Chapter Text
I.I
The silver of the knife glints off the deep wine-red of the heart as he butchers it, slicing off the fat and sinew and separating the compartments with practiced strokes. The bitter copper smell of blood has overtaken that of the deep red wine.
Hannibal Lecter does not often eat raw heart, if he does not experience a particular craving. He finds so very few that he feels like tasting.
Heart tartare. He likes the English; he likes hearing the words in certain mouths. The tapping of tongue and lush retroflexes, like the heart’s own beat and burst of blood.
(Although both of them, both Will and Clarice, are embarrassed of the way they speak, he loves their luxuriant, unstudied American accents. Like they are talking around marbles and water. Like they have cut their precious tongues.)
At this moment, the only sounds are the soft sharp chops of his knife and the glop of meat and blood. His own breathing.
It has taken him much practice to prepare the dish to his satisfaction, without ruining it.
The greatest trick is preparing it while the heart’s owner still lives. To chop it up and consume it while they still breathe.
He has tried twice.
He has succeeded once.
I.II
“I want you to meet someone,” they had said.
When he had first laid eyes on Will Graham, he knew he must have his heart. Will was one of the most beautiful things Lecter had ever seen in his life.
Will had risen to shake Hannibal’s hand as he entered the office, as Jack Crawford introduced them. Uncomfortable and suspicious, Will had stared somewhere below the taller man's left cheekbone as he muttered a perfunctory “pleased to meet you.”
Hannibal had smiled, taking the opportunity to look the young man over. Even under the sickly yellow light of the office and the backdrop of grinning dead girls and the red ribbons of what was left of their bodies, Will was pleasing to look at. Especially under, perhaps--an excellent frame. Hannibal was a man who believed presentation was almost as important as content.
Will was handsome and lithe underneath the rumpled clothes and glasses, beneath his drawn-in wary stance and jerky avoidance of eye contact. His intelligence simmered in his cast-down light eyes, in his crackled drawled words, his lovely mobile mouth, his accidental over-emoting. So open to everything and thus trying to let nothing in.
In his head such chaos and violence, and poor Will huddled in a corner almost defenseless in his own head. And yet, Hannibal thought, as he casually glanced over the wall of girls (so pedestrian, so compulsive, the result of grimy need) he immersed himself in these heads to save others that he wouldn’t be able to look in the eye.
A walking St. Sebastian, heart pierced a hundred times over, leaking blood trails.
Perception, as he told Will, was a tool pointed at both ends. Lecter couldn’t help himself; a rare occurrence.
He had to taste this one. He used his perception like a scalpel raked over a ribcage, straight into soft flesh.
“I imagine,” he said to Will, his voice low and soothing, calm and offhand, “that what you see and learn touches everything else in your mind. Your values and decency are present yet shocked at your associations; appalled by your dreams. No forts in the bone arena of your skull for the things you love.”
The blow hit. He saw it in the fear and anger flare in those lovely blue-green eyes. He had pierced in; he had laid Will’s perfect little heart open and beating.
“Whose profile are you working on?” he scowled. When Will was uncomfortable, Hannibal noted, there was always a hum, an almost latent hysteria to his words. His voice would pitch high; he’d drawl his sarcasm. Always challenging. Putting up hurdles even in his voice. He turned to Jack. “Whose profile is he working on?”
Hannibal preempted Jack. (If Jack thought he could keep such a delicious thing to himself, he was wrong.) “I’m sorry, Will. Observing is what we do,” he said. “I can’t shut mine off any more than you can shut yours off.”
Will was endearingly, maddeningly petulant. Hannibal would never quite break him of the trait; he’d never quite try.
Later, he brought Will breakfast in a motel room in Minnesota. Will answered the door. He was even more beautiful when he just woke, bleary, badly sunlit, before he had remembered to throw all his defenses up.
The motel was cheap and it was chosen for its proximity to the crime scene. The decor skewed sulfur yellow, a permutation of the early sunlight that was the only illumination in the room. Stale cigarette stink hung in the air, not quite chased away by the tannic swirl of fine fresh coffee or the hot eggs and sausage.
Hannibal watched Will eat, the sun on one side of his face. They spoke briefly of the case. Of Jack and the FBI. Hannibal gently teased him, saying how fragile the FBI must see him. A treasured little teacup.
When Will smiled it was as if something had seized him. Overtaken him. It was how a child smiled, in spite of itself, with little control.
“How do you see me?” Will asked. He said it casually, but there was a curl of hunger to his voice. He looked Hannibal in the eye.
Hannibal smiled.
For his Will (he had never been anything to Hannibal but Hannibal’s Will) he had strangled a young woman and pinioned her on antlers. He thought of Will’s face as he drove the antlers through the stubborn white flesh. He also thought of dinner, and wine pairings.
Even after eating her lungs, he went to bed unsatisfied.
I.III
They were both used to being vulnerable and being seen as vulnerable. Will adapted his vulnerability; if he was to be a target the least he could do was avoid the arrows while still proving useful. Clarice weaponized hers.
Even as hunter, Will had been prey. Even as prey, Clarice was hunter.
But it had been too late for both of them the moment he saw them.
He himself was white teeth under still black water; a silver hunting knife in the snow-white night.
I.IV
“Someone wants to meet you,” they had said.
When he first laid eyes on Clarice Starling, he was standing in his cold blue cell in his cold blue clothes. The chill of the porcelain and chrome fixtures reflected off the glass. It had been years since he had seen sunlight.
(It had been years since he had seen Will.)
She had clipped in on cheap pumps, ill-dressed, but not from lack of taste. She did, he had to concede, have a little taste. It was impractical to spend one’s student income on clothing, and it could be impractical to look too lovely when one worked in such a thuggish and alpha-male-skewed field as law enforcement.
(Neither Will nor Clarice really knew how to dress themselves, although Clarice at least mastered the fundamentals. This did not concern him. He greatly preferred them in clothes he had chosen himself, or undressed, and on his bed. His, either way. Either one.)
In spite of her clothes, which obscured her figure through their cheap material and large size, she was beautiful. So, so very beautiful. Her body was soft, but muscled; a girl with a natural good figure who ran too much.
He would love, he thought, to watch her run. From him. To him.
It had been so long since he had seen such beauty and he was so hungry. He unabashedly took in the curve of her breast and hips, her clear pale skin, her dark blue eyes, her soft lips pressed close together. A tedious earnestness to her, perhaps, but also a brilliance, and a hunger.
And heart.
People came to him every so often; they were banal and rude and repulsive in their need, in their fear. Starling was different. She was cold water in a silver basin. She was a pulsing hungry heart under perfect skin and Evian skin cream. So much to pull apart, to test and taste.
She greeted him politely, with a smile, and sat down on the cheap folding chair. Her voice and movements echoed in the spare hallway, against the background churning of infection that were his fellow prisoners. Unlike his other visitors, she did not gape at him.
In fact his Starling was not there on his account but on Jack’s. He had sent her there ostensibly to have him fill out a questionnaire. A crude subterfuge on Jack's part, but Starling believed it. He imagined she trusted Jack a very great deal. Jack wanted his help on Buffalo Bill; he sent a little starling instead of himself. No, the little bird was not overly interested in Lecter at all.
(She would be.)
He did sense some slight fear—this was only reasonable. But she had learned long ago not to cower. And after all, she did not believe he was the worst thing that could happen to her. The press would only call him that later, when they spoke of her.
Starling did well at first, perhaps because she had little actual interest in him. But she was young, and earnest, and quickly stumbled. He leapt. He drove in his knife.
“Do you know what I see when I look at you,” he had smiled, he had purred, and he told her the worst of what he saw. He laid her little heart bare, perfect scented skin pulled back.
The way razor cuts work: there is a sharp gasp of a stroke—you feel the pressure, the opening of the skin, the lurch of anticipation before the bloom of pain and blood.
The pain bloomed. She smiled, tightly, and blinked. She was hurting. She was beautiful. “You see a lot, Dr. Lecter. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you—why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Maybe you're afraid to.”
But her eyes were wet, and Hannibal couldn’t help but lick his lips.
What had Jack been thinking, sending such a tender thing? Jack could see far but never saw enough. Jack didn’t see the dark god lurching at the back of Starling’s head—her dead father, through his absence forever withholding the love and approval and acceptance she would struggle for at the FBI.
Jack had sent her to him as both bait and a taunt. He knew Lecter, deprived of the feast that was William, would be so hungry. And so he dangled this sweet thing, tougher than Jack knew, in front of him. Perhaps he wanted to resolve the trauma of Miriam and Will through safe repetition: surely, Jack would tell himself, surely this one would be safe. Lecter was behind glass and couldn’t devour any more of his protégés. His children.
Jack hadn’t figured out that Hannibal only physically ate the ones who had nothing better to offer the world than their flesh. Clarice and Will were much more complicated and nourishing meals.
Lecter saw. And remembered.
At first he refused to help her. She was bait, a taunt, a searing reminder of all the meals he could never have--and would be treated as such. But as she was walking away he heard her soft gasp; he smelled the sharpness of semen and her flush of horror. (Miggs, next door, abusing his broken little bird.)
Lecter cried out for her to return.
She ran back over (he decided he liked her running TO him), close, too flustered to remember she was supposed to be frightened of him. Were it not for the chill glass he could have reached out to take her by the waist, the hand, the throat. (Her wary trusting look reminded him of Will; that old pain scraped briefly under his ribs.)
“Do this case file for me,” she pleaded.
“No,” he had said, “but I’ll give you what you’re most hungry for.”
“What’s that?”
“Advancement, of course.” (Recognition. To be seen for who she was. Yes, Lecter could give her that.)
The triumph and delight in her blue eyes was worth a year of incarceration.
A few hours later he talked Miggs into swallowing his own tongue. He went to bed hungry, as always, but that night (and every night after, for so long, for every day he didn’t see her) more so than usual.
I.V
Not a single drop of blood has dribbled on his chef’s whites, on his long sinewed forearms. With a neat slide of the knife, he slips the chopped offal to the side of the cutting board.
On the smooth pale wood, the dark heart lies open; waiting for him.