Author's Note: Hey, everyone! Hope ya'll had a merry Christmas! Here's a couple thousand words. Better late than never, I guess.
Hannibal wandered just behind the sashaying Maryann. They wound their way throughout her gardens like lazy sojourners, enjoying the time spent idly. The doctor was not given to idleness: he was always planning, drawing, sharpening. He knew Maryann wasn't either: he'd seen knitting needles and a ball of yarn beside the most used chair; stacks of books with many bookmarks. Her work outdoors, which she was currently showing him with such an unpretentious and humbly excited air, bespoke of an active life both mentally and physically: design, implementation, creativity, upkeep.
Hannibal could appreciate that. But what mildly surprised him was that, though they walked and talked, there was no real activity going on here, now; only discovery. They were simply being. Enjoying each others' company. No pretense, no expectations. It made the doctor shove down the uncharacteristic nervousness it inspired in favor of the rarity of the occurrence.
Ordinarily, this would have been a simple walk through some nice gardens, with only his eyes and occasionally his nose elaborating on his experience. Maryann made him involved.
"Poke this leaf, gently, now. This is called Sensitive Plant." The little leaves folded like praying hands at his ginger prod.
"Now touch that seed pod. Haha, did it get you? This species shoots its seeds when touched!" Hannibal was becoming aware of how very alive the plant world was.
"See the petals? Every flower in this family is arranged according to the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. So are the eyes on a potato, you know." And a little later, "Red-tailed hawk, ten o'clock! Get 'em, Rusty!" She waved to the swooping bird like an old friend.
And with a gesture to an errant bush, "Take a leaf and taste it. Just trust me! Sweet, right? It's stevia, like the stuff on the store shelves. I learned the hard way that you only need a wee bit of the stuff for a gallon of liquid."
"I had a similar experience with truffle oil," Hannibal replied. "I smelled of the stuff for days."
"Kitchen mishaps," she sighed. "Even the best are subject."
"The best?" he echoed.
"I won't stoop to flattery," Maryann said loftily, nibbling on her own leaf. "But if you're using truffle oil, clearly, you've got chef chops."
"And you include yourself in this category?" he queried with a teasing challenge.
"I can't give away all my secrets, good sir," she laughed. "Suffice it to say, I'm one helluva baker."
"We shall have to match wits someday, good lady," Hannibal said, cocking a brow.
"I look forward to it," she said with a cocky grin.
That look on her face made Hannibal's blood heat deliciously.
Hannibal had to admit, this stroll was becoming an adventure. For a man who prided himself on control of his environment as much as his own person, to be taken on such a ride was at once enrapturing and discomforting. The woman doing the deed was what made it both.
"Here, sniffies!" she encouraged, holding out a plucked leaf.
The doctor took the opportunity to slide long fingers around her wrist, steadying the proffered hand, and brushed his nose close. A blink of surprise flitted across his face. "What is that," he inhaled again, transfixed. "Delightful smell?"
"Cinnamon basil," she informed with a smile. The posture of her lips was diluted with shyness at their pose, her cheeks pinking again. "I could roll in the stuff. It makes the best tea on the planet."
"I could make a syrup with that," Hannibal declared, loosing his hold. "And stop time."
She laughed. "You make it sound like that's a regular occurrence."
"At my dinner parties, yes," he replied, pinning Maryann with a lidded gaze and smooth accent. "Outside them... with fair regularity."
She pinked even further and giggled as she walked off, with him in tow.
A while later as the heat faded from her face, she was able to continue the tour. "I have the obligatory wheel garden for herbs," Maryann said, gesturing to a large circular formation of plants in which the paths between were spokes dividing six pie slices. She slowly walked around the basinless sandstone fountain in the middle while he followed languidly. "Cosmetic, in this one. Note the witch hazel. And medicinal over here." Hannibal was no expert on succulents, but an aloe plant in the Virginian climate ought not get that large. He doubted he could encompass it with his arms.
"Let me guess," he drawled, stopping their circumvention. "Culinary," he pointed to a pie-slice with a zealous rosemary bush and swaths of basil.
"Very good," she commented, cocking a brow at him challengingly. "But I bet you can't guess the others."
He accepted her wager with a competitive tip of his lips. "Biblical," the rue, mint, and cumin were distinctive.
"Correct. Do you read it much?" she asked. "The Bible, I mean."
"I have read it," he replied. "It helped me form some basis of God and life's purpose on this planet." He glanced at her, but didn't dissect her with his gaze. "Do you read the Bible?"
Maryann chuckled. "It's a habit I can't kick. And it soothes me spiritually, you know? Gives me some hope there's a direction to this madness we call existence."
Hannibal tempered his smile. He had his purpose. Grandly put, he was imitating the God he saw as murderous.
Time wore holes in the silence like heels in socks.
"Shakespearian," he continued after consideration. The combination of pansies, roses, and columbine was unmistakable to the classically trained eye.
"And there is pansies, that's for thoughts," murmured Maryann, almost to herself.
"A document in madness!" replied Hannibal. "Thoughts and remembrance fitted."
She sighed. "And there goes my conscious knowledge of Shakespeare. You're welcome."
"You can read the Bible, but not Shakespeare?" queried the doctor. She seemed voracious enough to read most anything.
"The language is difficult for me to grasp," she revealed, peeking up at him sheepishly. "Go ahead, call me a fraud."
"Never," he swore. Stepping closer under the pretense of gently waving away a bee from her hair, he continued, "I've not read more than Hamlet since primary school."
Maryann smiled at him, guilt assuaged.
The bee was persistent, irritably circling them. "I used to wonder why bees did that," she commented, pinking faintly at his closeness and trying to cover it. "Zoom so close, I mean. Then I realized: I would do the same thing if I had compound eyes like them."
"I have a bit of a random question, Maryann," began the cannibal. With a quirk of his mouth, he amended, "On the subject of random observations."
The gardener's expression was sweetly teasing. "You, random? That'll be the day. Go on, I'm listening."
"What makes a carrot taste gamey?" It struck him as mildly absurd that he should ask, and momentarily, he wished he could backpedal.
"How it's grown," she explained, unfazed. "More sun, more time, more sugars develop in the tissues. However, it has to be the right season of time to plant, like for an early spring or late fall harvest, or they get pretty raunchy."
Hannibal wondered if all the time and sun embedded in her skin would make her sweet like a good carrot, too.
"Do I need to beat up a carrot for ruining your dish?" she joked, putting a fist in the opposite palm.
"No, no, that won't be necessary," Hannibal sighed. "I ate the soup anyway."
"The carrots from our collective venture will not have that issue, I assure you," she declared vehemently. "Nor tastelessness, nor grainy texture."
"I believe you," he replied.
Maryann showed him her arboretum, or, as she called it, her 'tree collection.'
"Forgive me," said the doctor with humor. "But that's a rather ambitious thing to collect."
"Stamps are boring," she asserted with a wink. "Plants, at least, give something back." She touched the semi-smooth trunk of a red maple, leafed with little green-silver dots that waved in the friendly breeze. "Shade. Food. Oxygen. Inspiration. Shelter. Warmth. Who wouldn't collect that? It's all in here," she patted the trunk once before moving on. "Argh, I'm such a damn hippie!" she hollered through the miniature forest with a dramatic groan tempered with a laugh. With a clutch of her head she moaned, "Don't look at me, you'll burst into rainbows!"
Hannibal laughed at her failure to take herself too seriously, but had to concur the sense of the matter. She took from trees all they had to give. In the same way, he took from his victims... and would soon take from her.
"What do you collect, Doctor?" she asked breezily over her shoulder as they rejoined the path.
The cannibal kept his smile under wraps, for it was likely too dark to escape notice. "Wine, mostly," he replied blithely. "Books." And body parts. And inadvertent weapons. And corpse counts for his many murderous personas. And fine threads attached to the souls of which he was puppeteer.
Unbidden, the darkness in him rose like a monster from a pit. By God, she was so damn sweet. So combatively naïve, and brutally innocent! To his beast, it was sickening, challenging. The cannibal existed in a world of his own construction (or revelation?) that was everything hers wasn't: shadowed with horrors; with grimy, grinning power lust; with that delicious, heady desire to murder.
Wasn't it? Her scarred foot hinted otherwise.
And yet she time and again turned her back to him, tempted him to pick up a rock from the path and bludgeon her to death.
Hannibal forcibly shook his head. No. Not yet. He had yet to enact a fraction of his intent on Maryann. Perhaps, he thought, cooling his anger. I am jealous of how genuine she is. In this instance of weakness, her mantle seemed easier to carry than his own, so shot through with subterfuge.
"The real question is why one collects," Hannibal asserted, sticking his hands casually in his pockets and drawing abreast of the gardener. "Knowledge and learning. Relaxation and stress reduction. Personal pleasure. Competitive challenge. The desire to control, possess and bring order to a small, or even a massive, part of the world. Tell me, am I striking gold?"
She folded her hands behind her back, slowing her walk to keep pace with him. "Personal pleasure, most likely, for me."
"As a psychiatrist, may I elaborate?" he asked.
"By all means."
"You collect plants out of a desire to control."
Maryann's brow furrowed. "How so?"
"Don't mistake wanting to control as a bad thing," insisted Hannibal, reading her frown. "In moderation, it is healthy. Yours manifests as a desire to keep bad things out of your life, your area of existence, by putting only things you deem good in proximity." He stopped on a flagstone, and she imitated, turning to face him. "Am I correct in inferring this also applies to the people in your personal life?"
Maryann's back muscles were tensed again. Hannibal was striking a nerve. "You could say that," she murmured.
Hannibal glanced at her scarred foot, the magenta pucker peeking from her shoe. She saw his pointed glance. "As a doctor of the mind," he began. What better way to set her at ease than to pedestal himself as a healer? "My opinion is that letting only the good things into your life, and kicking out the bad, is a healthy practice."
She gave a wry twist of her lips. "Then why does it hurt so much, sometimes?"
Hannibal ironed out the deeper side of the grimace with a thumb, cupping her cheek and causing her breath to subtly hitch. "It depends on the depth of the roots."
His hand was so warm.
In the swirling wake of her nightmares of the previous nights, and with baa, baa, black sheep seeming to float across her mind with every blink, Maryann was somewhat more frazzled than she cared to admit, or even let on.
Psychiatrists. Go figure, Doctor Hannibal Lector would be able to discern her heart like an open book.
His palm felt like a solid comfort against her jaw, the human contact glorious, the male touch even more so.
"He was just a client," she whispered, the very edge of her mouth against the lifeline traversing his thenar. "He was charming and... then he wasn't."
"He hurt you," inferred the doctor.
"The man was a monster," Maryann said, the dispassion of narrowly repressed pain coloring her words. "When I figured it out, he changed tack."
"When he realized he couldn't get what he wanted from you, he turned violent." There was sympathy in that accent, but not onerous pity.
"Yes. He dumped a kettle of boiling water on me. I saw it coming, but..." she pointed the toes of the scarred foot indicatively.
"It is difficult to live with scars," Hannibal surmised, finally dropping his hand.
She smiled weakly, feeling unsupported by the withdrawal of contact. "I can live with the foot. It's the dreams that irk me." The gardener scoffed. "It's like, what right has he got to invade my dreams? His stunt put him in jail. So why can't I escape him?" Her watered-down green gaze fixed on his angular face. "Riddle me that, Hannibal."
At the sound of his first name leaving her lips, the beast in him gave a wide, sinister, toothy grin.
Hannibal guided her to a bench, pulling out a handkerchief for her welled eyes.
"I need not tell you," she said thickly. "How old fashioned a hankie is. Or how dumb I feel for needing it."
"You are not dumb for being emotional, Maryann," he insisted, taking her hand. A puppeteer's strand affixed itself. "You suffered a trauma. I imagine you have not sought therapy?"
She shrugged reluctantly. "No."
"Let me assure you, you seem well-adjusted despite your ordeal. There is no shame in getting a bit of extra help over a hump." He plucked a strand of salt-sticky hair from the corner of her eye. "You can't escape him - or rather, his memory - because you feel like you caused your own trauma. You feel guilty."
Maryann's eyes were as wide as tear-swollen membranes would allow. For a long moment, she stared at him. "That's pretty spot on."
"It's the same for many victims of violence," he assured. "They feel like they somehow invited their attack."
"I let him get close to me," she murmured. "It's my fault he was close enough relationally and physically to hurt me in the first place."
"That is not true," Hannibal declared, with more force than professionalism might suggest necessary. In a beat of hesitation, he reeled back in his emotion. Seeing this vibrant, kind, gentle woman haunted by something (and being trusted to help her process it!) was gratifying to his beast. But at the same time, it struck a chord in him. He didn't like seeing her so wounded.
Or perhaps, her wounds not being by his machinations.
"That is not true," he repeated. "No matter what your relationship was to this man, his actions were still his own. He is responsible for his own doing, Maryann. You are not the cause, an effect, or a trigger. His sickness was his to unleash or not, and he failed to keep it in check."
The doctor wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the statement. Though the counsel was the same for victims of rape, domestic violence, hate crimes, and every victim in between, the symmetry of Maryann unwittingly repeating history was sweet to him.
The gardener was quiet, staring down at their joined hands. After a twitter-, buzz-, and breeze-filled minute, she said softly, "Thank you." Her tone said that she'd taken his words to heart, swallowed his counsel like water, down to her innermost being.
Am I as sweet to you as you are to me? he wondered.
"Do you hold all your patients' hands?" she asked with a chuckle.
"I hold hands with dear friends," he rejoined. A lie: it was very unlike him to allow physical contact when it wasn't for evaluation, seduction, or manipulation. The purpose he found driving their current touch was all but foreign to him. He genuinely sought to comfort her.
"Dear friends," she repeated, testing the words. There was the slightest twinge of disappointment in her tone.
"And perhaps," he admitted tactfully. "In time, more."
The simplicity of a heart bared to another already flayed belied the explosiveness. In the moment her drying eyes met his, the masks fell away just a little. They saw each other's feelings: hers, real; his, contrived (weren't they...?). They acknowledged the presence of something stirring between them: the complexity of it all due to their contractual relationship, her pained past, the chance for power abuse brought about by her healing wounds and by his profession as a psychiatrist.
Yes, they both saw it. And chucked it out the proverbial window.