Natsukashii: (adj.) 懐かしい: of some small thing that brings you suddenly, joyously back to fond memories, not with a wistful longing for one's past, but with an appreciation of the good times.
The first time he fell in love with her was the first time she ever saved a life.
He did not know it when it happened. There was no way, with his stinted emotional development and his difficulty recognizing his own feelings, then, he could have known. He knew only that it was a piece of him that had seemed to call to other pieces. He couldn't identify it at the time, and he would not be able to for several years. Falling in love was never an occasion for Hannibal Lecter. It was not a grand thing, not a gratuitous affair. Hannibal Lecter fell in love the way most people drank their morning coffee: just as routine and just as satisfying. No trumpets to usher it in. No pomp. No circumstance.
He'd caught her shouting at Dr. Ersling to move as she applied appropriated pressure to a man rapidly hemorrhaging, and he thought it mystifying that this was the same woman who had evidently voluntarily changed a catheter. That this was the Dr. Bloom whose bedside manner had become the stuff of legends. She was small, smaller than he could imagine, and he wasn't a large man. But her eyes were the blue of a fresh, easily tapped vein and her hair fell thick and dark around her shoulders like the molten waves in obsidian. He had seen her save that life, then, with all the detached wonder in his eyes, but she was beautiful and he had found scores of women beautiful. Throngs of them, even, he was hard-pressed to believe a woman could be truly aesthetically ugly. But it echoed again in his mind. She had saved a life and he had watched her, and he had no way of knowing that had been her first. Did not know one day he would become another breathing body on her list of lives saved.
He turned on a heel immediately and dipped into the fluorescent shock of the break room. Tapping a nail on the table with his coffee thermos in hand, he counted exactly thirty seconds before, a little erratic, scented a bit of high adrenaline and deep breaths, Alana Bloom barreled in. The jumpy quickness of a young woman just toeing the line between life and death. He took her in and once she had stopped, cursing under her breath at the cold coffee, he gestured to the table before him with a grand swoop of his arm and asked, "Would you care to join me, Dr. Bloom? That sludge has been sedentary for hours. It isn't more than mud."
She sat and offered her own sadly empty thermos to him, a trusted bond between them both. Soldiers in the trenches, though she always said hello to him each morning and he had shared more than half of his homemade energy bars (blueberries and oats and cinnamon and honey to bind it), and to Alana that was enough to echo 'friendship'. He was always kind to her, and terribly polite. She didn't understand why the other doctors called him cruel or strange. She thought, really, he just seemed very different and that loneliness clung to him like mothballs to an old coat in the attic.
"Thank you, Dr. Lecter. That's very kind of you. It's been—an afternoon." She met his red eyes for but a second, and then felt, with that, a fraction of the tension alleviate from her spine.
"Your adept understanding is quite extraordinary. I will admit, the gentleman you shouldered, albeit to the benefit of that victim's life, will be coming up with a few additional bruises to his ego and his person." This is where I would chuckle, he thought, staring with detachment at his own statement. He did breathe a rasp of faint air through his nose, but it was only passable, like a tickle in his throat.
"Ersling will live." She said, voice laden with a touch of contempt for the man. She didn't particularly enjoy his company, and she didn't particularly feel he was fully competent. His stitches were sort of crooked every single time, she would eventually tell Hannibal, and he would hum with approval. "I'm just- I'm glad I caught him in time."
The adrenaline was thrumming away gradually, and his coffee was very finely brewed, she found, weary and a little boneless in the seat, now, cradled by it. Hannibal watched her with the eyes of a predatory bird, and she couldn't help but briefly notice that in the edge of a faint light the color could almost be aubergine, like the skin of an eggplant glared in the sun.
"Had you not, this hospital would be short one human life. That victim's family would be short a single member. Your clarity has been very valuable." Her hands were trembling and he leaned back in his chair, a polite trick to look at the whole of her and focus on her fingers without an obvious gaze. A doctor, after all, never wants to discuss shaking hands. He unwrapped his own protein bar from flawlessly packed cellophane, not hungry, but merely to remind her that there was a humanity to him, and that was extended by visibly human tasks. "You should breathe, Dr. Bloom. I have a word I find- teacup, for instance- that when said in couplet intervals soothes me. A word, a beat, again. I can imagine Dr. Ersling is very frustrating when he does not perform up to par."
"Ah, he's only human. Everybody makes mistakes." For a moment he said the word, and she tried to imagine him alone, speaking such a ludicrous little two-syllable thing to calm his nerves. It coaxed from her a laugh that bubbled to the surface and her hands had stopped shaking when she said, "teacup, huh?"
When she smiled he watched her from behind the frosted glass window of his abstract mind. Was it painful, to smile so sincerely? Did it hurt, to attribute such realism? Beside him he saw himself in shadow like a creature, like a blackened representation. In his memory palace he looked at it, and he replicated the same expression as she, feeling it on his own face. The shadow followed suit, and outside his own mind his face was third and last to smile. He had forgotten the protein bar and only mirrored her expression with a thin, tight upturn of his lips.
"But he was very close with this profession, and here, very close doesn't quite-" he leaned forward and looked for the words, indecisive, wondering if his indecision constructed more authentic mortality, "-cut it."
His deadpan had torn her asunder. She put her head on the table, cheek turned aside, and she began to laugh. Great, authentic, undignified guffaws of laugher that sent fat tears rolling down her flushed cheeks and unladylike snorts between each scrambling sound. "-cut it! Oh god I can't-!" She gasped out, pushing the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to stop the onslaught of fatigued but altogether satisfying tears.
Stepping outside the moment it is here, at 10:32 at night, that Hannibal Lecter fell in love with Alana Bloom. Deep into the furthest reaches of their relationship, beneath glass, outside it, a free man or a shackled one, he will always remember 10:32 on September 2nd at Johns Hopkins. It will be a memory he draws on in loneliness, in happiness, in contentment, even in contrition. He will say he fell in love with her then not because it was beautiful. Not delicate or gentle, not even eloquent. But her laugh was something much better. It was hers.
"I've a slice of pecan pie in the refrigerator, if you may feel so inclined, Dr. Bloom." He forgot to enunciate 'slice' but it didn't seem to matter. Her head still fell back, a fresh bout of laughter free of her throat, and it went on for a good minute until she was breathing in small rises and falls of her chest and staring at the discolored ceiling with a painful grin affixed on her face (not a bad pain, no, a very happy one).
"-slice... man. Thank you, Dr. Lecter. I needed that." She was still in the throes of the aftermath, and he thought he might like her best smiling. Her eyes were the same color as the Mediterranean on a particularly beautiful morning, and he enjoyed being reminded of that, of the water off Tuscany.
It took him a moment before he placed both hands on the table- a sign of trust and honesty, he reminded himself, the way he would show her his hands and knuckles and palms to know they were empty- and he spoke, "Permission, if I may and am not offensively forward, to ask if you would join me in seeking out more edible pastures for the evening, once we have adequately served our masters."
She had always wondered about him. Perpetually playing solo, and for a man who was not old (though he was not exactly young, either) he conducted himself with an enormous gravitas. Atlas' shoulders if she had ever seen them, both figurative and literal. She wondered if he ever knew that others could see the things he carried just by the sense of feeling alone.
"I would like that very much. Did you have something in mind?"
"Ladies' choice is customary. I asked, but I would defer to your palette." Truthfully he was curious. Whether she would keep to her own tastes or pander to his. It was a worthwhile interaction, he was beginning to discover, to gauge and measure another living human being for their decisions.
And she took the weight of the question with the true seriousness it carried. She thought he might be shy, might be arrogant, might be something of both those things, and he always seemed to have such I excellent culinary tastes. So after a long deliberation, she had ticked through each choice but went instead for blessed simplicity, "Ever been to the Thames Street Oyster House?"
There was something in his smile that forced itself free, a flash of predatory teeth. He was pleased with her choice and, a courtesy, he allowed it to strike like flint across his face, "I cannot say I have, but I will never turn down the promise of potentially exquisite seafood."