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“I look weird,” Abigail said, twirling a strand of her hair between her fingers. “I always knew I’d look weird with light hair.”
“It is not so light,” Hannibal replied, plucking the strand from her fingers and tucking it behind her ear. He’s right, of course, it’s not that light. More of a copper brown than a true red, it was just… different from what she was used to. “It suits you,” Hannibal said, combing though her hair, flipping a section over here and there to make sure the dye had set. “Would you be averse to having bangs?”
Abigail looked at herself in the mirror. She tried to see herself as a stranger would, but the image of herself she still held within her mind, dark haired and pale, kept superimposing itself over her reflection. “Wouldn’t bangs make me look younger?” she asked.
“Not necessarily,” Hannibal said, and her eyes flicked up to study his face. It was mildly blank in that way she had always been impressed with, had spent hours in the mirror trying to copy, mostly failing. She wasn’t sure if it was a mask anymore, or if the small expressions that flitted across his face sometimes were the real mask. He caught her staring in the mirror and smiled. It reached his eyes, but Abigail could smile with her eyes if she wanted to. Even if it was a lie. She tried it then, and Hannibal cupped her face in his hands, stroking his thumbs along the corners of her mouth. “Very good, Abigail,” he murmured.
“I’d be okay with bangs,” Abigail said.
Hannibal released her face and reached for the scissors. She closed her eyes and tried to relax, concentrating on the feeling of him running a wet comb through her hair, on the gentle snip snipping noise of him cutting away her old life, the fall of her hair down into her lap.
She should thank him, maybe, for helping her disappear. But if it wasn’t for him, she wouldn’t have had to run in the first place. This was all his doing, Abigail thought numbly, breathing steadily in and out. Her entire life was his doing.
She wondered vaguely why she did not feel more anger towards him. She still resented Will for killing her father, and who was more at fault here really? The man on the phone or the man with the gun?
Not that it mattered anymore. If it had ever really mattered in the first place.
“Open your eyes, Abigail.”
She did. Hannibal had been right, she didn’t look younger. She also looked entirely unlike herself. But that was the point, wasn’t it.
“What do you think?” Hannibal asked her, and she looked at him in the mirror and smiled with her eyes.
“I think I’m ready to start over.”