Gideon was not expecting Hannibal to launch himself across the table like an Saxon rocket. It was obvious in the way his mouth dropped open, and his knife fell at an awkward angle to Maryann's chest. In a millisecond, he repurposed the awkward into the intentional.

Hannibal managed to get a vice-like grip on the man's wrist, but not before the blade point bit deeply into the gardener.

Maryann howled as tissue and muscle were cleaved, screamed as their minutely tensioned war oscillated the blade slightly out, back in, twisted it. It was almost like Gideon was fucking her, and Hannibal was jealously trying to stop it (if only so he might do it himself). Hannibal's hair had fallen into his eyes, giving a monstrous intensity to his snarl. Kneed upon his own table and shaking with the holding the knife at bay, he looked like a demon.

Maryann rolled into shock with barely a whimper of argument. She felt the blade agonizingly clip a rib bone, and Gideon grunted like an animal with the attempt to drive it further into her, to make good on his threats. Hannibal was uncannily and obscenely silent, like a yawning tomb, as his arms corded under the rolled sleeves of his button down.

How odd they might look to the post-seizure Will, if he awakened: Hannibal kneeled, Maryann skewered, and Gideon precariously enthroned. A strange knot of violence and victim. As contentious as the tectonic plates vying for dominance and territory under their feet.

Maryann realized after... a minute? more? - that Hannibal was still waiting. She could see the same merciless insistence in his eyes. He was insanity, knocking on her skull for entrance when he'd already wormed in through her pupils. He was cruelty, flaying her from the inside out. He couldn't possibly ask for more from her: she'd accepted the certainty of getting stabbed for this bid for freedom at his behest!

The knife was stuck: the men were too evenly matched, at least from this position. If Hannibal loosened his grip at all, Maryann would be dead in seconds. She had no choice (exactly, no doubt, as Hannibal had planned). Come, little gardener, the monster in his maroon depths taunted. How badly do you want to live?

Maryann batted over her shoulder, seeking Gideon's stubbly face, and through the haze of torment and by merit of touch located his eyes. She scratched - clawed, really. Gideon roared and his pull on the knife slackened, giving Hannibal enough leverage to wrench the man's arm back. The knife extracted two inches of cold, blood-stained steel from Maryann, who was pitched to the floor with a cry.

Her pain given voice was suddenly echoed by a man. Will staggered forward, his countenance clearing and aware for the first time, approaching the fighting men with uncertainty.

"No!" barked Hannibal, knowing Will would comprehend. Hannibal finagled his feet to the floor, jerked Gideon to his feet at the same time the man rose, and began to grapple with Gideon for control of the knife. The faces of the two killers were locked in identical snarls, their eyes gleaming as maliciously as the contested blade dipped in blood.

"Hannibal!" Will gasped, reeling in mind and body as reality crashed down around his ears. The room surged and shrank like he was standing inside a lung, compounding his dizziness. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes with a torn groan, not trusting the deceivable orbs. He didn't feel well. It was several times worse than he'd been feeling lately. Or rather, what he'd been sick with had finally come to a head.

Will's sweat-matted curls rose belatedly to the sound of breaking china, as Hannibal and Gideon's clash cost the psychiatrist a few dishes. Gideon, having a lower center of gravity, had managed to shove the Hannibal to the table, scattering spinach tarts. Their arms were still tangled in physical argument over the knife. Hannibal was by no means struggling to keep the knife well away from himself, but it would only be a matter of time.

Hannibal's lips moved, saying something low enough only for Gideon to hear it. Gideon paused in surprise, but a smirk grew on his face. "You do understand," he marveled. It sounded like an all-too-rare occurrence, so wonderful that he could scarcely believe it.

Will drew his FBI issue sidearm shakily, vision blurring in and out of focus as his brain steamed like a cherrystone clam. As the two men disengaged warily from their fight, the click of the safety drew their attention. "S-stop," Will managed hoarsely, leveling the gun at Gideon. "S-stop right where you are..."

Gideon looked barely perturbed, as only a man with nothing to lose might. Without taking his eyes off of Will, he muttered to Hannibal, "Got anything for this?"

"Will," Hannibal said, with a psychiatrist's insistence and a friend's keen worry. "You're hallucinating. You've had a seizure." He spared a dispassionate glance at Maryann when she moaned ever-so-softly in her pooling blood. Thankfully, she was on the other side of the table from Will, at the cannibal's and cutter's feet, unseen and unheard. It was just as well.

The empathetically cursed man heaved several breaths, punctuated with wild-eyed glances between both former doctors. He sounded ready to cry when he blurted, "But Gideon - !"

"Abel Gideon is not here," Hannibal interjected, swooping up on Will calmly. He held out a hand that had been murderous only seconds before. "Will," he grabbed the man's attention. "Give me the gun. You're not well."

Will was so overwhelmed by the conundrum of what he saw and what he thought he saw, the tears that had threatened actually spilled, blurring the specks and streams of glitter and color that danced across his vision. "He's right there," he whispered around a constricted throat, tortured visage plumbing Gideon desperately for clues. If Gideon wasn't there, then Will was well and truly crazy. He wished...

"He's a mirage," Hannibal corrected, gentling the man with a ghost of a hand on his sweaty neck. With care, he tried to extract the gun from Will's slick fingers, only to be met with resistance. When he saw the minuscule signs of reluctant acceptance from Will, the utter trust laid bare and virginal in his lapse of facilities, he tried again and succeeded in taking the gun slowly out of his hand.

When he turned around, Gideon had fled stealthily, leaving only, "Thanks for the meal, Doctor," on the stuffy air of the dining room.

"Will," Hannibal addressed the swaying and lost-looking man, soft as a winter breeze. "I'm going to call 911. You need medical care. Abel Gideon's escape from the sanitarium must have triggered an episode."

Will's body followed the heavy loll of his head. "Gideon's out?" he slurred.

Hannibal, ever the good friend, understood the urgent nature of Will's tone and put a hand gently on his arm. "Doctor Bloom is safe in protective custody in her house." He strode briskly around the table, leaving the handgun and, casually, his personal car keys on the dark wood surface. With that, he left the room, his smirk unseen to the tortured FBI special agent.

Hannibal paused within earshot. After thirty seconds of thready breathing and palpable confusion, he heard labored footsteps and the jingle of car keys.

The cannibal smiled.

Maryann hovered on the edge of unconsciousness. The stickiness of the blood on her, under her, and between her numbing fingers was growing. Her senses hazed in and out as she tried to stay awake, fought to keep her heart beating even as it betrayed her fluids to the cold floor. She faded for a moment, only to find Gideon gone when she came back. How...?

Will and Hannibal were gone, too. That terrified her more for their sakes than that she was alone. Alone wasn't good. But her friends and that psychopath suspiciously missing was worse.

Well, two psychopaths and a friend, anyway. She put a pin in that.

Maryann wondered about the coagulation rate of chest wounds, and blood loss to body weight ratio, and tried to envision if the agony in her chest was due to a heart or lung puncture. She was terribly short of breath, as the hysterical rapidity attested.

It had been a while since she'd felt death breathe down her neck like icy mist in the daytime. It usually kept to her nightmares, its familiar form of Black Sheep.

She felt Hannibal before she saw him, much like she had summoned Black Sheep's presence by thought in her moment of dire vulnerability, only Hannibal came while she was awake. He came out of the sensational awareness she had of death's spiritual touch, bubbled out of the oozy, inky darkness that ate at her eyes as though he was its agent, cut of the same cloth. He crouched, rolled her over.

"Hannibal," she whispered, relief and fear in her voice. Not fear of him, not essentially: fear of ineptitude, of incapability to help herself. She didn't expect his help.

"Have I remediated?" asked the doctor softly, his knee in her crimson puddle. There was a sharp glint in his eyes of wicked gallows humor, echoed by a glint in his hand. The knife of Gideon's.

Maryann could appreciate gallows humor, no matter the circumstance. Well, that was a lie. Perhaps she could in this instance because she knew, if Hannibal had returned, she would live.

Somehow, the knife didn't even factor into this notion. She'd based every action upon the certainty that both Hannibal the man and the monster that he hid wanted her. How long was debatable. "I think so," she replied dryly (even as her voice was dry).

Hannibal clucked his tongue, tracing the edge of the deep cuts over Maryann's collarbone. "A shame to mar such lovely skin." With nonchalance that was nearly an insult, he applied a clean dishtowel to the deepest puncture; the one that threatened Maryann's life on the opposite breast. "But even the stately lioness has scars."

His press on her wound turned firmer, and the knife rose to her sliced clavicle as his gaze hardened. "As a fellow artist, you understand the principle of three in design, do you not?"

Maryann's eyes widened as realization sunk in. "No, don't, please - "

The knife swiftly and brutally opened her skin, parallel to the previous two marks. Maryann shrieked in torture, clutching at the sleeve of his offensive hand as she writhed it out. The irony of her seeking comfort in the very hand that cut her was fitting.

At her aborted movements, and with this last dose of agony, Maryann tipped off the precipice into blackness so deep and swallowing, it felt like the moment before creation's first blast of light through the universe.

Hannibal wondered if Will would have the capacity of mind to stop Gideon from harming Alana Bloom. The cutter now had a directive for his final pure vengeance: he would surely be tougher to stop. Good thing, then, that Will had taken his gun.

Hannibal sat back on his heels and observed, for a moment, the scarred foot of his gardener speckled with blood of fresher wounds. The metaphor for her journey of recovery from Black Sheep, right into his dubious, devious arms, appealed to him.

The three straight cuts had their own aesthetic merit, though. His was the most perfect one, he was proud to note: it was obvious despite the seeping cloak of blood. The wounds reminded him of the claws of the woman they decorated. When she'd reached over her shoulder to scratch at Gideon, he had been grateful not to be the center of attention, in that moment. The shock that she did not purposefully impale herself further, as Hannibal had predicted, had been written on his face for anyone to read.

A quick cleanup as he relayed his address to the 911 operator assured that no suspicion would fall on him for having two place settings. He placated the first responders tactfully, convincingly, and managed to duck the police by name-dropping Jack Crawford and politely pointing out jurisdictional issues. Gideon was the subject of a manhunt spearheaded by the FBI, after all. As Hannibal rode in an ambulance, in the company of paramedics and the unconscious Maryann, Jack Crawford left a message on his phone.

"Hannibal, it's Jack. Will's been hospitalized. He shot Abel Gideon outside of Alana's house, literally feet from her door, then collapsed. Gideon's still alive, but he's been shipped to the prison hospital. Call me when you get this."

Whilst waiting for Maryann to come out of emergency surgery, Hannibal began a message of his own on Jack's office voicemail. "Jack, Maryann's been taken to Richmond Memorial. Will had an episode -"

The phone clicked to life. "What do you mean, Will had an episode? I thought he was being treated by you."

Hannibal tightened his grip on his phone, absently picking at the bloodstain on his knee as he spun the lies smooth as spider silk. "His condition rapidly deteriorated, and the straw that broke the camel's back was learning of Gideon's escape. Although hindsight is admittedly 20/20, it seems our friend has an underlying physical condition."

"The doctors are testing him now," Jack grumbled in agreement. "Whatever's wrong with him, it's not just psychological."

"Indeed," Hannibal admitted (confirmed). "Such illness only festered and compounded his unique psychosis, however, as evidenced tonight. Will was susceptible in such a state of mind, and Gideon used him to find me, perhaps thinking I knew where Alana was. I wasn't home. He found Maryann instead."

Jack sucked a breath, then let it out explosively. "This the same woman who interrupted Tobias Budge's attempted murder of you?"

"Yes. She's in surgery now for a stab wound to the chest, and serious contusions." The cannibal let some tightness color his voice. "Those, I imagine, were simply for pleasure." More accurately his pleasure; both proxy and personal.

The FBI agent paused as the shadows of Hannibal's carefully spun doubts reared. "In your professional opinion, do you think Will could have done anything?"

Hannibal allowed the vagueness of the leading question to arouse his anger, as only a friend might when his friend is accused. He showed it in the careful, fractal iciness of his tone. "To aid Gideon or to hinder him?"

"Either," came the even reply.

"Jack, you have undoubtedly seen Will after this episode. What do you think he was capable of in its throes?" That question was a double-edged sword: either Jack believed the best of Will, or was falling under the sway of Hannibal's subtle machinations as the psychiatrist cultivated Will as a scapegoat, deployable when the necessary.

Crawford's contemplative mulling was punctuated by a long sigh. "You're right. Will is..."

"Will," supplied Hannibal simply.

"Yeah. That's about as apt a way to put it as any." He was muffled a bit in his next words, like he was scrubbing the side of his face unoccupied by technology. "I have to go. I have paperwork to fill out on Georgia Madchen, Abel Gideon, and now, Will."

"How is Miss Madchen?" Hannibal asked conversationally.

"You're at Richmond Memorial, so you can see for yourself, if you want something to do while you wait on Maryann." There was a knowingness in Jack's voice, like he saw something Hannibal did not.

Hannibal grunted, as much in hidden derision of someone presuming to know him as in noncommittal affirmative. "I might do that. Take care, Jack."

"Yeah, yeah," drawled Jack. "Go tend your gardener."

Hannibal was so caught off-guard by the unexpected humor at his expense, he loosed a chuckle.

As Maryann was wheeled very much alive out of surgery, Hannibal met and monopolized the doctor into whose care the gardener was transferred.

"You're Miss Shule's..." the doctor rubbed his bleary eyes into focus at the tablet's virtual chart in his hand, "... Employer?" he finished dubiously.

Hannibal straightened slightly. "Yes."

The doctor - Suma - was genuinely flummoxed. "And how does that make you privy to her treatment or condition?"

"I found her and brought her in," Hannibal explained with saintly patience. This caffeine-jacked greenhorn might not be fresh out of residency, but he was close enough to draw Hannibal's seniority-steeped upturned nose.

The Dr. Suma swiped to another page. "You aren't on her emergency contacts list."

Hannibal's superior height allowed him to see the screen's photo of Maryann's wallet-sized emergency information card. It was entirely blank, except for one Sharpied-out set of data. Black Sheep, Hannibal thought. "In my defense," he said reasonably. "Nobody is."

The soon-to-silver head inclined in assent.

If there was one thing Maryann had driven home to the cannibal, it was that honey caught more flies than vinegar. "From one ex-doctor of medicine to a current one," Hannibal began, drawing close and speaking low. "You know how difficult it can be to secure someone capable of making medical decisions for a patient who is alone. To my credit, I am competent of making such decisions, and invested in Maryann's health on a more personal level."

Dr. Suma eyed him critically. "So you're her boyfriend?"

Hannibal restrained a grimace at the unwashed masses' word. But the question held water. Was his tentative connection to Maryann enough to garner such a label? If given leave, would Maryann agree with the terminology? It served Hannibal's purposes to reply, "Yes. The title is more recent than her records reflect, I'm afraid."

Dr. Suma gave him a tired flicker of a smile, as though seeing someone else's relationship almost made his stunning lack of one less painful. "Very well, then. I'll just take your contact information..."

Less than an hour later, Hannibal had insinuated himself in the necessary paperwork, learned the names of the nurses on the floor, the doctors on every shift, and the surgeons who had attended the gardener. Once all that was cataloged, he set about inspecting the work of current medical professionals.

Maryann was quite boring when she slept under drugs. Hannibal determined that, eventually, he would require exposure to her undrugged slumber to expound his frame of reference.

Unimpeded by propriety, Hannibal carefully lifted the dressing on the stab wound, then the trifecta, and noted the stitches. Cushing sutures. He would have used Halsted. Although he was tempted to glimpse her lovely form, he decided that when he finally did, it would be because she desired him to, not to mention when she was awake to react as he salaciously imagined. That would make it all the sweeter.

After checking the dosage and placement of the IV in Maryann's arm, Hannibal surmised there was nothing left to do but go home, change his ruined clothes, and clean up the house.

The floor of the dining room was a simple fix: ammonia took care of all DNA evidence. He burned his clothes scrap by scrap, then scattered the ashes in the garden. As he tossed the dusty mix, he meditatively made note of various changes that had escaped his attention.

The spring vegetables were hitting their stride. The rainbow Swiss Chard in its neon palate drew him like candy drew a child. The kale was adolescent but pickable. The squash plants looked like tiny spokes of umbel leaves, like carnival rides rotating around a central motor. The vines of squash and cucumbers were starting to trail.

Her truck was still parked in the driveway. He found the keys trustingly hanging in the ignition and marveled that Gideon had not stolen the vehicle. Will had stolen his, after all. But then, Gideon had hardly walked to Hannibal's house. Hannibal only ground the gears of the stick shift once as he maneuvered it into the garage.

Redressing in attire fit for public, he packed a light bag and made his way back to the hospital. Finding that Maryann had yet to awaken from the surgical anesthesia, he rang Will's cell on a whim. Walking the therapy garden gave him enough privacy for the call.

"Hullo?" came the groggy reply as the special agent picked up.

"Will, how are you feeling?" Hannibal asked. The breeze over the pink cabbage roses was delectable, spiked with decaying petals.

A yawn hummed over the line. "Empty. Just poured out like a Mosaic drink offering. But also tangled up, like a silk moth in its cocoon." Another yawn. "Too tired to really care, though. They gave me something."

Hannibal did so adore Will's way with words, especially when he was looped. Loose, pliant Will was so refreshingly novel in contrast with his usual neurotic, haunted self. "I gave my debrief to Jack," he informed, standing at the edge of the sunken koi pond to watch the orange, black, cream, and gold fish roil at the surface, mouths gasping hungrily.

Will gave a wry one-note laugh. "Did you paint me accurately, Doctor Lecter? Out of my mind, be back soon?"

"I only told him what I saw," Hannibal defended mildly. "A man whose psychological problems were multiplied by what I now suspect to be a physical ailment. I am only chagrined I did not catch it in time to help you."

"'S alright," mumbled Will, sounding drowsier by the second. "If it weren't for the hallucinations, Alana might be dead now. At least, that's what I told Jack in my preliminary debrief."

Hannibal smiled. "Too true. Call me again when you are ready to talk." When you are ready to tumble in the undertow of your mind's dark, sucking currents.

They hung up and Hannibal meandered back to Maryann's room, expecting to find her still asleep. He was surprised when he walked in to find her sitting upright, blinking slowly and crunching a cup of ice.

The tension between them thickened the longer he stood in the doorway. Hannibal had excuses planned for every potential accusation: why he let Gideon hurt Maryann, why he played the hostage situation the way he did, why he let her bleed on his floor, why he cut her a third time himself (admittedly, that was going to take some explaining away.)

His surprised deepened when Maryann broke the silence. "I don't want to hear excuses. You owe me that," she said, soft enough to be nonthreatening. "First off, let me say I don't intend to tell anyone anything about this," she nodded down at the dressing over her 'claw marked' collarbone. "Second, I will not dare to presume to understand exactly what you... turned into, in the dining room, but I know that whatever it is wants something from me." She lifted the cup to her lips, albeit with a tremble that did not go unnoticed. "Third," she swallowed in such a way that had nothing to do with ice. "If you intend to kill me for what I saw, what was entirely beyond my control or fault, then please, do so here and now."

She pinned him with green eyes that were simultaneously hostile and wary. "I'd rather not waste anyone's time, including my own."