There was an intern at Johns Hopkins. She had blue eyes, the very bluest, the sorts of blues that made up the prisms of a finely cut diamond, and marginally waved, stupidly thick hair as black as a raven's wing. She hadn't quite grown into the way her gait made her seem taller than she was, because she was truly only five feet tall, but she had a tendency to swagger with an awkward young confidence that bespoke at least five-foot-five. When the wind was too sharp and too cold it lashed at her cheeks and left them flushed at the highest points just near her eyes, and she smiled easily at everyone but had an equal tendency to sink her teeth in mercilessly to anyone who deserved. This intern's name was Alana Marie Bloom, and this time would be the first day she was to become apparent to Hannibal Lecter. These moments were not significant because they would meet. No, they would not meet for some time. These moments were so important because they would not meet, but he would begin to build an ideal around her that would perhaps soften the blow of their actualized meeting.
He was rough around the edges, then. Working as a trauma surgeon with a bedside manner that seemed to lag a bit short of distant but concerned. He had been tailoring this persona for some time and its perfection had missed the most important part of a good suit: all the hidden stitching that pulled it together underneath. He hadn't found connection that he could understand in so long, and what he did not realize, then, was that this absence of example left the suit unfinished and in danger of collapsing the hem.
His hair was brushed back neatly into a dark ponytail that was sleek and pompous. As if he wasn't exotic enough, with the cruel slice of his cheekbones and his somewhat burgundy eyes (sometimes wine-dark, like light cradled beneath a glass of Merlot), Hannibal chose for patterned suits and the occasionally exaggerated thickness of his accent. It was not often, but it served where it did to remind he was the untouchable, a breed apart from them. Some of the interns called him 'Dracula' and that was just fine. He supposed he would privately chuckle at it in the depths of his calculating mind, being a Count of real descent. They just barely accepted his odd pigment mutation. They'd all read about that color in textbooks, after all, but he was willing to believe no doctor had ever expected they would see eyes like his in person.
Dr. Ersling told Alana Bloom that Dr. Lecter was 'weird and cruel', which actually translated to he had never seen the man eat before and he knew that on more than one occasion children had been more inclined to hide behind their parents than even look at him. These were both instances of 'weird' and 'cruel', but it was an occasional topic of discussion amongst some members of the staff. "Just stay away from him." Ersling had warned, and a small throng of chuckling interns had asked within themselves if it was Count Dracula they were all talking about. A medical savant, one of the youngest medical school graduates there had ever been, but Lecter was cold and distanced, strange, empty as a drum.
He overheard (heard) them talking about Alana Bloom. Dr. Ersling who he didn't like very much, besides. The guy was English with an accent he exaggerated from London (English accents, he found, were somehow beloved in this country) and he bragged about his surgical accomplishments when Lecter knew for a tremendous fact it was all embellishment and Ersling's stitches were just slightly crooked every time.
"A doctor changing a catheter. She even chewed the nurse out for being 'indelicate'. Can you believe it, Dan? I swear, womanly compassion. And she's a terribly pretty thing. Surprisingly good under pressure. I wouldn't have taken that from a look at her."
There were wheels turning in his head, then. They had turned on, the grating cogs, and they were shifting against the grooves with repeated motion, click click clicking. Why would a doctor change a catheter? That was nurse's work. A nurse indelicate, a doctor more delicate? He'd rested his hands around his styrofoam cup of coffee, cradling it to sip with detached intrigue. And maybe he didn't realize it then, because he certainly didn't, but compassion fascinated him, humanity awed him. The terminal disease known as the human condition everyone suffered from had symptoms he wanted to study, and it was beautiful, in its way. It was meant to be preserved, worshipped, for compassion, he thought, is not a standard issue quality, but a rare one, something gilded and fascinating. It left a poor taste in his mouth to have it called 'womanly'. There was nothing 'womanly' about compassion. In precisely a year, three months, and six days he would serve Alana Bloom Richard Ersling in a Cassoulet, his intestine better suited for sausages, his tastefully flayed flesh for pork skin, white haricot beans stewing in the casserole.
It would be some amount of time before he met her (two weeks and one day), but he found himself mentally attributing traits to her in a faint game with himself to see if, visually, she looked like he had imagined. His human suit had begun to evolve gradually, because its missing stitches had been called 'compassion', and unwittingly he was sewing them in with a hand too clumsy on the unfamiliar needle. He needed a steady one, much surer, and soon enough he would have that.