Heavy footsteps thudded behind her. She was stock-still, cemented in place, limbs locked even as she screamed internally.
"Baa, baa, black sheep." Rasping, jeering laughter fell from a smoky throat, serving to raise every goosebump on Maryann's body in one gasping, painful sweep...
She jerks awake with a cry, her foot on fire, skin like sandpaper from the wash of sensational terror. She is suddenly grateful for her perpetually cold hands, and she clamps freezing fingers over the blazing scar on her foot. A sound that is half hiss, half sob emanates from her lips, her body coiling in on itself in a convulsive shudder.
The dream's horror slowly fades, but by the time she can unclamp her muscles, the sun is rising. It brings her no relief.
As Maryann robotically prepares her morning tea, she wonders dementedly if she amputated the foot, the dreams would stop. At this rate, she would seriously consider it.
A single wayward drop of English Breakfast lands on the scar, and she very nearly drops to he floor in sudden, hindbrain-deep shock. The countertop catches her, and she sloshes more scalding liquid down the cabinets.
The tears threaten her again, haphazardly splayed against her kitchenette, and she allows herself to complete the sink, draw her knees to her chest, and water them with quiet, despondent sobs.
Who is she kidding? Hannibal was the nicest man she'd ever met. Chivalrous, polite, intriguing. Maryann was a bundle of frayed nerves and unrefinement. Those maroon eyes like royal dead suns meeting hers with care and shiver-worthy heat meant nothing. Those long fingers sweeping her cheekbone and spanning her waist meant nothing, absolutely nothing in light of her heart's stony grave.
She hears that rasping laughter from her dream echo mockingly, confirmingly. After what he put her through, she would never trust again.
"Never again," she whispers hoarsely to her patellas. Anger and despair go to nuclear war.
Her mostly empty mug shatters against the far wall, staining the white with rivulets of tawny fluid.
When the heavyset, bearded man disembarks from his vehicle, Maryann swallows at the eau de crazy rolling off him. Unlike with Will Graham a few days ago, Maryann has zero interest in making contact with this particular patient. He takes one dismissive look at her, then moves towards the front door with an air of eager purpose, like a puppy.
Maryann shakes her head in disbelief, only returning to her task when Hannibal - dammit, Dr. Lecter - has let the man inside and shut the door behind him. "I am so glad all I have to talk to is you guys, sometimes," she mutters to the row of infantile carrots. Gliding alongside them with a collinear hoe slices fledgling weeds off at the ankles, and she lets the repetitive task consume her thoughts.
Soon, though, she is brought out of reverie by a second car tearing up the driveway. The man who hastily rips free from this vehicle is medium-height, slight-figured, and black. He spares no glance towards her as he approaches the front door and enters without knocking.
Maryann finds it odd that Hannibal - double dammit, she might as well give up trying - would see two patients simultaneously. Perhaps the second man was early for his appointment. The gardener leans on her hoe and checks her phone for the time: three-quarters-past the hour. Yet another oddity! If the two men were undertaking joint therapy with Hannibal then surely they would arrive on the hour, and together.
The sharply dressed black man was either early, or extremely late.
Maryann went back to weeding. "Does he get miffed?" she wondered aloud with an impish grin. "When they're late?"
She imagines Hannibal resplendently dressed for receiving patients in the same charcoal gray suit and deep antique-rose tie she glimpsed at the front door. In her daydream, the tall man opens the door and regards her, the tardy patient, with a narrowed gaze of thinly veiled displeasure. She squirms, apologizes, and he frostily lets her in. She's debating the effectiveness of this as a therapy technique when she's suddenly crowded from behind, a strong arm encircling her waist.
"Lateness is rather rude, Miss Shule," purrs that accent in her ear, dripping with dark and delicious promise. "How do you propose recompense...?"
Maryann shook herself mightily and reeled in her libido's toothy smile. "Whoa," she whispers, putting cold knuckles to her fevered cheek. "Damn. I need to stop reading that Fifty Shades stuff. It's going to skew suits for me."
The gardener had to admit: Hannibal was definite eye candy by way of professional attire. Although 'candy' didn't cut it. No, Hannibal was a dark chocolate tart with fluer-de-sel and grand marnier-spiked caramel, served with a tiny golden spoon that curbed sweet gluttony, but left one aching for the next bite like a methodical lover's next touch...
"Okay," she hummed resentfully to herself, hacking at a stubborn weed. "Hannibal's handsome. Knew that from the start. But seriously," she scolded herself, applying the hoe with renewed vigor. "Get a grip, Shule. He's your client. And he's older. And he's all refined and shit. On top of your own bag of crazy..." This was the downside to rough sleep and so much time alone with a hoe and her thoughts: surliness in her self-therapy and willful swearing in her internal monologue.
She wanted to growl at the torn nature of her feelings. Despite her breakdown before breakfast, she was having a harder time boxing up Hannibal and putting him at the curb than she cared to admit. That day in her gardens, sitting next to Hannibal on that bench, with his sweet-smelling handkerchief drinking her begrudged tears, Hannibal had called her his dear friend. It had touched something deep inside her, something she'd thought to have buried along with her previous trauma; a need for solace in another person.
She craved connection.
Hannibal had demonstrated openness, kindness, tact. "And perhaps, in time, more," his voice echoed in her mind. Interest.
She wanted to show him the same. She yearned to crack open the door of her heart. But the raspy laugh from her dream doused her insides with cold, bitter acid, extinguishing her hope like a candle flame.
No matter what she craved, that nightmarish man and what he did would dog her steps. Never again.
Maryann was disrupted from her sobering contemplation by a faint thudding sound. She looked up quizzically. Did that come from inside? she asked herself.
Another thud came, louder, and the muffled sound of glass shattering. Definitely inside the house.
Maryann let the hoe fall with growing suspicion, taking unsure and increasingly uneasy steps. No. Can't be. I must be hearing things. Bad sleep catching up to me...
She heard a man's yell of agony, and broke into a run across the lawn. "Oh Lord, oh no."
The steps were cleared in two bounds, sneakers landing hard on the wood. "Hannibal?!" Maryann called loudly, banging on the front door. Shit, did it again... "Doctor Lecter?! Open up! What's going on in there?"
With closeness came clarity: there were sounds of a struggle coming from inside the house. More glass shattering, the grunts of men exchanging terrible blows.
Maryann's hand hesitated on the knob. Icy white terror rose in her chest like an arctic wave. The stately house might as well have morphed into Fort Knox. I can't go inside, Maryann panicked. I can't. Last time I went in a client's house, I got -
A loud, sharp exclamation wormed into her ears. It sounded like Hannibal's accent wrapped around pain. A man's hacking cough followed it.
Maryann forced herself to be brave, to swallow the cold fear laying frigid in her gut. Hannibal was being attacked: she would be damned if she let anyone get hurt when she could stop it!
She bared her gritted teeth, squeezed her eyes shut, and twisted the knob. As it swung open on eerily soundless hinges, true silence descended on her. Before she could lock up in fright, she strode on weak knees across the threshold, ending up at the intersection of the foyer, the parlor, and a hallway. The house was quiet as a tomb, enclosing her in a contrived, womb-like oppression. Stillness was a velvet glove dampening and smoothing doubt into every thought, smothering speculation like water flooding lungs.
She paused, straining to hear around her pounding pulse. Had she imagined the whole thing? Impossible... surely interrupted sleep didn't translate into auditory hallucinations!
Chiming, dulcet notes broke her tension, coming from down the hallway. She bolted towards the sound, images of bloodstained suits and lax limbs made gangly in reposed ungrace racing through her head. The notes continued as she pinpointed the source room, adrenaline humming in her spinal cord.
Was that... a harpsichord?
She bounced off the jamb breathlessly, her expectation of the worst given voice. "Hannibal!" she cried, and every emotion she'd been trying to box away colored the word.
The man standing at the harpsichord jerked at the sound of his name, whirling.
Maryann saw a glimmer of something feral quickly fall behind a paper-thin mask in his eyes. Hannibal still looked rabid, with blood coming from his mouth and his suit and plutonium hair rumpled. "Maryann?" he said in disbelief. As he stumbled closer, his injured limp was evident. "What are you doing here?"
There was a certain predatory grace in Hannibal's step that inspired her to a flickering anxiety, for a reason she could not fathom. Maryann felt like she ought not be seeing what was etched on his face: she dared not look close enough to name it. Whatever it was, it sent a shiver down her spine.
Baa, baa, black sheep.
Maryann took in the ransacked room: upended furniture, speckles of crimson on the carpet and hardwood, shattered fragments of art and glass.
The gardener became aware of the tremble rattling her from soles to fingers, but managed to answer, "I heard a struggle. I thought - " her eyes landed on the two lifeless men: glassy-eyed, limp, dead. "Oh my God!" she yelped.
Hannibal's beast roared for Maryann's blood. For the first few steps towards her, his intent was to heed its dire howls. A ghostly impression of her jawbone in his palm served blueprint for what he ordained to do. He could already feel the creak and dull snap of the vertebrae.
But halfway across the room, he noticed her shaking. From the stray tips of escaped hair to her vibrating knees, she was fighting her own fear harder than he'd just fought Tobias.
She was doing it for him. For Hannibal's sake, she was wrestling with that neurosis that kept her from entering unfamiliar abodes.
The realization brought him out of his homicidal rage like a chill waterfall.
He finished his limp towards her with less spurred speed, becoming aware of every distinct pain at once in a wincing cacophony. By the time he could reach the door frame, he found he required its support.
"Hannibal," she said again, concern written in her green eyes as they met his searchingly. Her hands twitched towards him, but failed to land. "Are you okay? What happened?"
How fortuitous, that she could serve to corroborate his story. He had a real reason not to kill her, now. "Tobias Budge," Hannibal bit out as he indicated the man who'd dared to challenge him. "He's a psychopath. He came here to kill my patient, Franklin." He gestured towards the obese man's corpse, but it wrung a grunt of pain from him. "He killed Franklin before I could stop him, then tried to do the same to me. I had to..." He trailed off convincingly, easily portraying a shocked and shaken self-defender.
Maryann's wide eyes took in the two bodies, then the forest orbs landed on his again. She was prodding his expression, not quite able to hide her querying. It wasn't for veracity: she trusted his account like she'd trusted his hold in the greenhouse. What she sought was the remnants of that feral thing that she'd glimpsed.
Hannibal held her gaze steadily, breathing with more ease than she despite the pell-mell of the minutes before. He had a choice, now: let her confirm what she'd seen for that split second, or let her confirm the existence of his mask.
It was time to test her mettle.
Braced against the jamb, almost hulking over her with his hair in his eyes, he set her see. He let a glimmer of the beast show in his maroon depths, allowed design to twist his countenance imperceptibly into something iced without emotion and ablaze with bloodlust. This, he told her without speaking. This is what you saw. Are you afraid, little gardener? Do you quail before a predator? Do I touch some base, long-buried instinctive terror of Neanderthal days?
Maryann took him in as time suspended. Pensive, aware, investigative, she watched the shift of his demeanor. She understood this was a rare thing, that Hannibal was looking for a reaction, plumbing her for something. He was far to observant to fool: she had no choice but to react exactly how she felt.
How she felt distantly surprised her. How was it that, in the midst of this electric cocktail of happenstance and shocks, she found seeing the merest shadow of his animalistic self a comfort? Perhaps it was in that virgin honesty. She ought to fear the animal, knew as much.
But animals disguised as men held no real fear for her, anymore. She'd met one: now, two.
Trembling fingertips brushed his bruising jaw: light, unobtrusive, demonstrative. To an outsider, it would have looked like a comforting touch. I'm not afraid of you, the life-tender said.
You should be, snarled the beast. But the man who housed it found an impressed smile tipping his bloodied lips.
The paradox of time broke like a dam, sending them careening into reality. He dropped his mask again. A flash of disappointment painted her features.
Hannibal had the privilege to watch Maryann dig deep within herself, finding a modicum of steadiness in the lurch. That bizarrely wordless conversation was quickly guised in a farcical attempt at the normalcy preceding it. "It's okay," she told him with skin-deep surety. "You did what you had to do, Hannibal."
Hannibal, despite all, grinned. It might have looked more garish with the blood, and more than a little dangerous with the lurking beast in his maroon eyes, but he did it anyway. "You called me by name," he chuffed.
Maryann gave him an incredulous look, but gradually, it softened. "I guess I did," she replied.
The beast was satisfied, after all.
Maryann soon fell into the grips of her inner demon again, and it drove her back outside. Hannibal tidied up a few loose ends around the crime scene. Local police arrived first, and started to catalogue the scene. Hannibal answered their questions as a normal person might, but refused medical attention graciously due to the minor nature of his injuries. Tobias had done more bruising and angering than true harm.
Maryann had shakily lowered herself into a porch chair, and stayed there as the police came through. She responded automatically to their queries, struggling against the tiredness in the wake of her adrenaline dump. The paramedics griped to each other as they assessed her perfunctorily, muttering that the homeowner had refused treatment of any kind, even painkillers. Apparently, he'd been a medical doctor before becoming a psychiatrist, and had contended to treat himself should the need arise.
That little revelation fell like a flake of snow on a pond, dissolving into Maryann's conscious thought with scarcely a trace. She was still flooded by what she'd seen in Hannibal's eyes, and her own reaction to it.
One of the jumpsuited forensic investigators poked his head out to coordinate the ambulance transport of the bodies to the lab for further analysis, once the FBI had taken a stab (apparently, that was some sort of inside joke). Before the medics adjourned, they shoved a Styrofoam cup of coffee into Maryann's hand and wrapped a grey wool blanket around her.
Maryann sipped instinctively. Oh, that was nice. When had she gotten cold?
She watched the steam rise from the murky liquid with unblinking eyes until footsteps on the porch jarred her from stasis. "Will - erm, Mr. Graham?" she rasped, looking up in surprise. "What are you doing here?"
The awkward, curly-haired man paused, letting the accompanying burly, black man leave him behind to talk to the policewoman in charge of the scene. "Hannibal called us after the police," explained Will. His brow furrowed. "Are you alright?"
Maryann nodded. "Little shaken, but I'm fine." She explained how she'd seen both of the men - the portly victim and his lean murderer - go into the house, how she'd heard the struggle and come to investigate, and how she'd come upon the scene. "I told all of this to the police, but Hannibal's side is more detailed than mine."
Will had crouched next to her knee, peering through his glasses at her. "He killed Tobias Budge?" repeated Will.
"He had to," Maryann reasoned. "Self-defense. He said Tobias came at him."
Will shook his head with bewilderment. "I just can't see that composed man doing something like that."
"He's your friend, right?" Maryann ventured. "Hannibal, I mean."
"Yes," Will said guardedly.
"Then I get why you don't want to think that of him," Maryann replied. She thought back to that feral thing she'd glimpsed in the psychiatrist's maroon eyes, just before he'd locked it away. Whatever that thing was, it made Maryann's scalp prickle in understanding. Suits, manners, and cordiality be damned: Hannibal had taken down the psychopathic killer that invaded him home.
It was a lion mercilessly taking down a challenger to his kingdom. Kingdom of what? Readjusting the blanket around her shoulders, Maryann said, "I overheard the police talking... did Tobias really kill two cops?"
Will's jaw clenched. "He did. I was there."
"Oh my God, are you alright?" she asked with alarm.
"Fine, same as you," replied the man with a lopsided grin. The expression fitted his face ill with an obvious lack of use, but that only endeared it in a way.
"Will," said the burly black man who'd walked up with the special agent. "Ready to go in?"
Will nodded curtly, and when he stood, it was like a weighty cloak had settled on his shoulders. Or a set of chains. Maryann recognized the burden as the yoke of his job, and did not envy it. She watched him disappear into the house.
"You're free to leave, Miss Shule," the female police officer said. She was the officer in charge of the scene, and in the wake of the burly man's conversation, she had a browbeaten air. "We'll contact you if we need anything else from you."
"I don't think I'm good to drive yet," Maryann admitted, grimacing at how weak she sounded.
The female officer took a step closer, giving a comforting smile. "First time seeing a body?"
Maryann swallowed and nodded. As good a reason as any.
"It'll pass," the uniformed woman assured. Then she, too, stepped into the house.
Maryann contemplated her now cold cup of coffee, then poured it into the bushes. Less than an hour after the heart-stopping panic, and she could hardly believe it was her who fought down her fears. The gardener glanced at the threshold of the house, marveling. If she were asked to cross it again, now, she doubted she could do it. But then, adrenaline and concern for someone's safety were strong motivators.
She sighed. This mental block was psychic backlash from the foot scarring incident. In the tumultuous days after, when she thought she might lose her mind to the pain of such overwhelming betrayal from a man who had claimed to love her, she had fixated on the singular decision that had sealed her fate: entering the man's house. Not doing so again became a way to protect herself, to the point of obsessiveness.
Now, it had nearly been detrimental to Hannibal. Although Maryann knew he'd killed Tobias before she arrived on the scene, what if he had been injured further while she tarried on his porch, wringing her hands with stupid fear?
Maryann vowed to take strides towards outgrowing this phobia. If it kept her from helping someone avoid harm, it had no place in her life.
She looked at the door again and swallowed nervously. She would start the next time someone invited her into their home.
Good glory, I've been spelling Lecter as LECTOR the whole time! I'm ashamed of myself, frankly. I'm going to fix the entire story, liek rite naow, guys. My bad, and thanks to the person who pointed it out so politely. :)