Chapter Text
Pain in his ear, creeps down the back of his neck like a degenerative disease freezing up his blood in his veins and shutting his body down. Pain; there's a lot of pain, at first.
It gets warmer, hot, almost.
Webs close in tightly around him, stifling him, curdling his presence of mind. The suggestion is a wave; starts as little more than mist and swamps him, knocks him off his feet, and holds him under.
It whispers his name in a tone warm like the filmy taste of honey coating his palate. It calls him to sleep and be peaceful, and when he struggles against it, the onslaught hits him harder, heavier, and intense in a way that gets under his skin and pulls inward and keeps him swaddled within himself. She twists in him like nausea or happiness or disease or fear.
Her name is a word taken from a language he swears he knows that means you will submit. Her voice is the change of seasons carried on the winds whispering, Submit to me. Her hands sink into his and steal his purpose and his rhythms. His body is her instrument, and the song she uses him to play croons, You’re my darling puppet, Frederick. See how prettily you dance.
He does dance, but his memory of the steps slides away from him. She smiles with his mouth and promises not to stay.
Something about her is masculine. Something about her is feminine. The same leap one makes when detecting the smell of smoke in another’s hair, clothes, fingers; the pungency exclaiming carcinogens. The trace she leaves in him exclaims transcendence of observable gender, observable identity, observable presence, existence, pathology, madness, melancholy, being, being, being…
Through the darkness he thinks he sees a face, first angry and then helpless, wondering. He sees the face, the eyes, the dark curls spilling over a pale, sweating forehead. He thinks to love the face, but she hates it.
She hates it, she hates it, she hates it…
Rest, Frederick, I’ll be gone soon.
Chilton is losing his mind.
There’s another voice in his ear, transformed. It’s familiar almost, like seeing a portrait of himself with his silhouette taken out and only the colors remaining, meshing and running together, turning him into a puddle of unshackled saturation and hue. The second voice leaves, and he fights the way he did when he noticed her initial attack on him. It’s no use. She will always be stronger than him.
There’s roaring in his ears, sends his stomach crashing like nerves. He shivers, and the cleansing violence of it frees something locked inside of him. He worries. Before he can stand to open his eyes to the light burning straight into his brain like a hot metal poker, he worries that it’s always been there. He’s afraid it’s always existed in the back of his mind, at the very bottom of his heart, burbling and groaning beneath the surface, just waiting for him to succumb to it.
You will submit. Submit to me.
You’re my darling puppet, Frederick. See how prettily you dance.
“Frederick,” someone calls him from…probably his right.
He looks, squinting and mumbling gibberish slanted at the end like a question. The voice calls him again from farther away.
Your other right, he reprimands himself as he’s twisting around stiffly in his seat.
He is sitting. He feels with his hands to confirm, and he is. He stamps slightly with his feet, and he is, solid ground, shoes, tile, and people talking and laughing all around him but not at him. Chilton blinks, swipes leadenly at his face.
Hannibal approaches him through the noise, head cocked to one side and an entertained expression on his face. Chilton has the presence of mind to frown, though his words aren’t quite as forthcoming.
“You look worse for wear,” Hannibal declares in that casually graceful way of his.
Chilton yearns to say something clever and vaguely playful, but his head is pounding. Hannibal crouches before him, half a step to Chilton’s right, and watches him with a flicker of amusement sprinkled across his impassive face. The sun streaming in through the huge windows opposite them throws darkness over the natural shadows under his brow bone, his cheeks, and mouth. There’s enough sunlight in the room that Chilton can see him anyway, but he wants to say something about the light, wants to say something about duality or the Apollonian and the Dionysian, wants to crack a joke because Hannibal stares at him, but nothing comes.
Hannibal saves him from the silence.
“You’re home, Frederick.” They look around, and Hannibal amends, “You’re in an airport about fifteen minutes from home.”
“How’d I…” He swallows, shakes his head. “Jesus, was I mugged getting off the plane?”
“You may be jetlagged,” Hannibal concedes. “Perhaps you were drinking last night.”
“Are you suggesting I have a hangover?” It’s the worst kind of defense, and really, Chilton can hear what he sounds like. If he remembered anything at all from yesterday, he might at least have a point of reference, but he’s got zilch to work with. Hannibal’s still looking at him, so Chilton tries to laugh it off, self-deprecatingly. “Where’d I go? Vegas? I didn’t get married, did I?”
Hannibal, bless him, smiles and chuckles along with him, companionably. Warmly he says, “You went to New Orleans.”
“Why did I go there?” Chilton smacks his lips delicately and attempts to sit up straighter in his seat. He’s been slouching and zoning out since Hannibal summoned him out of his dreams, which he’s fighting now to remember. He clears his throat, hands supporting him on the smooth armrests of the chair. Gruffly he tacks on, “Mardi Gras’ not for another three months.”
“You only called me last night to ask if I could retrieve you from the airport. I didn’t know you left Baltimore before we spoke on the phone.”
“Well,” Chilton replies dryly, not knowing where to go with that information. “Did I tell you what at least inspired me to go?”
Easily, Hannibal answers, “I believe you were quite fascinated with the case Jack Crawford was sent to investigate.”
“La Croix Tueur,” Chilton names both the case and the killer, in custody, the last he read. He revises, “Charlotte Tasse and Matthew Bennett, according to the papers.”
“There was a consultant I’m sure you’ve also read about, wounded in the line of duty.”
“Yes.”
Chilton nods and rouses himself to try standing when Hannibal does. He’s not so wobbly in a physical sense as he is dizzy and fraught with a migraine. Keeping upright is not the problem; keeping gravity from seducing him too far in any one direction is the issue. For a few moments he just stands stock still, orienting himself. Hannibal keeps his hands in his pockets, trusting Chilton, apparently, not to need his steadying hands. He looks relaxed and focused, still standing on the wrong side of the noontime sun.
Stalling for time, Chilton asks, “What was his name?”
“Will Graham,” Hannibal supplies after a beat.
“Unfortunate bit of business to get caught up in a firefight like that; what kind of cards did the guy have to draw to end up in cahoots with Jack Crawford and get himself shot his first week on the job?”
“It was only his first week,” Hannibal replies stoically, analytically. “He caught the killer for them. Are you uncurious as to how he did it?”
“Oh, I’m very curious,” Chilton admits, comfortable in his brazenness around someone who accepts and often encourages it. He shrugs as part of his response. “I must be; I did go to New Orleans.”
Nonchalance fits Hannibal like string music fits a masquerade ball, faintly maudlin but ever impressive to stand still beside and just observe. He moves out of Chilton’s way when he test a small step and then another. Chilton feels and detects, with no small amount of irritation, that he must look so oafishly beleaguered fumbling and hobbling beside the light- and sure-footed Hannibal Lecter.
He wonders if Hannibal’s dance partners ever experience that daunting sense of dissatisfaction trying to keep up with him. Never mind people who partner with him in any other sort of way.
It occurs to Chilton that he’s suffering from an inferiority complex as a result of jetlagged drunkenness and that he needs to stop it before he goes looking for a ruler or some measuring tape. Really, he must have fallen asleep and woken up in a bottle of Jack.
“Perhaps you wished to throw in your hat for consideration.”
Before he understands to what Hannibal is alluding he mumbles, “What hat? Oh, for what, I mean; consideration for what?”
“Alana Bloom has been screening therapists for the man, Will Graham.”
“Oh, has she?” His interest blossoms like dye tinting clear water. “I suppose there’s a rather large pool to sort through.”
He means to suggest that Hannibal must be up for consideration; he must be if Chilton is.
“Really, Hannibal, the woman adores you. Do you think the rest of us could even compete?”
Hannibal glows when he hears the first half of what Chilton says to him. The sight makes Chilton beam a little in response. The funny, bright glint in his eyes and the minute tug at the corner of his lips is contagious, apparently.
“Dr. Bloom’s relationship with me has always been purely professional. She is a woman of integrity.”
“Well, that’s all good and fine,” Chilton begins, drawling around his vowels and raising his eyebrows at Hannibal once they really get to walking. Hannibal’s always been like a balm for Chilton, restorative where a great majority of people tend to condescend and insinuating where others tend to declare brashly. “I’ve got to say, though, Hannibal, if the only thing keeping you is integrity, you’re a better man than most.”
Again Hannibal smiles, though maybe it’s just a touch hollow where it read as much fuller to Chilton just a few minutes ago. He makes a note not to joke about Alana Bloom again in case there’s a saucy, sentimental story to be delivered in the near future.
When they get out into the parking lot Chilton breathes and sighs and probably puts both hands on his face and in his hair. Some vague oppression that had haunted him, had sat like tightly coiled energy in the pit of his stomach, lifts off him at last. His steps fall more easily, and his hands have a better idea of what to do than dangle indecisively, confusedly at his sides. Hannibal awards him with an entertained smile for his frolicking, and Chilton is not ashamed in the slightest to consent to the word.
“Were you interested in Will Graham? Since it looks like he’ll be headed your way when Jack Crawford brings him back, I mean.”
A few seconds pass, and Hannibal pretends to consider it, pretends to look conflicted as if the question begged something much more comprehensive than a simple yes or no. Finally Hannibal nods once, roots around intentionally in his pocket for his car keys, and aims as he clicks. The gesture and the subsequent toggling of the car horn triggers some distant memory rattling around in his brain.
He chases after it like a boy chasing fireflies in the darkness, but it eludes him. He only hears some eerie whisper urging him to do something. The words are disjointed fragments, recognizable but disfigured. He wants to give his permission. He wants to surrender.
“More interesting than Will Graham’s involvement with the FBI is how he came to be discovered by Jack Crawford in the first place,” Hannibal’s voice sails through Chilton’s inner monologue.
He’s buckling into Hannibal’s car and looking out through the windshield. It’s a strange oddity, the gaps in time.
“How do any two people meet?” Chilton muses back, feigning disinterest to hide his confusion.
“Perhaps it was through the grace of God,” Hannibal jokes, smiling as the engine turns over. “Perhaps he was summoned through the works of some powerful magic beyond our understanding.”
“Perhaps he walked into the police station and volunteered his hands for the cause,” Chilton offers cheekily.
“We may never know.”
It might just be that Hannibal quipping with him through his mask of a straight face calms Chilton or maybe it’s something to do with his brain chemistry finally evening out, but he sinks back into the seat and lets Hannibal drive without pushing too hard against his freely given humor. It feels tacky to revel too much; the thought just makes him uneasy where usually it only riles him further.
After some more driving has happened and Chilton has succeeded in maintaining the mutual silence, Hannibal asks, “Are you hungry?”
“Famished,” he replies on instinct.
Hannibal takes a different exit off the freeway and steers them toward his home, taking streets Chilton recognizes and can name going off sight alone. He’s asking if Chilton likes prosciutto, and Chilton says something to the effect of liking anything Hannibal cooks. A ghost of a smile sits on Hannibal’s lips the remainder of the rider, and they don’t speak and the radio doesn’t interrupt the quiet.
“Do you ever feel like you’ve been hacked?”
“Hacked?”
Hannibal looks over his shoulder at Chilton, does something interesting and precise with the hand holding the spatula that causes the pan to make a great sizzling sound. Chilton looks around at the pristine, black-and-white kitchen, forgetting if he blacked out again or if he just hadn’t been paying attention. For a few long seconds he wonders what the difference could be.
“It’s the most bizarre thing. I swear I’ve come off something…encumbering.” Chilton is unsure, and he sounds it. Hannibal looks concerned but prepared to hear him out. He removes a thin, burn-red sheet of prosciutto from the pan and lays it gingerly over a toasted piece of focaccia. When he glances back at Chilton before scorching something else in the pan that makes the whole room smell of salt and vinegar, Chilton continues, “I can’t remember a single thing I did in New Orleans. I’m half-inclined to believe I didn’t go, but the crumpled plane ticket in my coat pocket says I very much did go.”
Gravely, Hannibal asks, “Are you currently taking any medications, Frederick?”
“I…No,” he exclaims, a touch too defensively. He dials back. “No, I’m not.”
“I cannot account for what you may have done or seen in Louisiana, but it may just be the case that a person or persons interfered with you.”
“Well, I’m not…At least I don’t feel like someone did anything to me. I was a little groggy waking up, but I’d notice by now if something was wrong and I feel perfectly fine.”
It’s a lie, and he’s sure Hannibal hears that it is.
“Then in that case, believe that you are perfectly fine,” Hannibal says in a mild, agreeable tone.
He switches off the fires on the stove and collects two plates loaded with Roma eggs served on thick bread slices. Chilton rises and lets Hannibal herd him into the dining room. While he sits, Hannibal explains the etymology behind the word prosciutto: throws around words like exsuctus and exsugere.
“These essentially suggest a sucking out of moisture or vitality,” Hannibal announces, sweeping into the room with a bottle of Crémant and two glasses. Chilton smirks as Hannibal pours. Softly, as if he were sharing a great and terrible secret, Hannibal recites, twisting the bottle and pulling away from Chilton’s glass to pour into his own, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
Chilton hums and asks, “What are its lowest terms, I wonder?”
“Whatever it is that waits for us on the other side of that Spartan existence.”
Hannibal seats himself and gestures for Chilton to begin. He tastes the Parmesan adorning the topmost part of the sandwich in between the egg and the slice of warm, toasted bread. It’s a nice culmination of flavors, and it pairs excellently with the bubbly, subtlety of the champagne.
Chilton makes little circling motions with his glass, not really swishing but just experimenting with the ways the light reflects and sometimes absorbs, terrifyingly, into the trap of lazy middle-of-the-day alcohol.
“Are we celebrating?”
“Safe returns home are always worthy of celebration,” Hannibal agrees, raising his glass to Chilton’s, which has wilted slightly in his grasp. “Are you certain you feel all right?”
“Oh, yes,” Chilton replies emptily. “I’m perfectly all right.”
“Are you worried something untoward could have happened in the time you cannot account for?”
Hedging, he says, “An ungovernable human being is an ungovernable danger in our line of work, is he not?”
“If his inclinations while he is unaware of his actions tend toward danger, yes, he is.” Hannibal tilts his head a fraction to the left, and it is the only sign he gives that he is invested in the conversation. “Are you dangerous, Frederick?”
Laughing weakly, he says, “Are you?”
“I suppose if I had to be,” Hannibal murmurs and takes a sip of the Crémant.
“That is a very wholesome, standard answer.” Chilton nods generously, tearing into the last half of the Roma eggs on his plate. “I’d expect nothing less from a man so concerned with integrity.”
It isn’t said to pry or rib or insult. Chilton just says it, tapping into older pieces of their conversation while his mind wanders, trying to retrieve pieces he lost in Louisiana. He doesn’t think anything of his words except Hannibal’s expression darkens and closes off in a way that unnerves him.
A very ancient, reptilian part of his brain warns him to be afraid, but he shakes that off. It’s the sensible thing to do. It’s not like Hannibal will leap across the table and try to do him harm.
I didn’t harm a hair on his head.
He whips around in his chair, searching for a voice that’s a blend of his own and something deeper and more complex than sound or memory can provide. It burns in his mind like an undertone synthesizing a song from his childhood and changing its entire meaning through that one shift in the notes.
Listen to you.
“Frederick?”
I said I didn’t harm him.
“What?”
Hannibal’s mask is gone, and he only looks disconcerted.
“You were talking to yourself.”
“Was I? Oh.”
They watch each other for a moment, and Chilton has to ask, so he does: “What did I say?”
Hannibal tells him, and he doesn’t skip a single word. There’s some tension in Hannibal’s jaw, a kind of agitated, unconscious tick coming and then going and then coming again. Chilton apologizes. Hannibal waves him off.
“You should sleep once you are home,” Hannibal tells him in a small voice. “Sleep and stay hydrated.”
“Of course,” Chilton says. There’s nothing else he can say.
Hannibal drives him home twenty minutes later, and Chilton stares vacantly out the window. He alternates between keeping his eyes closed and trying to trick himself into a hypnotic state watching the trees and the houses whisk by. There’s no effort on Hannibal’s part to make him speak, but Chilton feels that introspection is an ill-fitting suit on him. He tries, once his home springs into sight at the end of the street, to rectify his lackluster mutism.
“When Bloom gives you Will Graham, expect trouble.”
He can’t explain why he says it, but it’s there, tugging at him, pulling him…inward.
I told him you were alive.
He blinks and rubs at his forehead, and Hannibal speaks.
“I find that strife makes a reward sweeter to taste.”
Chilton laughs and presses his fingers gingerly to his eyes. The car creeps to a stop. Hannibal kills the engine.
“Do you think Will Graham will see you as a rival?”
There’s a hand on the back of Chilton’s head, neither clinical nor intimate but some crass middle ground in between. Chilton tries to look, but Hannibal is doing something to him, taking something that doesn’t belong to either of them but that Chilton doesn’t mourn.
“Invite me in, Frederick.”
“What?” He turns, astonished, breaking the connection between his scalp and Hannibal’s fingers. “Why?”
“You’re faint,” Hannibal answers readily. “What good will my supervision do you if I leave as you collapse behind a closed and latched door?”
“I don’t need to be supervised,” he protests, pertly throwing open his door and slamming it shut behind him. Hannibal follows him up in spite of Chilton’s angry glare and steadies him, humiliatingly, when he swoons. He says again, to drive the point home or maybe just to pacify himself, “I don’t need to be supervised.”
“Of course you don’t,” Hannibal grants him, taking Chilton’s keys and unlocking the front door.
Hannibal follows at a safe distance into the foyer and takes Chilton’s jacket before seeing him into the den. He picks it over the bedroom because he is not having Hannibal traipse after him up the stairs in some bizarre show of concern that feels scarily like intimacy but really isn’t at all.
Honestly, Chilton has no illusions about the nature of their relationship.
“You’re not tucking me into bed, Hannibal.” He rolls his eyes and toes off his shoes while Hannibal hovers in the doorway halfway between the kitchen and the front door. Chilton falls into an armchair and sighs. “See, I’m not falling apart,” he notes in an overly simplistic, boorish tone of voice. “I’m going to have a nap.”
Hannibal strides into the room, and all right, he can play it that way, fine. Chilton watches him, some dull brand of defiance stirring up in his chest.
Placidly, he muses, “Has anyone ever told you that you own any room you walk into?”
“I believe I have heard the same said of Walt Whitman.”
“Ah, Walt,” Chilton hums as Hannibal takes a seat on the armchair across from him. He adds, stretching out his legs when he sees that Hannibal means to stay a while longer, “Also called a narcissist and borderline psychotic.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” Hannibal counters.
“No one would have given a damn about Walt if he’d been perfect,” Chilton agrees, sinking into the armchair and humming vaguely. “Perfection is a myth.”
“And yet we all chase it.”
When he cracks open an eye to look, Hannibal is smiling small and only just bringing his eyes to Chilton’s.
“Yes, well, optimism is hard to kill.”
“It coexists alongside hope.”
“It makes its home there.” Chilton shrugs exaggeratedly and then slumps when his shoulders fall. “It roosts.”
Hannibal says something else, soft and indistinct and Chilton misses it. His head swims. Light filters in when his eyes drift open, but he sees nothing. All he has are shadows and scratches of whispers and the stagnating taste of grapes on his tongue.
It calls him to sleep and be peaceful.
He jerks out his sleep, drawing long, ragged breaths. His forehead is cold with sweat. Hannibal is nowhere to be seen, so he heads upstairs to try sleeping in his bed. He’s tired enough; has the exhausted feeling in his limbs and in his neck like whatever sleep he got in Louisiana wasn’t real sleep. His everything aches, and not in any kind of way that suggests he enjoyed doing whatever it was that made his muscles so sore.
Stripped down to a shirt and boxers he twists the blinds closed and crawls under the blankets to cast his exhaustion out of him via bed rest. It doesn’t take long to slip under again, though there’s something there catching and twisting at his dreams, bending the light and moving the furniture around so it’s all unfamiliar and strange.
He sees himself, or rather remembers himself, standing in a darkened room and looking at a phone, but the screen powers down and cracks when he looks at it. The voice pinging around in his ears dies out.
You’re welcome, Ose.
You’re welcome.
You are.
Are you?
He’s left with void and the shrill din of absolute silence, but he clutches the phone in his hand like a life-preserver. He clutches the phone until the screen flickers on and shows him the ghostly impressions of a face. He whispers the words to himself, You’re welcome, Ose. You’re welcome, Ose. You’re welcome, Ose.
He whispers until his body burns and the muttered prayers become screams of agony. A lifetime passes with him screaming when the line finally breaks and the fire recedes. He shoots up in bed, drenched and shaking and swinging with all his might.
Swinging at Hannibal, he discovers a full two minutes after he calms down.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispers hoarsely, mortified at himself. Hannibal presses a perspiring glass of ice water into Chilton’s hands and helps him to drink it in slow, patient draughts. “I thought you’d gone.”
“I did,” Hannibal says, taking the glass from Chilton so he doesn’t drop it. He sets it down on the bedside table and places his cool palm across Chilton’s forehead, and Chilton probably makes a very grateful sound at the change in temperature. “I suspected you might have a fever.”
“Spectacular,” Chilton drawls when Hannibal removes his hand. He accepts the aspirin Hannibal slips into his hand and swallows the pills with water.
Hannibal sits with him as he comes down from his fever-dream and the fever itself. Chilton situates himself on the bed so his back is to the headboard with the blankets bunched up in his lap. He rolls his head around on the wall and decides.
“Could I tell you something impossible, Hannibal?”
“I have no doubt at all of your ability, Frederick.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he says carefully, dropping his chin and giving Hannibal a significant, fever-travel-hangover-addled look. “Could I tell you something impossible without seeming completely mad?”
“Yes,” Hannibal says with certainty and reserved confidence. “Would you like to invoke doctor-patient confidentiality?”
Chilton smiles with his eyes dropping closed, weary.
“Do I have to call you doctor?”
“Yes.”
Hannibal laughs when Chilton opens his eyes, and for a moment he feels lighter than the air itself, just laughing in a little less than his bedclothes with Hannibal—Dr. Lecter—sitting at his bedside in a chair he brought from downstairs.
“Maybe I should put on pants first,” he mumbles, barely self-conscious but concerned with propriety.
“You threw half of those blankets at my head while you slept. Your state of undress is of no consequence to me unless it bothers you.”
“No pants then,” Chilton decides after a prolonged moment of thoughtful consideration. “You’re getting to know me so well today.”
“Circumstances gave me an unfair advantage.”
“Circumstances,” Chilton repeats hollowly. “About that impossibility that I wanted to share with you.”
Hannibal waits, crosses his leg at the knee. His head tilts to one side; hands clasp atop the overlapping knee.
“Well, doctor,” he sighs, rubbing his hand over a tender spot on the back of his head. “There was something in my dream that might have…been a memory from Louisiana—or at least a clue of some sort.”
“What did you see?”
“There was a face,” Chilton says, recalling the image in his mind. It’s faded over now when he tries to summon it up.
Perhaps it was through the grace of God. Perhaps he was summoned through the works of some powerful magic beyond our understanding.
Chilton falters, stitching the contours of that face together where he can but mostly drawing up a shattered mosaic, incomplete and roughly hewn about the edges. He swallows.
“I remember blue eyes, or they could have been green.” He kneads around the bruised section of his scalp. “They could have been at least six different colors, and that’s based only on what the light did to them.”
“You sound enamored,” Hannibal muses, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward slightly.
“It’s the only solid thing I remember about it,” he retorts, not defensive but definitely with a hint of petulance.
“Was it a man or a woman?”
Chilton sits back, eyes the ceiling and accepts the glass of water when Hannibal offers it. He swishes the cold water around his mouth a moment before swallowing, letting the cold seep into his gums and cheeks. He shakes his head.
“I can’t remember.”
“A picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps you will see that face again and be reminded of what you lost.”
Hannibal’s tone isn’t dismissive, but it is final. Chilton raises his hand to keep him from changing the subject.
“There was a name, too.”
He blinks once, settles back into his chair, and crosses his legs again.
“Whose?”
Chilton doesn’t know what an exasperated face looks like, but he’s sure that emotion exactly manifests in his expression because Hannibal tilts his head again and rephrases the question: “What name?”
“Ose.”
A beat skips between them, flutters, really.
“Have you ever heard of this name?”
“Not that I can think of, no.” Chilton watches him for a response, and he gets nothing. “Have you?”
Hannibal sighs silently and says by way of answering, “Ose is a demon rumored to cause insanity. Some legends say he can assume the form of a leopard, and some call him a president of hell.”
Chilton laughs, a nervous, juddering sound. Hannibal doesn’t laugh or smile—why would he, Chilton reasons, he’s in doctor mode—so Chilton asks a semi-serious question.
“Do you know the etymology behind his name?”
“It may be traced to the Latin os, meaning language or mouth; or osor, denoting he that abhors.”
“I dreamed of a demon who causes insanity and whose name means hate,” Chilton deadpans.
Hannibal smirks, and the tiny gesture is so calming, Chilton doesn’t fight the smile quivering onto his own lips.
He mumbles into his hands, “Jesus, what did I get into over there?”
“I’m certain it would have made a very good story.”
“At least this isn’t the first vacation I’ve come back not remembering.”
Hannibal smiles and picks up the emptied glass of water before striding out of the room for a refill. Chilton reaches into the drawer beside his bed for his tablet and navigates onto TattleCrime.com, peruses through the older articles until he finds the one that links back to the Times-Picayune. He takes the glass of water and sets the tablet down in his lap with the website clearly illuminated, still on Freddie Lounds’ blog. Hannibal stares for a moment before reclaiming his seat.
“I’m curious. Do you think the name Ose could be attributed to the face you saw in your dream?”
Chilton sets the water down and clicks through to the Times-Picayune.
“It crossed my mind,” he admits, setting the tablet aside for later, not wanting to be rude.
“But where would it lead,” Hannibal states plainly, a rhetorical question.
Chilton doesn’t have any kind of answer anyway.
“If I had gone to meet Will Graham, Jack Crawford would have known about it,” Chilton holds his index finger down. “I would have a visitor’s pass from the hospital he’s staying in—” he holds his second finger down. “More importantly, I would have received a very angry voicemail from one Alana Bloom, and I did not get one of those.”
He looks down at his three fingers and releases them, starting in on his other hand.
“The plane ticket in my pocket says I was in New Orleans last night. You received a call from me asking to pick me up at the airport at such and such a time. All I can remember about that time is troubling and makes me question my sanity, which is, apparently, this demon Ose’s specialty.”
Hannibal chuckles, a small thing, an offering of comfort gladly taken.
“We are, of course, avoiding the highly psychological approach to this dream of yours.”
Chilton straightens out, sets his hands in his lap, and leisurely says, “Let’s hear it then, doctor.”
“I suspect you have a working knowledge of Latin,” Hannibal begins. Chilton nods, and he elaborates, “The name you remember, Ose, may represent your perception of your speech, or more narrowly adhering to the definition of the Latin os, your mouth and your use of language. This name, a mere phantom, juxtaposes itself with a face that is nothing more to you than a pair of changeable, though beautiful eyes.”
Hannibal pauses in his breakdown of events, giving Chilton the opportunity to psychoanalyze himself.
“I…desire the approval of someone,” he begins haltingly. “Someone whom I barely understand but who…”
Osor, denoting he that abhors.
“Someone who can’t stand me.”
“Perhaps there is only one person in the equation.”
Chilton blanks momentarily.
Flatly he says, “I don’t hate myself, Hannibal.”
“Have you considered that you might not know yourself; that the broken visage you saw may have been your own?”
Chilton notes that Hannibal is careful not to use the words reflection or mirror. He thinks to object when Hannibal continues.
“The object of this hatred—if it does exist within the parameters of this dream, and I am not convinced it does—would not be the Self but the speech, that which is transmitted by way of mouth. It could be indicative of deeply seated frustration with your personal relationships or perhaps even professional ones.”
The words Chilton had intended to say don’t fit with Hannibal’s proffered analysis. He doesn’t have time to flinch away from Hannibal’s hand when it slots against his forehead from the wrist to his knuckles. Chilton just waits.
The hand recedes and he says, “I keep a thermometer in the bathroom.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Hannibal tells him cheerfully. “We’ve broken your fever.”
“Thus ends the doctor-patient confidentiality,” Chilton announces blearily. His relief is interspersed with gratitude. “Now I should actually put on some pants.”
“There is no need for that,” Hannibal says, waving him off and rising to his feet. “I will see myself out.”
“Oh,” Chilton blurts out before closing his eyes in irritation at himself.
I have no illusions about this.
“Thank you,” he says vaguely, hoping it covers what he means without giving too much away.
Hannibal just says, “You’re welcome, Frederick,” and takes the chair back downstairs. He comes back up a minute later to advise Chilton to try sleeping again even if it feels like a terrible idea.
Chilton says he’ll try, and try he does. He waits until he hears Hannibal’s car drive off; he waits ten minutes after that and looks out the window. When he gets back into bed he closes the blinds again. Hannibal must have opened them when he came back and woke Chilton up from his nightmare.
He deflates into the sheets and closes his eyes, and he’s dead tired. Coasting in between consciousness and unconsciousness the words play through his mind in his voice and in Hannibal’s voice.
You’re welcome, Frederick.
You’re welcome, Ose.
You will submit.
Submit to me.
You’re my darling puppet, Frederick. See how prettily you dance.
He that abhors.
Are you?
You are.
Rest, Frederick, I’ll be gone soon.
Chilton is losing his mind, but at least he finally does sleep.