Chapter Six: Bouillabaisse

Mischa Potter's P.O.V

Mischa Potter awoke precipitously, blinking up to the coffered ceiling of Hannibal Lecter's living room, every thought in low definition like she was swimming in a dark room and what came before were snapshots. Only she couldn't see the photographs through the thick shade they were left to develop in. Somewhere in her mind an on button had been pushed, new electricity circulating in parts it hadn't before. Though her eyes were open, she couldn't fathom why or how they had been closed prior to looking up at that ceiling, could not remember shutting them at all, the last thing she accurately recalled was getting back into Hannibal's car from the farmers' market… Or had she gone to the bathroom to splash water on her face-

Did she go to the kitchen at some point?

Her heart was pounding behind her scrawny ribs, drumming to the hollow mind dizzyingly sinking back into filled consciousness, a strain in utter darkness as her breathing rate began to steady.

"Mischa?"

The hesitant voice came from the open doorway, and Mischa bolted upright on the low sofa she had been sleeping on, quilt falling down to sag in her lap pathetically revealing a pair of cartoon cactus pyjamas with a cursive Hug Me! Scrawled across the chest she doesn't remember buying let alone putting on.

Will Graham was peeking through the living room entryway.

"You awake?"

Mischa blinked at him, frozen on the sofa like a startled deer in headlights.

"I-"

And barely stops herself from saying I think so? Because she is awake, isn't she? Which meant she must have been sleeping before, because that's how that worked. So she had been sleeping, and now she was awake, and… and…

Will's grin was soft on his face, as soft as the comforter bundled in her lap and strewn over her legs.

"You fell asleep in the car on the way back. You woke up for a few minutes when we got in to get changed but then you fell back asleep. Hannibal didn't want to disturbed you."

The tension hardening her shoulders lowered a fraction, a little, as Will finally crossed the threshold, rubbing the back of his neck with a loose hand and a sheepish eye.

"Truth be told, I passed out for a little bit too. Fell asleep in that chair over there and only woke up half hour ago. At least you have jet lag as an excuse."

Jet lag… Yes. It must have been the final wretched vestiges of jet lag catching up to Mischa and she'd… slept it off. It was fine.

Really.

She frowned lightly as Will's hand dropped from the back of his neck, swinging loose by his hip.

"How did you do that?"

She gestured coyly with a tilt of her chin to the hand in question, a hand with a white bandage around the palm. Will frowned down at it himself, flexing his fingers as he turned the limb over, scrutinizing it with a scowl and a curious twist to his mouth.

"I don't remember-"

He shrugged it off lopsidedly.

"Must have done it this morning when I was fishing. I catch myself with the hooks so often, I'm surprised when I don't come out of a trip with a prick or two."

Had Will had a bandage around his hand when they'd been at Hannibal's car? Mischa couldn't remember. Tom had been nattering away in her ear since the farmers' market, and it was hard to concentrate on the little details of outward stimuli when you had a megalomaniac blowing hurricanes in her thoughts incessantly.

Coming back to himself rather abruptly, Will awkwardly pointed behind himself with a prod and waggle of his thumb, smile a queasy sheen on his face.

"Uh… Hannibal told me to come wake you up. Dinner's being served."

"Right-"

Mischa nodded perhaps a little too fast and a little too hard, a little too enthusiastic to put this behind her. Sleeping. She was sleeping. Everybody sleeps, and loads of people don't remember there dreams.

It was fine.

It was fine.

"I'll be right there."

Will nodded, turning around and heading for the dining room, disappearing around the bend. Mischa counted to ten in her mind after the sound of his footfalls faded from the hall.

"Tom?"

She whispered to the silence. The only reply she got was the low tic-and-toc of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room counting the seconds she was wasting. Mischa huffed as she threw the comforter completely off as the answering silence marked by the spinning hands of time, slinging it over the back of the couch, bare feet striking plush rug as she heaved herself up.

Tom came and went as he pleased, unfortunately coming more than going, and if he had deigned to give her a moments respite as he had sometimes done in the hospital, who was she to turn her nose up at having only one voice in her head?

A silly girl, that's who.

Mischa Potter's P.O.V

"Uh… If I knew we were having guests I-I would have gotten changed."

Mischa self-consciously shuffled at the entrance of the dining room, watching Hannibal come prowling out the side door from the adjacent kitchen, silver bowls of something steaming balancing perfectly on glass plates he was carting in and laying on the awaiting empty platters before the half full table.

Will was already sitting down, luckily a familiar face in the crowd, but the other two sitting opposite him were strangers to the young girl. The broadfaced man, as big in personality as he was in physical presence Mischa suspected, donned a suite of dark washed, easy to care for colours, his hair cropped close to his head. Business put over comfort and style with the only self-identifying mark of personal aesthetic being the small soul patch beneath his bottom lip. He smiled as wide as Mischa thought his voice could be loud.

The woman sitting at his side was small and pale, and everything Aunt Petunia had wished she could have been but could never quite replicate. She'd cut her own corporate career look with bold and bright patterns of colours that played well with her dark hair and light eyes, the flimsy flow of her blouse bouncing off the stiff starch of her skirt and black kitten heels. Snagged somewhere between Wall-Street mogul and kind-hearted kindergarten teacher.

Tom, anew, doesn't say a word, invisible even to Mischa's eye though she knows he's there, he's always there, and she almost misses the little snark dripping snippets of secrets he could have fed her on these newcomers by a glance if he were present.

Almost.

Instead, Mischa, in her full-length cartoon painted pyjamas that hung loose and baggy across her small frame felt a little like a toddler who'd accidentally waddled into a company CEO meeting.

Apart from Will, of course, in his plaid and his khakis. He looked just as disjointed as Mischa felt under the sudden scrutiny.

"Mischa-"

Hannibal said in way of greeting with a small smile as he placed the bowls down before his guests, serving the man and the woman first, regarding her in the doorway over their heads.

"There you are. Come, sit, eat. I'm sure our guests do not mind the informality."

Mischa slowly, gradually, worked her way into the room, heading for the seat beside Will, two down from the head where, Mischa suspected with the knives, forks, and spoons laid out, Hannibal would sit. On her way passed, she curled her toes as she walked, trying to hide the bare feet from prying eyes, missing the fact there was no rug in this room, only dark, hard wood.

"This is Dr Alana Bloom and next to her is Special Agent at the FBI and the head of Behavioural Science department, Jack Crawford."

Hannibal introduced before skirting back around for the kitchen and the pending meals to be dished out. With him gone and lost to the stove, two pairs of eyes swiftly landed on her. Mischa had to fight down the urge to shrink into her seat, spotting, from the corner of her eye Will's commiserating half-grin.

"Hannibal tells us you're his niece?"

It's the woman who speaks first, Alana, was it? Politely waiting with her meal in front of her for the rest of them to be served.

Never before had Mischa missed Molly's Sunday lunches, where everyone crowded around the wonky table and dove in when and how they could through the madness to nab a pork chop. No sitting on hands or making small talk.

"I-… Yes. He's my Uncle so that would make me his niece."

Thankfully, Alana doesn't take her clumsy social skills as pretentious condescension, as many had done before, quiet always somehow ended up being equated to being stuck up, and instead smiled over at her.

She had a nice smile, Mischa finds. Big, unimpeded, warm and welcoming. Another psychiatrist.

Fantastic.

And… By Will's miniscule, little shuffle in his seat, the hands beneath the table that rubbed palm across khaki thigh, a possible ex fling? Current fling? Interested party?

Something a tad over the line of professional curiosity and appropriateness.

"British?"

Mischa found she was right two-fold as the man, Jack, finally spoke. His voice was loud, but low too, soft in the way it gently weaved over his words. A voice that was good for reading bedtime stories, but on the flip of a switch, could blow an eardrum.

"I grew up there, yes."

Thank Merlin for everything he held dear, because Hannibal saved her from stiltedly answering any more questions by his return carrying the last of their food, placing first hers down, then Will's, then himself before taking, as Mischa had first presumed, the seat at the head of the table.

"This looks delightful, Hannibal."

Jack praised as he dipped over his bowl, sucking in a sniff of the steam, humming along with the exhale. Mischa herself peered into the bowl of what looked like some sort of freshly cooked stew.

"It's bouillabaisse. A seafood fish stew made from fresh shrimp, clams, mussels and red mullet topped with lemon and sitting in a broth seasoned with fennel and a drizzle of rouille. Please, dive right in."

And everyone did dive right in, but it was only as Mischa snatched up the large, still warm bread bun and tore a honking chunk out, unceremoniously dipping and scooping the bread into the stew and shovelling the entire lot into her mouth, to glance up with her cheeks full, did she notice the others had the small spoon in a line-up of four in their grip, who needed four different sized spoons?, fork delicately balanced in their other.

Mischa gulped around the large bite, timidly glancing to Hannibal.

"You said this was informal."

Hannibal actually chuckled at her, and it eased some of the mortification Mischa was feeling, especially when Alana grinned and abandoned her own spoon and fork for her bread bun, taking just as hearty a taste as Mischa had. Will wasn't far behind in joining the bandwagon, and with the tide of the flow against him, even Crawford seem to ditch his utensils in favour of a bread boat. Her Uncle, Hannibal, of course, kept his own spoon resolutely in hand-

A hand with a white bandage.

Huh.

That was odd, wasn't it? Same bandage, white, thin gauze, so it came from the same roll, or at least the same brand, and Mischa doesn't remember her Uncle cutting his hand prior to the farmers' market, not like Will could have, had seen his hands up close when she was handing the plants over to be loaded into the boot-

Catching her looking and catching the accompanying frown, Hannibal smiled and cocked a pale row.

"Shelling the clams sometimes requires a sacrifice. Luckily for me, this time it was a small slip and a smaller scratch."

Right, obviously. Chef's cut themselves all the time. Mischa herself used to get terrible grease burns on her hands when she was forced to cook the Dursley's bacon for breakfast, when she was too young to realize that higher heat didn't mean a faster cooking time, only the higher chance of getting the oil to spit.

"Are you okay?"

Hannibal's smile grows at her query, as he pierces a rather fat looking shrimp and a slither of lemon peel and takes a delicate bite along with a sip of his spoon broth. Nothing like Mischa's almost comically large bite and stained finger tips.

"Never better."

He replied after he swallowed.

"What high school are you attending, Mischa? Dulaney? Franklin? Chesapeake?"

Alana asked as she daubed at her own stew. Mischa faltered suddenly, irrevocably, at the question, bread half torn in her hands. If she said she was allowed a year off from school due to extenuating circumstances, they would ask why. If they ask why, how could she explain the last five years of her life in two minutes of polite conversation? Even if she told them the cover story, that would beg more questions, and those would sprout their own, and inevitably-

"Mischa is being home schooled currently."

Hannibal elegantly intervened with a bite of mullet and fennel.

"The discrepancies between her last Scottish boarding school and the American curriculum seem proportionately large enough that it appeared to us to be detrimental to pull her from her current educational trajectory."

"Oh-"

Alana perked up with interest, just as Mischa shot Hannibal a rather grateful look, if a little perplexed to. They hadn't gotten around to talking about schooling just yet. She, personally, hadn't even considered it, only concerned with how exactly she was going to get through the next six months, not what she would be doing during that time.

"Are you teaching her personally, then? Or hiring a tutor?"

Hannibal used the real cotton napkin to dab at his mouth before he answered.

"Myself. I'm restructuring my work hours to leave my mornings free for teaching, and in the afternoons and evenings she can join me at my clinic where she can make use of the top floors while I work on the bottom."

Mischa felt a little… touched by that, the fact that her Uncle had thought about this already, had gone out of his way to make her way easier, that he seemed to care about her education and prospects when even Dumbledore hadn't given much of a thought about her missing a year to go on the run if it meant they won the war.

Of course, Dumbledore didn't seem to care all that much seen as the overarching plan had involved her dying, but-

Sadly, pathetically, absolutely wretchedly, the only comparison Mischa has to match Hannibal against on care principles was the man who'd raised her to die.

Circe, her life really was quite pitiful, wasn't it?

"As long as you're free when the FBI call with a fresh new crime scene, doc."

Jack Crawford crooned with a good-natured grin. Mischa frowned.

"Crime scene? Why would Hannibal need to go to a crime scene?"

Jack chuckled.

"Didn't you're Uncle tell you? He consults for the FBI with Will here. He helps keep the bad guys off the streets. He's a regular hero around these parts, Doctor Lecter, and a damn fine cook."

Bad guys.

The term sinks to the bottom of Mischa's gut like a canon ball in the ocean, nary a splash to hinder its downward descent into unseen waters.

Bad guys.

Mischa might have missed a lot of muggle school, but even she could add two and two, FBI and psychiatrist, and understand what bad guys would join the pair with a red rope in the shape of a noose.

"You… track… serial killers?"

"Hardly."

Hannibal replied with a note of humility that doesn't sit quite right with Mischa. Something in the tone ringing flat.

"I merely aid with the profiling of their behavioural patterns and drives."

Mischa dropped her bread down on the glass plate, and she doesn't reach for a spoon, looks down at the stew of chopped up little lives that had once swam free. She doesn't look back to her Uncle either, finds she doesn't really want to suddenly.

She's not a little kid anymore, despite the fuckin' pyjamas. She's well past the stage where she had seen Dumbledore's lemon drops and grandfather smiles and could overlook the blackening hand he hid in his periwinkle robes. The age where she scuttled about in the dark of number four Privet Drive hoping against hope that one day Aunt Petunia might kiss her forehead and call her a good girl.

She's smart enough now to look a gift horse in the mouth in case someone was trying to trojan horse her.

Because everyone did. Everybody wanted something.

That something was just never simply her.

Was this why she was here… Now? Had Doctor Lecter heard about Tom Riddle beforehand? His name had been put in the muggle papers after the war, him and his death eaters had caused so much damage the ministry had no other choice but to release… sanitized information to explain all the sudden muggle deaths.

Was she just a happy coincidental professional curiosity? Another scrap left behind to help explain another serial killer? A foot in the door for a psychoanalysis of a dead, not so dead, sycophant?

Mischa doesn't know why the thought hurts as much as it does, but boy, does it. It burns, and it aches, and it's a bitter pill in her throat that threatens to suffocate what little articulation she has left, which was never much to begin with.

"May I be excused?"

"Mischa-"

Mischa doesn't wait for Hannibal to finish. Her chair screeches on the dark wood, her bare feet plod to the door, she turns the corner, and she doesn't look back.

Mischa Potter's P.O.V

Mischa was sitting on the steps to the garden, staring up at the beginning hints of stars dotting the darkening sky when the door behind her opened. She doesn't look up or to the side as the body joins her on the stoop, but she smells them with her keen nose, a trait she had inherited from Nanny Annie. An exquisitely mixed cocktail of brandy, ambergris and cedarwood with something a little dark and burnt like seared honey.

Mischa knew the smell well, knew it came from a perfume called, ironically enough, the tragedy of Lord George. She knew the bottle too, had seen it on James Potter's dressing table in Godric's Hollow when she'd visited the ruins once, a little amber thing with a golden stags head for a topper.

Mischa wondered if the universe was laughing at her, that Hannibal had somehow chosen the same aftershave her dead dad once wore.

"I didn't tell you of my work with the FBI because I didn't wish to invoke unpleasant memories of your own personal experiences so fresh from the onset of the infliction."

The breeze was nice outside, cool and sharp against her cheeks.

"Journalists once broke into my hospital room. Did you know that?"

Hannibal's silence was answer enough.

"They bugged my bed with… recorders so when I had nightmares they could hear what I said if I spoke in my sleep. They thought they could get the next big headline from what I might have screamed."

"Mischa-"

A sigh, not quite suffering, but nothing so light either. Like emerging starlight, she hangs between dusk and dawn.

"Did you know?"

She ultimately asked as she turned to face her Uncle. The guests must have been gone now, off to their homes and their families and there houses where demons didn't creep around in the dark of the night. There's no anger in her voice, no resentment skulking behind the vail, she's not even accusatory, only curious.

"Did you know about Tom before you agreed to take me in? Is that why I'm here?"

"Mischa."

Hannibal framed, final, brisk, but somehow weak, like a wine glass stem that could snap in a too tight grip.

"You are more than your connection to Tom Riddle."

A warm hand slipped onto her shoulder, steady, holding her in place, making her see, not letting her run.

"I know you are not… used to people seeing you that way, and I understand, given the circumstances, why you would be weary of anyone who would say otherwise."

You are more than your connection to Tom Riddle.

No one had ever told Mischa that before. No one… No one had tried to. With the war, with the horcruxes, with the strife and the anger and the good of the many tacked on by a prophecy, Mischa's life had always been, always, pinned onto Tom's like an afterthought. A by-product.

A means to an end.

Dumbledore, Severus, even the Dursleys, everything had always somehow, someway, come back around to Tom. Never her. Not Mischa. Mischa, as a singular identity, had never existed.

Tom. Tom. Tom.

Mischa doesn't know how to live, be, or breath without Tom as a lynchpin.

Hannibal's hand clasps on her shoulder.

"I swear to you I didn't know about Tom Riddle before I read you case file, after I already agreed to take on guardianship."

Mischa doesn't know what does it, the hand on her shoulder, the oath, the bloody moonlight rising, the fact that Tom's not speaking and she'd made a right prat of herself, but she breaks.

She breaks horribly.

"I hate them."

She croaks with coals burning in her throat, with dampness cresting on her lashes, with a breathless sort of wheeze and a stiff ground beneath her bare feet, a girl grounded in elements lost to the nature of a broken soul.

"I hate them all. Albus. McGonagall. Even my friends. I hate them so much it makes me sick."

Mischa was rambling, she knew that, maybe even incoherent, partly exploding and imploding with things she never thought she would ever say.

"They let me die."

There it was. The truth no one wanted to admit. Mischa Potter died, and everybody profited while she lost everything.

"They let me walk to my death and-… I know it was my choice. I know I had to do it… But no one… No one tried to stop me. Not once. No one thought I was worth-… I hate them. I hate what they made me. I hate that they got what I never did. I hate that they left me to rot with the Dursleys, and I hate that they put Tom's actions on my shoulders as if it was my responsibility to stop the madman they created, I hate the fuckin' lemon drops and I hate their bastard traditions and I fuckin' hate them so much that I somehow hate Tom less because at least he was honest about what and who he was and-"

Mischa can't carry on through the tears, can't list all the things she wants to hate and suddenly does, like Snape's incessant bullying of a child, that McGonagall along with Albus was there when she was dumped on a doorstep in winter and didn't try to stop it, never once checked in on her, that Sirius, despite his promises, never bloody took her away, that Remus ignored her for years until he couldn't anymore, that Hermione, right now, was back with her parents when Mischa never could be, that Ron always had the option to turn his back on the war, which he did more than once, when she never got the same choice-

She hates so much of everything, all at once, Mischa felt like she might break apart into tiny shards of glass and blow away in the wind like sand through struggling fingers.

"I hate them, I hate them, I hate them-"

But maybe this time, she doesn't have to try and hold herself together alone, because Hannibal is there, and he was pulling her to him, and there was a steady heartbeat pressed to her ear, the smell of her father's aftershave, a stable hand on her back and a voice at the crown of her tangled curls speaking from upon high like it came from the stars.

"It's okay to be angry, Mischa. It's good to be angry, sometimes, and it's better to let that anger out then to let it fester inside. Anger can keep you safe, it motivates us to action, denying anger will only cause unnecessary anguish. It is a normal emotion, and often the first step in processing deeper entanglements. Don't shy away from it. Embrace it and see it for what it is. A reaction to surviving pain, distress and grief. You are angry because you are alive to feel anger."

"But it hurts so much."

"I know."

Hannibal's voice fluttered her hair, a scarcely there kiss to the crown, no belittlement, no stiff upper lip Mischa, no you must do this, you must do that, you must carry on, you must win this war, you must die, you must, you must, you must-

Only I know.

Only recognition.

Only being seen, and once, just once, being understood not as an element to a prophecy, a child soldier, the sacrificial lamb, but just Mischa.

"I know."

It only makes her cry harder, cling harder, quake harder, and somehow… It feels good.

Thoughts?

A.N: Tripped myself up a little with this fic, as it started going in a direction I didn't particularly like. So I went back into my notes, reworked some things, changed others, and now I'm back at it again lol. Tom doesn't show face again for a little while, but he's not gone permanently, he comes back. In the meantime, enjoy theorizing about exactly what went down between last chapter and this one (Which, I promise, does eventually get explained, but I got to keep the mystery going for a little bit). I'll give you a little hint; no one got the cut on their hand the way they said they did, but only one of them is lying XD.

As always, thank you all for the follows, favourites and reviews, and if you could, don't forget to drop a few words in a review, I love hearing from you all!