Chapter Text
She doesn't have much she can understand. Not when it's been two weeks and her head still isn't right and that fatalistic white stick turns the second strip blue and then suddenly she understands everything.
The world is as clear as the glimmer off her wedding ring. And the glimmer off her engagement ring is suddenly too bright for her eyes. She turns the stone inward, ignores the feeling sinking in her gut.
The television footage is nonstop. There are few good graces that keep the press from her door and most of them are Jack Crawford generously surveying her home. She's sure Freddie will turn up and the visit will not be friendly. It will be Freddie following her opportunistic sense of smell, snuffling around her doorstep like a pig for truffles. She's learned to separate where the friendship ends and Freddie Lounds bottom-feeding journalist extraordinaire begins. She doesn't bother to check the Internet or read the paper, but she knows they'll call her some cheap tabloid name. The Cannibal's Bride. Something that will make her curl her fingers into fists. She finds herself visiting TattleCrime. Searching for an excuse to sling some rage Freddie's way to do something besides feel sensationally numb or white-hot angry.
"I need to talk to you, Jack," she says. She's wrapping the telephone cord around and around her arm, her wrist, draping it across her throat, around her neck, her shoulders, like a child spent idle too long.
"I don't know if the public is the friendliest place you could be for a cup of coffee, Alana."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know who else to call and I just need--"
"Don't be sorry," Jack Crawford was Hannibal Lecter's best man. Jack Crawford stood beside him with wide, solid shoulders and muttered to Hannibal how beautiful his wife looked. Jack Crawford, filling placeholders for all those empty places that Hannibal's family wasn't. How this must sting. How it speaks of Jack's marriage to justice, to convict a man who he stood next to at the end of a wedding aisle. There's a parallel she's drawing, she knows, between that and the walk to his cell. "Can I come around five o'clock?"
She doesn't know how she isn't crying but she knows only that she isn't. The little strip on that test is the same blue as her eyes. "Yes. Thank you, Jack. Five is great."
"So I married an axe murderer," she says to herself once she hangs up the phone, her hands folded atop the counter. It doesn't sound as funny out loud as it did in her head. "Only this was a lot worse than an axe murderer, I think."
She hopes she's the kind of girl who suffers reasonable morning sickness. It will be very nice to be queasy with a purpose beyond the utter disgust of the spoon fed lies she's still living in. He's everywhere she turns (she's having a hard time rooting him out completely) and that's a little revolting. "So I married a serial killing cannibal?"
That doesn't sound better out loud. She unwinds the phone cords and saunters into the living room to take a nap, but it's fitful and when she dreams she dreams of a little boy with Hannibal's eyes who eats her heart with a baby's scrabbling, gluttonous fists.
Jack Crawford never knows what to say in these instances. Bella would know, she was always good at this. He doesn't know if he should be happy or disappointed, can't tell if these things warrant congratulations or a solemn tone. Children have never been his strong-suit. The idea of them has entered and left so frequently in his mind it was more a turnstile than a truly imagined family. So when Alana Bloom says, "I'm incubating the world's cruelest joke," he blinks and stares at her for stupidly long moments.
He waits as she laughs hysterically for a whole two minutes, waits another one as she begins to cry with the gulping ferocity of a woman drowning. He won't insult her by speaking in soft, patient words. He feels like it would be patronizing. That doesn't matter, because once she's done she's excavating the last tears with her fingertips from the corners of her eyes and he can't tell if she's grimacing or chuckling still. But it looks something like relief on her face.
"I'm going to assume this is a currently bad time to ask if you know what it is you might be thinking of doing."
She folds her hands on the counter again, just like earlier when she was alone. Her breath out feels like weight slipping off her chest and that's enough, it really is, to make the air taste bearable. Jack never sits particularly close, but she can't ever shake herself of the tendency she has to turn her body inward, to angle her knees to point at someone when she's comfortable around them.
"It's the worst time. But I'm not letting him remove every single ounce of light from the world. He hasn't completely closed the curtains, Jack. I won't give him that kind of power."
"But Alana, children? You could--"
In that way that's always infuriated him she reaches across and lays two fingers to his wrist. And like always it stops his speech, he gets it, "This is virtually my field. I know what kind of damage and potential baggage I could impart on a kid. And I plan to be as conscious of it as a parent can be."
"This is going to be tabloid hell, you realize. You're going to suffer a hailstorm from the media worse than what you've already managed. And the likelihood of it being an entirely safe environment for this theoretical child, Alana, we don't know how many people Hannibal's killed or how many of them have names we can uncover. I just need you to understand that there is no outcome here that is absent of how Hannibal's name could cause you serious trouble down the road."
"I'm not," she says coolly. She catches them immediately, the words Jack isn't saying, "I won't drop into the witness protection program and scurry away from him. I have no insight to what supposed type of murderer my husband was-- is--" that requires a swallow to say, "--but he doesn't have it in him to hurt me or this theoretical child. Hannibal couldn't harm a direct connection to himself. Killer or not, we both have always seen the truth of his narcissism."
For awhile Jack had thought it was funny, when Hannibal loosened up and relaxed after having been married for a few months, and Jack realized that Lecter just spent a large amount of time peacocking at every possible opportunity. It isn't funny once the trait can be linked with the narcissism of a serial killer with a god complex.
Alana is mourning a lot of things. She is mourning the loss of a husband (the man Hannibal was, he’s dead, isn’t he? To her, he has been cleaved free of this new monster he is now, the one she is still afraid to speak to behind a sheet of glass). She is mourning the way selfishness is fleeting (she had briefly considered functional alcoholism, then thought better of it upon realizing she was weighing pros and cons like it was a job offer) and she’ll have to take up decency for the sake of some new life. She is mourning the tree limb that was her life she did not bother to notice was rotting, and now she’s going to have to hack it away. This is going to hurt.
“How did we get here, Jack?” She asks, once she thinks it’s possible. Once he has seemed to relax even a little from this alien silence of his. Jack has never been a talker, but with Alana he tends to speak more than his standard five word sentences. It’s an effect she has on people.
“If you can figure that out, would you tell me?”
She shrugs into her cup of tea that has gone yet untouched. It’s really nothing but a reason to have Jack here, but he would’ve come regardless, so she keeps thinking about how stupid she must look, to be using some pleasantry like coffee-tea as though there’s no history between them. His own cup has been drained halfway.
“I want him to know.” She says, and it’s hardly more than a murmur. Now her lips are around the edge of the cup but it’s for no reason but to mute her voice. “I want to tell him myself.”
“You do whatever you think is the best idea.” There’s a tone in Jack’s voice that says but if it’s stupid you damn well better rethink it. He reaches up, points a short, thick finger at her coffee mug, “And given your new development you should give up the caffeine.”
“That’s mostly mythological. But I can cut back.” Jack is her favorite visitor so far. Even Freddie looks at her with some three-ring circus kind of sympathy almost tattooed across her face. Jack is hard to read but never unkind, and that mixes well because he doesn’t feel even remotely overbearing. Alana appreciates concern, but there’s a point where all it does is spark in her the desire to shout and cry and it’s never pretty for anyone involved.
“You’re going to be fine,” he says, but she’s too realistic to believe it.