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This is a ghost story about a girl who stops being a ghost — a girl who goes back for her body, drags it back to her like a carcass through the snow and muddy leaves, and stops living in the shadow of its absence. This is a girl's story that boils down to a deer bone broth of art and anger, one the blood to the other's vein.
It begins and ends with her hair, which is bust length now, even curled. Abigail hates it. She looks in the mirror and her reflection is the same as it was the day her father opened her carotid artery over the kitchen cabinets, an unchanged ghost, not growing, only aging. Stagnating. Haunting.
Abigail can feel dissatisfaction curdle and curl into rage in the back of her throat — a darkening cloud that signals a coming storm, the eye of the cyclone deciding to damn every filthy thing it sees, rip the roof tiles off and unbatten all the hatches and howl all the ache in its heart out. It's getting too much to swallow down, growing like a pearl in the pit of her stomach alongside secrets and the lingering spikes of dread when she thinks of the coldness of her father's irises. It swells until it feels as though her whole body is full of concrete, heavy and dark, until it feels like it's slowly corroding her stomach lining and spreading, hot and sickly through her organs, spoiling the meat.
She doesn't want to be meat anymore. She wants to spoil every cut that could be sliced from her, make it too bitter to finish, to even start. She wants to burn everything in her wardrobe that isn't black, to stray far enough from her wide-eyed, Mall of America innocence with her pastel cardigans and cowboy boots that when her father sees her in Hell, he doesn't recognise her.
The same restless energy that kept her climbing the hospital wall builds in the hollow of her throat until it's too much like having it cut and she puts on a good soundtrack to drown it out, to lose her mind to, haunting howling vocals and pounding drums, and she paints — to use the word loosely.
This is where she differs in her art – Hannibal is, of course, masterfully skilled, sketches regularly, revamps Renaissance paintings with a 2B pencil, all meticulous attention to detail, while Abigail… she's not the best artist, always rushing to get the line art and shading of the finished product and forgetting some essential under sketch. Her paintings are once in a blue moon, a messy birth of acrylics and emotion and watercolour pencils she's had since high school.
Will's fishing lures are a looser concept of art, but she appreciates it, the vibrant feathers bound by thread to the sharp hook – Will is good with his broad hands and enjoys physical tasks in a way that makes her want to sign him up for a pottery class just to see what he'd create. He would have appreciated the carved bone pendants and earrings one of her dad's hunting friends would sell at his market stall — Abigail was always grateful that Ted's children looked nothing like her.
With no under sketch or plan in mind, she starts with a fine brush and old black acrylic. She births a messy, disproportionate outline of a girl who looks like her — something she's fucking sick of thinking about. Little white tubes, flecked with each others' colours like rainbow sprinkles, a reminder of innocence that calls to mind having someone spit in her face on her way out of the courtroom, rattle as she digs around the old cardboard box salvaged from her parent's haunted house.
On a stained plastic plate, she mixes colours furiously, crazed and obsessive, loosening the pigments with haphazard splashes of abandoned drinking water until it's right — the colour of arterial spurt pooling on the floor of the cabin, the kitchen.
She looks at the sketchbook as though through the scope of a rifle, debating when, if, to take the shot. She wants to. She shouldn't, though. But she wants to, and if it'll keep her from setting the house on fire, maybe she should.
She's going to do it.
As haunting vocals fade out, lamenting about falling in love with a war unaware that a truce has been called, she hurls gushing visceral crimson over the unsuspecting page. It curls its edges in shock, like Carrie's mouth stretched into a gasp and then a scream as pig blood soaks into her pretty prom dress.
Maybe Abigail gets a little bit too unhinged during the staccato guitar and screams of a song about sitting drunk on the curb and being done with it all – smearing violent red across the pale paper with her elegant fingers until it turns into slaps, into punches.
She opens her mouth and a sound so visceral and animalistic comes out that her heart leaps in her chest with a prey animal's primal fear – but this time, she is the predator.
Amid the noise, Abigail finds herself reminded of climbing over the wall of the psych hospital; how, once she was sure she was far enough out of earshot, she'd sink to her knees in the wet leaves and scream until her chest ached. Thank G-d Will's not here and she's alone with the fog carrying her haunting howl across the flat fields.
Turning the valve in her larynx has helped, released some of the pressure, but not enough – like lifting a carcass and knowing it's too heavy to be completely drained. It's still too much, and her thoughts are still too loud, audible above the scream stinging her throat, so she voices them.
"I hate you!" she sobs, tears blurring her vision into a slaughterhouse floor of pain and screaming and redred red . Her head is fucking swimming as she smashes the spiral-bound spine off the floor, nowhere near as hard as she wants to, like useless fists in a dream. "I hate- Why?! Why-y-y?! Fuck you, fuck you, fu- fuck you!"
Words don't feel as good as noise so Abigail wails again, long and loud and ragged. As she squeezes her eyes shut to get more force behind the scream, her father's victims pool around her, a heap of shrieking dead girls, and they all howl and sob and scream in unison through bloodless cracked lips, driven mad by death and stolen futures and injustice. The dogs downstairs are joining in too, yips and howls and whines carrying upstairs in solidarity with their pack.
Eventually, the scream fades into heaving breaths and aching growls and spluttered aborted syllables. The reflection in the mirror is still her father's daughter through the mess, freckled face glistening with tears and snot and spit.
Despite her aching abdomen and pounding headache, Abigail can't stop crying. She sounds like Sarah Paulson's melodramatic weeping in every fucking season of American Horror Story — Violet often imitates it to make her laugh.
Maybe a laugh would take her into a kinder headspace – no harm in trying, especially with the burning tension in her shoulders. Tentatively, as though she's being watched, Abigail lets out another guttural wail, tailing off into a wet laugh. That feels a little lighter. She tries an exaggerated terrified sob, then "Hnnngh, I don't want a cupcake, hmmaah!" interspersed with silent giggles. She must look fucking insane , but hey, dogs can't tattle on her to Doctor Bloom.
How funny would it be if Freddie Lounds were outside listening though? Standing in her stylish coat with her camera and her voice recorder, autumn leaf curls bouncing as her big ocean eyes scan around for the wolf stalking across the flat fields, only to find that it's Abigail having a complete fucking mental breakdown. This only serves to make Abigail laugh harder.
By some standard, laughing by yourself on the floor is better than crying by yourself on the floor, right? So that's what she does, right up until her raw throat can't make another sound tonight, bled dry.
That's when she gets the scissors.
She positions herself in front of the mirror for another rebirth, tears dried into plasticky trails on her freckled cheeks. Abigail sections a chunk of silken hair beside her face, the reflection's wet-lashed eyes dancing back and forth. The scissors gleam invitingly as she places the hair into their mouth, sunlight on fat silver trout waist deep in the stream with Will.
She cuts it.
The strands drift towards the floor, Icarus tumbling from the sky, pieces catching on her shirt. Abigail can't move her eyes from the blunt cut of the shorter section. Slowly, it starts to feel good, like her father's claws are retracting, losing their hold over her.
There's little that can be done about his blood in her veins – diluted by the transfusion – or his eyes, ice blue with nothing behind them, staring back at her in the mirror, unless she gouges them out. The scissors glint in her hand like a hunting knife and she toys with the idea of gutting herself, but then no one would be there to honour her. It would just be finishing her father's murder. Cutting her hair is substantially less fatal, so she sticks with that — besides, she doesn't want Will to find her opened and empty and dripping through the floorboards when he gets home, and she especially doesn't want him to think that she offs herself over an amateur haircut.
Over the bouncing glitchy beat of a song about being disappointed by your heroes, Abigail snips and trims haphazard sections to roughly uniform length, trying to ignore the memory rising like bile in her throat of the fat wad of black and brown hair stuffed into a cushion cover so as not to be wasteful. When she releases the sections like a trigger, the ends rest on her shoulders, tickling along the scar that still stings when it rains.
It isn't enough. She takes it a little higher, pinching sections between the insides of her fingers and snipping towards her skin, not careful because she gives a damn about spilling blood, but because it would be inconvenient to clean up. Finally, with some contortion and a rather intensive upper arm workout, it's more or less even at the back, and Abigail clatters the scissors onto the floor in the direction of the abandoned paint tubes and sketchbook murder scene.
The woman in the mirror with her blunt cut bob and lightning-bright eyes is not her father's little girl.
Abigail Hobbs is dead, she thinks, staring at the blood red paint clinging to her palms, drying into the crevices of her skin like microscopic rivers. Long live Abigail Hobbs.
Satisfied, she stumbles on fawn-stiff legs to the bathroom, washes the crust of fluids off her lamb's face, washes all the blood she can from her hands. She's met with a thorough sniffing investigation from the dogs as she lets them out, grabs a glass of water for her blinding headache, and returns upstairs to collapse into bed.
Human hair and acrylic paint tubes are strewn across the floor like phalanx bones, and she's reminded of the cabin with a stab of guilt. There's no honour in having your life stolen, your cold corpse butchered into tenderloins and shanks. She wonders if Elise Nichols or Paige Cohen or Danielle Woodward would ever forgive her. Would they understand that she had to survive? Or would they see her as just as guilty as her father for setting the trap, giving him access? After all, she was the lure – their blood stains her hands as well, no matter how much milk and honey soap she lathers on them.
She hopes they're torturing him, wherever he is, flaying him and slicing him into the choicest cuts. An eye for an eye. Maybe they'll do the same when she makes her way there. Maybe Nick Boyle will gut her and they'll all tear chunks off her with a Louisiana alligator's death roll. Maybe she'll deserve it.
*
Honestly, Abigail forgets about her hair – both the new shortness and the chunks littering the floor – until a few moments after she wakes up. She realises fully what she's done when she walks into the kitchen and Will almost drops his mug, coffee splattering over the countertop.
"Hi." Will says, brow twitching. He opens his mouth and closes it again, and she doesn't blame him. He wasn't even gone the whole night, came home to the left of midnight, and finds that she's had a breakdown and chopped off a good six, seven inches of hair, like a restless dog clawing through the screen door. Even the actual dogs behaved themselves better than she did.
"I know, I took a good bit off." she dismisses, shoulders bristling against anticipated rejection and disapproval and chastising as she reaches for the kitchen roll to clean up the puddle of coffee on the counter.
Will's face softens, eyes like the cool freshness of a late March sky as they tick over her. "You look good. Suits you."
Her mouth slants, unconvinced, as she avoids his eyes, bright despite their tiredness and oh so perceptive. She imagines him decades younger with those same knowing eyes, the changeling child that rubbed people the wrong way, whose father didn't quite know what to do with him.
He tilts his head as if trying to peer under the veil of her unwillingness to talk and says sympathetically – empathetically – "Needed a change?"
"I had a rough night." Abigail says quietly with another fraction of a smile, partly because she doesn't want to be psychoanalyzed at this time in the morning and partly because her throat is still sandpaper.
"You can tell me about it. I'll tell you about this case if you want." Will says as if this is a fair deal, pouring her a cup of coffee. "Or, uh... just one, or neither." G-d, this man is autistic. She loves him.
So she tells him about the painting and the screaming and the dead girls who are, at the core of the issue, undeniably her fault. He understands. She tries not to have a favourite parent, not after how that worked out last time, but if/when she tells Hannibal this, he'll wax poetic about rebirth and taking back control, which is fine because that's who he is and how he supports her.
Will just gently furrows his brow in concern, in a way that makes her feel loved and not criticised, and pulls her into a hug. Rocks her side to side and tells her it's ok to let it all out sometimes – if you didn't, you'd lose your mind.
"You missed a bit at the back." he says against her temple as his fingers find it.
She lets him tidy it up, shoulders tense from the last time she had her back to a father figure with a blade in his hand. He notices and tries to avoid touching her, holding the section out from her neck and snipping away the missed dead ends.
And finally, Abigail Hobbs, daughter of the Minnesota Shrike, is dead. Abigail Hobbs, Will Graham's daughter, Hannibal Lecter's daughter, is brilliantly and beautifully and unmistakably alive .