Will mentally arranged the faces in the courtroom according to skin hue, much as James Gray had, to keep himself passably calm. When that failed, he scanned the crowd and found Maryann. His face flickered in a grimace when he noted she sat next to Hannibal.
It seemed all the ladies were visiting him, wherever he went. Katz had come for him to arrange her victim pictures. Purnell had come to advise him to plead guilty. Bedelia Du Maurier had come to tell him that she believed Hannibal's guilt, through her heavy-laden whisper of, "I believe you."
If Du Maurier were as smart as Will knew her to be, his cell had been her last stop before hopping a plane someplace far, far away. He found it embittering that the only person who quantitatively thought him innocent would jump ship.
And now the gardener, his friend, watched his trial. If he were the intelligent, creative psychopath the prosecution painted him throughout the day, he might have been prouder of his fan club.
Will wasn't wholly sure that Maryann was convinced of his innocence. She wasn't privy to the nuances of evidence: she lacked the doctoral insight of Alana, Hannibal, and others who worked with Will. Maryann was a creature of instinct and gut-checks. She would not be sitting in this courtroom if she thought him completely guilty, but like any creature of instinct, she knew there was a chance she could be proven fatally wrong...
Crawford dragged himself into the hot seat to admit he might have had a part in creating the mess that was on trial today. Will scathingly thought that it was the least Crawford could do, really. The dark doors he'd encouraged Will to open in his own mind were not going to close. No, Will would live with the shadows of the killers whose minds he'd visited for the rest of his life. He knew that. He'd known that, when he first answered Jack's request for his consultation.
Will once more felt the crushing weight of borrowed demons and his welcoming housing. Death, when exposed to death, lead to more death.
But oh, the green in Maryann's eyes was so bright. She was female: life giver, from womb to breast to her tender fingertips caressing the earth. The other women he came in contact with choked their very nature, or it was choked for them in a man's world. Alana was the only one he'd found with the occasional flicker of femininity, and when beheld, it drew him to her.
But Maryann... she was something different entirely.
That gave him some courage. So instead of resting in the skin spectrum that Gray's lingering traces bestowed, he buried himself in the green of Maryann's eyes.
And bless her for sensing he needed it: she held his gaze as long as he looked.
Freddie Lounds was a vulgar blight on Will's already bad day. The contrived kinship she portrayed with dear, departed Abigail Hobbs was as revolting as it was damning. The prosecution licked up her words like forest animals at salty ground.
Until, with two questions, Will's lawyer Leonard Brauer dismantled her façade. There were three ghostly smiles in the courtroom at the lawyer's dismissal of the hatted media whore: Will, Hannibal, and Maryann.
Prepping for court with Brauer and Alana was both clarifying and heartbreaking to Will. For the sake of a unsullied testimony, Alana declared she had no romantic feelings for Will. He understood, although it felt like a knife to his gut. By sacrificing what was budding between them, she was trying to save him from the electric chair.
Will was starting to wish everyone would stop trying to help him. This feeling persisted when his lawyer opened an envelope with a severed human ear in it.
As he stared at the crystals of dried blood on the table, Will had to admit his friends' taste in him was almost as bad as his taste in profession.
The severed ear caused a stir among the doubters of Will's innocence, just as Hannibal had planned. Katz and the team were able to prove the same knife that cleaved Abigail Hobbs' ear from her skull had done the deed. The knife had been signed out of evidence by a bailiff in Will's trial. The bailiff, when discovered arranged in a four-part harmony of mutilation, caused even more of a stir.
Hannibal brought pictures and the crime scene documentation, and Will dully scanned the documents before giving up the pretense and sinking himself in the visual evidence.
Impersonal. The bailiff was used without thought or care, like a pen.
"It's not the same killer," Will said, blinking back to reality. "He murdered his victim first, then mutilated him."
Hannibal looked sadly disappointed at Will's confirmation, and vaguely nauseated when Will mentioned Abigail in the context of her victimhood.
"I wanted to dispel your doubts once and for all," admitted Hannibal.
"Doubts about what?" Will queried, confused. My sanity? My innocence?
"Me," replied his friend morosely. "I want you to believe in the best of me, as I believe in the best of you. This crime offered us reasonable doubt."
"It offered us a distraction," scoffed Will.
But the psychiatrist had a point. "Maybe this acolyte is giving you your path to freedom. Even Jack is ready to believe, Will."
This was enough to take Will aback, surprise written over his scruffy face. But he quickly came back to earth. "It would be a lie."
In a moment of selfishness with his ambitions stifled, Hannibal bristled. "I don't want you to be here." You should be free, with me.
"I don't want me to be here, either."
"But you have a choice," Hannibal pressed. "This killer wrote you a poem. Are you going to let his love go to waste?"
"Red tie," Maryann asserted from the bedroom door.
Hannibal glanced over his shoulder, having not heard her approach his open room. He put down the opulent purple he'd been considering and turned his collar up. "Are you sure you don't want to come?"
She slipped into the walk-in closet and loosely wrapped her arms around his waist from behind, her nose buried between his shoulder blades. "Can't," she sighed. "Gotta go visit my friend today. She's normally pretty 'out there,' and recently she's become more unstable than usual."
"How do you know her?" Hannibal asked, enjoying the press of the gardener's breasts against his spine.
"We're fellow apiculturists. She gave me queen Zeus, from whence the rest of my hives sprung."
Maryann dragged her hands up Hannibal's torso languidly, finding where his were knotting the tie and brushing them aside. Although far too short to see what she was doing, she deftly finished his work and cinched it gently to his throat.
"Will is our friend," she said, shifting to stand in front of Hannibal and folding down his collar. "I know you'll do your best with this Hail Mary testimony, but don't beat yourself up if it doesn't work out."
Hannibal's lazily aroused expression fell to determination. "It won't fail," he assured.
Maryann stood on tiptoe to peck his lips. "I hope not."
Hannibal's hands came to her waist, and with a gentle groan, he recaptured her lips. As she moaned in turn, one hand drifted to her firm posterior, and gave it a smack as he disengaged. "Naughty woman," he chastised with a smile. "Trying to distract me?"
The gardener purred, still held at the waist. "Mmm, give you confidence, maybe."
"Consider me confident," Hannibal said, kissing her forehead.
Maryann's face turned from pink with excitement to rose with embarrassment. "Sorry to just ambush you. It's that damn aftershave, I swear to God..."
Hannibal laughed. "I'll let your nose lead your explorations when I return, I promise. If," he squeezed her ass again, dipped to her ear, "You let me do the same."
Maryann's eyes went wide, then fluttered shut with a frustrated moan. "You are not playing fair, in the slightest."
He seared her with one more kiss in response. Hannibal always was a master at stacking the deck.
Author's Note: Sorry for the shortie, I'm trying to set up the next episode/chapter as a major turning point. This is also a test to see who is still reading, haha.