Work Text:
Denise agreed to meet Freddie Lounds after her shift was through. She had been hesitant at first, not wanting to tangle with the likes of a tabloid journalist, but Freddie was persistent and Denise knew it would be easier to cave than spend anymore time dodging her calls.
Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham had been declared dead, swallowed whole by the angry Atlantic Ocean. Freddie believed that couldn’t be further from the truth. For her part, Denise tended to agree.
In a park ten minutes from the BSHCI, they sat on a bench beneath a towering oak. Freddie balanced a voice recorder on her knee. “Thank you so much for meeting me here,” she said. She was pretty and thin, with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I just have a few questions for you about your time spent with Hannibal Lecter.”
Denise looked down at the small silver recorder. “Should I introduce myself?”
“You can if you’d like. The interview will be in print, the recording is for my ears alone.”
“Okay, well, my name is Denise, and I work as an orderly at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.” Denise stared up through the oak’s spindly branches, their leaves a green canopy blocking out the sun. There were birds in the higher branches, obscured mostly in shadow. “For three years I cared for Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal the Cannibal as most of the public knows him. I served him his meals, delivered his mail, changed the sheets on his cot...”
“Did Hannibal ever attempt to engage you personally?”
Denise could still see the way his dark eyes sat in the hollows of his face. “Sometimes it felt like he was trying to get inside my head, pull something out for his own amusement. We’re trained to never talk to patients about our personal lives, but especially with someone like Hannibal Lecter.”
Freddie shifted. The leaves rustled overhead. “If I know Hannibal Lecter, he didn’t stop trying.”
“After a while it was like he just wanted someone to talk to. Most of the time I ignored him, but there were times when… he was so charming, you know? It was easy to forget what he was. There was a sadness in his eyes some nights. I’d sit and listen to what he had to say for a while.”
Freddie took the recorder from her knee and held it in her hand, eyes growing wide with intrigue. “Did he ever talk to you about Will Graham?”
“Never directly,” Denise said, “but he said enough that I always knew who was on his mind.”
The birds hopped down from their branches until they were just overhead. There was a pair of them, fat and brown. Sparrows. They sang and they pecked, their little heads darting all around.
—
Denise dragged a chair from the corner of the room and sat down in front of the glass partition. It felt good to rest her feet in the middle of a double shift. She ached right up the backs of her legs. She thought it was about time to buy new shoes.
Hannibal Lecter rose from his cot on the other side of the glass, closing his book and placing it on top of the blankets. The cover was weathered green, with golden letters etched along the spine. What words she could make out weren’t in English. Italian, she thought, perhaps.
Even in the confines of his cell and his hospital-issue jumpsuit, the doctor maintained an air of power and grace. Hands locked behind his back, chin held high, his eyes fell to Denise’s face.
“How are you this evening, Denise?”
She fidgeted with the sleeve of her white scrub top. “I’m fine, thank you.”
Hannibal rounded the worktable in the center of his cell and sat. “But you would prefer if we didn’t talk about you.”
She nodded, trying to avoid his eyes. She gazed at the veins on the backs of his hands. “You know I’m only here to listen.”
“And you know that I appreciate the company.”
She wondered if, perhaps, somewhere in the recesses of his wicked mind, he were capable of discerning every detail of her life based on nothing more than how she listened. A twitch of the lip, a brow raised as if on cue. She clasped her fingers together in her lap and tried her best to remain stoic.
“Tell me, Denise, have you ever been to Florence?”
She had been to Rome once, on her honeymoon, but never Florence. She sighed and held on to her silence. Hannibal’s lips drew thin with a smile.
“It’s lovely this time of year. Early spring, the flowers just beginning to bloom in Il Giardino dell’Iris, smoke rising in great plumes from the Easter carriage in Piazza Duomo. The air smells of new beginnings.”
Hannibal clasped his hands beneath his chin and gazed off, as if drawn into another time, another world. “I was sad to see my last visit there cut short, although in hindsight it was for the best.”
He’d been there with Will Graham, she knew. She’d read all the papers after Hannibal’s arrest and watched every story about it on the news. The nature of their relationship beyond doctor and patient had never been specified, but she’d always wondered if they had been lovers.
Florence seemed like a very romantic city.
Hannibal’s gaze returned to Denise’s face. The temperature dropped in the air between them. “Perhaps, someday, I’ll walk those ancient cobbled streets once more,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll have good company by my side.”
Denise reigned in her composure and straightened her back. “You and I both know you’re not going anywhere for a very long time.”
Hannibal smiled, his face nothing more than a smooth cage of bone and shadow.
—
“Florence,” Freddie said, her thin frame leaning into Denise’s side, “that’s where you think he is now?”
“No. Not Florence. Not yet.” It was only then that Denise realized she was bunching her hands into painfully tight fists. She let them relax in her lap. “If he is alive, then Will Graham is, too. Seemed to me he was happier to be locked up than without him. But they’re not in Florence. He’d want to save that for last, for when he could be certain they could stay.”
Freddie’s eyes sparked with delight. “Do you believe Hannibal Lecter is in love with Will Graham, Denise?”
“Oh yes. No doubt about it. He sketched him, in one form or another, almost every day. Page after page, sometimes just his eyes or the backs of his hands, but every one carried with it that same ghost. The one you only know when you’ve loved and lost.”
The pair of sparrows, with their shining feathers and golden beaks, jumped down to rest near their feet. One continues its song as the other stretched its wings. Denise watched them until Freddie spoke again.
“If not Florence, then where?”
“Miss Lounds, I’m not an investigator. All things considered, you probably know more about Hannibal Lecter than I do.” She breathed in deep and exhaled slow. “I don’t think he’s in Florence, but you’d have better luck throwing a dart blind at a map than taking my word on where else they might pop up. I know that he is a monster, and that he is in love. I know what he deemed suitable for breakfast and what he left in the tray to turn cold. Other than that, I have nothing else for you.”
Freddie clicked off the recorder and tucked it into her purse. “I think that will be all then,” she said, rising to her feet. The birds at their feet flew away in a flutter of wings. “I just have one more question for you, if you don’t mind. Off the record.”
Denise nodded for Freddie to continue.
For a moment there was something like fear in Freddie’s eyes. “Do you ever worry that he’ll come for you? It would be easy for him to find where you live.”
“I was firm with him when I needed to be, made sure he knew the rules, but I was never cruel. I treated him with as much respect as he treated me. He was never discourteous, neither was I. He’d have no reason to come for me.”
Denise blinked and for a flash she saw poor Bedelia Du Maurier behind her eyes, When they found her she was drugged out of her mind. Or hypnotized. It was hard for them to tell. They found nothing traceable in her system. She’d lost both legs over the course of a long weekend.
Assumed dead or not, it was quite clear who had come to claim them.
“Were you ever discourteous to him, or to Mr. Graham, Miss Lounds?”
Freddie’s smile was tight and frightened. “Thank you again for your time.”
Freddie Lounds turned and walked away, purse tucked tight beneath her arm. Denise watched her until she reached the parking lot and disappeared into the darkness of her car. In the distance birds were singing, loud and bright. Sparrows, she supposed.