"I want to carve a place in my scar for you," Maryann said weightily.
How poetic, Hannibal thought. She knew he would only leave a scar-upon-scar, but deemed his wounds more acceptable than those Black Sheep had perpetrated on her. It was flattering. It was arousing.
It was so naive.
He expressed as much by grasping her chin with his thumb and forefinger, the light grip daring to test her declarations. "How do you know what I planned to accomplish?" he asked, in reference to her earlier statement. "Or even what I plan to do now?"
Maryann swallowed, eyes faintly widening, but the pulse in her throat only bumping slightly faster. "Given that I'm still breathing," she whispered, glancing down at his mouth. "I have an idea."
Hannibal slowly drew her face close to his. "Are you so sure?"
Maryann's breath fanned over his face, soft as her words. "We've been playing around this for months. Since I first showed up at your door. I may as a human tell lies," she asserted. "But I refuse to live them."
With that, he pressed his cannibalistic and liar's lips to hers. She melted like tender plants under the sun, glittered like light on a rippling lake.
She tasted faintly of pain, and resolution, and absurdly of hope. Her heartrate soared, the beat profound under the hand that still grasped her wrist.
Oh, how he wanted to ruin her, wreck her body and mind the way a glacier rearranged the land it crawled. If she thought he would save her from her demons, she was sorely mistaken. Time would prove that, but it gave Hannibal time to take what he pleased.
He could taste her axis beginning to tilt towards his pull. Tugging her bottom lip, he granted a graze of his teeth that make gooseflesh erupt across her face, down her arms, all the way to her fingertips. She gasped faintly in his hold, repressed a shiver at the sinister capacity of those fingers (wondering why they felt like brands on her skin).
Hannibal's beast bayed. He wrapped fingers around the back of her neck, made her tip back her head for him, open her mouth. The arch of her neck tugged her stitches. A flood of submission accompanied her whimper, which he swallowed like the choicest of morsels, savoring it.
He smugly noted that her eyes stayed closed when he pulled away finally, and that when they opened, her hazed eyes looked like the souls of swirling cosmos; deep as black holes, promising as green stars.
The pact was made.
Deceleration is as complete and sudden as his mask's descent. "You are going to have trouble conducting life," Hannibal informed her, tracing the veins in the back of her hand. "Your work is on my property. Why not streamline your efforts?"
Maryann's pride shook her from the basking daze. "I'm not helpless," she claimed, brokering no argument. "I'll be fine. But thank you, Hannibal."
Hannibal gave a faint, secret smile.
"Kiss me again?" she asked in a small voice. At his measuring look, she regained a bit more of her wit. "It's conducive to getting better."
Hannibal did not reply. He wondered if she might earn the privilege, or consider herself above such. Ghosting a hand over her wounded clavicle, he wordlessly bade her lay back on her half-raised bed. He marveled at how she responded to his challenge with grace: allowing him to subdue her, raise her chin, bare her neck.
As though he would refuse her, when she melted under him so beautifully. He rested his lips over her throat for a long moment before granting her request.
I'm not afraid, Maryann stubbornly told herself. All the pain and terror of her interaction with Gideon had been worth it: she'd averted disaster on her head.
Now she was left to contemplate which might be easier: allowing the monster with maroon eyes to consume her, or waltzing hand in hand with it into its lair.
In the quiet electrical storm their kiss inspired in Maryann's body, she corrected herself. No... I'm not afraid of the beast. The man, on the other hand -
Hannibal drew back, cupping her jaw, keenly observing what he'd wrought.
- the man, on the other hand, she thought dizzily. Might be the one to truly kill me...
Hannibal is inspired by a conversation with Will to leave a comb in Georgia Madchen's hyperbaric chamber. He knows it will spark in her slowly growing hair and burn her alive, eliminating any chance she had of remembering it was Hannibal who framed her for the murder of Dr. Sutcliffe.
The flames turn her cage into a hellish tomb, wherein she writhes like a phoenix denied rebirth.
Will is recovered enough from his episode to deduce what Hannibal had not cared to hide (that Georgia had posed a threat in her returning memory) and also what he'd planned to reveal later: that Hannibal had couched his more recent murders in those of other killers. He might have given the special agent a standing ovation.
He didn't piece together that it was Hannibal, the Chesapeake Ripper, doing the copycatting. If Will had, he might have been even more disturbed by the implications.
Hannibal wasn't personifying the Ripper in all of his murders because he wasn't doing it for fame, or vanity. His pride allowed him to let others take credit for his work because it didn't matter to him.
What Will had yet to put his shaky finger on was that Hannibal was a killer, was an animal predator disguised in the world of humans. Murderous urges were human... gaining sustenance from his kills was uniquely animal.
Hannibal found Maryann rolling her eyes through a nurse's assistance in arm exercises, maintaining an air of appeasement even as she winced.
"I hear you're leaving us tomorrow," the nurse said conversationally, clearly trying to draw the recalcitrant gardener from her sulk.
"Yep," Maryann replied, flashing a shy smile at Hannibal even as her stitches tugged a grunt from her.
Hannibal twitched a brow as he sat in the room chair, drawing another sullen expression from Maryann, who was conducted into a wide, slow windmill motion by the nurse.
"You told me you're a farmer - "
"Ow. Horticulturist," corrected Maryann, forcing Hannibal to bite back his smirk.
"How are you going to work around your stitches?"
A flicker of worry, like the tip of an iceberg belying its underwater size, crossed the windmilling gardener's face. "Slower, I guess," she said quietly. "Good thing I only have one full-time client."
Hannibal caught her gaze knowingly, but waited until the nurse had left to speak. "What a fortunate client."
Maryann smiled around a grimace, rotating the shoulder of the puncture wound. "Not so fortunate, if I can't provide what I'm contracted to do."
"Do you truly think that matters to me?" he asked dryly, standing to gently prod the pectoral offended by Gideon's blade.
Maryann huffed, prideful of the business built on the merit of her young body, by her own hands. "No. To you, it's just money. To me... ahem, you gonna buy me dinner first?" she quipped as he tugged down the shoulder of her hospital gown.
Hannibal granted her a look over her exposed gauze-covered wound.
"Or, you know, make me dinner first?" she amended weakly, clearly spurred to nervousness by his proximity.
Hannibal probed the injury clinically, noting that the hole in the muscle was in an unfortunate place for one whose livelihood was a physically demanding one. "Seeing as our last dinner took a decidedly tragic turn," he paused to lock out her arm, rotating it palm-up. "I would be delighted to."
She hissed as he gently pulsed the arm backwards, forcibly loosening her own muscle. "Looks like my own kitchen is closed for a while."
"You told me you are a baker, more than a chef," Hannibal recalled, rotating her hand palm-down after ten pulses. "What are you fond of baking?"
Maryann pressed her head back into the pillow, breathing through the stretch of her stitches. "Skillful stuff, like souffles. Ouch. Mundane stuff, like bread." When Hannibal laced his fingers in hers, signalling his therapeutic touch had turned metaphysical, she sighed, a slight sheen of sweat prickling her brow.
"I've thought it over," she murmured after a long moment. "Your cohabitation proposition."
Hannibal waited with an air of outward patience, though inwardly he growled with excitement.
"My brain consistently nay-said what my heart was wanting," she continued. "It was like a Senate meeting in my body: bipartisan all the way."
Hannibal gave a reassuring squeeze to her interlaced fingers. "Who had the majority vote?"
Maryann smiled, eyes twinkling like the sun on a river. "It's jumping the gun. It's reckless and foolhardy and utterly against convention. Convention states that we are only just beginning."
The cannibal's smile took an air of knowing as he traced her hand's veins with a thumb. "I daresay we are far from conventional, my dear."
"Exactly!" Maryann turned her head to regard him deeply. "The part of this - the part of us - that is not conventional... it started the second I darkened your door."
Hannibal's allowed the visage under his mask to change, knowing she would see it. "I will see you when you are discharged, then."
When he learns the full extent of Will's mental issues, Jack Crawford is put out, to say the least, at Hannibal's apparent concealment of the fact. Hannibal placates him with doctor/patient confidentiality, like the pillar of ethical behavior he pretends to be.
Crawford also reveals the pattern that shows Abigail Hobbs was present for her father's victim selection. This agitates him, because the cognition is there, but not the evidence. He needs more time, and is growing impatient. Hannibal cups his own talons around the fledgling girl judiciously.
Crawford responds by confronting Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier. There is nothing to be gained from such an assertive move, other than a venting for Crawford's frustrations. Bedelia does not break confidences lightly, and certainly not for dangerous Hannibal Lecter.
Will checks himself out of the hospital, and Hannibal only finds out when he shows up to visit, only to find the orderly stripping the bed. Hannibal knows what Will's absence means, and smiles to himself as he leaves.
That smile broadens when he learns Will has taken Abigail back to her father's hunting cabin. The combination of the ever-so-soft Abigail and the unstable Will was bound to prove delicious.
Will drives Abigail, shaking and crying, straight into Hannibal's arms. He is chagrined to see his fledgling so afraid, and his heart cracks a little when she asks if he is going to kill her. In that moment, he is strongly reminded of Maryann. "I'm sorry I couldn't protect you," he tells Abigail, stroking her cheek as he comforts her.
To say what came next gave him no pleasure would be a lie, and Hannibal would not lie to himself. The pleasure is distinctly different, but perfectly palatable.
The tenor of Will's phone call in the earliest hours of the morning is dead flat, monotone. He summons Hannibal to his house in less than thirty words, and less than thirty minutes on the cold Virginia road.
Hannibal finds the man sitting bereft on his front stoop, unconsciously wrapped in his own arms like the straps of a straitjacket. He shakily outlines what he remembers of his night. The doctor escorts them inside, and at the frigid touch of Will's skin drapes a blanket over the shivering man's shoulders.
"Kitchen sink," Will murmurs before the blanket settles, eyes staring sightlessly (or perhaps too insightfully, seeing worlds and realities blessedly not the current).
Hannibal approaches the sink to find a human ear resting in a pool of bile. "When did you last see Abigail?" he demands hoarsely. "Will! When did you last see Abigail?"
Will recounts his night again, in greater detail: taking Abigail to Minnesota, his deductions, his hallucination frightening the fledgling. It was a satisfying variation on a theme; a dish done two ways.
He sits down heavily, belying his shock at the proceedings. After a long moment of contemplation, he tells Will what any true friend would. "Will, we have to call Jack. You can't run from this, it will only be worse."
Will stares at him through those thousand-yard eyes.
"Get dressed."
Beverly Katz's caustic treatment of him as she scrapes his nail beds for flakes of blood is a bucket of cold water to Will, thrusting him mercilessly out of the stunned abyss of his pensivity.
She tells Will he shouldn't have been working for the FBI in his condition, clearly viewing the choice and the subsequent happenings the fault of his poor judgment. "You always said you interpret the evidence. So do it, Will," she challenged coldly.
He looks at her twitchily, beseeching her not to drive him to this conclusion.
"Interpret the evidence," he told him, lips thinned unsympathetically. She was one of the angels in the Lord's throne room, holding a burning coal to his tongue to cleanse it, that he might receive his prophecy.
"According to the evidence," Will begins, a terrible howling beginning in his heart and ears. It makes him start to shake, soon realizing it is with restrained sobs. "I killed Abigail Hobbs."
Hannibal found it easy enough to shed a single, manly tear in the presence of his psychiatrist. He mourned the loss of innocent Abigail, his little fledgling. He was only starting to grasp the absence of his friend Will. As he went about his day, he was gloomy. Childishly, he felt like his favorite toy had been tied to a kite and whisked into the stratosphere, but knew he himself had been the one to unspool its string. He'd needed a scapegoat, and Will had been so very fun to frame and twist and corral. That game was in its final throes: Will would undoubtedly be sent to prison for 'his' crimes.
Still, he hid all that away as he drove, in favor of a less morbid mask. Hannibal went straight from his appointment to Maryann's hospital room to find her dressed in standard-issue hospital scrubs in an unflattering blue. She mostly chattered with the cautioning doctor while Hannibal politely reduced the accompanying orderly to standing watch, choosing to aid her extrication from the bed himself.
"I don't believe in prescribed pain narcotics," Maryann explained stubbornly to the exasperated Suma.
The medical doctor glanced to Hannibal, who quirked a 'what are you going to do?' brow. "Miss Shule, I can guarantee your injuries are going to keep you from sleeping without something to knock the pain down."
Maryann's stifled grunt translated into a tightening of her grip on Hannibal's steadying arm as her stitches echoed the doctor's words. "Then I will be in good company," she managed, glancing up at Hannibal with a cheeky smile.
His spirits lifted enough to return the expression. It also amused him to hear Suma's quiet huff.
"I would advise you against any lifting over ten pounds for the first month," the doctor continued. "You'll tear your stitches."
"Does a collinear hoe count?" quipped Maryann, her grin turning impish for Hannibal's sole benefit.
Suma and Hannibal exchanged looks again: one doctor significantly more dejected than the other by not knowing what a collinear hoe was. Suma sighed defeatedly. "Will you at least take the prescription slip with you, in case?"
"Nah, I'm good, thanks." Maryann waved away the paper as Hannibal rolled her past the doctor. Hannibal, however, snagged the slip with a surreptitious wink and a doctor-to-doctor nod.
As Hannibal commandeered her wheelchair out the sliding doors and knelt to extract the gardener's feet from the pedals, he was stopped by a hand on his shoulder.
He looked up. The longer he held Maryann's green gaze, the more her face became the one he held back. All joviality of watching her wear down Suma faded.
So she'd seen through him. Perceptive little thing. His thumb grazed the beginning of the scar on her ankle, causing her to shiver lightly.
"What is it?" she asked, tone worried.
Hannibal set down her foot with great care, portraying his shock believably. "Will has been taken into custody," he says slowly, disbelievingly.
"What in the world!?" cried Maryann, gripping the arms of the wheelchair. "What for?"
"The probable murder of Abigail Hobbs."
Sorry about the POV jumps, I had a lot of ground to cover. :)
*sprinkles Pop-It Rocks* I'm baaaack bitches!
*flutters away*