  He was studying her carefully, and Clarice knew the importance of her answer, and was blessed with an epiphanic moment of clarity.

"There are few sounds in your world, aren't there?" 

He stared at her for a moment before confirming with a simple:  "Yes."

"What will I know there?"

"Silence."  It was as much a revelation to him as it was to her, and he seemed to move some great distance in his mind.  "The colors are brighter than any earthly hue.  The sights are beyond expression.  The scents evoke a well-being that cannot be measured in mortal habit."

"Mmm.  Sensual override?  My 'mortal habit' could stand some of that."  Her words brought him out of his faint reverie.

"We haven't finished with your first lesson." 

Clarice reached over and took hold of the butcher knife, hurling it into the fire with deadly accuracy.  "Lesson one over."

Lecter's response was an arched brow, and a soft:  "I think I'll keep mine."

Clarice paused.  "On to lesson two, then."

"Was it my mistake, or did you want to be fucked?"

"I can do two things at once."

"I'm flattered," he smirked.

"Ah.  Perhaps you'll prove me wrong?"

"Let's compromise.  Ars amandi.  Lesson two:  The art of loving."

He pulled one leg from between him and the chair arm, draping the silken expanse over the side.  When he did the same for her other leg, he pressed her back until she lay exposed to him, her head falling back over his knees.  Clarice heard the satin of her gown give way to the unmitigated force of applied steel, and her nipples hardened at the mingled cold and anticipation in the air.

Clarice's nakedness in the light of day was something quite new to Hannibal.  She lay before him, trusting, responsive, and all things to him—palpable.  When he proceeded to stroke her flesh, it was something of an obligatory gesture, for he'd gleaned full satisfaction in the very sight of her; pressed the image, the moment, like a flower in the pages of his mind, to keep for eternity the moment of joy the sight of her had produced.

She grasped his ankles, and his hands traced and reshaped the curves of her breasts, thumbs circling the delicate peaks, while she sighed in pleasure.  His hands moved lower, as he began a philological discourse in response to her challenge, and Clarice tried to concentrate on his words, to give him the answers that would be rewarded with maddeningly brief flicks of his fingers against her swollen clitoris.

"Ars artium," she hissed an answer, and felt the sweet relief of pressure, but only for a moment.  She bucked against his hand, and felt that she would explode from the blood pounding in her head, fighting to flow to the other end of her body and take up residence at her pleasure center.

"And what is logical, Clarice," he asked, setting each of her ankles at the top of the chair, "in equating an orgasm of pleasure to 'death'?  Shall we call this lesson then ars moriendi—the art of dying?"  He hoisted her forward and up.  Clarice, no longer hanging over his knees, had a clear view of him as he placed his lips around her.  She came in a dizzying rush, confusion rampant in a body where blood had been caged and forbidden, and was now rushed to every tingling nerve ending.

Eventually, the world settled, and Clarice Starling learned she was still in it, though confused when he picked up the topic once more.

"Mortuum is 'of death', as in caput mortuum, or death's head."  He lowered her back down, but grasped a handful of her hair to keep her head from falling back, so that she could watch him guide her hand to his erection.  "Change the spelling, and you have the German kaputt, meaning broken.  How do you suppose 'head' became 'broken'?  Then there's caput mundi, or 'head of the world', many times a reference to Rome, and by association, to God." 

By the hair, he pulled her face closer.  He stilled her soft hand on his cock, forcing her fingers tightly around him, demanding:  "Which is it, Clarice?  Caput mortuum or caput mundi?"

Death or submission?  Not an easy choice for some.  More importantly, not a choice Dr. Lecter would proffer.  Clarice Starling considered carefully.

"Using a 'k', if I choose kaputt mundi, we have a broken world."  She watched to confirm that he understood.  "So, with license, I choose kaputt mortuum.  We have destroyed death."

It was with great satisfaction that Hannibal Lecter watched Clarice Starling pass her lessons through the years with flying colors, her beautiful, silken legs thrown across his shoulders at times, braced against the floor at others in what they happily referred to as a tergo.

She was a good student, and he, at times, considered that he should perhaps pace himself.  Then he would gaze upon the shattered remains of a teacup, and think to himself kaputt mortuum, and then he would remind himself that there were hundreds of languages, and more for him to learn yet.  Then he would go find her, wherever she was.

For Clarice's part, she reveled in being so utterly filled by Hannibal.  She diligently maintained the precarious balance of their relationship.  They had left his home near Paestum shortly after that morning, which had languished into bright noonday before they'd left that chair.  She never let herself forget why:  Though she would never know the details of his plan, she knew it had never been intended that she live there. 

Days, weeks, months, then years went by, and there was always that delicious tension in the air between them, resulting in a manufactured hush, carrying the two in a bubble, a private sphere where two poles revolved in the endless game of light versus dark, with only the stars to guide them.

On a holiday in Tierra del Fuego, they stood at the point where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet, beautiful lights of Ushuaia glowing below them.  He pressed a kiss into her palm, and asked:

"So, my dear, have you found my world to be all that I'd described it to be?"

At times like these, so many years down the road they traveled together, she felt the temptation to trust and believe that he had changed his nature, that he could not do without her.  That she could tell him she loved him, and hear the same from his lips.

But the road they traveled was the Caminito, and the rules of the tango applied.

Even now, she knew, she must tread carefully.  To keep him would require some finagling, and it must be done with finesse, for she felt in her heart of hearts, that if he ever knew, it would be over.  It was a difficult line to walk, balancing in one hand the necessity that he must always wonder, and in the other hand the necessity that he must trust her, to a degree.  He must, every now and again, wonder:  Did she hesitate just a moment too long?  Was that a look?  Was there an underlying meaning in that comment? 

Only then, could she exist.

"Colors, sights, scents.  Yes, they're as you described."

"And silence?"

A pause.

A look.

"Silence."

~  ~  ~