"I don't want it."
Clarice spoke the words calmly, dispassionately, with all the investment he might have expected from her had they been discussing the weather, and not their prospective child.
He had known, before now, her feelings on the matter; it would have been foolish, and to his mind terribly disrespectful of her, for them to enter into a sexual relationship without discussing family planning, and so they had, and Clarice's position had been made clear: no babies. Hannibal strongly supported his lover's personal autonomy in this as in all things, and he had deferred to her on the matter of contraception. Fatherhood held an idle sort of curiosity for him; no paternal instinct had never compelled him, but the process fascinated him, and now that the possibility had asserted itself that fascination returned. The thought that she might, at this very moment, be incubating a new life, a tiny creature made of their flesh and bone and brought forth despite their feeble human attempts to prevent it, was an intriguing one, and one he wished to explore further. It seemed to him to be an opportunity, and he did not want to cast it aside lightly.
"The choice is yours," he told her.
They lay together on their bed; Clarice had left him, for a time, his stunning pronouncement having completely obliterated any amorous feeling in her, and when she returned he saw that she had traded her silk dress for a satin negligee. In her absence he had undressed himself, casually discarded the remnants of his tuxedo and replaced it with a pair of silk pajama pants, and stretched himself out upon the bed, picking up a book to read while he waited. The upstairs apartment was vast and sprawling, and a suite of rooms had been set aside for Clarice's private use, should she wish to spend time away from him, but he had known that she would return on this night. The question that had been raised was too monumental; she would not want to wrestle with it alone. And then she had, returned to him, with very little fanfare, gracefully lay herself down beside him, her dark hair spilling across the pillowcases as they reclined together. She was watching him, now, eyes bright and shining at him in the darkness.
"Just like that?" she asked him. "It's my choice, and you'll go along with whatever I say?"
Clarice did so love the push and pull of argument between them, he knew; she had honed her skills at debate, and sometimes he rather felt as if she started these little contests just to see what might happen. Still she surprised him, sometimes, and he was surprised, now, to hear her react almost as if she found his deference disappointing.
"Yes," he said at once. "Having a child requires a great deal more from you than it does from me. It's only right that the decision rest with you."
As he spoke he reached out and placed his palm against her belly, feeling the softness of her beneath the satin, watching his hand rise and fall in time to her deep, even breaths. He could almost feel the rush of her blood beneath her skin, could almost hear it, almost taste it; what would it be like, to watch her belly swell? To see her breasts grow heavy with milk, to watch as their child emerged from the warm wet place between her legs where Hannibal had so often sought to bury himself? His lifeless cock twitched in answer to the images that flashed through his mind, the thought of taking her, tasting her while she carried another life within her suddenly, surprisingly erotic and enticing to him.
"And if it didn't? What would you choose, if the choice was yours?"
That was what she really wanted to know. A breathless hypothetical they had only discussed once before - in the Chesapeake house, a lifetime away from where they were now - had become a very real question of life and death, and she wanted to know whether his thoughts had changed, now that a child was within their reach.
"I would keep it," he said simply. He did not have to think too long or too hard about it; he knew the answer already. Though Hannibal's personal philosophy held no room for gods or devils or heavens or hells, he had devoted rather a lot of time to the concept of entropy, the study of chaos theory. He would not have said it was fate, that delivered this would-be child into their hands; he did not believe in fate, as such. But chaos had introduced a new piece to the board, and he was too curious to learn what might become of it to simply cast it aside in an effort to maintain his comfortable status quo. He had thought, for some time, that he might through Clarice make a place for Mischa to return to the world; he had hungered for it, sought to shape her, mold her, make her, wipe clean the slate of her mind and bring back that which had been lost to him. He had put such ideas to the side, having learned that Clarice herself was too resilient and too remarkable to be replaced, but now...now there was a little cluster of cells nestled in her womb that might, one day, become what he had sought. A little girl, Mischa reborn; the thought of it made him ache.
"Why?" she asked him, blunt as she often was with him. Their initial interactions had been built on pretense and obfuscation, but she hid nothing from him now, and her honesty pleased him.
"Legacy," he said, knowing that if he'd said Mischa her heart would have turned against the idea in a moment. She hid nothing from him, but Hannibal still had his secrets; the habits of a lifetime were proving difficult to break. And it was not a lie, precisely; it was only a secondary motivation, and not the primary, and he knew that he would, eventually, be forgiven for the omission.
"You and I have engineered our disappearance from this world," he continued. "No one is looking for Special Agent Starling, any more, and Hannibal Lecter is no longer among the top ten of the FBI's most wanted. It's all terrorists, now. I checked."
She laughed, lightly, and he took that as a good sign, and carried on. "We have left no footprints behind us. Oh, there are those who remember the stories, but that's all we are now. Stories. You, a cautionary tale. And I...I am a bogeyman, to frighten children. When we are gone, who will know the truth of us? What mark will we have left upon this earth? A child is a legacy, Clarice. We can pass on all that we have learned. The wealth that keeps us comfortable could pass into their hands, and raise up another generation. A piece of us will live on, through them. A beating heart formed of our DNA, the foundations of our very selves replicated in another living body. And perhaps another, and another; centuries from now there may still be a piece of you, out there in the world. Reproduction is the only means of achieving immortality."
"And you want that, don't you? Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south."
He did so enjoy it when she quoted scripture to him. The Lutherans had done their work well, with her.
"I would settle for one descendant," he said modestly. "Whatever I may wish now, my desires will count for little once I'm gone."
"It will be years before this child can do anything but soil itself and cry. What happens if you...Hannibal, you aren't a young man, any more."
He had not ever been young in their acquaintance, but he knew as well as she that the passing of the years was not changing him as perhaps it might another man. He was still slender and graceful as he had ever been in youth, his hands still strong enough to kill, his teeth still sharp enough to tear, his cock still eager enough to keep her satisfied. It was a point of pride, to him, that despite having passed the milestone of his sixtieth birthday he was hale and healthy and as capable now as he had ever been. Some had accused him of being the devil incarnate, and some had waxed lyrical about his godlike senses, and he delighted in fanning the flames of their suppositions. His capabilities had, to his mind, far surpassed those of his human brethren, and it seemed almost laughable to him that the failings of old age might dare to attack him as they did other, lesser men.
"Perhaps not," he said. "But I am not like other men, my darling. If I were, you wouldn't be here."
No, she would not have chosen him, if he had been just another man. She'd had her pick of them, once, and spurned them all, given her beauty and her breathy moans and the clutching of her lean thighs and the salty taste of her sweat to him. Clarice had delivered herself into his hands because she found him worthy; surely, he thought, she must know that he would not leave her until he'd had his fill of her, and it would be decades before he'd even entertain the notion.
"I've many good years left in me yet. More than enough to see our child to adulthood."
From other men such certainty might have been born of arrogance; Hannibal was only stating the facts as they stood.
"A child," she mused, and he could hear it in her voice, the way her own certainty was eroding. There was very little in the way of maternal instinct in his Starling; he had seen that from the very first. She was too dedicated to her own independence to impulsively take on such a burden, and she had confessed to him outright that she felt no yearning for a babe of her own to hold. But perhaps now her mind was changing; perhaps she felt, as he did, that it was an opportunity they ought not allow to pass them by.
"You don't have to decide tonight," he told her.
Clarice smiled, and covered his hand with her own where it lay against her belly.
"We don't know for certain there even is a child, Hannibal."
"You doubt the cleverness of my tongue?" he asked her, teasing. "You wound me."
"Your tongue is very clever," she agreed, laughing. As she spoke she wrapped her delicate fingers around his wrist, and very slowly began to nudge his hand down her body, away from her stomach, low along her pubic bone. "But I was trained in forensics, not taste. I want a test, first, before I make any decisions."
To her credit her voice remained steady and level even as their combined hands drifted lower, beneath the hem of her short negligee, back up to reveal that she wore nothing at all beneath it.
"And I don't want to think any more. Do you think yourself capable of distracting me, Doctor Lecter?"
Hannibal's hand had begun its own journey, nimble fingers finding their way through the thatch of coarse curls at the apex of her thighs. The words Doctor Lecter falling from her lips never ceased to inflame him, and so he turned his face into the crook of her neck, nipped her gently with his teeth as his fingertips swirled through the wetness gathering between her legs.
"I think you'll find me very distracting, Clarice," he murmured against her skin, and she shivered, and they set aside all thoughts of the future, and their future progeny, in favor of more immediate delights.