Alana Bloom looks in the mirror and erases everything that makes her her. It happens first with the way she takes her hair into her hands and it pools in dark, thick strands in her palms, spills over onto the genuine white of her palms and pollutes her skin in a brief moment. Somewhere, she feels all this, but it's so deep inside herself that her breathing shuts it out. She slides a baseball cap over her head and tucks her ponytail through the back, tugging it with all the force Alana Bloom typically does not have, hard enough that the wisps of hair at the back of her neck pull. Next is a pair of dark cat eye sunglasses. Her eyes go, disappear behind obnoxious lenses. She smoothes the lines of her face with a smile practiced in a mirror, the sorts of smiles that are always false.

He'll think she looks absurd. She can almost hear his voice. That does not suit. She has been hearing his voice in the back of her head for a dog's age, now, saying everything in the precision of his thick, terrible accent. The black yoga pants and the black, hooded sweatshirt, the grey tennis shoes. Soccer mom to the greatest extent. She flashes another brilliant smile in the mirror and, just for the hell of it, slips the glasses down her nose to look, to tilt and see her eyes, languid. Her pupils don't dilate, but her teeth feel too big, too crowded for her mouth, and she's hollow, cheap. She shudders and presses the glasses back onto their perch. She doesn't understand the sight, and for a moment it resonates. She'll feel a pang somewhere, but it's brief, a drop in the ocean.

What a laugh her life has become. Her eyes aren't more than dull bruises embedded in her face, her collarbones fight against her skin in a way she has never liked very much, and her wrists have gotten thin enough to snap off at the tendon. Everyone is trying to move on but she's stuck, stuck, stuck, and the only way she can move on is by giving this all one last scrambling try and if it fails letting it fall into nothing forever.

This is so fucked up.

Somewhere in the back of her head she hears his voice, This is detrimental to your health, Doctor Bloom.

"Fuck you." She says out loud, her teeth tight together, the sentence just a hiss.

She doesn't hope that he won't kill her. She doesn't hope he will. Honestly, she doesn't hope much either way.

The airport's waiting and so is he, if he's even still waiting at all. And if he isn't, she's going to hunt him like a hungry wolf.

Months Previous…

She hates him. She doesn't hate him. Not hating him is the absolute worst part. It makes her feel confused like a dog wandering a new house after waiting to be adopted for twelve years. There's no logical sense to the conflict of it, and she doesn't dwell, and just phases back to whatever the hell she was doing in that moment. Losses of time, she always thinks, distant. Falling in love with a serial killer who you half-hate like the black plague might do that to you. Letting him manipulate you into it without you ever knowing it was manipulation might do it even worse. Nothing is safe, now. He's taken the most sacred thing she ever believed in and perverted it: love. And now she can't trust it anymore. The departure of Will's dogs leaves a gaping absence in her life, but she can't bear to fill it with another animal. She can't trust the idea of love ever again. She thinks if she took out her heart, by this point, she wouldn't know how her own physician hadn't seen the cancer. It's blackened, isn't it? Hannibal had never turned his cruelty on her, but she thinks his kindness was worse. She would've preferred his cruelty.

The Method of Loci is a mnemonic device invented by the Romans and the Greeks to recall information with the usefulness of memory enhancement. It has always fascinated Alana Bloom, to some extent. If she closes her eyes she can still hear his voice when he explained it in another life. First, you build in your mind a place with which you are familiar, most loved. Choose a museum, Doctor Bloom. I've seen you most at home moving through well-loved art, and a record room won't jar the realism. Now remember a consistent path—it's important to walk it frequently at first, to walk and walk and walk the structure. Your mind teaching itself to work around where you wear your footsteps. Pepper your route with storage locations, or choose one room, but at first it is beneficial to scatter. This technique will be your memory, tangible to your mind. Draw it out—rudimentary, Doctor Bloom—and designate your locations, specifics, remember it against your memory to be sure you're accurate. Begin to scatter information about to be remembered. Symbols will do nicely, and while mine is rigid and hyper realistic, yours may be better for a touch of fancy—of course, I do not mean to offend or imply you as 'flighty', but you're less rooted in routine than I. Walk the annals of those halls imagined, discover parts of yourself you otherwise wouldn't have considered. Be wary, your mind is a weapon with two very sharp edges. Be sure you're holding it with your hands around the hilt and not the blade.

She wishes it didn't ache her to remember all these discussions so clearly that happened before and above all she wishes she couldn't hear the haunted warning in his words: be wary. She wishes she didn't know all about Hannibal Lecter's broken mind, the one he doesn't think is in disrepair, but he can't see the floorboards rotting because the wood's so far beneath the marble.

Sometimes she closes her eyes (her Memory Palace is similar to the Art Institute of Chicago, she took his suggestion, then, a place well-loved and frequented) and she sits captivated before the Toulouse-Lautrec paintings and he visits, unbidden, unwanted, but so wanted, and he's hazy around the edges like some exalted entity. He speaks to her, dark and smothering, more a part of the walls than a part of his own self. Even here he is a god, but he told her, once, to be wary of where she was holding the weapon and she's sure, now, can look down and see it clear as day, that her palms are sticky with her own blood and the blade's been biting in right to the bone.

"You weren't careful," Hannibal says, smoke and shadow, sex and death, "Lord, what fools these mortals be."

"Shakespeare's trite for you, Hannibal." She drones, distant, "C'mon, you can do better than that."

The absurdity of talking to her brain is clear. And she regrets bitterly, here, that it's not even in her own control that she can make him feel present.

She doesn't visit her own Memory Palace much after that. The first time it does happen she pays him a visit in the flesh the next day and she's reminded and he isn't sex and death and dark and smoke at all. He's just a lie decomposing in a cell.