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What kind of girl are you?
The kind who wants to live, I said, and I did want to
until I didn’t anymore. But I wanted the leaving
to be on my terms, so I hit my father back.
— Vievee Francis, Taking It
There’s a gap in space floating in front of her. Just beyond the window. A body-shaped hole that the rain-fractured light from the street lamps below can’t quite manage to fill in.
Against her palms Abigail can still feel the soft give of Doctor Bloom’s flesh, the rigid bone underneath, the wet of her jacket. Her hands are slick with rain water.
It was so easy.
Doctor Bloom had felt almost weightless. Like gravity had forgotten her for a moment, or had perhaps seen what would happen, felt the inevitability in the room as uncompromising as rain and released her into the sky. A body suspended, glass shards around it like dust motes on the air, silhouetted by the scattered, uninterested light.
And then gone. Swallowed up by glittering glass, glistening rain, gutting gravity.
Abigail waits for the sound of a body hitting concrete – she waits like waiting for a diagnosis, dreading and impatient. Does nothing but stand there two steps from the shattered window to hear the dull thud and the sharp crack buried in the core of it.
In the end, Doctor Bloom’s end is barely audible. A distant impact, buried under the rain and glass and Abigail’s uneven breathing. Another body bleeding on the ground while she stands above, unbloodied and disbelieving.
You have to honor her. Otherwise it’s murder, her dad murmurs behind her ear.
Her whole body feels cold; the sudden, creeping chill that comes from inside of her, nothing to do with the wet night air now pouring into the room, ruining the expensive wooden flooring. Not that it matters. The room blurs and fills with water as the tears finally well over in her eyes and she can’t breathe quite right, hands tingling with the weight of another life. She can feel the frost creeping up her bones.
But underneath all the cold Abigail feels a slow drip of nauseous fury running, molten, down her throat. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Now you’re going to hunt with me, Hannibal said to her, and she wanted to run. Towards or away? Just run.
Hannibal made her do this. She didn’t want to. The little thrill of terror that followed her up the stairs had leadened in her gut as she saw Doctor Bloom, eyes prey-wild and trembling everywhere but her gun-steady hands. Not Doctor Bloom. Not her. The blood-drenched beast that stalked her up the stairs had caught Abigail’s eye, and Abigail had known.
She had to. She didn’t want to. She’d wanted a hunt but not like this.
She doesn’t go to the window. Can’t bring herself to look at the crumpled body of a woman who’d done nothing wrong, who’d tried to help her and likely mourned her, all those months ago when Abigail died for the second time on that kitchen floor. Abigail knows she won’t honor Doctor Bloom.
Just murder, Abigail. He sounds disappointed now, and she can picture the little furrow in his brow he always had when she’d misstepped.
Like the crush of the body on the pavement below, Abigail feels very far away. Her life has hardly been a life, the way she’s been collecting deaths. She’s saturated with ghosts. She cries like she isn’t the one holding the knife.
Abigail doesn’t know where Hannibal is, moving silently through his jungle as she stands here, vaguely sorry. It’s his fault, this mess, this death, but it’s hers too. And Will’s, for the betrayal. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She remembers the set of Hannibal’s shoulders, that night, after Will had gone and the half-eaten ruins had been cleared from the table.
Divide the fault enough and it falls apart.
From the window there’s a whistling sigh as the storm cuts itself on the keen glass shards left in the frame. The rest of the house behind her is unmoving, the empty quiet after disaster; and yet it feels like there’s something lingering unfinished within the walls. Abigail tries to hold her breath so she can hear beyond her own quiet sobbing, listening to the way the house held its breath.
It sounds like waiting.
We’re waiting for Will. It’s important that he sees you.
Hannibal’s words. She hopes he doesn’t come, because she doesn’t know what will happen. Why would he come here? He rejected the place made for him in their world.
Hannibal thinks he’ll come, though.
Abigail turns her back to the body-shaped hole beyond the window and goes downstairs.
Will Graham comes into the kitchen looking pitifully half-drowned, hair plastered to his skull. Steps cautious and gun raised. Like Doctor Bloom. He isn’t prey, though, she knows. His eyes focused, his shoulders steady. She recognizes the predators. So does Hannibal.
She wonders if he’s here to repent. She wonders if it will be enough.
He hasn’t seen her yet, but he will. He needs to. It’s important that he sees you. Abigail presses her lips together to muffle her crying. She can’t stop it, and she knows exactly what she looks like, trembling and teary, breaths shuddering, dark travel clothes making her slim and small.
Poor little Abigail.
Will sees her as she’s moving into the kitchen, sees her victimhood and her fear and not the deaths she’s got clutched in her hand. He doesn’t see her. He sees the girl bleeding out on her kitchen floor.
But he looks right at her, meets her eyes, says her name like it’s going to shatter, forms it over his tongue before he speaks it like naming her will make her disappear, and she can’t help the sob that presses up her throat. All that shocked hope and affection in his eyes – he thinks she’s innocent, and she’s not, but she wants to cling to it, the idea of it. Her hands, bloodspattered but not bloodstained, the kind of death that washes off. All this simply happened to me. She wants to pretend, and he wants to pretend too.
“I didn’t know what else to do, so,” she tells him, “I just did what he told me.” She’s still crying. And it’s the truth. It’s the truth of the girl bleeding out on her kitchen floor.
There’s a second, right as she says it, that she thinks he’s going to approach her. Comfort her, maybe. She doesn’t know what she’d do with it, his misplaced affection, the uneasy stick of it to her skin. A hug right now would be suffocating. She doesn’t want him to be her dad. She doesn’t want his need. She wants to run.
His gaze shifts to the space between her brows. “Where is he?” he asks instead.
Hannibal.
The image of his tense shoulders, that night. And earlier, the bitter curve of his mouth that she’d call sad if he were anyone else, the sharpness in his eyes like a blade being polished as he chopped the vegetables. Abigail feels a surge of fear for Will, coming here. She wants to tell him to leave.
Run. If he ran, she’d probably run with him, she thinks. Just to run. Like two deer through the woods. Or two wolves.
But it’s too late, she realizes, as she catches the glow of Hannibal’s hair in the doorway. She can’t help the way her breath hitches at the sight of him, stalking through his territory. He moves differently now, muscles looser, sharp corners smoothed out to make him lithe like a big cat. He looks like he’s shed himself, all the grooming and propriety, and stripped down the brutal teeth and bones of him, down to just hunger and instinct and focus.
This is the thing she felt thrumming below his skin, she realizes, in those moments he stood before her and embraced her. It’s terrifying. And yet there’s a satisfaction to seeing the beast unchained, to see what he is.
She’d heard the fight before from above, crouching by the wall of an unlit room, felt the tremble of the great house as bodies crashed and thrashed within it while she stared at the wisps of painted smoke, the only thing visible of the painting on the opposite wall. She remembers the agent, Crawford – Jack, Doctor Bloom had said in pointed outrage, outrage for her – his pointed questions over the smell of chemically-slowed rot. The terror of his suspicion, the knowledge that he was right and saw her monstrosity so easily, when she’d done so much to hide it.
Hugging her knees in that dark room she’d hoped, quietly, shamefully, that Hannibal would win.
And he did, and there’s awe in her too, somewhere in all the terror. She knows a predator when she sees one.
“Y– You were supposed to leave,” Will says as he turns, and the strange twist of his voice makes Abigail think, oh. She feels the realization, rolls it around the palm of her hand, but the water’s too murky for her to hold it up to the light. Just oh.
“We couldn’t leave without you,” he tells Will. It sounds like a promise.
The air is silent, watching them. The three of them, or more nearly the two of them. She’s hardly there, hardly alive. Two predators and a ghost in the kitchen, crowding the corpses out. Abigail feels the way the teeming dead, collected by each of them, are pressed to the walls by their presence, clearing the space for this meeting of monsters.
The house has been holding its breath for a while, almost too long, and now it’s straining with it. Something needs to break.
Hannibal watches Will, unblinking, and Abigail realizes, with a terrible clarity, that she’s going to watch Will die. She can’t see what Will looks like, only the back of him, but the gleaming knife of Hannibal’s gaze is darker than she’s ever seen it. She can see the gentle heave of breath as he brings up a gentle hand to cup Will’s face, like he needed to prepare himself for touching him. It feels far too intimate, and Abigail feels a little thread of guilt in the tangle of her gut for watching them.
Hannibal’s thumb brushes the edge of Will’s ear, once, and then she sees the flex of tendons as his hand curls around Will’s neck.
Then a shocked groan, the wet slice of flesh, the fresh scent of blood anew in the air – Abigail can’t stop the gasp that’s punched out of her. It slips unnoticed under the sounds of blood spilling to the floor, a tearing sound she knows to be the knife by the jerk of Hannibal’s arm. Her head spins, the razor-edged violence intercutting such intimacy making her feel like she’s the one being gutted.
She can only stand there, watching the awful embrace that follows as they wrap around each other like lifelines, Will’s gun clattering to the floor as he clutches at Hannibal for balance. It lands near the foot of the cabinet, under the hole of impact-crushed wood. She can hear the sharp, pained breaths coming from him. Hannibal strokes his head soothingly, like he’s sorry, like Will’s not dying in his arms by his own hand, and she hates him for it.
Yet it seems so genuine, this loving touch, as an aftermath of his brutality. Natural, the way snake venom gets you high. Abigail feels like she almost saw it happen before it did, the sway of their bodies towards each other, like their own gravitation. Hannibal holds Will as naturally as he does a knife.
“Time did reverse,” he murmurs, chin tucked over Will’s shoulder as Will shudders. “The teacup that I shattered dared to come together again.”
He looks directly at her. “A place was made for Abigail in your world,” he says, and Abigail understands the gift he’s made of her to Will. The offering. Love me and you can have her. Join us and we can be a family. And she hates him for that, too.
He asks, “Do you understand?” and Will doesn’t, but Abigail does. Will betrayed them. He chose not to join them, he chose a different world. What then becomes of this one? The one she has a place in?
“A place was made for all of us, together.” He releases Will, holds him with the palm of his hand hooked under his chin, watching the face Abigail can’t see, turned away from her as Will is.
The world without all its pillars will crumble. She thinks of Atlas, and Hannibal’s strong arms wrapped around Will, wrapped around her, the same tenderness and power. She can barely hear Hannibal speaking over the rush of blood in her ears, the crumble of the world he’d built falling to the floor with all the rest of the carnage. A place was made for all of us together.
Hannibal releases Will, and he crumples down to lie among the ruins. Abigail makes an aborted movement towards him, but something stops her.
It’s not her place. Will’s death belongs to Hannibal.
You don’t touch another predator’s kill, her dad reminds her.
Will’s fighting shock, she can see his legs twitching, heels sliding on the slick floor. He’s gasping, louder than before, and she wants it to stop, wants to cover her ears or his mouth. His arms are wrapped around himself, a sad mirror of how he clutched at Hannibal who now stands over him, watching dispassionately as he tries to keep his insides in place.
“I let you know me,” Hannibal says. “See me.” And he sounds angry, Abigail notices. Hurt. She’s never heard him sound like that before. Will looks up at him from under his lashes, raises his chin as blood sluices out of him. Meeting his eyes.
She watches these two men flay each other open, spilling their guts onto the kitchen floor. All that truth and hate and love falling down into the rubble.
Father-killers and wannabe dads, who coated their hands with her blood on that other kitchen floor, all those months ago, and adopted her out of it. Stained themselves with her death and claimed her in it.
“Fate and circumstance have returned us to this moment where the teacup shatters.”
Rearrange the pieces and they’re here again: kitchen, blood, air stinging with betrayal. Minus an ear and some innocence, Abigail thinks, and we’re all here. And the world he made for us is at our feet.
She hears, “Don’t– don’t. No, no–” from the floor, looks at the proffered hand to meet Hannibal’s eyes. They’re unreadable, and more animal than she’s ever seen them – not animal. Base. Unclothed, scraped raw. He looks at her and looks through her. She wonders what he sees on the other side.
He says her name, tells her to come to him, and Will’s pleading helplessly at his feet, and the knife’s in his hand and the gun’s on the floor. Abigail feels, for a moment, the pull. The gravity-displacing inevitability that pulled Doctor Bloom into the air.
She imagines the quiet. It could all be over. Hannibal would cut her throat, she knows; he said he would, when she’d asked him twelve weeks ago, veins thrumming with life as she died again. He’d cut her throat like her dad did. She can hear her dad’s voice, telling her to hold still, don’t move and the way it broke at the end, right before the knife pulled through her arteries and the bullets buried into his ribs.
Hannibal’s face softens, and he looks gentle. Maybe it would be gentle. She could slip into death like falling into the water.
The knife in his hand, the gun on the floor. It could all be over.
Abigail doesn’t move.
“The place for me – it doesn’t exist anymore, does it.” Her voice is flat and out of place. It’s not a question.
Hannibal really looks at her, and then somewhere at the edges his expression fractures and he looks, suddenly, tired. More than tired; ancient and timeless, as if he’s been alive long enough to outlast the old gods. The blood on his face has dried now, as have her tears, and the fluorescents shine unearthly on his light hair, his bruised skin, his rumpled shirt. He lowers his arm.
“No,” he says.
Will has gone silent beneath him, wide eyes flickering back and forth, half-focused. The pool of his blood has made it to her shoes by now, halfway across the kitchen. He won’t be awake much longer.
“But there can be a new place,” Abigail offers, voice quivering slightly over the last syllable. She forces the next two words to be stronger. “For me.”
He studies her wordlessly. Abigail looks back at him.
Once you’ve locked eyes with the beast, you can’t look away. If you look away he gets you.
“I’m sorry the world you made for us didn’t – couldn’t happen.” She feels careful as she’s saying it, tiptoeing through the ruins of the life that could’ve been. She doesn’t look at Will. Hannibal’s knife glares up at her for a moment, and the smell of blood hangs heavy in the air. “But we can make a new one. Put the teacup back together.”
There’s a beat of complete stillness, broken by Will’s shuddered inhale. She still can’t look at him, but his legs twitch in her peripherals, going into shock despite his best efforts, and the brush of wet fabric through cooling blood is loud below them. Hannibal still hasn’t looked away from her, but Abigail knows he’s fully aware of Will’s presence and the sluggish flow of life seeping out of him.
She feels like she’s standing on a precipice, and she’s tired of staring down the ravine, waiting to see if the hands will steady her or push. She wishes, for once, that the decision was her’s.
Finally, there’s an almost imperceptible shift in Hannibal’s expression. A barely-there loosening of the skin around the eyes.
He offers his hand to her again. Abigail thinks, briefly, that he’s going to kill her anyway. Another world, the next world. A place made for her in the world of his mind.
She finally lets herself look down at Will. The exhausted fear in her gut reflects back at her in his wide, pain-glazed eyes. The shock, though, belongs to him. Was it so surprising that she would try to survive? When it’s all she’s ever done? The girl bleeding out on the floor didn’t survive, though. She’s still there, gasping for breath, staring up at her savior, eternally desperate and eternally grateful.
Abigail’s throat isn’t open anymore. Her boots soak with blood that’s not her own.
The soles feel heavy as she lifts them out of the blood starting to congeal at the edges of the pool. She steps forward, into the deep, and turns to the cabinet. The gun is light in her hands, an unfamiliar shape, dwarfed by her experience. She’d be happier with a rifle.
She turns back to Hannibal. His face is unchanged but his eyes are dark, like he’s pulled down the shutters. He tracks her movements, the gesture of her arms.
“Just in case,” she tells him, feeling both safer and more in danger than before. By doing this, she knows, she’s cast off her sheepskin. Showing her claws makes her a threat. But Hannibal’s proffered hand hasn’t wavered, and when she reaches out it envelopes her gently, steady and warm and tacky with dried blood. Below them, Will gasps out her name, once, twice. Pleading. Choking on it.
Without looking at Will, Hannibal leads her away.
The air outside is cool, and for a moment all she can do is stand there and breathe it in; the wet musk of the rain on the sidewalk and the freshness of soaked greenery. The coppery scent of blood and terror that clings to their clothes is quickly washed away by the cleansing downpour. Beside her Hannibal is tilting his head to the sky, eyelashes fluttering.
It feels heaven-sent, in the Old Testament way. No morality in the way water takes everything back and rinses the earth. Abigail feels again in her legs the surge of adrenaline, the desire to run, and she’s so saturated with rain and emotion that she can’t tell if it’s fear or joy that calls her to the wild.
Doctor Bloom lays prone before them. It takes Abigail a moment to see her chest heaving through the blur and under the heavy coat draped over her, and sickly relief washes over her. Alive. She didn’t kill her.
Distantly, the whine of sirens catch her notice. She looks to Hannibal, standing statue-still and eternal, raindrops splashing against the marble of his face. After a moment, he closes his eyes, and when they reopen they’ve shifted colors in the scattered light.
He pulls the coat off Doctor Bloom – Will’s coat, she guesses, from the comment Hannibal had made of his improved wardrobe – and wraps it over her shoulders. The gesture is casually cruel, and it tingles brightly along her arms like a raw nerve.
“Wasn’t she your friend?”
Hannibal looks down at her as if he’d just now seen her, as if she’d been nothing but a part of the landscape. “I gave her a choice,” he replies. He steps over her unconscious body and walks towards the road.
The coat clings stiff and oppressive like guilt, drenched with cold and smelling of wet wool. Her throat closes up. She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t deserve it. Not after what she's done to her.
It pulls at her jacket as she shrugs it off, clammy against her skin as she fumbles with the gun between her hands. She lays it carefully as she can back over Doctor Bloom, feeling the weight of it on the broken body and tells herself she can’t be making anything worse than it already is. When she looks up, Hannibal is watching her from the gate.
The knife is no longer in his hand. She stands above the woman she didn’t kill for him and clicks the safety back on Will’s gun.
Neither of them say anything as she steps up to join him.
Abigail’s almost blinded when she steps into the circle of light under a streetlamp, tucking the gun awkwardly under her arm for lack of better options. The instinct to run is screaming at her on beat with the pulse throbbing through her body. Run. Run. Run. Run.
Lining both sides of the neighborhood are looming townhouses like Hannibal’s, standing proud in the dark with white scaffolding and decorative plants, dotted with lit windows, whispers of life drowned out by the rain.
If Abigail were more lucid she’s sure she’d feel something about the houses like backs turned to them, happily oblivious to the horrors pouring out onto the sidewalk behind her, and she’s sure she’ll think about it later, replay this walk a hundred times and imagine a hundred other scenarios, but right now it doesn’t feel real.
It feels like she’s walking through a dream. The buzz and garble of being not-quite-awake that she recognizes from gutting Nicholas Boyle, from shooting her first deer, from I was curious what would happen when I killed Marissa. The detached over-awareness of shock.
They come to her car, parked where she left it – only a couple hours ago, but it feels like a different lifetime now – three streets over in an innocuous spot under a dripping sweet gum, tucked just close enough to the residence driveway that it doesn’t look out of place. A stray thought of what would’ve happened to it had she died just now wanders through her mind and then stumbles away.
The keys come out of her pocket into his hand as they approach. Doesn’t think about it at all, just hands them over. Abigail almost asks for them back, but she’s unsteady as she stands beside him, watching him fit the key in the handle. She doesn’t feel all there.
Hannibal should seem out of place in her teal second-hand Honda but he manages to look as dignified as anyone could be, rain-soaked and beaten, sitting in the cramped driver’s seat. Instead Abigail’s the one that feels out of place in her own passenger seat, shivering as dampness immediately spreads from her thighs into the cushion.
The gun goes into the side door compartment. Out of sight and easily accessible. She briefly considers shooting Hannibal now. Or later. Considers what she’ll do if she has to.
They start driving away easily, the homey trundle of her old car steady in her chest. The sirens have gotten loud enough now behind them that Abigail pictures them already at the house, arriving on the scene to the disturbance of the neighbors who watch from the windows, wondering what happened to the good doctor. The thought of these guileless, privileged sheep gathering in their bathrobes and nightgowns to watch the parade of bodies wheeled out of Hannibal’s house, hapless faces aglow in dawning realization and the sudden first light of horror hits Abigail beneath the chin. A needle of laughter shoves up out of her mouth.
She dissolves into giggles, knowing she sounds nothing short of completely hysterical as she props herself up against the door, gasping for breath. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
She can’t stop laughing anymore than she could stop crying. She laughs until her stomach aches, until her eyes are blurring again and her throat is searing.
Hannibal watches her out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t touch her, doesn’t reach for her, doesn’t say anything, but his presence is warmer than it’s been all night, and Abigail knows, instinctively, that she won’t have to use the gun yet. That thought, more than anything else, settles the frenzied thing inside her.
It’s not safety – the idea’s as foreign as another country. Safety is a whole other culture, with a different set of behaviors and a different diet, and she’s only ever known what she grew up with. Hannibal isn’t safe, no, but he’s the biggest predator in the forest, and she’s tucked down by his feet. Nothing can get her but him.
His quiet, the familiar engine and grind of the tires, and the clean musk of rain-damp clothes pull a soothing blanket over her mind, and her breathing finally evens out.
Abigail groggily wonders just how many houses Hannibal has. The one they’re pulling up to now looks cold and uninviting, all stone and strange irregular pillars that jut up to flank the house protectively. The steps make a point at the bottom and lead up at two angles, facing outwards, discouraging entry. The patchwork stone visible in the moonlight gives the outer walls and pillars an aggressive look, like a broken thing stiffly reassembled, shatter lines further emphasized by the sleek, modern home shielded inside.
Everything is blue-grey in the moonlight, darkened by the lingering damp left by the rain. Abigail doesn’t recall when it stopped. The steps are slick under her feet, and she can feel the uncomfortable stick of her socks in her boots as she walks. Her clothes are half-dried, battered car heater unable to chase out the moisture hiding in the folds and hems. The weight of the gun is uneven in her jacket, bumping her leg as she walks.
Hannibal at the top of the stairs moves to unlock the door, though not with a key; Abigail doesn't catch what it is as it slips back into his pocket, but it looks like a lockpick a friend of hers once used.
Oh, she hasn’t thought of her friends in so long. They live in a past life, with all the other normal faces and voices she had once lived among. She can hardly remember it anymore. She doesn’t feel like she’s ever been normal.
Beyond the door, everything is dark but for the light coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the spectres of furniture covered in delicate white sheets, which are arranged sparse and artful throughout the open rooms, throwing shadows over the gleaming floor. Hannibal steps purposefully through what Abigail can guess to be a foyer, across the living room and down a little hallway into the master bedroom. His prowling gait has shifted back into something less bestial, his back straight, the clicks of his shoes on the floor regular.
He opens the double doors at the far wall and reveals the bathroom with the flick of a switch. It looks expensive, is her first thought, despite living in Hannibal’s many expensive rooms for over a year. Grow up like she did, at the lower end of middle class, and wealth will always be impressive.
Thin planks of warm reddish wood walk the walls horizontally, accented by heavy grey granite. An unframed rectangular mirror sits on the far wall. Only a small stack of white hand towels and a small soap, pearl-like in a rounded glass, are on the matching granite vanity below.
“I suggest you shower,” Hannibal tells her. The light behind him, aflame against the ruddy wood, catches the beginnings of swelling under the blood crusting on his face. “A new life begins when it’s washed clean of the blood it is born in.”
Abigail wants to tell him she’s already been washed clean by the rain. Natural water, which she’s always been more comfortable with, blessing her into wilderness. He’s the one blood still clings to.
There’s an appeal to warm water, though. The chill that settled into her has sunk down to her bones. The ever-present damp stick of her clothes is grating on her. Seeing her nod, Hannibal steps aside and murmurs something about clothes in the car as he slides the doors shut.
A girl stares at her from the mirror. It takes Abigail a moment to recognize herself.
Her face is puffy and there’s red creeping in at the corners of her eyes, shadows pooling under. Freckles jump out against her pale skin, her cheeks carrying an undead sort of glow, lips ruddy with blood. Signs of crying. Recognized from those ill-fitting years of crucifying herself over the bathroom sink, wishing she were anyone else.
She scrubs at her face, steps away from the vanity. A sharp tug lets her hair fall reluctantly down her back, damp holding the strands in shape. Her clothes peel free, making a weighty pile on the empty countertop, the gun laid to rest at the top. Her body ghosts in the mirror.
The thought of Hannibal tugs belatedly at her. She wonders what he’s doing while she’s in here. It wouldn’t surprise her if he was simply sitting in the living room graveyard, having unearthed one of the chairs to wait in, planning.
Abigail feels the sealed openness of the room. She’s been in hotel bathrooms more homey than this one. It’s completely deserted but for a pile of fluffy towels on a rack and a handful of products in the shower stall that cost enough for the label to have nothing but a name printed in a font that screams money. Through close inspection she susses out what could possibly be shampoo and conditioner, a matching set of delicate bottles smelling richly of citrus and something sweet.
The lurid scent makes her gag initially, flooding her overstimulated senses, but she adjusts as it melts through her hair. It’s far more mature than anything she’s ever used before; even Hannibal had provided her with something younger. It doesn’t feel right – she feels like a child, still, with Hannibal.
Like with her dad, but different. With Hannibal, she’s not just a child; she’s a child in a fairytale.
She faces the wall, shielding the left side of her head from the spray. The canal pocketed by scar tissue, what remains of her ear, feels hollow in contrast with the pressure on her right.
If she thinks about it too long it becomes a yawning hole, tunneling straight to her brain. The fear is irrational, Abigail knows, but sometimes she imagines the water rushing in, widening the hole until her brain is exposed and melted down to nothing. Another open wound to walk around with.
The shower is good. She stands under the water until the steam hides everything, clouds her mind and leaves her mellowed while sharpening her senses. There’s an awareness of her body she can’t shake, nerves alight and buzzing under her skin as she counts the beats of her heart, loses her place, starts again. She can feel more than see the pink of her heated skin.
The towels are as soft as they look, and Abigail allows herself a moment to get lost stroking over her face rhythmically, admiring the down. The towels at her seaside house are this soft too – she enjoyed walking around a house that’s all hers and laying on the cool floor cushioned with expensive towels, skin bared to the salty air.
The memory pulls her back to sun-warmed afternoons and lazy naps she took for no other reason than because she could, in a house that didn’t feel like home but didn’t want to eat her whole. There’s a drowsiness here, lingering at the edges of her consciousness, that’s waiting for her body to stop.
She keeps moving.
One towel wrapped around her body, tight across her chest, wedged firmly beneath her arms, another pulling her hair up. She eyes the soggy pile on the countertop. It looks like a nest, with the gun as some sick, deformed egg. Which makes her the mother, giving birth to something dead.
Abigail stops the thought there. Hannibal had said something about clothes, right? She tries to ignore the feeling of standing inside her body, feet on cool stone, towel on skin, and pulls open the double doors.
Steam and cool air meet in a rush to occupy each other’s space. Light spills over the floor from behind her, illuminating a neat stack of clothing at her feet. The offering, she recognizes, is her clothing; the royal blue button down, the charcoal slacks, simple white socks, matching nude bra and underwear. Things he’d bought for her, somewhere in the beginning.
There’s no mystery where they came from, of course, but she spares the room a cursory look out of habit and there’s a woman on the bed.
There’s a woman on the bed.
She’s flat on her back, limbs straight and limp like a body in an open casket. The light doesn’t fully reach her, leaving her blanketed in shadows but for her hair, which looks like gold flowing into the air around her. Abigail can’t tell if her eyes are closed or not. Whether she’s breathing.
The heat leeches right out of her. All she can think is no. No. Recalls Will’s litany of denial. No, no, don’t–
All this death was supposed to over. It was supposed to be over, but it’s not. It follows her from house to house, hers to Hannibal’s to here. Stalking her like a beast, watching her through the trees of her life.
Heavy breathing fills the room, little treble gasps clipping the ends of each breath increasingly tighter. Her breaths. She knows her own panic intimately, having spent many hours and nights with it, the two of them alone, curled around each other. Rocked by it, wishing home was something she could come home to.
She slots her hand against the base of her throat, thumb tucked under the raised scar tissue of her death, pulse kicking against her fingers. Stares into the shrouding dark. Waits for the kick to slow.
Unfreezing herself takes an unknowable amount of time, standing in the doorway in only her towels, cold burrowing itself permanently into her flesh, but her breathing eventually evens. Abigail forces out a breath, a short burst through her nose, and walks over to the bed.
Her shadow collapses over the bed, dissolving easily into the dark. Up close, she sees that the woman’s eyes are closed, able to make out the curves of lashes against the lighter skin, makeup shadowing over the deep sockets. She looks like a statue; regal, all carved lines, aquiline nose and high cheekbones.
Gorgeous.
And alive.
Abigail can feel the rise and fall of her chest as she hovers her hand over the tailored black jacket slick over a fitted red dress. Her mouth is slightly parted, face slack with unconsciousness. At her hairline is a cut that looks like a smear of darker in the dark. It’s almost unnoticeable, so little marring the body that it almost looks untouched. Asleep. Tucked into bed.
Her dad would be impressed by Hannibal’s handiwork.
The fairytale image of them strikes her; herself, leaning over the unconscious form of a beautiful woman in bed. Abigail, in third person, bending down to press her lips against her, warm on cold. The idea makes her uncomfortable, no coherent reaction beyond a wave of generalized self-hatred and a jolt of disgust right down to her core. Predatory, her mind whispers. Or is it her dad?
Straightening up awkwardly, she becomes aware of the presence in the room behind her. The muscles in her arms tighten. She thinks of the gun in the bathroom, and looks over.
In the doorway stands Hannibal, with a similarly neat pile of clothing in his arms. His gaze rests on the woman in bed. It’s her house, Abigail realizes. Not his.
“Doctor Bedelia Du Maurier,” he introduces, having stolen her voice. “A colleague of mine.”
It knocks loose something inside her. Hundreds of questions flutter down between her teeth, why her why here does she know – and she opens her mouth and a little girl voice comes out.
“I thought she was dead.”
Hannibal regards her with a tilt of his head. “And that upset you.”
Abigail watches him step into the room, the human walk, shirt collar smoothed down and still bloody. He doesn’t really need her to answer that question, so she doesn’t.
“It’s easy to imagine the unconscious body as dead, given the ambiguity between the two. Both states of rest. They are often conflated in art.” His eyes flick up to hers as he sets down the clothing at the foot of the bed. “Considering tonight’s events, the ease of imagining must be almost effortless.”
Wet hair slides along her collarbones as she gives him a little nod. There’s a temptation to cough, force out the little girl speaking inside of her. She hates the voice of it. Doesn’t want to just swallow it down because then it’s still there, inside her, sounding small and scared and dependent.
“And when you realized she was awake, what did you think?” Hannibal asks.
He at the foot of the bed, she by the side, the woman laid out before them. Another test. To see what she’d do. Again there’s the outrage, again the flicker of anger, of hot rocks in her chest, that she knows should kill him, do the world a favor and try to get to the gun in the bathroom before he slits her throat. And your world?
She needs him still. If she kills him, it won’t be tonight.
Tonight she gives him what he wants. “I thought that my dad would be impressed. There’s barely a scratch on her.”
Now the pleased cut of his mouth. His head is slightly bowed, looking up at her with dark eyes, submerged in shadows and the bathroom’s red-stained light. She’s reminded of a neoclassical painting, a man by candlelight. At once welcoming and forbidding, summoning her to his side by the flame.
He doesn’t say anything about her still thinking about her dad, about unhealthy attachments or some other shit another psychiatrist would say. Like Doctor Bloom might say, maybe.
“You understood your father quite well,” is what he says. He does use the past tense, though.
“I guess.” Abigail doesn’t want to say yes, because she doesn’t understand a lot about her dad; why he had to kill those girls, why he had to kill her and why he didn’t, but she understood some. She understood the hunt, the impulse and the art of it. The necessity.
“You hear his thoughts in your head, even now. Echoes of the conversations you used to have,” he says.
She recalls him asking once about her dad’s haunting. He didn’t play coy, didn’t ask whether he haunts her. But what kind of haunting it is. She remembers telling him the kind of haunting that happens to ghosts.
Hannibal tilts his head, just ever so slightly. “Have you ever considered that those thoughts might be your own?”
Nausea washes up against the sides of her like the sudden tide, crashing against the rocks. The eroding cliff face of her guts. Rotting from the inside out. The force of it sends shockwaves up her spine, vibrating around her skull.
I’m not my dad, Abigail thinks, and Hannibal replies No, you’re not.
Torrential waters churn beneath and within her. The cliff edge, crumbling into the ancient sea. She tightens the towel over her chest.
“I need to get dressed,” she says.
“Of course,” Hannibal replies, and steps out.