Chapter Text
“So he’s calling himself Will Graham now?”
Hannibal paces in her sitting room, a mess if she ever saw one. He had been alarmingly devastated that the articles leaking his name had been removed from the Times-Picayune, and now that Freddie Lounds’ blog had created a hot topic out of the man Hannibal had become inconsolable.
“Yes,” he mutters, stopping by the window to stand.
“And you’re certain?”
“Would I come to you with this information if I doubted?”
She rolls her eyes, memory taking her back to Valais where she had first met the famed Ose. In that time he had walked as a man called Petrus Varisyn and he had burned at the stake for witchcraft. As long as she has known him he has always been demanding about the things he wants; objects he would like to possess.
It really isn’t surprising in the slightest that he’s found himself most desirous of an angel, even a fallen one.
“I don’t trust your judgment where Mal’ak ha-mashḥit is concerned.”
He turns on her, face empty of emotion and eyes burning like the flames that killed him the day they met. But his eyes always held hellfire within them, for anyone foolish enough to look close enough. Bedelia could see it, and so had Mal’ak ha-mashḥit, all those years ago.
Bedelia returns his muted glare. In attempt to remind him of who he is, she names him as he is when she says, “You’re obsession will be your death, Ose.”
“I have died a thousand deaths,” he snaps. “Yet I have lived only once.”
She laughs, surprised and experiencing something else much more complicated in the very hollow space within her chest; perhaps pity. He doesn’t move from the window but he turns his face away from her to look outside. His reflection in the glass is his own, the face he wore on his ascent from the pit to the murky jungles of Tenochtitlan; it’s the face that warped and twisted in bodily agony when the flames licked higher and higher into the smoke blackened evening sky nearly six hundred years ago.
“You’ve been very busy,” she muses flatly, moving to stand beside him.
Her own face twists into view, exposed in the reflection to his eyes as much as it would his. He flicks his eyes toward her reflection and then back to his. The face in the reflection becomes that of Hannibal Lecter again.
He murmurs, more to the window than to her, “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
“Poignant.” She gives him a hard look and then turns back to the sunny day beyond the glass. “Have they released a photo of your darling dear?”
“No.”
Dismissively she says, “Well, then I suppose you had better not worry about it until they do.”
“Jack Crawford means to bring him from Louisiana. If he retains any of his divinity by then, it may spell damnation for both of us.”
“For you, maybe,” she growls. “I have no intention of provoking the first being to have any hope of besting me in a hundred years.”
“Ninety, Barbas,” Hannibal chides, raising one eyebrow when she turns to sneer at him.
“The Great Kantō earthquake was not something either of us could have predicted, nor was the subsequent slaughter that followed in its aftermath something we could have combatted on such short notice. A mob mentality is not a corporal being as Mal’ak ha-mashḥit is a corporal being.”
“The body collapsed in the road after the first wave of ethnic cleansing subsided was a corporal being—yours, in fact.”
Seething she spits at him, “You act as if I had not pulled you from enough corpses by then to merit reciprocation.”
“You act as if I had inconvenienced you. By all means, let me die the next time it happens.”
“It shouldn’t happen at all! You are Ose.” She manhandles him away from the window so he won’t be able to avoid her eyes that way. He just sighs and turns to make for the foyer. “Do you have any idea what your name used to mean to the rest of us? You crawled out of hell. You lived among them with a different face every night, you left no bodies in your wake, and no man could ever tell he hadn’t been quite himself in the time that you kept him for a disguise.”
He stops to gather his coat and makes a show of getting his arms into it.
“The world changes every day, Barbas.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she mutters bitterly. “The old ruins still stand; the old languages still carry music for those with the skill to speak them. The world is the same place it has always been; you’ve changed.”
“Do you think you haven’t?”
“I know what I am, just like I know that this life here is temporary; that all life is temporary.” She raises a hand when he goes to speak. “And for us, death, too, is temporary.”
“A perfect cycle of life and death,” he muses with a false smile. “How very droll.”
“Don’t try to talk circles around me, Hannibal.” And he so clearly is just a man with his earthly cravings and persistent immaturity. “This Will Graham, if he is the same one you knew in Tenochtitlan, there is no claiming him for yourself in this lifetime. You had your chance, you were cheated, and life continued as it always will.” Trying to be gentle with him, for whatever purpose that will serve, she adds, “He bestowed life upon you that wasn’t his to give and certainly wasn’t yours to take.”
“He can give me everything now; whatever he has left.”
There’s no reasoning with him. She hadn’t expected he would listen anyway, but it’s disheartening all the same that he proves her right. Bedelia has not lived a thousand years on this earth to seek death out via increasingly violent, creative means. She had not pulled the charred remains of his old corpse in Valais from the pile of the dead so that he might seek it either.
She didn’t see it then. She hadn’t wanted to.
When he leaves she stands by the window for a spell, dreaming with her eyes on the few wintry clouds speckling the sky. He never liked to tell her anything about his past lives from before they met. Sometimes, if they had found themselves contained within a terrestrial purgatory, he would slip and mention paradise as he knew it. He would mention the name she had hated from the first revelation.
Ose, a former president of hell and ruler of legions, had fallen when the angel was sent down—more than half a century before the latter had truly been cast down. It was a disgrace, but no one had ever known of it. There had been talk of an angel, also nameless in the beginning, and mentions of a star-crossed union. There were rumors it had been God-ordained, but to speak of it was blasphemy whether one wore wings or whether he wore a face of smoke and ash beneath the one of flesh and melanin.
It’s absurd that she should be curious, but the mystery of this romance, however legitimately Hannibal ever desired the fallen one, has gnawed at her for centuries.
She takes out her tablet and goes digging through Lounds’ blog and the Times-Picayune. There is still no photo to lend a face to the name, but the name in question has been supplied anew. More information about the man’s involvement in the case had since come to light; the injury he sustained protecting a self-proclaimed murderer, his withering condition in the hospital, and his active role as Special Investigator in the case. She finds herself frowning at the phrase withering condition.
If he had in fact touched ground only a short time ago, then it shouldn’t tax him to heal at an elevated rate.
That explains the previous redactions.
A non-human hounded by a human media storm needs to act as human as possible. Hannibal must be ripping his hair out at the irony. Jack Crawford must be mad as hell. Bedelia assumes he must know what Will is; how else would he have snatched him up so quickly for his cause unless he and his team had been the ones to discover him?
She wishes she could have seen it; the traditional way to refer to the lightning storms that wrought disgraced angels was ḫa-lam Supad: the Shepherd is lost.
It had always been more of a celebratory exclamation than an actual title. Later, the event became known only as Ḫa-lam, and “ḫa-lam” itself became a derogatory word among their kind; among the angels and the demons alike.
In the old days there would be a hunt in the wake of Ḫa-lam, an expedition to see who would claim the abandoned Child’s head. There was great sport in it. Any time one of them fell anywhere Hannibal was the first to go running, the first to inquire as to the name or names. He would lose himself in the chase and he would venture after the prize with so much vitality that she had been surprised to discover he had it in him after decades of listless inactivity.
She hadn’t seen it because she hadn’t wanted to see it.
Hannibal doesn’t speak to her again until a few days later when something new has graced the likes of TattleCrime.com. She goes to look anyway, though she is still annoyed with him and would like nothing more than to wring the neck of the man called Will Graham just to be done with it all.
There are a few things running through her mind as she scans the latest update on Freddie Lounds’ blog. The first thought she really has is that quite a few people have already got their hooks in Will Graham, tugging him a number of ways for their own selfish—and sometimes less so—devices. Hannibal hasn’t even had the pleasure of seeing him in the flesh yet, and he already has his claws firmly implanted in the man’s heart.
But there are claws in Hannibal’s heart, too, in whatever soft part of him exists that allows him to hunger for things he should not be capable of desiring. They deserve each other; the damned one and the rejected one. After all, they are both only men anymore.
The article presents a few more facts transferred over from the Times-Picayune and a few completely new theories as to the man’s true identity and the nature of his work with Jack Crawford. It’s all hilarious, paranoid conjecture, of course. The truth is too fantastic to print; she doubts Freddie Lounds has any idea.
There is one facet of the article that does spark her interest at the bottom of the page: a photograph of a man lying in a hospital bed with oxygen tubing stuck to his face. His eyes are closed, and he looks, for all intents and purposes, to be in a withering condition. She can’t say just by looking how much of it is fabricated and how much of it is real. She sends Hannibal a text asking if the man is the same one he knew in Mexico. He tells her it is, so she calls him.
“We should leave, before we are detected.”
“I have no intention of leaving.”
She grits her teeth. “What are you going to do then?”
“Go about my business, as usual.”
It’s in his voice, the excited beating of his body’s heart; the almost breathless declaration teasing of an ancient chase restarting after too long of a wait. She can hear that he will not be convinced of changing his course.
“I caught him once,” he says calmly.
“He was the one to catch you, Hannibal.” She shakes her head. “You were possessed of him from the moment he was snatched from you.”
“No one else has taken possession of me since.”
She thinks if she were the type to be sentimental that statement would sting, but she had only ever revived him in the past out of some misplaced sense of idolatry. He had been so great once, but perhaps in all the time that she had walked alongside him, over seas and deserts and cities, he hadn’t been who she thought he was.
He says, through the fog of memories, “If you wish to leave, you may.”
She sighs, the decision made already. They are quiet for a few seconds more until he speaks again.
“I will send you off then.”
“Come early for your appointment this week. There is a patient I have who will fill the necessary role.”
He agrees. How the afternoon proceeds is entirely up to her then. Bedelia rearranges her schedule so that Hannibal will be her final patient and purchases a plane ticket for the same day. She sits down with her penultimate patient nearly a week later. Her senses are attuned to every shift in the air, alerting to Hannibal’s presence the exact moment his car pulls up in the parking lot.
“Have you spoken to your sister since the incident, Isaac?”
He fidgets in his seat, tugging on his sleeve and keeping his eyes focused out the window. Isaac’s meetings with her are court mandated. Well in his thirties now, his childhood had been particularly traumatic. After months of coaxing and waiting him out he finally confessed to the charges of which he’d been accused. The complete story of his life is a mess of guilt, abused trust, and confused allegiances. His death would be a mercy. She had suspected he wanted to do harm to her several times. Given his history it’s quite impressive he has demonstrated so much restraint thus far.
She feels only a slight tug of guilt for tipping the scales against him the way she plans on doing as soon as he buckles under the pressure of her gaze and returns her eyes. When he does he will see her true face.
“Ally doesn’t…she doesn’t want anything to do with me…after…” He scrubs a hand across his eyes and then down one side of his face. His voice quavers. “After I…”
“After you nearly beat her fiancé to death with a crowbar,” she fills in for him.
He shouts at his feet, “He was hurting her! I know he was hurting her.”
“She told the police and the judge in your case that you made it all up, Isaac; she posited that you were obsessed with her.”
His eyes fly up to hers, the emotions changing rapidly from hateful rage to frightened confusion to outright terror.
“What’s…what’s wrong with your…” He scrambles out of his chair and backs away toward the window. “Dr. Du Maurier, your face…”
She stands and approaches him, careful not to advance too quickly.
“He was in a coma for three years because of what you did to him, Isaac.”
“I…no, he…He was bad, I had to…”
He lurches toward her desk for a weapon but only succeeds in knocking half the things on top of it to the floor. He whirls around on her, and desperate, throws himself at her, hands tight and bruising around her throat.
“You’re not going to kill me,” he screams, spitting on her as they crash into a bookcase and crash into a heap on the floor. She struggles only because the consciousness beneath hers is of a wild survival instinct and will not remain still in the face of death. “You’re not going to do it; I won’t let you!”
The door to the office opens, and her face flickers from demonic shadow to the strangled red of a human gasping for breath, for life. She can already feel the edges coming back where they had rounded from years of gentle submission. It will be easier to leave now, with the violence and the terrified screaming reminding her so readily of home.
Hannibal is crouched over Isaac on the floor. He resembles the leopard stalking toward its prey, shoulders working beneath his jacket and elbows bent with whatever it is he’s doing. She thinks it’s fitting that the last time she sees him will be like this; Ose as the leopard, Ose as the creature of hell that he is.
Isaac gurgles and convulses from his spot on the floor, but he does not try to stand or flee. He doesn’t speak or scream. She suspects he can’t.
Hannibal folds the man’s jerking arm across his chest, fingers clenching sporadically around the bloody handle of a pair of stainless steel scissors. With one gloved hand over Isaac’s wrist and one over his elbow, he holds the point over Isaac’s jugular vein and waits for a spasm powerful enough to push the scissors through his skin. Isaac suffocates before that can happen.
Hannibal rises and comes to crouch by her side.
“Are you still here,” he teases, turning her face one way and then the other in his hand. The gloves are dry. She anticipated as much.
“I wanted to see you in action again, for old times’ sake.”
“That would imply that we have had good times together.”
“It wasn’t all fire and brimstone, was it,” she murmurs, surprising both of them. Her lips twitch up and so do his. “If you require that I return, for any reason,” she intones, searching his eyes, “kindly go to hell.”
He laughs. A promise exists somewhere within the sound of it.
“Goodbye, Barbas.”
“Auf Wiedersehen, Ose.”
She closes her eyes, his hand coming to rest over her forehead. They’ve done this for each other before. There hadn’t always been time, as with the case of the great quake in Yokohama or several instances of the occasional execution for accused witchcraft, necromancy, lycanthropy, or cannibalism. It’s nicer when it happens this way, of course; it’s pleasant, like falling asleep.
When she’s out, she lingers in the room a while to watch Hannibal manage the woman left behind in a catatonic state. She watches him take his fingers across her forehead, gloves now removed. He brushes her ruffled hair out of her eyes.
“I’m sorry. I heard the noise from outside. I had to be sure you were all right. Can you hear me? Dr. Du Maurier?”
“Hannibal,” the human woman murmurs in the voice that has been Barbas’ for so long. “Hannibal, what…Oh, God, Isaac,” she breathes, sitting up abruptly and looking immediately to the lifeless body of Isaac Miggs with something like distraught panic. “I need…we have to call the police, Hannibal.”
Barbas waits a moment longer until Hannibal raises his eyes to the corner of the room where she stands veiled from Bedelia Du Maurier’s eyes but not from Hannibal’s, from Ose’s. He nods, almost imperceptibly, and helps Bedelia to her feet as Barbas fades and decompresses herself into something small and inconsequential, a fly. She goes out the window when Hannibal opens it under the pretense of letting air into the room that has already begun to stink of death.
As she’s stretching her wings into those of a butterfly and preparing to take off, he whispers, “You know where to find me, sister.”
And she tells him, in that capacity they have constructed that allows them to speak to each other without words or gestures but with intentions and truth, Get busy living, brother.
He laughs softly, and she flutters away, catching the cold wind as it blows and taking on the shapes of a sparrow and then a Black Kite. It takes a few hours in the air and a meal of three mice, but she makes it to the sanitarium where she knows a certain doctor works. She worms her way through the building’s defenses and overtakes him easily; all it really takes is one weak spot. She goes in through his ear, before he can do anything about it.
Maybe it’s a testament to the way Frederick Chilton runs this place that no one questions him when he walks right out the front door. Barbas is quite entertained. She laughs when she gets out to the parking lot and clicks the unlock button on his keys. She follows the sound of the horn and takes the car to the airport.
She would reprimand Ose for a move as reckless as this, but she had planned her entrance and exit strategies both. The flight is nearly six hours long. Night has fallen by the time the plane lands in New Orleans.
Chilton’s body is so very perfect for short term possession. He kicks around a little in his confusion, but he relinquishes his fight early on, prepared to settle in for the long haul. She admires the type of resignation she gets from him, that it isn’t out of fear or weakness that he doesn’t struggle. He’s curled up beneath the biting static of her presence in and around his mind trying to understand it.
His dangerous inclination for discovery will get him eviscerated one day. It is the downfall of all those who expose what does not belong to them that they will be turned inside out when the Judgment day comes. She wonders about Freddie Lounds as she’s depositing his body into a motel.
Chilton stays asleep, obedience called by the strings she keeps tied around his subconscious. While he worked as a convenient enough means of travel, he will not be welcomed readily into Will Graham’s room.
Barbas works her way through the streets, running through the shadows and the trodden slush first as an alley cat and then as a dog and then as a drunk hobbling on and off the sidewalk. She pitches over to one side into the street when headlights flash behind her. The beleaguered body tumbles over the hood of the car, cracks the windshield, and nosedives into the road. The car speeds away, but a rattled witness calls an ambulance.
The ambulance takes her to Interim LSU.
She waits out the ride to the hospital and waits out the initial flurry of hands and IVs and monitor readings. The first nurse she gets alone, much later into the night if not morning already, is younger and blonde just like Bedelia Du Maurier.
The drunkard passed out on the uncomfortable cot shivers and moans quietly when she leaves him. His broken ribs and collar bone sting him in her absence.
The nurse, nametag helpfully reading Saskia, fights like hell to get Barbas out. She would expect that kind of response here in the Crescent City, though she discovers straight away that the woman’s vigorous attempts at emancipation were crafted farther East in the likes of rural New York. She enjoys that a bit more, really; the influx of memories learning to drive a tractor the same year she brought home her first boyfriend, memories of the woman’s parents, memories of leaving them behind to go to medical school and become a doctor.
“I love a girl with a fighting spirit,” she murmurs to herself as she walks out from behind the curtain and makes for the nurse’s station in the atrium of the—she looks—third floor.
She types in the name Will Graham and scans the room number and the scheduled rounds each nurse is to make up to the room, probably still guarded by at least a preliminary detail if not Jack Crawford himself. A man named Bartholomew has the last slot tonight. Barbas takes the cell phone from her pocket and looks for a Bartholomew in the woman’s contacts. She finds one Barry and opens a blank text message.
Can you take Verger tonight? Saskia was scheduled to visit him at the same time Barry is supposed to visit Will Graham. He always says the most bizarre stuff to me.
There are memories of that, too: Mason Verger’s head wrapped in cloth bandages and his arm broken in three places on the fifth floor, his hulking sister looking on in silent hatred, and Mason Verger telling Saskia in a rasping whisper, My sister used to look just like you.
She hadn’t told Barry or anyone that it was happening. Barbas takes personal offense to the secret, to the power it enables Mason Verger to have over her.
Barry texts her back, perhaps having some idea of what she means, Yeah, can you take Graham then?
Sure.
As she’s making her way to the elevator he sends her another text: I can talk to Archambault about assigning him someone else if he makes you uncomfortable.
Barbas answers the way Saskia would, though it irritates her to do so: I can take care of it myself, Barry. I just don’t feel like dealing with him tonight.
She steps out of the elevator and adds, But thank you.
I live to serve.
There are actually no guards waiting outside Will Graham’s room. There is one person at his bedside sleeping with her arms folded on the thin mattress and another with his head resting against the wall in a chair nearest to the door. She makes quick work of the task at hand, checking and marking his progress. The man is not withering; rather he’s robust with a steady pulse and no lesions anywhere but for a healed over scar at the center of his chest. He doesn’t stir when she checks him, accustomed to this type of necessary, clinical touch and not expecting foul play.
His morphine drip is also quite high, which suggests he is either in a great deal of pain, or he is being given a placebo drug in place of morphine so that he will only have the appearance of being in tremendous physical pain. It’s quite the extended charade, but it’s perfectly executed. Finished, she takes the phone from her pocket again and takes a clear snapshot of him from the foot of the bed where his chart hangs unassumingly.
“Is it standard protocol to take pictures of your patients?”
She snaps one more photo when he opens his eyes, blue-green like a murky sea. The photo stills and preserves in the phones memory before his expression can change from bleary bewilderment to stunned panic.
He is a mouse looking up at a grinning feline, after all. He knows his place.
“Ḫa-lam,” he whispers, eyes wide and flicking from her face to the woman sleeping at his side.
Barbas whispers back, “Hush now.” She slips her hand into her pocket for the scalpel she nicked from one of the surgical trays downstairs and raises it to Saskia’s neck. “Don’t you move, Destroyer.”
His jaw is set tight but in an emotion less like fear and more like concern. He thinks she’s come to slaughter him in the name of Ḫa-lam. In light of tradition, he can’t figure out why she would threaten the life of her host rather than just kill him and be done with it.
Voice lighter than the rustle of the blanket falling away as he sits up, she asks, “Why were you cast out?”
“I…” He frowns, eyebrows furrowing. Something falls over his face, a kind of shadow she would fear if he hadn’t been reduced to a measly human man. “I disobeyed orders.”
“That’s always the reason you give,” she says, meaning angels when she says you. He flinches at the implication; flinches because she’s just admitted to killing others like him for sport. “Give me a better reason.”
“I f-fell for the wrong…person,” he confesses with clenched teeth and flared nostrils as if admitting it hurts him. Maybe it does. He hisses, “Is that what you want to hear?”
The dark-haired woman stirs at his tone but doesn’t wake. He gives her a desperate glance.
“Will you please put that away,” he mumbles, eyes locked on the scalpel in her hands. “We both know you could kill her without the use of an extraneous weapon.”
She tucks the scalpel back into her pocket and comes around to the side of his bed not occupied by a visitor.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Barbas,” he says.
The old name carries a strange ring when it isn’t said by Ose, by any of the forms he manipulates. There is always a hint of his voice regardless of whose body he uses. Mal’ak ha-mashḥit is a stranger, but she knows him; has a detailed history of him as seen through Ose’s eyes; has a soft kind of affection interspersed with scornful enmity for the creature of sunlight and intuition.
She leans in closer and breathes, “Ose lives.”
Several quaint emotions dance over his features: shock, confusion, denial, hope, and fear. He looks angry in the next instant and grits out, “Liar.”
She hums, feigning displeasure at the name she wears over her heart like a badge of honor. “I would never,” she murmurs, taking out the phone in her pocket again. “Smile for your sweetheart, Will Graham.”
The first photo has his eyes trained on her, rage clearly written into his features. The second finds him looking wonderingly into the camera. While it isn’t anything so outright as a smile, she figures it’s the best she’s going to get for her troubles. She stands and makes for the door, sending the photos she has snapped to Chilton’s phone and deleting both the photos and the text messages after the fact.
“He becomes like a child at the very thought of you,” she muses with her fingers slipping around the door handle. “He’ll be ecstatic to see the sentiment returned.”
“Wait.” He starts to fold the blanket back but stops when he sees her patting the pocket where the scalpel rests. “How…” He falters for a moment before steeling himself. “Where can I find him?”
“Not so fast, dumu Aĝ.”
Child of Heaven.
He winces at the title he can’t claim anymore.
“Please,” he starts to say, but she raises her hand to stop him.
“Have faith that he will find you.” It is a warning and a threat, but she can see that he takes it for a promise. “You remember faith, don’t you?”
He is silent, eyes mournful as he watches her go. As soon as she is out the door she walks Saskia down the ground floor, rids herself of the scalpel at hand, and trades bodies with someone in the waiting room complaining of a sprained ankle. She watches Saskia blink and frown to herself as she goes, making sure she will not cause problems for either of them.
She walks outside, the brisk winter night lovely and cool, even with the minor sting of the injured ankle. Once she is close enough to the motel, she ditches the host in favor of entering the opened bathroom window in the guise of a bird.
Chilton is fast asleep where she left him, sprawled across the bottom half of the bed with his shoes and jacket still on. The room key hangs from between his fingers. She takes the phone from his pocket once their bodies are one and the same again and sends the photos to Hannibal. Immediately after they go through she texts him, I didn’t harm a hair on his head.
Hannibal calls the number he no doubt recognizes and is understandably outraged.
“What in the hell were you thinking going after him?”
“Listen to you,” she chides him in Chilton’s fond, musical sort of drawl. “I said I didn’t harm him.”
Calmly but with his temper still flaring beneath, he asks, “Were you discovered?”
“Oh, yes, but not as your darling drinking buddy, Dr. Chilton, no.” Vaguely, a residual pride wells in her chest; she rolls her eyes. “I’m more careful than that, Hannibal; don’t you know me by now?”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. She suspects he’s taken to scrolling through the stolen photos of Will Graham. She smirks at his predictability.
“I mean to bring Frederick home in the morning. You may pick him up at the airport if you wish; fabricate a story he will believe about some impromptu trip or other. I will be long gone by then.”
He remains silent, thoughtful in the spaces between the faint static ruffling over their connection. His voice is quiet when he voices his question: “What did you say to him?”
“I told him you were alive.” She pauses in case he goes to protest, but he does not. “I asked him why he was cast out.”
More silence.
“He said, and I quote, my sweet, foolish Ose: I fell for the wrong person.”
Hannibal clears his throat after a moment of stunned quiet. He says, “What time at the airport tomorrow?”
“Be there at noon.”
She feels him nodding through the phone.
“Barbas,” he says.
“You’re welcome, Ose.”
She disconnects the call and sets the alarm for the following morning. Frederick Chilton rests beneath her influence, struggling to remember even as his mind washes clean in the night.