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Chapter Text

In Dr. Susan Klein’s office, the world was kept in perfect balance.

It was a marriage of order and chaos, of reason and mystery.

One wall was lined with neat rows of medical texts—spines aligned with military precision--while another sagged beneath the weight of dog-eared novels and half-forgotten relics and trinkets from foreign markets.

Paintings of ambiguous serenity hung between countless diplomas, certificates, and honors, while the ritualistic masks on the opposite side of the room made a gentle mockery of them. Everything hung suspended between reverence and irony, just like Dr. Susan Klein herself.

Although Clarice Starling had been a reluctant patient, she admitted to liking the middle-aged psychiatrist a lot. Yeah—she reckoned that, if psychic equilibrium wore a human face, it would probably look like Susan Klein.

Clarice's own mind, on the other hand, had enjoyed no such balance. Not as of late. If anything, her mind had been a battlefield, her body a cage too fragile to hold the war raging within. As she had done for weeks now—ever since her return from Florence—she drifted through her days, unable to hold fast to the present. Conversations blurred, hours dissolved, and her mind slipped away, unable to anchor and ground itself in her own life again.

Every single day, as if by invisible hands, she was being pulled to that moment on the Ponte Vecchio, when Dr. Hannibal Lecter had bled out in her arms—a look of betrayal in his eyes.

Even in her memory, those eyes undid her—like a mirror she could not turn away from, hypnotic and patient—forcing her to relive everything that had passed between them: Guilt, shame, desire, all binding her body and soul to that moment. It was as if time itself had simply refused to move on. From Florence.

From him .

Meanwhile the clock on the wall ticked and ticked like a metronome Clarice couldn't shut off, the swing of the pendulum cutting her time and thoughts into ever smaller pieces. Dr. Klein’s voice murmured on in the background—measured, reasonable, and half-ignored---as if carried through water.

Clarice’s gaze drifted past the desk to the enormous window, where the world outside blurred behind rushing rivulets of rain.The trees in the park bent and shook as if trying to break free from the earth. The weather was getting worse. Or perhaps it had been this way all day, and only now did she notice.

She was so very tired.

“Clarice?”

The voice pulled her back, a mix of urgency and patience only people of a certain experience could manage.

“Clarice?”

She blinked.

The storm—both the one outside and the one inside her skull—seemed to recede, leaving a dizzy silence in its wake.

“Clarice?”

She lifted her head, suddenly self-conscious—suddenly embarrassed.

Dr. Klein was watching her, eyebrows slightly knit, the weight of understanding balanced against concern. 

“Where did you go this time, Agent Starling?”

Clarice wet her lips but said nothing.

Klein leaned forward slightly, almost conspiratorial.

“Have you been eating enough?”

Clarice nodded—a hollow gesture.

Dr. Klein wasn’t buying it—how could she? Everyone could see it. Even Dee had mentioned she was losing weight that was never hers to begin with. The truth was she felt fragile, confused, and undeniably unwell.

“Any more nightmares?” Klein asked carefully. “What about panic attacks?”

Clarice smoothed her hands against her thighs and drew a single, deliberate breath.

“I think I’m getting better,” she said, almost convincing herself.

She really, really wasn’t.

That morning, a blackbird had slammed into her kitchen window—feathers scattering—a thin trail of blood smeared across the glass. Only a minute or so later, she had crumpled to the floor—chest heaving, heart punding—choking on air that wouldn’t come. Her left hand had cramped itself into a claw, knotted with pain. She had screamed against the fridge until her throat was raw—burning with the helplessness that always followed these attacks.

Dr Klein’s eyes stayed steady—too steady.

“You know, there isn’t much point to these sessions if you’re not being honest with me, Agent Starling. Let’s try again.”

The clock ticked, the rain ran.

And then—quite suddenly, Clarice’s composure cracked.

“Fine.”

She drew a deep, shaking breath.

“I’m lucky if I sleep more than an hour or two a night,” she admitted.

Why not. Everyone could see she was falling apart.

“No nightmares. Guess I don’t sleep deep enough to have dreams at all, good or bad. And erm… I do still have panic attacks, several times a week. I’m terrified I’ll have another one all the time. I mean, I know they can’t hurt me, but… every time I have one I’m completely wiped out afterwards—more tired than I’ve ever been.”

Her voice was quieter the second time, laced with guilt and shame she knew she didn’t have to have but still did.

“As far as eating goes…” she hesitated, then shook her head. “It’s like my body doesn’t let me.”

She fought back tears, pressing her lips into a hard line. The truth was she wondered, not for the first time, if she would ever feel whole again, or if this emptiness had claimed her for good.

Dr. Klein nodded, a saddened smile softening her eyes. Special Agent Starling had been a tough nut to crack, and the admission—however hesitant—clearly felt like a small step in the right direction.

Clarice leaned forward—jaw tight.

“I just need to get back to work. That’s the problem—Crawford won’t let me. I’ve got too much time to sit around and think about myself. And it doesn’t help. It just makes everything worse.”

Her fingers twitched against the edge of the chair.

“For some people,” Dr. Klein said gently, “thinking about where they are and where they have been is what allows them to move forward.”

“Or sometimes,” Clarice shot back, a sharp edge in her voice, “it’s better to keep moving and let your mind catch up. You tell me, Doctor—do you have any scientific evidence that thinking actually alleviates anything? Because I’m sick of thinking.”

Her chest heaved, almost bursting with a confession she didn’t want to admit: that she was tired of being trapped inside herself, tired of the weight of secrets she could neither share nor shake.

Klein let that hang for a moment.

“Clarice, you’ve been under extraordinary stress. Trauma doesn’t heal on command. PTSD takes time. You need to accept what happened to you in Florence.”

Florence.

The word hit her like a punch in the gut.

Klein had no idea what had really happened there. Nobody did. Nobody except her—and Dr. Lecter. All everybody else had was the official line—neat and sterile—a thick coat of bureaucratic paint over the truth, and everything she still carried inside.

“Could it be,” Klein asked carefully, “that you’re on edge because Hannibal Lecter is being flown back to the States? He’ll be back soon—incarcerated not far from here. After everything he put you through… yet again… I can understand how that would be a cause for concern. For fear. Are you perhaps afraid he might escape again and... hurt you?”

She shook her head, perhaps a little too eager.

“No.”

Klein frowned, then leaned back in her chair. 

“He’s one of the most dangerous men alive, Clarice… as you well know. For anyone’s career or personal life to become so entangled with that kind of manipulation and…”

“Evil?” Clarice offered, tired of the old refrain.

“I was going to say violence,” Dr. Klein replied. “I don’t know if I even believe in evil, do you? The bloodbath in Florence wasn’t an act of some abstraction. It was the act of a man. One man.”

There was a pause. When Clarice spoke again, her voice was low but steady—a line drawn between a world that demanded her calmness and the chaos exploding inside herself.

“What happened in Florence wasn’t merely Hannibal Lecter’s fault, Dr. Klein.”

For the first time, the psychiatrist looked at her as though she were speaking in tongues—saying something, well… insane. Klein shook her head slowly, confusion flickering across her features, as if she were talking to a naïve cadet who had been claimed and molded by the devil himself.

“No, Agent Starling. What happened in Florence wasn’t, isn’t, and will never be your fault. Agent Lansing’s death is not your fault. Don’t let men like Hannibal Lecter—these figures of sadism—twist your empathic nature into a weapon to be wielded for their own benefit.”

Clarice nodded, but the words rang hollow—meaningless. They were meant to heal, meant to reassure, yet they only deepened the fractures inside—reminding her that no one else could ever truly understand what had happened, or what it had done to her.

Once again, the clock on the wall ticked louder, sharper, chiseling away at her composure. The sound threatened to unmoor her, to drag her back into the undertow of memory, where Florence still smoldered, where ghosts waited for her to join them. 

“Stay with me, Agent Starling,” Dr. Klein whispered, her voice a lifeline cast across the dark water. It was steady, patient, soft—coaxing her back to shore.

Clarice met her gaze. Klein’s expression was steady, measured, but beneath it flickered the heaviness of someone who knew they were trying, perhaps in vain, to reach across an abyss.

Dr. Klein was a patient woman—patient in a way that sometimes made Clarice ache with guilt. More than once she had felt bad for giving her so little to work with, for leaving the doctor grasping at shadows instead of truths.

But she couldn’t.

She couldn’t even begin.

How could she ever confess the truth? That she wasn’t afraid of Dr. Lecter—not in the slightest. That the real terror lived elsewhere: in the memory of shared breaths and surrender—willing and complete.

She could still feel the echo of it on her skin, the almost unbearable knowledge that her body had wanted him, and still did. A monster. A cannibal. The thought made her stomach knot even as her pulse betrayed her.

Her mind didn’t want it—didn’t want to belong to him in any way, and yet the truth wound through her veins, more and more impossible to extract. Because in some dark, unspeakable symmetry—they belonged to one another, and she knew it. Part of her had known it even then, in Frederick Chilton’s dungeon. 

No. She could never say that aloud. Not to anyone. She was only here because Crawford had given her an ultimatum: see Dr. Klein, or lose her place in his unit.

Jack had watched her unravel for weeks, the cracks showing in ways she could no longer hide—missed details, vacant stares, a voice that faltered. He had tolerated it with a kind of paternal patience, until the morning she broke in front of everyone. A panic attack had dragged her along mid-briefing, and that was when Crawford had finally drawn the line.

“Do you have a way to unwind?” Klein asked. “To let your body know you’re safe?”

Clarice shrugged.

Dr. Klein, resigned to her silence, offered a smile—the weary smile of someone long accustomed to locked doors.

“Okay then.”

She gave a small nod, then slid open the desk drawer with a hushed scrape. A moment later, she set a cassette on the polished wooden desk between them: a plain white case, unmarked except for a single red circle stamped in its center, stark like a wound. She pushed it toward Clarice with the careful motion of someone handling something fragile—or dangerous.

“This is for you.” Klein said. Her tone was gentle but edged with firmness, the voice of someone treading carefully. “I’ll be honest, Agent Starling—I don’t believe you’re ready to return to work. And I don’t think you want to be here either, speaking with me. So… just perhaps… this will serve as a bridge.”

Clarice’s gaze lingered on the cassette. Its plain white cover revealed nothing—no clue, no promise—only the small red circle at its center, staring back at her like an all-seeing eye.

“What’s it supposed to accomplish?” she asked at last, her voice flat, almost weary. “Make me levitate if I think happy thoughts?”

Klein laughed softly, a sound more breath than mirth, and shook her head.

“No. Quite the opposite. It’s a guided hypnosis I’ve been developing with colleagues. The purpose is not to stir your conscious thoughts… but to bypass them, to open a path into the labyrinth of the unconscious mind. Our daily thoughts, even the darkest and most pressing, can sometimes be nothing but distractions—shapes we throw against the wall to avoid looking at what we truly feel, think, need.”

Clarice stared at the tape and swallowed.

“When do I listen?” she asked.

“Whenever you can be alone, undisturbed for an hour.”

“That’s it?”

“For now.” Klein leaned forward, her voice lowering, as though she were entrusting Clarice with a secret. “And I hope that after a few weeks of listening—listening to yourself—you will return of your own accord. And then, perhaps, you’ll be ready to talk to me.”

And that was that. The session dissolved into silence as Clarice slipped  the cassette into the pocket of her coat. As she left the office, the doctor’s voice trailed after her in memory.

Hannibal Lecter is being flown back to the States soon.

She knew she wouldn’t get to see him. There would be no professional reason, and therefore no reason at all. Just as there hadn’t been a reason for her to see him in his hospital room in Florence. She had asked Crawford once, only once. She knew better than to ask twice.

She had tried to frame it as professional necessity—that she was one of the only people alive who truly knew how to deal with Hannibal Lecter. Crawford hadn’t even pretended to consider it. “I don’t think so, Clarice,” he’d said flatly. And that was the end of it.

She hadn’t pushed.

Couldn’t.

It would have raised eyebrows.

But to know he had lain there—hovering between life and death, and she had not been permitted at his side after everything that had passed between them—it hollowed her out, leaving a pit that no amount of self-deception could fill.

She told herself it was for the best, that Florence had been a fever dream, fleeting, intoxicating, and unreal, never meant to survive the harsh light of morning. She told herself she would go home, resume her life, and pretend the tide of forbidden lust had never swept her under.

She had her tricks.

Every time she felt that strange pull of desire for him, she forced herself to remember. Remember what he had done—to Questore Saggio, to the men in Mason Verger’s house, to Cordell, to Verger himself.

How he had shattered her schoolgirl fantasies with a look so distant and cold that she had doubted whether he was even human. How he had severed Cordell Doemling’s head with a butcher’s knife, even while she had pleaded with him—begged him—for mercy.

It always frightened her, sharp and unrelenting, and enough to remind her of the truth. The truth of who he was, who she was, and of the bitter knowing that there could be no room for longing or fantasies in Clarice Starling’s life. Not about Hannibal The Cannibal Lecter. She had to move on. She had to bury the past somewhere deep and dark and keep walking forward—even when every fiber of her being screamed otherwise.

Even when the truth lived inside her, festering, her pain, her grief, her heartbreak—all unspoken, all demanding she face it.

Chapter Text

Dee had brought home way too much Chinese food.

An hour later the cartons from Golden Lotus stood scattered across the coffee table. Their flaps hung open, steam long gone, leaving only the mingled scent of soy and oyster sauce in the room. Chopsticks leaned out of them like antennae.

“I’m so full, I’ll never eat again,” Ardelia groaned, already leaning toward her best friend with a sheepish, guilty smile. “Want a popsicle?”

Clarice snorted, then shook her head.

Once again, she had hardly touched the food.

She curled into the corner of the couch, shoulders hunched as the intro of the seven o’clock news blared from the television. The words reached her ears, but failed to penetrate the fog that had settled in her mind. Her eyes were not on the screen.

They were fixed on Ripheus.

The cat lounged on the armrest, tail wrapped neatly around itself, and regarded her with a stare so cold and unblinking it felt like accusation. Clarice shivered, though she wasn’t sure if it was from the chill of the room, or from the quiet, unsettling sense that Ripheus could read her thoughts.

Once he had settled in his new home, he had been sweetness itself to Ardelia—nudging her, curling into her lap every now and again, purring. But whenever his gaze turned to Clarice, his eyes hardened, as if he knew, somehow, that she had been the one to blame for his master’s absence. As if he held her responsible for the fact that Lecter’s hands would never scratch behind his tufty ears again.

Clarice endured the glare in silence, but the weight of it pressed into her ribs. Dr. Lecter had asked her not to be afraid to love the beast, but had apparently neglected to make the same request from the beast himself.

“Where are you, girl?” Ardelia asked, waving a strawberry popsicle at her like a red flag of concern.

Clarice realized too late that she had been gone again, lost in some guilt-ridden daydream.

She blinked, trying to anchor herself. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?”

Dee raised an eyebrow in silent judgment, though there was no malice in her voice when she spoke. She had tried so hard to make her feel better, and Clarice knew that without her, she would already be gone—swallowed by a deeper, darker hole than the one she already found herself in.

With her strange alchemy of patience, urgency, and good old-fashioned gossip, Dee could often make Clarice believe—if only for a moment—that she wasn’t unraveling all, that she could still pass for the woman she used to be. That she was still tethered to the world, still halfway Clarice Starling.

“Oh, so it’s not just me, then—hmmm? Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

Clarice let her head fall against the back of the couch and sighed, the weight of her thoughts making her eyelids heavy.

“It does ,” she murmured wryly. “Y’all need to start minding your own business.”

“You know I won’t,’ Dee stated. “You need to get out of your own head,girl… and out of this appartment. The only time you leave is to see Klein. You need to start living again, laughing again, mingling again. Guess what, I know the perfect opportunity for it too—”

But then Ardelia Mapp’s eyes narrowed, her attention snapping toward the television as though something there had seized her. Without a word, she snatched the remote and cranked up the volume. Clarice knew all too well Dee didn’t waste her focus on background noise, not unless it mattered. Immediately, she followed her friend’s gaze to the screen.

The anchor’s voice sharpened—cutting through the room, sudden and precise, each syllable carrying the weight of the unsettling news.

“…two more children have gone missing along the Skagit River in rural Washington. Authorities confirm this is the third disappearance of a minor this month—the first in Concrete, the second in Grassmere, and now a third child from Hamilton. While there is currently no evidence to suggest these cases are related, the local sheriff’s office is urging parents to remain vigilant.”

Dee let out a sharp, incredulous snort.

“Of course they’re fucking related! Three kids up and vanish along the same river in a single month and they pretend it’s coincidence? Common people, please.”

The images flickered across the screen—two grainy photographs that joined another one—school portraits. Smiling faces that looked too small for the frame, too fragile for the world. Photographs meant for a Dad’s wallet, a fridge door, or a grandmother’s mantel, now commandeered by the machinery of spectacle and grief.

Clarice agreed with Ardelia—of course the cases were connected. But she also knew, with the weariness of experience, that by the time the pattern became undeniable, more children would already be gone. That was the brutal arithmetic of her work: patterns weren’t born from foresight, but from aftermath. 

It was a truth that had always sickened her. Every investigation she’d ever worked was built on suffering, on someone’s absence. That was the part she could never reconcile, the part that left her awake at night staring into the dark. Justice was rarely preventative. It was usually a ghost that arrived late—dragging its feet—a long trail of grief in its wake.

Clarice shook her head, a sigh slipping out.

“I definitely need to start working again.”

Ardelia swiveled back toward her, eyes sharp. “Already forgotten what Klein said? That’s a new record.”

Then, with a mischievous tilt of her head, she added, “But speaking of work—Director Kelly’s retirement party is next week. It’s gonna be fancy as hell, girl. A helluva lot of rich and recently divorced from Washington, New York and London, you know the type.”

That drew a groan and, a moment later, both women slipped into the same well-worn act: straightening their postures, lifting invisible champagne flutes, donned voices too sweet and too brittle.

“Tell me, my dear,” Ardelia trilled, eyes half-lidded like a debutant, “is it a terrible bother, this catching murderers business of yours? How does one proceed? Does one simply point and shout ‘there he is, that’s the man!’?”

Clarice answered in kind, her own drawl feathered with mock gentility. “Why, certainly. It’s the simplest thing in the world. A lady just bats her lashes, and the killer comes right along—whether it be with the candlestick, the rope, or the dagger tucked neatly in one’s evening bag.”

Ardelia gasped theatrically, a hand pressed to her chest. “Heavens! Don’t forget the revolver, darling. A proper soirée is simply incomplete without a firearm going off!”

Their laughter rang out, full and unguarded for a moment, the kind that made the shadows retreat. But even as she laughed, Clarice felt it—that whisper at the back of her mind reminding her that none of it was a parlor game. It was blood on her hands, screams she couldn’t silence, and faces she could never forget.

The laughter faded into a knowing quiet between them, heavy and unspoken.

“Yeah,” Clarice said softly. “I know the folk.”

Ardelia looked at her gravely, the flicker of the television painting her face in cold light.

“Crawford wants you there.”

Clarice let out a shaking sigh, rubbing her forehead as though she could press back the weight gathering behind her eyes.

“So you going?”

“I don’t think so, Dee. It’s never really worth it, is it? Unless you’re looking for connections.”

“Clariiiiiice…” Dee groaned.

“No, Dee.  I’m not running for office and I’m not shopping for a rich husband. I wanna get back to work. I wanna do my job.”

Ardelia groaned, tilting her head back against the couch in exasperation. “Starling, come on. You have to go. You need to see people again, breathe.Get tipsy. Who knows—you might even meet someone interesting there. Someone else .”

Clarice turned her head, gave her a flat, unreadable look. “Someone else?”

The words hung in the room like smoke, sharp and stinging. Ardelia’s lips parted, but she hesitated, as if she knew she had wandered too close to a door that Clarice kept locked.

“You know,” she continued. “Someone cultured. Smart. Rich. Sexy.”

Ardelia’s tone was light, but her eyes sharpened just slightly. “Someone to take your mind off Dr. Lecter.”

Clarice tensed.

There it was.

Even Ripheus twitched his tail, as if the sound of his master’s name in Ardelia’s mouth had unsettled him too.

Clarice said nothing. Instead she rose to her feet with a groan and gathered the cartons with deliberate care. The silence stretched as she cleared the table, taut and fragile. It was easier to keep her hands busy than to meet the weight of Ardelia’s gaze.

“You’re gonna change the subject, aren’t you?” Ardelia’s tone was measured, but there was an edge beneath it—an awareness.

Clarice moved toward the kitchen with her arms full, her steps steady only because she forced them to be.

“Why would I?” she said, too lightly.

But she knew why. She always knew. Because if she stopped pretending for one second, if she turned and met her friend’s eyes, everything might come pouring out. She was terrified of that flood—the confession of what had happened in Florence, of what she had let happen, of what still lived inside her despite every desperate attempt to neuter and classify it. If she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop.

She would have to admit the truth: the man the world called a monster, was the only one she wanted. She would have admitted that she had kissed Hannibal Lecter, and—God help her—that it had been incredible, searing through every nerve like something stolen from a dream. She would have admitted that, had it not been for those fucking sirens in those Florentine streets, she would have gone much, much further—would have surrendered to him without hesitation, would have given herself to him completely.

And still, she would have had to speak of the terror: the part of him no intimacy could soften, no plea could sway into mercy. The part of him that butchered, that fed on human flesh, that existed beyond the borders ofeverything she valued. That was the chasm she could not bridge, no matter how her body ached for his touch.

She could not give voice to any of it. Because if she began, she would never stop. The words would pour out of her like a bloodletting, and she feared there would be nothing left of her when the confession was done.

And she wasn’t sure Ardelia—or anyone—could ever forgive her for any of it.

“Why don’t you wanna talk about what happened in Florence, babes?” Dee asked softly. Concern and suspicion shaded her voice, but she kept it gentle, as if sweetness might coax Clarice out of her shell. “You know you can always tell me, right?”

Clarice forced a nod. “Of course I know.”

The words came too quickly, too neatly—a performance she despised even as she delivered it. She hated herself for speaking to Ardelia that way—one of the few people who had held her up when she could have drowned.

The weight of her insincerity pressed against her lungs. Dee deserved the truth, but the truth was a flood, and Clarice knew if she cracked the dam even an inch, it would all come spilling out—ugly, uncontainable, beyond repair.

So she kept her arms folded tight, as though holding her silence in place.Then she added with a weary finality: “I think I’m… I’m just very tired, Dee. I’m so very tired. I think I’ll turn in. Goodnight.”

Ardelia let her go with a sigh, her voice suddenly low and bitter.

“Yeah, run away when I bring that bastard’s name up—what else is new.”

She paused at the foot of the stairs, hand gripping the banister, but she didn’t turn. She couldn’t. If she met Ardelia’s eyes, the dam would break. 

***

Clarice let herself collapse onto the bed. She groaned, more tired than she could remember being in months—maybe years—yet the heaviness in her limbs carried no promise of rest.
She hadn’t truly slept since Florence. Not the kind of sleep that healed or quieted the mind.

What she endured now were hours of lying still in darkness, trapped between waking and dreams. Sometimes she drifted just far enough to feel the tide pulling her under, only to be yanked back by restless fear, intrusive thoughts. It was not rest—it was captivity.

Dee’s sudden mention of Lecter’s name still rang through her—reverberating—its echo refusing to fade. The sound of his name on another’s lips had made her panic again, and she hated the way it unraveled her composure. Every time someone spoke his name it was like the striking of a match that set her nerves on edge, igniting a panic she didn’t understand. Why did it happen? Why should it?

The day after Florence, she had almost told Ardelia everything. The words had crowded her throat, desperate for release. But even in the privacy of her mind they had sounded absurd, unhinged, like the confessions of someone who had lost her grip on reality.

The moment she imagined speaking them aloud— I kissed him, I wanted him —her own thoughts shifted, turned cold and clinical, as though she were standing outside herself. She knew exactly what Dee would say. Hell, she knew what she would say if it had been anyone else.

Hannibal Lecter is a monster. A sociopath. He cannot love. He only manipulates—that’s his gift, his art. If you feel anything for him, it’s because he wanted you to. Because he made you. You are too intelligen and too well-trained to be caught in his web. 

Hannibal Lecter is dangerous. Everybody knows that.

And still, the silence between them—between her and Ardelia, between her and the world—was safer than hearing those truths echoed aloud. Safer than admitting that despite everything she knew, her soul reached out for a man who everyone was convinced didn’t have one.

Almost without thinking, she turned to the nightstand. The drawer gave a soft wooden sigh as she slid it open, and then—with a deep and shaking breath—took out a small plastic vial. Hannibal Lecter’s blood. It looked so innocuous in its clear container, and yet it carried the weight of a secret she could never unburden.

She had almost handed it over to the Bureau in those first frantic days after Florence. Almost. But then Krendler had appeared with his smug grin and his smug silence. He hadn’t breathed a word about Mason Verger’s grotesque archive of extortion—the database of DNA: blood, sperm, hair samples. Not a single fucking mention of the photographs and tapes, the bodies stacked on top of each other in the cold storage.

He hadn’t mentioned them.

And that silence had told her everything.

Krendler had buried all of it. Entire chains of truth, vanished into thin air. By the time the Italian police and Interpol had stormed Verger’s estate, the house was a crime scene curated to one narrative: every body, every sin, every act of brutality belonged to Hannibal Lecter. Somehow, conveniently, Lecter’s DNA marked them all, even the ones he hadn’t touched—Robby, the Pale Man, the corpses rotting in Verger’s cold storage. All Lecter’s handiwork.

He had been framed, and there was nothing he could do about it.

In the Bureau’s official story, Clarice Starling had failed. She had been unable to stop the cannibal. Worse—a promising trainee had died under her watch. Verger’s depravity, his wealth and reach, were erased from the ledger. As though he had been nothing but another of Lecter’s victims, innocent and wronged.

She knew who had twisted the truth. And Krendler knew she knew. Just as he most likely knew about those photographs of her—the ones taken in Florence, of her at San Miniato with Hannibal Lecter. And worse: the ones of her slipping into his villa and out again, hair undone, blouse undone and rebuttoned in a haste. A walk of shame. Proof enough to ruin her career. Proof enough to damn her.

That was the silent covenant between her and Krendler. They each held a knife at the other’s throat, and both knew better than to draw blood… at least for now.

She turned the vial slowly between her fingers, watching the way the lamplight caught the substance within. She had done this almost every night since returning from Florence, as if searching for some revelation.

Her hand trembled, and she despised herself for it. She told herself she kept it as insurance, as evidence, as a tether in case the truth ever demanded proof. But deep down she feared the real reason: she couldn’t let go. This vial was the last trace of him in her hands, and holding it made her feel like herself again somehow.

For a moment, a wave of anger surged through her—anger at him, but more at herself. She had clawed her way up from nothing, from poverty and ridicule, through sleepless nights and endless training, to stand before herself and the world as an FBI agent. And now, after everything, here she was—undone.

Her chest grew tight—breath snagged in her throat, shallow and uneven.

Anxiety.

Panic.

“Get a grip,” she hissed through clenched teeth, striking the heel of her palm against her temple as if she could knock the weakness out of herself. “Get it together, Starling.”

But her own voice sounded hollow, a command given too late. The tears welled anyway, hot and traitorous, spilling down her cheeks before she could stop them.

She shifted restlessly on the bed for awhile, trying to calm down. Then, almost involuntarily, she reached for her purse. Her fingers brushed against the familiar shape before curling around it—the cassette Dr. Klein had given her. White case, red circle stamped at its center like an ancient seal.

It stared back at her in silence, offering a kind of promise: put me in the tape deck, and the storm inside your mind will pass. Everything will be okay again, promise.

Clarice turned it over in her hands, skeptical as always. And yet the longer she looked, the more that small circle seemed to radiate a quiet authority, steady and absolute. Almost without realizing, she nodded at it—an obedient gesture, as if acknowledging an order given.

She had tried these things before. Guided meditations with soft-voiced narrators, breathing exercises that only made her more conscious of her breath, yoga that left her body aching but her mind untouched. The only thing that came close to soothing her was Alan Watts murmuring about letting go, about surrender—mostly because of the sound of his voice, she reckoned.

It was as if her own mind refused to release her—determined not to soothe but to interrogate, to demand she solve the riddle of her feelings.

She slid the cassette into the radio on her nightstand. The mechanism clunked, swallowed the tape, and with a soft click the reels began to turn.

Then there was only silence—pregnant, waiting.

Then: A voice.

“Welcome to The Red Circle. You may close your eyes now. Surrender. Enter. If at any moment you wish to leave, you need only open your eyes and the circle will release you.”

Clarice lay back, her head sinking into the pillow, eyes tracing the pale ceiling above her. She exhaled, slow and uncertain, and allowed her body to relax into the waiting silence.

Chapter Text

You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
    —Edgar Allen Poe



Clarice and Ardelia stepped into the ballroom—a threshold into another world.

The room crackled with money and power: politicians, magnates, well-known faces Clarice had seen only in magazines and the flicker of television news.

It was no ordinary gathering. It was the send-off for Robert Kelly, Director of the FBI—his retirement wasn’t celebrated in Washington’s sterile halls of bureaucracy, but in the mansion of a wealthy diplomat. Kelly himself was already surrounded by senators and lobbyists, the way a campfire draws insects.

Clarice tugged absently at her gown, suddenly aware of how plain it seemed. At home, her greige gown had seemed elegant, Ardelia’s scarlet dress luminous. But here, among women made of diamonds and pearls, they looked like intruders.

“You look stunning,” Ardelia said, reading Clarice’s thoughts with that uncanny ability of hers.

“So do you, Dee,” Clarice replied, squeezing her friend’s hand.

They had driven up the long, graveled driveway in Clarice’s battered Mustang, and the memory of its rattling engine clung to her even now, as if the car itself were still parked like an embarrassment against the line of black limousines and chauffeured sedans outside.

For some reason, Clarice didn't remember what had happened before that. All she knew was the she hadn’t wanted to come, but that Dee had insisted, pulling her out of the cocoon, promising laughter, champagne, something resembling life. But as Clarice looked across the room, she felt herself shrink—not in stature, but in belonging.

They lingered near the door, unwilling to wade into the sea of wealth and influence before getting their bearings. The ballroom unfurled before them like a stage where every guest already knew their lines—polished laughter, well-weighed words.

“Shall we?” Ardelia asked.

Part of her wanted to turn back, to retreat into the night and the safety of her own silence. Instead, she forced herself to stand a little taller, to pretend she belonged, and wandered into the crowd.

Ardelia wasted no time. She leaned close, her voice a conspiratorial murmur edged with mischief.

“So, what’s on the menu for you tonight? Tall, dark, handsome, loaded… preferably all four?” Her grin widened, sharp as a dare. “Tell me… what are you looking for, girl?”

Clarice eyed her. “I’m looking to be out of here in an hour. I’m here as a professional courtesy, and mostly because you dragged my ass all the way out here, remember?”

A waiter appeared, balancing a tray of champagne flutes. The young man paused before them, studying them with an amused smile. “Don’t tell me you two are actual FBI agents.”

Clarice and Ardelia exchanged a look, then both laughed. “That obvious?” Ardelia asked, taking a glass.

The waiter grinned, leaning closer as if to confide in them. “I expected a gathering of fascinating, dangerous people. Instead, most of the guests look like their idea of danger is a round of golf in the rain.”

Ardelia snorted softly. “Director Kelly’s probably hoping for something cushier after this. Politics. Lobbying. Lecture circuit. Who knows?”

The waiter tilted his head. “So far I’ve counted… ten actual agents. At most.”

Clarice smiled wryly. “Most of them probably figured out how to escape this circus. I nearly managed to myself.”

She nudged Ardelia with her elbow, her voice pitched low but playful. “But this one insisted.”

Ardelia rolled her eyes, though the corner of her mouth curved.

The waiter straightened, the glint of mischief in his eyes. “I’ll bring you the freshest hors d’oeuvres before anyone else paws them,” he said, and drifted away like a conspirator disappearing into the crowd.

The champagne was cold in Clarice’s hand, but already the warmth of the room pressed against her, heavy with perfume and ambition. She felt herself shrinking, yet also watching… closely . Her mind, untrained to be idle, sharpened. Every detail became a clue, as if she were not a guest but a profiler—scanning, measuring, piecing the crowd together like a puzzle of motives and personas.

And then her gaze snagged, caught by a canvas looming on the nearby wall. A painting of immaculate white, so luminous under the chandeliers it seemed to give off its own light. At its center rested a solitary red circle—a wound, an eye, a secret. It seemed to pulse faintly in her vision, as if it had been waiting for her eyes alone. Something about it unsettled her, and yet it drew her gaze with an almost gravitational pull.

Clarice felt her breath slow. 

Unthinking, she drifted toward it--her heels silent against the marble floor.

Up close, she noticed the title and the artist, painted in stark black letters at the bottom: The Red Circle – S. Klein .

“Klein,” Clarice muttered.

The name jarred her. She was certain she had heard it before, perhaps during her wanderings at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

A faint shiver passed over her, the uncanny sensation of something reaching out of her own memory to meet her here, in this place.

“Starling,” came a voice from behind, warm and freighted with authority.

She turned, still half-dazed, and found Jack Crawford standing there, Ardelia at his side. His presence, solid and immovable, carried its own familiar gravity, anchoring her back from the strange pull of the painting.

“I’m glad you decided to come,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching toward a smile. “Even if it’s Agent Mapp that deserves most of the credit for dragging you here.”

Ardelia grinned. Clarice only managed a small shrug, as if caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

“It’s not that I didn’t wanna come, sir. It’s just—”

Jack’s expression softened.

“Starling, It’s fine, I get it. These places aren’t always made for our kind. And their kind doesn’t always realize how much they need our kind.”

Clarice felt a flicker of relief. Jack understood. He always did, more than he let on.

“I’m just glad you’ll be back to work on Monday,” he went on. “I know it hasn’t been easy—being sidelined after something like that.”

His voice dropped a register, quiet but firm. “How’s the physical therapy?”

“As good as new,” Clarice replied, almost too quickly. “Better than new, some days. It’s been… reinvigorating. If anything I feel stronger than I did before.”

Jack’s eyes measured her carefully, as though weighing the truth. There was no malice in his gaze, only the weary knowledge of a man who had read too many reports, seen too many crime scenes, not to read between the lines.

“You were lucky, Starling,” he said at last, his tone roughened with the grit of memory. “A bullet in the shoulder was a lucky break. Bentov wasn’t aiming for your shoulder—he was aiming at your head. It could’ve ended differently, and you know it.”

Silence hung between them for a moment, softened by the swell of strings from the distant orchestra.

But then Jack shifted, his gaze sharpening. Clarice saw something flicker across his features—a tightening around the mouth, a shadow in the eyes. When he spoke again, his tone was weighted, suddenly practical.

“There’s a case waiting for you on Monday. I know I should probably ease you back in, but this one—”

He broke off, then he let out a sigh—low, reluctant—the kind of sound a man makes when forced to speak aloud a truth that unsettles him. It carried the faint edge of fear, a quality Clarice had only rarely seen in him. In an instant he seemed older, his shoulders drawn down by something heavier than duty.

“I’ve seen a lot in my years, but this one’s ugly. Pure sadism disguised as quasi-religious nonsense. It’s ritualistic, complicated. Bodies broken, then re-configured into sigils and symbols. It’s a forensic maze—a puzzle without an end, really.”

Clarice felt her spine stiffen, her skin prickling. 

“You want me on it?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

“I want you leading it,” Jack said. “But I won’t have you do it alone. Not yet. You could easily end up in charge of the whole unit one day, Starling. You’re the best I’ve got. But this case could get real ugly real quick… which is why I’m setting you up with the best support I can think of. Someone from outside the bureau.”

Her brow furrowed.

“Sir, you know I prefer to run my own investigation—”

Jack shook his head—smiling—like he’d been expecting her resistance all along.

“That’s an order, Starling.”

She clenched her jaw.

“Fine. Just as long as they don’t get in my way, whoever they are.”

“He won’t be in your way, that I can promise you. On the contrary, I think you could learn a lot from him.”

Clarice opened her mouth to protest. Again, Jack would have none of it.

“Yes, Agent Clarice Starling. Even you could still learn a thing or two… Especially from the very best the world has to offer. He’s an old friend of mine. I think you would make a good team.”

Clarice’s stomach tightened, though she didn’t know why. It was something in the cadence of Jack’s words—the certainty, almost reverence—as though he were not speaking of a man but invoking an idea, a presence. She searched his face for a hint of irony or exaggeration, but saw only certainty.

Then Jack’s eyes shifted. They followed someone across the room, and Clarice instinctively tracked the movement as well. A ripple seemed to pass through the crowd, though no one else appeared to notice…

“Ah,” Jack said at last, his voice lower—something between respect and curiosity. “Speak of the devil.”

He lifted his hand in greeting, calling out with a familiarity that did nothing to soften the strangeness of the moment.

“There he is. Let me introduce you. Hannibal!”

Clarice nearly choked on her champagne.

And then there he was.

Doctor Hannibal Lecter.

Living legend.

The crowd seemed to part around him. His eyes—an unearthly, glacial blue—found hers from afar, then lingered, ever so slightly too long before the hint of a smile tugged at his lips, like a secret only meant for her.

The sudden weight of his presence gave her a flutter, a heat rising to her cheeks as he slowly closed the distance—every movement precise, deliberate, a choreography of quiet authority.

Ardelia leaned in, whispering, “Giiirl. That’s the actual Doctor Hannibal Lecter. Oh my God, oh my God, be cool about it.”

Be cool about it?

She could hardly breathe.

She had never been one to admire the famous, the celebrated, the untouchable—yet here was the one man, the one prominent figure whose intellect, poise, and undeniable magnetism had pulled her in like gravity.

She couldn’t really explain it.

She had long admired him from afar, and she wasn’t the only one. There was a dangerous allure to Hannibal Lecter—a brilliance that was at once terrifying and intoxicating,
an enigma she had longed to solve without fully admitting it even to herself.

The man was a genius.

An intellectual superstar. A world-renowned psychiatrist and philanthropist—the brilliant mind whose accolades, awards, and charitable works needed its own thesaurus. Author of “The Psychology Of Violence” and several other defining works relating to psychopathy and impulsivity. His reputation alone could make knees buckle.

His grey hair was slicked back—just as it was in every interview—and the cut of his tuxedo was flawless, though no tailor could take credit for the way he wore it. He was impeccably dressed, impeccably composed, and effortlessly charismatic, his presence commanding without a single trace of force.

His quiet confidence stole her breath away.

Jack’s voice floated in and out, performing the formalities of introduction, but Clarice heard little beyond the beating of her heart.

Dr. Lecter inclined his head, then slowly took her hand in his—a gesture both courtly and disarmingly intimate.

“Good evening, ladies,” he said, barely above a whisper.

She found herself staring at his mouth, unmoored as his lips grazed her knuckles with the barest touch, more invocation than kiss. He did the same for Ardelia, but his eyes did not stray far from Clarice—drinking her in with the quiet assurance of a man who had seen everything—except perhaps her.

“Clarice is one of the FBI’s finest,” Crawford said, pride tinting his gravelled voice.

Lecter nodded, then took a single deliberate step closer—the distance between them shrinking with a gravity that made Clarice’s skin prickle. She could feel the warmth of him, faint but undeniable, the subtle scent of his cologne brushing against her, intoxicating. 

“I’ve heard of you, Agent Starling,” he said with that famous voice of his, smooth and velvety, carrying both a warmth and a subtle danger that always aroused her a little bit. “And I’m pleased to say I can finally scratch meeting you off of my things-to-do-list.”

She flushed, then drew a slow, steadying breath—though her stomach betrayed her nerves. She tried to remind herself that he was just a man, even if she suspected him to be just a little more.

“I’ve heard of you too,” she managed sheepishly, the sound of her own voice suddenly alien and rough. “Though, I suppose—almost everyone has. Your work on the psychology of violence… it’s genius. Invaluable. Like the Yellow Pages. Well… I mean, more important than that.”

The words hung between them, ridiculous and earnest all at once. Clarice immediately felt the heat creeping up her neck, wishing she could take them back.

She couldn’t believe herself.

Pull yourself together, Starling! You’re embarrassing yourself in front of Hannibal Lecter!

Just then, Ardelia leaned closer and nudged the knife of embarrassment a little deeper.

“She’s a big fan. She’s seen that interview you did with David Frost on deliberative thought… what, like eight times?”

Clarice’s cheeks flamed. She opened her mouth to protest, but no words came, only a strangled little laugh that betrayed her mortification.

Lecter merely chuckled.

“I’m honored, Agent Starling.”

Every detail of him—the tilt of his head, the slow, deliberate gleam in his eyes, the quiet authority in his posture—etched itself into her mind.

When his smile deepened, measured and unblinking, Clarice felt a jolt in her chest, a shiver that made her knees weak. Everything else. The noise of the party—the clink of glasses, the hum of conversation—faded into something far away and meaningless.

He seemed to sense the tremor in her composure, and simply allowed the silence to stretch, charged, taut and intimate, almost unbearable. Every breath he drew, every movement of his lips and hands, seemed to brush against her skin...

It was more than admiration. More than awe. Something deeper, warmer, prickled in the hollow of her stomach—a dangerous, delicious tension that hummed beneath her rational mind, begging her to acknowledge it even as she tried to stay composed.

Was he flirting?

Then, finally, he spoke again, his voice low and deliberate, each word rolling over her like a caress: “If I may say so, you have a very intriguing way of seeing the world,” he murmured, his gaze holding hers. “I’d like to experience more of it.”

Clarice was caught off guard, a little confused as to the exact meaning of his words—struggling to respond as Hannibal Lecter’s eyes bored into her soul.

But Jack’s voice cut through the mystery—grounding yet casual. “I showed Hannibal some of your profiling work, Starling. Hope you don’t mind.”

Clarice blinked, unable to tear her gaze from Lecter’s pale, penetrating eyes.

“I—uh… of course not, sir,” she managed, her voice betrayed by a shudder that made her wonder how he could possibly not have noticed—and if he had, what he might make of it.

The air between them felt charged. She had never been starstruck before, and yet here she was, caught by a man whose intellect and presence had undone her with a few polite words.

Perhaps Crawford sensed the undercurrent, the fluttering of her pulse, for just then Jack cleared his throat. “Good. Erm… I need to discuss something with Hannibal about our research methods at the Unit. If you’ll excuse us, ladies.”

He gently steered his old friend away, and as they walked, Dr. Lecter cast another look over his shoulder at Clarice Starling, the faintest curve of appreciation—perhaps even flirtation—on his lips. It felt like a delicate, dangerous promise of more to come.

Ardelia muttered under her breath, eyes darting from him to her and back again. “Uhuh. That is one beautiful older man. Don’t you think, babes?”

Clarice swallowed hard, the heat pooling in her chest refusing to dissipate.

Dee leaned closer, her grin sharp and unrelenting. “Girl, he likes you.”

Clarice shot her a pointed glare. “Stop. Better yet, don’t even start.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t like him,” Dee pressed, eyes sparkling. “Or did you watch that two-hour David Frost interview with him over and over again just out of intellectual curiosity?”

“Yes. That’s exactly why.”

Dee arched an eyebrow, teasing mercilessly. “Oh, so it’s nothing to do with the fact that his sexy British ass looks particularly fine in that one?”

“He’s not technically British,” Clarice corrected, a faint edge of embarrassment creeping into her voice. “He was born in Lithuania. Apparently he’s a count. Old money.  He and his sister were moved to England after the war. They were just kids. They were both raised there, went to school there before he moved over here in his mid-thirties.” 

Dee snorted.. “You’d only know that because you have a crush on him.”

Clarice’s cheeks flamed, and she opened her mouth to protest, but Dee cut her off, leaning in with mock conspiratorial relish.

“Look, it’s fine, girl. If you don’t want the classy, successful, slightly over-the-hill James Bond–looking rich guy, I’ll seduce him myself. Though, obviously, I can’t compete with you.”

Clarice folded her arms, then leaned forward.

“Ardelia. Drop it.”

“Nuh-uh,” Dee said. “Did you see that look in his eyes when Crawford pulled him away from you? He could have murdered Jack.”

Clarice blinked, momentarily lost for words. She opened her mouth, then closed it, trying to ground herself as she stole another glance at Hannibal Lecter talking to Crawford—composed, commanding, and utterly magnetic.

She swallowed—then shook her head as if to physically dislodge the childish fantasies that crowded her adult mind.

“I admit it, he’s quite the man, isn't he... Yeah. A world-famous man who used to date a literal supermodel.”

Dee frowned, already defensive about the words to follow.

“So?”

“So he’s used to long-legged blondes, Dee. He’s not looking for a tiny West Virginian who likes wool and tweed and sleeping a lot.”

“Tiny but terrifying,” Ardelia reminded her—voice firm but playful. “I won’t have you talking about yourself that way. Remember—you’re not a shrimp. You’re a low-altitude legend who needs her beauty rest.”

“I love you, Dee,” Clarice murmured, a rueful smile tugging at her lips, “but drop it. Men like him don’t want low-altitude legends—they want Longlegs McGorgeous.”

“Lola Legzilla,” Dee added without missing a beat.

“Veronica Vertical Vixen,” Clarice finished, her voice softer, almost a whisper. “Besides, I wouldn’t know what to do with him. I’m too busy for a man in my life, let alone one as much as that. I could never keep up with him.”

And then, almost as if summoned by the very thought, Hannibal Lecter appeared at her side—narrowing his eyes with a subtle, knowing smile that made her breath catch.

“Keep up with whom, Agent Starling?” His voice was so smooth it made her shiver.

He leaned slightly closer, the faintest trace of cologne brushing her awareness, and added, almost guiltily, “You know, I could never forgive myself if the evening ended without me having asked you for the pleasure of a dance. May I?”

Clarice’s breath hitched. She could feel the hush of the room around them, the soft murmur of other guests fading into nothing as his gaze held hers, unblinking and intimate, the world reduced to a fragile orbit of his pale blue eyes.

Once they reached the dancefloor, his eyes never left hers.

He drew her close, slowly—just close enough for their bodies to recognize one another without collision, allowing him to guide her while the scent of his cologne twisted around her senses, leaving her breathless. Clarice’s pulse raced, her mind caught between professional decorum and a dizzying, forbidden surrender to the moment—to a man she couldn’t even hope to resist.

Her hands rested lightly on his shoulders, the faintest brush of his fingertips at her back—his touch making her body ache in ways she had never experienced, or thought possible.

Lecter’s eyes never wavered. And in that gaze, she felt a strange, intoxicating certainty: that somehow, impossibly, her life had just taken a turn—as though the stars had aligned and they had both been moving toward this moment since the day they were born.

The music rose around them... and somewhere in the distance, the enormous white painting with the red circle at its center simply watched—observed as Clarice Starling surrendered, body and soul, to the pull of a man the world called a genius.

His eyes held her whole, a labyrinth of moments folding in on itself like a dream within a dream.

Chapter Text

Monday broke over Quantico like any other, a morning so ordinary it felt reluctant to begin at all. Clarice held her coffee close, savoring the sharp heat against her palms, the taste anchoring her to the present moment—a few sacred, simple minutes before the horrors of the work pulled her whole soul into its greedy web.

The hallways were as they always were—awash in artificial light, carrying the scents of disinfectant, musky files, and damp carpet that never quite dried. To most, it would have been stifling, a maze that pressed too close and told of countless evil deeds that would have sent most people running. 

To Clarice, it was a sanctuary.

A place of perpetual pursuit. The hunt for monsters and their motives—and in that crackling, dangerous weight, she felt a strange comfort; the comfort of belonging, of being home.

Like every Monday, she passed the enormous painting on the wall:The Red Circle by S. Klein.

Her eyes landed on it almost like a ritual, a mental clocking-in of sorts, signaling that the week had truly begun. But unlike other Mondays, she felt an unsettling tug at her chest, a quiet unease that rose the moment her eyes met it. The familar red circle at its center seemed to pulse faintly, like a heartbeat she could almost hear. She didn’t know why. The painting had always hung there, as far back as she could remember, a constant in the sterile hallways.

Yet today it felt different—charged, almost alive.

She blinked and shook her head, brushing off the feeling as she veered left into Behavioral Science, then made her way toward the briefing room, where Jack Crawford was waiting with a brand-new case.

When she pushed open the door, Jack was waiting, seated at the head of the table—shoulders hunched beneath the weight of leadership in a place so steeped in darkness and uncertainty. Before her feet had crossed the threshold, he leaned back and slid a folder across the surface. It rested at the place where she always sat—waiting for her eyes—its leather edges shining in the cold fluorescent light.

“They call him the Rubik’s Killer,” he said, voice hoarse and matter-of-fact.

There was no flourish, no attempt to soften the words. “Four women so far.”

“Morning to you too, Jack,” she replied, then settled into her chair.

Her fingers lifted the folder with the care of someone handling something fragile—or cursed.

She opened it slowly. The first pages were unremarkable. They always were. Photographs of the four victims, all women. There were names, birthdates, addresses, next of kin—details that anchored them to ordinary lives. All from the Chesapeake Bay area. But as she turned the pages one by one, the world of the Rubik’s Killer revealed itself.

The crime scene photographs were almost abstract. There were no bodies, or faces. No vacant stares frozen in the moment of death. There were only limbs, hands, teeth, hair. Severed bodyparts, rearranged into grotesque symbols.

An alphabet of chaos.

It was like some pagan ritual—a sacrifice for a deity she didn’t want to know, or a geometry lesson from a mind that had abandoned the world in exchange for hell.

Her stomach tightened.

The images demanded attention, resisting comprehension, and yet insisting on it. She traced the jagged lines, the symmetry, her mind trying to map the logic of a madness she could almost—but not quite—understand.

A puzzle.

“They were found in alleyways. One of them discovered by a nine-year-old. Poor kid.”

Clarice exhaled slowly.

There was an artistry to the work, she realized. Every arrangement, every placement… laid out the devotion of a zealot. Meticulous. Ritualistic. Deranged.

“It’s obvious he wants them found,” she said, voice low. “Found, and understood. Interpreted by someone.”

This was no ordinary case. It was a nightmare, speaking to her in symbols. A language, or complete gibberish, perhaps—the only message the madness itself. Either way it was a map, unfinished… in need of a cartographer. A mind equal to the task—one who could look beyond the surface, past the crude geography of flesh, and into the unconscious—that place that spoke in another language; one abstraction, of dreams, of symbols.

Clarice felt the familiar pull between horror and fascination.

She knew these gruesome hieroglyphs weren’t meant for her, not truly. They were for whoever the killer believed would understand them. And here they were, thrust into her hands, asking to be read.

And then—

The door opened.

Clarice felt the shift at once—a faint awareness that prickled across her skin---nerves recognizing the presence that had entered well before her mind did.

It was as though her body had been fine-tuned to respond to his.

Doctor Hannibal Lecter walked into the room, neither hurried nor hesitant—every step measured, deliberate, graceful.

“Morning, Jack,” he said, his tone as smooth as silk.

His eyes however, were not on Crawford. They sought hers instead—almost unsettling in their pale blue clarity—as though they could see far more than she intended to reveal.

“Good morning, Agent Starling.”

Her smile lifted against her will—polite, composed on the surface. Just underneath, every cell in her body was screaming. 

She cleared her throat.

“Morning, Doctor Lecter.”

He smiled knowingly, gaze lingering—allowing the silence between them to breathe.

Fuck.

Then he blinked slowly, like the shutter of a camera, as if committing her to some private gallery of memory.

Once again, he was impeccably dressed—pressed shirt, tie, waistcoat, blazer—every thread in its proper place, every line cut with elegance.

Clarice felt the weight of comparison before she could stop herself. She hadn’t thought to wear anything beyond her usual: cardigan, slacks, worn boots. Practical. Sensible.

Fuck again.

The man was style and charm incarnate. Meanwhile she sat there, rooted in her chair like a turnip, the embodiment of ordinary.

The contrast was cruel.

And yet, it did nothing to diminish the fascination in his eyes.

“I’m so looking forward to working with you,” he said softly.

He moved with unhurried grace to his seat—at the corner, just beside her—far enough to be polite, yet close enough to feel the warmth of him.

Clarice felt it: a shiver—a thrill that ran through her whole body, aching and completely undeniable.

Jack rose to his feet. 

“Alright then, Starling,” Crawford said, his voice edged with a weariness that might have been resignation—or relief.

“Doctor Lecter’s been fully briefed on the case. You can jump right in. He’s been generous enough to give us some of his time, free of charge, so make the most of it while you can.”

He stuffed his hands into his pockets and headed toward the open door, turning back once more time before leaving—

“You’ve got three days to pick this man’s brain and build a profile of Ricky Rubiks before he’s expected across the pond for a series of lectures at the end of the week.”

Clarice nodded, her pulse quickening when she looked at DrLecter. She told herself it was because of his reputation, his brilliance, the weight of his name. But the truth was simpler: she was drawn to him. And that—she knew—would make working together far more complicated than it should be.

“I’m perfectly willing to return to this case after my lectures, Jack,” Dr. Lecter said. “If needed that is… and if Agent Starling will still share a room with me after the first three days.”

He winked—innocent in intention but impossible to ignore.

She wanted to run.

“Wonderful,” Crawford said, checking his watch. “I’ll leave you to it, then. You know where to find me.”

Clarice barely heard him.

Lecter’s presence filled filled her thoughts, thrilling and unnerving, leaving her acutely aware of a desire she had never felt before.

He inclined his head toward her—then leaned closer.

“Shall we begin?”

***

The hours slipped away unnoticed. Crime scene photographs lay scattered across the table, overlapping in a grim mosaic of severed limbs turned to symbols, each image demanding attention, analysis, precision.

Clarice worked methodically—pen tapping against her notepad—though her composure betrayed itself in stolen glances across the table.

He leaned over a file—peering over the edge of his reading glasses—the slow, deliberate cadence of his voice winding around her as he murmured a thought, a hypothesis, a truth she didn’t yet want to challenge. Each syllable pulled her closer—and she sometimes caught herself leaning forward, staring, lips parted. The realization left her unsettled, cheeks heated in the privacy of her own thoughts.

Being in the same room with Hannibal Lecter was a test of restraint, a constant tightening in her stomach that left her aware of every small movement, every rise and fall of his chest.

He had shed the constraints of his formal attire. His blazer was draped across the back of his chair, abandoned. His tie hung loose, two buttons undone at his collar, revealing the hint of salt and paper chest hair that made her fingers itch.

There was a careless elegance, a precision of motion that drew her eyes again and again, pulling her awareness into the curve of his shoulders, the ease with which he moved.

After hours of quiet, it was Clarice who finally shattered the spell of taut politeness between them—her voice sharp, precise, unyielding.

It came when Hannibal suggested—with that calm, certain ease that always seemed to thread his voice—that the killer possessed “a working knowledge of symbology, and therefore, most likely, an intelligence somewhat above the norm.”

Clarice had felt her pulse rise—not with attraction this time, but with resistance.

“You can’t just assume that, Doctor,” she said—sharper than  intended.

Her eyes flicked to the photographs, tracing the limbs and symbols, then lifted back to his pale, unwavering gaze. “There isn’t any proof that someone is inherently more intelligent just because they have an interest society considers… intellectual. And you can’t assume he’s clever simply because he’s a psychopath. In fact, most of the data points the other way.”

Her voice had sharpened, a flicker of defiance—and something else, a thrill—running under her words.

And we don’t know if these…” she gestured, breath catching slightly, “arrangements are symbols at all. They could just as easily be random patterns. To assume otherwise—that’s not investigation. That’s mythology.”

He didn’t reply immediately. Instead, his pale eyes held hers, lingering, making her acutely aware of the heat crawling along her skin. The air between them was charged, and though his reading glasses softened his eyes a little bit, nothing could dull the intensity of the man.

Her fingers tightened around her pen. 

“In practical forensics and profiling, the so-called intelligence of a killer isn’t even what matters. That’s the kind of thing academics care about after he’s caught—when they’re writing books and making tons of money. But we actually have to catch the guy first. And in order to do that we have to be precise and work with what we know, not what we assume.”

Lecter’s expression did not shift much, but his eyes gleamed with a dangerous light. A smile curved his lips—impossible to categorize. Was it amusement at her stubbornness, or admiration for the way she dared contradict him? She could not tell, and the uncertainty prickled through her veins with equal parts frustration and heat—a slow, aching heat that pooled lower and lower in her belly.

“Of course,” he said, voice low and leaning slightly closer, “I would never presume to know how to do your job, Agent Starling. I know I’m not the one who has to speak to a heartbroken mother about what her daughter was wearing  the night she disappeared. And I’m well aware that I can pontificate from a leather couch, while the practical, ugly work falls to people like you. But let me show you what I mean. Let’s look at… erm.”

They both reached for the same photograph.

The brief brush of their fingers sent a shock through her—a pulse of deep delicious heat that made her shiver, set her skin alight. She flinched, letting go of the photograph so quickly it nearly slipped from the table.

She blushed—panicked—and quickly forced her gaze elsewhere.

“Sorry,” she she said, although she didn’t know why.

It wasn’t just the touch itself that had startled her.

It was a recollection of some kind. Like she had felt it once before, that sudden jolt of longing when their fingers touched—in a different lifetime, in a place she could not name. It was like a memory folded over memory, a strange echo of sensation, familiar yet impossible. 

A strange, fleeting thought flitted through her mind, then—romantic but absurd: she already knew this man somehow.

This wasn’t their first time around.

There was a subtle shift in him too. Hannibal Lecter, the unflappable, measured genius, seemed… unsettled—almost as taken aback by the touch as she was.

He cleared his throat, voice trying to regain its calm, silky cadence. “As I was saying… let me show you what I mean…”

Then, with infuriating calm, he drew a blank sheet of paper toward him.

“If I’m right, these patterns aren’t random at all.”

His pen hovered, then descended. Each stroke came with the grace of someone who had mastered the art of drawing  long ago, gliding across the page as though the lines already existed and he was merely uncovering them. In seconds, the crime scene’s grotesque “sigils” were reinterpreted into lines, arcs, shapes. Limbs distilled into geometry. Chaos reduced to a symmetry that was almost… beautiful.

Perhaps he had really He had seen something she hadn’t.

Dr. Lecter adjusted his glasse, then slid the paper toward her with a slow, almost intimate gesture. The sketches were precise, elegant, disturbingly graceful. Clarice leaned closer without realizing it, as though the paper itself had a gravity that pulled her in—or perhaps it was his voice, low and certain.

“Hmmm… Just as I thought.” he murmured, tapping the point of his pen against the paper. “Not random at all. They all represent Arsenic.”

Clarice frowned, leaning closer despite herself. “Arsenic?”

“The alchemical symbol,” he said softly, his eyes lifting at last to meet hers. They held her—gentle, yet with a force that denied escape.

“Arsenic,” Lecter went on,“was considered the agent of transformation, of purification. A poison that—alchemically—burned away the dross to reveal hidden truth. Symbolically, it speaks of illusions, dreams, of truths we cannot face directly—unconscious forces so destructive that, if left unintegrated, they devour their host.”

Clarice’s throat tightened. She forced herself to swallow, though her mouth was parched.

“So you think…” She hesitated, “You think he wants to purify something?”

A shadow of a smile traced his mouth, subtle and dangerous.

“Perhaps, yes. An attempt to purge something he considers dangerous… or shameful. Something he cannot admit to society or even himself—at least, not consciously. Perhaps this is the only language he has for speaking a truth he cannot, dare not name.”

She looked at him—in awe, unable to hide it. The precision of his mind, the elegance with which he drew meaning out of chaos—it left her dizzy.

“You’re looking for someone in the same age range,” he added. “Twenty-seven to thirty-five. At the most.”

He paused there, deliberate—his eyes never leaving her face. 

“These weren’t mere… chance encounters, Agent Starling. The killer knew every single one of them, and quite well too. Perhaps they even grew up together.”

The way he said it, the low cadence of his voice, made the numbers feel less like data and more like invocation—a man constructed from nothing, conjured to life by the sound of Hannibal Lecter’s voice—precise, unyielding, inescapable.

Clarice’s throat tightened. It was just analysis—nothing more—but in his voice, everything became flesh, and she wondered if his voice could breathe life into anything, even things that were long-dormant… feelings never stirred before.

“Or…” he offered. “ I’m simply wrong, and we have to approach it from another angle entirely.”

For a heartbeat he said nothing. He only studied her, head tilted.

Clarice felt the heat crawl up her neck again, betraying her, but this time she couldn’t look away. The strange ache in her chest swelled—an ache born not only from the case but from a small, almost impossible notion forming in the quiet chambers of her mind: perhaps, for the first time in her life, she was falling in love.

***

By dusk, They had built the man together, brick by terrible brick: geography bound to the Chesapeake Bay, where his roots sank unseen into the same soil as theirs. Each one pulled into his orbit.

She had to admit—if only to herself—that he had been right. The patterns weren’t empty. They spoke, and Hannibal had been the first to recognize their language.

Perhaps he wasn’t just a man of books and lecture halls, spinning clever theories from the safety of distance and wealth. What he had seen in the photographs, what he had coaxed from images—it was more than intellect. It was vision. Perhaps—God help her—he was exactly what the world thought he was: a genius.

By the time they walked into the parking lot, the day was in retreat. The sun sagged low on the horizon, its dying light gilding the rows of cars ahead.

She hadn’t realized how far the hours had carried them, how the afternoon had slipped like sand between her fingers. In his company, hours dissolved into minutes, swallowed whole by his voice, his mind. 

She kept her gaze forward, but her awareness was sharp, crackling with the nearness of him: his shadow folding into hers, their footfalls on the pavement. Every so often, their steps aligned so perfectly that it seemed less like coincidence and more like choreography, as though some hidden metronome guided them both. It unsettled and excited her in equal measure, how electrifying it felt just walking beside him.

“This is me,” he said, veering off, path curving toward a car so exquisite it seemed unreal. “Goodnight Agent Starling. Drive safely.”

There, beneath the molten sky, gleamed a 1955 Mercedes 300 SL, bodywork like poured mercury, glinting as if it had stolen the light of the dying sun.

Her throat tightened. That car had been her private desire since childhood—a fantasy she had seen only in books and dreams.

Of course, she thought. Of course he drove a car like this. It was inevitable, almost cliché—the single, wealthy man of a certain age. And yet the machine itself and the man who owned both silenced mockery. Midlife crisis or not, it suited him in the way all things seemed to: effortlessly, gracefully, perfectly.

She stopped short. “That’s yours?”

The question came out softer than she intended, too reverent.

He inclined his head with a matter-of-fact nod, as though nothing about the vehicle was unusual.

Clarice circled the car once, the way one might circle a wild animal: awe mingled with caution. Her hand ached to trace the lines of metal, to feel the chill of its skin under her fingertips. “She’s really beautiful.”

His eyes lingered on hers, not the car.

“She is indeed,” he murmured, the words heavy with double meaning.

Clarice’s breath hitched. For an instant, her knees almost gave way, the ground unsteady beneath her. Heat surged beneath her skin, shameful and thrilling all at once.

He smiled knowingly.

“I suppose a lot of dangerous things are beautiful,” he said while he produced the keys, letting them dangle between two fingers, the chrome glinting like bait. “Would you like to take her for a spin? Around the parking lot. Or around town. Perhaps… to dinner?”

He was already holding the keys toward her, as though her decision had been made long before she realized it. Clarice blinked. It was absurd—and forward—and yet her pulse leapt.

“I assure you,” his voice dropped to a near-whisper, “we’ll return here for your car afterward. Or if the thought of being alone with me in a car unsettles you…” the corner of his mouth lifted in a teasing half-smile, eyes never leaving hers, “you can drive yourself. Meet me there. The choice is entirely yours.” 

Her pulse spiked.

She was terrified—terrified of the feelings that had waltzed into her life unannounced, and in the shape of Hannibal Lecter, no less. Falling for him felt dangerous, reckless.

He would break her heart, she knew it.

Most likely she was a curiosity, a fleeting distraction or break from a life threaded with gorgeous models, dancers, heiresses on yachts—the kind of wealth and beauty she could scarcely comprehend. And yet… despite the warnings that screamed in her mind, she didn’t want to resist.

“Well? What do you say… Clarice?”

Her fingers closed over the keys before she could stop herself. And she knew he noticed the tremor in her hand—a small but obvious betrayal.

“Alright, I’ll bite,” she muttered, voice wavering. “I’m not losing my chance to drive this beauty.”

His eyes flickered, a slow spark of amusement and something darker. She couldn’t help but smile, despite herself.

“But just for the record—I’m only agreeing to dinner because of her,” she added, letting her gaze flick to the car, “so don’t flatter yourself too much, Doctor.”

His laugh was low, rich, almost erotic. It made her fingers tighten on the keys in a way that had nothing to do with the car.

He settled beside her, inevitable, his nearness a slow-burning ache. The car felt impossibly small suddenly, every inch of air between them charged, vibrating with heat. She could feel it—the brush of his arm, the scent of his cologne, his hand resting on his thigh—it set her nerves alight, making her breath shallow, her thoughts stutter.

“So,” she said, forcing a note of casualness into her voice, “where to?”

“The Potomac Vineyard,” he replied smoothly.

Her head whipped toward him. “The Vineyard? You’re kidding. That place books out months in advance—you can’t just stroll in. It’s impossible.” A nervous laugh escaped her.

He leaned back slightly, effortless, casual, watching her like she was an enigma when she felt like the least mysterious woman in existence. “Tell me, Agent Starling… are you hungry?”

She nodded, almost embarrassed.

“…Starving.”

“Then,” Dr. Lecter said.  “I suggest you take us there.”

Clarice turned the key in the ignition, her heartbeat louder than the engine.

***

The Potomac Vineyard had opened to them, no questions asked. A maître d’ had bowed them through the entrance, menus offered as though Lecter owned the place.

Twice already, strangers had drifted to their table—soft-voiced, deferential, apologetic—asking if he really was the renowned Dr. Hannibal Lecter, then remarking on how one of his books had changed their lives. Both times, he’d met them with that same effortless smile, a few words: courteous, charming, but also distant, as if the attention were at once flattering and painful. Clarice noticed how he balanced it—how the weight of fame was a thing he wore lightly, yet with careful precision, both old coat and armor.

She had been tense at first, her every word measured, every gesture calculated. The restaurant was too fine, and he—sitting opposite impeccable—was altogether too much. Yet… as the wine eased the tension in her limbs and the rich flavors of the meal grounded her senses, she found herself relaxing.

When he asked about her family, she hadn’t intended to answer. Not really. Not at first. But the wine, the hour, and his presence across the table drew honesty from her. She told him plainly: there was no family. Her parents had died when she was a child—father gunned down on the job. That, after a brief stay with family in Montana, an orphanage had raised her—the rest of her life cobbled together from resilience and necessity.

He looked at her then—not with pity, not with the clinical curiosity she had long learned to expect—but with a calm, steady attention… and above all, recognition. 

His own childhood had been equally marked by tragedy. His parents had perished in an air raid during the war. Mischa, his younger sister, had depended on him to navigate the chaos until the Red Cross carried them to safety—through the streets of Warsaw, the avenues of Berlin, and finally to London. His words conjured corridors of trains and decks of ships across the English channel—a Europe on its knees, still burning, bent, and broken.

Clarice found herself leaning forward, caught in the light of his recollections, the room shrinking around them as the past took shape between his words.

Unlike the continent collapsing under its own ruin, his childhood self had risen to the task. He had kept his sister's soul from drowning with whatever scraps of hope he could find in his own, promising her again and again that everything would be alright, that he would take care of her from now on. He said he had never once thought himself a liar when he told her those things—he had believed them fiercely, with the blind conviction of a boy trying to remake the world into something a little less frightening.

It hadn’t kept fear from gnawing at him. But the fear was never for himself—it was for her. Always for Mischa.

And as he spoke, she caught it: the smallest shimmer at the corner of his eye. A tear held in suspension, born of memory—of a boy and his sister, carried toward a country not their own, guided by some cruel, discordant cog in the machinery of history.

He spoke of the Dickinsons, William and Rosemary, an older childless couple who had poured their hearts into the two odd children fate had delivered them.

Their house had been warm, their hearts wide open.

He spoke of Mischa, now a professor of Eastern European History at King’s College, with unmistakable affection, each word carrying memory and mischief.

He recounted how she had smuggled stray cats and dogs into the Dickinsons’ home until the house was overrun with pets, and how Bill and Rose had only laughed, letting their home become a sanctuary for chaos… and misfits.

He grinned when he told her how, once, when he had confided in her about how terrified he was of a Latin exam, she and few friends had nailed wooden boards across every single one of the school’s staircases—wall to bannister, slicked with soap—so that exams were delayed by a whole day. 

He chuckled softly, as if he could still see the teachers and priests scrambling and slipping down the makeshift slides, their frustration and screams drowned out by a hundred or so children roaring with laughter.

“It was the sound of true happiness, I think,” he said, voice quiet—almost reverent.

She had been a talented dancer once—until a car accident left her with a back that would never bend the same way again. Yet her spirit remained unbroken, a force that charged forward with restless urgency, as if always fleeing something… something invisible yet inescapable… chasing her.

She had married once, recklessly, unhappily, and briefly. She had vowed never to let a man close again—until eventually, one came knocking after all. Now, even twenty years later, she could not bear to be apart from him for more than a day or two.

“I’d love to meet her someday,” Clarice said, her voice quieter than she intended.

Hannibal’s gaze lifted from his glass, sharp and quick, and she felt the weight behind it. Her words carried a meaning that went beyond polite curiosity. They hinted at a future… one more personal, more intimate than just the professional connection they had formed.

Clarice realized it instantly. She tried to retreat, forcing a smile as she  scrambled for words to mask the meaning. “I mean… she sounds really interesting.”

He let the silence stretch, then smiled—slowly, deliberately, a smile that widened as though her fumbling attempt to save face only confirmed what he had suspected… and hoped. The air between them thickened, charged, and Clarice felt, with impossible clarity, that a future had indeed been formed in that moment.

They talked about work, about Jack, about the days ahead. Once again, time slipped through their fingers, unnoticed. When they finally looked up, they were alone—save for the quiet hum of the restaurant staff preparing to close.

***

They returned to the Quantico parking lot just before eleven.

Clarice’s cheeks were still warm from wine, from conversation, from the strange electricity of the evening—of him .

Then he looked at her, his eyes searching for something like belonging in her own—as if they wanted to make a home there. 

They lit up the night, catching her whole body unprepared.

Something stirred within her—a pulse of desire, of lust, of something ancient and forbidden, a feeling she had long convinced herself she could resist—on command if need be.

Love.

He moved closer, deliberate and unhurried. The heat of his breath brushed her lips, and her pulse stuttered, trapped in the exquisite tension of the moment.

“I was right about you, Agent Starling,” he whispered.

Her brow furrowed—cool and composed—though the tremble in her voice betrayed her.

“Right about what?” 

“That you are an impossible lock,” Lecter murmured. “No one can open it without your permission. But once you choose to give away the key—ah, then… there will be no end to the revelations.”

He blinked.

“You’re everything or nothing at all, aren’t you Clarice Starling?”

The heat in her cheeks deepened. She tried to summon her training, to steady herself, to argue with him. Arguing came easy.

She opened her mouth to challenge him, but he was already reaching for her hand. His fingers closed around it with a gentleness that startled her, as though he held something he found to be irreplaceable. He lifted it, turned her palm upward, and pressed his lips against her skin.

If she was honest with herself, she wanted him to go further. She wanted to feel press of his lips against hers, the taste of his tongue brushing hers, the heat of his mouth stealing her breath. She had never longed for anyone like this, and the intensity of it—both thrilling and terrifying—pulsed between her thighs, demanding attention.

“I look forward to tomorrow,” he said softly, still holding her hand. “And, if fate is kind, to many tomorrows beyond it.”

He released her only when she was safely inside her car, closing the door as though sealing a pact. He lingered until she started the engine, then crossed to his own car. On the drive home, Clarice found herself giggling in sudden, uncontrollable bursts, unable to stop. The sound felt girlish, reckless, absurdly alive.

The man was a dream. A dangerous, impossible dream she had never expected to have. And yet, the thought of a life without it felt suddenly unimaginable.

Chapter Text

At the end of the third day, Clarice Starling once again felt the hours slip through her fingers. Each step toward the Quantico parking lot was a step toward loss, toward goodbye—toward an ending she wasn’t ready to face. She found herself wishing with an almost childish desperation that the hallways would stretch on endlessly, or that the night might conspire to hold them captive forever.

She stole glances at him as they walked—his striking profile, the quiet grace of his stride, the self-possession that radiated from him like a current. Once, when his eyes found hers, he smiled—a small curve of the lips that sent heat through her entire body.

He must have known… didn’t he? That he could unravel her, thread by thread, just by looking at her.

The last three days had been dizzying.

Word had spread like wildfire—Dr. Hannibal Lecter was walking the halls of Quantico alongside Clarice Starling. Crawford had summoned him like an oracle to crack the code of the Rubik’s Killer, and the legend himself would solve the case in a matter of days. Done and dusted. Inevitable.

Students’ eyes had followed them, wide and reverent. They lingered in corridors, clutching files they didn’t need, loitering under fluorescent lights as if by accident, always stealing glances at the man himself. For Clarice, watching it all unfold, it had been like walking beside a rock star—dangerous, magnetic, impossible to ignore.

The case had absorbed them. And Clarice had felt it, the effortless intimacy of their minds as Dr. Lecter teased out meanings with surgical precision, and she—dogged and clear-sighted—translated them into the Bureau’s own code of profiling. The two of them together became something no one else could match: a duet of expertise that closed around the killer like a net.

On the second day, the sun had set unnoticed. It was near midnight, and they should have left—everyone else had—but neither moved, unwilling to surrender the strange gravity that held them there: each other’s nearness, mental and physical.

By that very afternoon, the profile of the Rubik’s Killer stood near completion: motive, method, signature. A suspect. Enough to make an arrest.

Jack Crawford had smiled at her, proud,  asking whether she had enjoyed working with Doctor Lecter in a way that felt conspiratorial. Because, he explained, Hannibal had told him how much he liked her—how intelligent and kind-hearted she was—and that he was secretly in awe of her, even a little intimidated.

She hadn’t known what to say except a polite, almost shy, “Yes.”

Jack had nodded, thoughtful, before adding that if only there were more people like Dr. Hannibal Lecter, then the world would be a far less ugly place. And that the good doctor was, without doubt, the best man he had ever known.

To think it would all end soon, unceremoniously, beneath the parking lot lights—it made her want to beg the world to stop turning—to let her keep this impossible thing just a little longer, a few more stolen moments in his company. And yet, when they stepped out into the night, it felt as though the world had conspired against her. The corridors had seemed shorter, the walk to the lot cruelly brief. 

Her car appeared before them far too quickly, a brutal reminder that their time—this fragile thing between them—was already slipping away.

“So—erm.” She fumbled for words, any words, anything to delay the inevitable parting. “I… I must say, it’s been an honor, Dr. Lecter. Working with you these past three days… it’s been invaluable. Enjoyable.”

He lingered opposite her, the space between them charged with something unspoken—with everything their eyes, their silences, and fleeting touches had conveyed over the past three days. 

“Enjoyable,” he repeated, barely more than a whisper.

Then he took a measured step closer, eyes glinting with that quiet, dangerous amusement that always made her stomach tighten. “Which of the two had been most to your liking, Agent Starling?” His voice was a low and deliberate murmur. “The professional experience, or the personal one?”

She faltered, words failing her as he closed the distance with a growing smile, his eyes fixed on her own, unblinking.

“I have enjoyed myself tremendously in your company,” he whispered as though confessing a sin, “Mostly I am in awe of you, Agent Starling… of your mind and your spirit.”

He took another step, unhurried.

“I simply cannot imagine this ending so soon. And… if you’ll permit me, I would very much like to see you again… once I return from England.”

He tilted his head, as if weighing her reaction, and then added, almost hesitant, “There is a Prokofiev ballet—Romeo and Juliet—at the Kennedy Center next week. I would be honored if you would accompany me.”

Clarice blinked, her chest tightening. 

“I… erm. You mean like a date?” she managed stupidly.

“Yes,” he whispered, leaning closer—the barest breath between them now, the warmth of him upon her lips, his voice dropping. “Indeed, Agent Starling… like a date. Would you like that?”

His eyes held her, fixed her, unmoored her. She knew it was a risk to let him in. Knew he would grow bored of her soon. Knew she should resist him—him, Hannibal Lecter of all men, God help her: brilliant, dangerous, intoxicating.

She knew. And yet she couldn’t.

“Yes,” she breathed, a tremor in her voice.

His eyes sparkled with something dark, untamed. Then he bit his lower lip, a slow curl of a smile—dangerous and utterly magnetic.

“Good,” he murmured.

Once again, he took her hand, lifting it to his lips with that slow, deliberate reverence that made her pulse stutter. “Goodnight, Agent Starling,” he murmured, leaving a trail of warmth where his lips had lingered.

When she sank into the seat of her car, the surreal weight of it all pressed against her chest: she—Clarice Starling—was about to attend a ballet with Hannibal Lecter.

***

The day after the arrest, the Bureau sang its own praises.

Eugene Vernon Wilkins—the so-called Rubik’s Killer—had been arrested in a mission so precise, so clean, that the news anchors spoke of it with something like awe. They called it the “arrest of the year,” a spectacle fit for myth. Flashbulbs burst, headlines bloomed, and America slept easier that night, convinced that justice had once again triumphed over evil.

And just beneath the applause lingered something even more appealing, a whisper that the real story lay not in the man in handcuffs, but in the strange alchemy that had caught him.

The brass lauded Clarice Starling by name, praising her tenacity, her precision, the clarity with which she had pursued the case. Lecter, meanwhile, required no such framing. The very idea of him was self-sufficient: a genius, inevitable, unquestioned. Together, they became a story. Irresistible to headlines.

But when the applause faded, Clarice was left with something she had not expected: time—and too much of it.

The week stretched endlessly, each day a slow echo of the one that came before. She longed for a remote, some impossible device to skip ahead—to fast-forward through the hollow days and restless nights until Saturday arrived, until the hour when Doctor Hannibal Lecter would return from England and take her to the ballet.

Excitement mingled with dread, a delicious, almost painful anticipation. Ardelia had dragged her through one boutique after another. Finally, they had settled on a gown—black, classic, elegant, but with a whisper of something more. The silk clung to her in all the right ways, simple yet devastating.

It was a choice made with the caution of two women navigating uncharted waters: what did one wear to a date with a millionaire genius—a man who that same day had been named the recipient of the Kraepelin–Alzheimer Medal, his name now echoing not just through newspapers but the annals of history.

When the knock finally came, Clarice’s body betrayed her. Panic rose like a flood, cold and sudden. She wanted to run—jump out the window, into the dark, vanish into the bushes until he gave up and left. This was a mistake, she thought wildly. She hadn’t prepared for this. She didn’t know ballet, didn’t know the intricate etiquette of that whole world—his world. What claim had she, a simple girl from West Virginia, to fall for a man like him—brilliant, perilous, untouchable?

The whole thing felt absurd, reckless, almost obscene.

And worst of all—why couldn’t he just have been cruel? An arrogant and cruel monstrosity; something she could despise without hesitation. That would have been simple. That would have been easy. She could have simply hated him, kept him at arm’s length, and moved on with her life, free of the flutter in her stomach and the ache between her thighs.

But no. He had to be this impossible, frightening thing: everything she could have ever wanted. Hannibal Lecter was a man whose genius was laced with charm and pure goodness—a light rather than a blight—the whole wide world agreed. He was irresistible and entirely undoing her.

It maddened her. Infuriated her.

Her heart thundered as the doorbell rang again.

“What are you waiting for, girl? You need him to kick the door down?”

Before she could answer, Ardelia’s hands gripped her shoulders, steadying her with a grin that was equal parts mischief and command.

“Dee, I… erm, I think—”

“Girl, breathe,” Dee whispered, her voice a gentle push as she guided her toward the door.

Ardelia turned the knob with a mischievous laugh, and before Clarice could even gather her courage, the door swung wide.

There he was.

Hannibal Lecter.

He stood there, poised, calm, impossibly elegant in a black tuxedo: velvet jacket, bow tie perfectly in place, and a bronze-colored leaf brooch pinned to his chest. The fabric clung just so, outlining a frame that was—not tall, perhaps—but powerful; and for a heartbeat, the world beyond the porch ceased to exist. Every rational thought in Clarice’s mind unraveled beneath him—magnetic, intoxicating, dangerously alive.

“Hot damn,” she heard Ardelia mutter under her breath, a grin tugging at the corners of her best friend’s lips.

In his hands, he held a small, meticulously wrapped package. The paper was crisp, each fold precise as if it had been handled with reverence. Clarice’s eyes flicked to it instantly, noting the deliberate care in its presentation. Before meeting her gaze, Lecter’s eyes found Ardelia, who leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, a teasing glint playing in her own sharp and terribly amused eyes.

“Miss Mapp,” he said, voice measured. “I have something for you.”

He held the package out with deliberate care. Ardelia’s expression softened, eyes sparkling with curiosity as she stepped closer.

“It’s a first edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems,” he said, voice low and reverent. “I came across it in a friend’s bookstore on Coventry Street. As I saw it, I remembered Agent Starling mentioning, in passing, that you were a fan.”

Ardelia arched a brow, arms folding across her chest, a smirk tugging at her lips. “Mister, are you trying to buy your crush’s best friend’s approval?”

Dr. Lecter’s lips curved into that slow smile Clarice had long recognized as both dangerous and utterly disarming.

“Is it working?” he asked, his voice smooth but playful.

Ardelia’s hands hovered over the package… and then—

“Hell yeah it is!” she breathed, eyes sparkling while she practically snatched up the gift as if it were a treasure chest. She undid the wrapping paper, carefully opened the book, and inhaled the faint musk of old paper.

“Oh my God—a first edition? This must have cost you a fortune!”

Clarice hung back, cheeks warming as she watched. Every gesture, every tilt of his head, seemed designed to charm—not just her, but anyone fortunate enough to be in his orbit.

“There are a few ink notes in it,” he added. “But I find that only enhances its worth rather than diminishes it. I’m of the opinion that marginalia, provided it’s not rude, lends virtue to the world.”

She caught the way the light traced the sharp angles of his face, the casual perfection of his posture, the almost mischievous curve of his smile. God, he was dazzling. And funny too—at least if you were willing to be won over by poetry and posture.

Ardelia glanced from the book to him and back. “Thank you so much, Dr. Lecter.
You know what? You have earned my permission to marry my daughter, noble sir. Clarice, marry this man!”

She gave Clarice a playful shove forward, and then—with a knowing wink—swept back into the house, leaving the two of them alone in the soft glow of the porch light.

For the first time, Lecter’s attention shifted fully to her, eyes locking onto hers with an intensity that made her breath catch. He took a step closer, the warmth of him rolling over her like a tide, every nerve achingly aware and tight with want, igniting a delicious, dangerous fire that made her want to press herself into him.

His voice dropped, a velvet caress in her ear: “You look breathtaking, Clarice. It has been… far too long being away from you.”

Her throat was tight as the weight of his gaze pressed down on her.

“Ready?” he asked, voice low and intimate.

She exhaled with a shudder. “If I’m being honest… no,” she admitted. “I’m not ready at all. I feel completely in over my head.”

Her confession hung in the air, raw and fragile. He tilted his head, dangerous and tender all at once.

“Then we shall be nervous together,” he whispered—voice charged with the heat. “I’m nervous too, Agent Starling—nervous to impress you.”

His hand extended toward her.

“Shall we?”

***

He had been the perfect gentleman—guiding her gently through the etiquette of the evening—always attentive, always aware. When admirers pressed for his time, he indulged them with polite precision, then excused himself swiftly, returning to her side with a small apology that carried more warmth than words. It was as if he understood she had stepped into a world that wasn’t hers—and he refused to let her stand in it alone.

By the time they found their seats, the storm of nerves inside her had softened, and she allowed herself to relax.

The ballet itself was nothing like Clarice had imagined. She had braced herself for stiffness—a cultural trophy rather than passion. But as the orchestra swelled and the first notes of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet trembled through the hall, she was drawn in—completely—swept into something elemental. Desire, loss, devotion—all played out through bodies arching, twisting, spinning.

Her pulse raced in time with the timpani, her breath hitching as Romeo’s hand lingered along Juliet’s waist, her body pressing into his in a tension that was almost unbearable to watch. She found herself unconsciously leaning forward, each leap and fall on the stage a revelation, violent and tender.

More than once, she stole sideways glances at Hannibal. He watched the stage, yes, but more often she found his gaze fixed on her, lingering with a quiet, feral curiosity. He drank her in—every flicker of emotion, every shiver of delight. His pleasure at watching her discover made her melt, unable to choose between the ballet and the man beside her, both intoxicating.

When the show was over, they lingered in the bar—the music still vibrating through her chest, her thoughts hazy with the thrill of the evening—and with him.

Hannibal had leaned close, offering her the requested glass of champagne while he cradled a cognac in his own hand, smiling, relaxed. She was barely aware of the world beyond the warmth between them, until a voice—husky, imperious, and utterly self-confident—cut through the haze:

“Hannibal, darling!”

Her breath caught.

There stood a creature so utterly breathtaking that her mind faltered. Tall, poised, with hazel eyes and hair like molten midnight cascading over her bare shoulders. Her gown—a sculpted white confection—clung to every curve with cruel perfection. Twenty-five at most, a study in grace and seduction, and yet there was a calculated innocence in the slight tilt of her head, the soft curve of her plump lips. She was exquisite, lethal in her beauty, and utterly untouchable.

The woman’s gaze never flickered toward her. Instead, it locked on Hannibal. Before Clarice could even blink, the woman’s lips brushed his cheek in a kiss that was intimate and possessive. Her hand hovered over his chest, then dusted away a speck that wasn’t there—a gesture that reeked of performative ownership.

“Darling,” she breathed, every word a spark of perfume in the air. “I can’t believe you’re here. It's fate, obviously. Darling, we need to talk. What happened in the Amalfi last summer was… a misunderstanding.”

Hannibal’s expression, otherwise so controlled, flickered with something almost imperceptible—a twitch of impatience, the faintest shadow of annoyance in his voice.

“Far from it, Isabelle, dear girl. I assure you, I understood the situation perfectly.”

His jawline twitched as she guided him aside, her hand brushing his arm, her presence filling every inch of space around him.

“Hannibal, I know you understand. I assure you, Mommy and Daddy really made me see how foolish I was. We simply must speak; I know you agree… We were made for each other.”

Her hand—elegant, certain—slid to Hannibal’s face. The touch was intimate, lover’s territory.

Clarice, frozen and banned in the shadows, could only watch. The woman was more than beautiful; she was a force of nature. A goddess. Compared to her, she felt provincial, raw, absurd—as though she’d stumbled into the wrong scene of a play—or the wrong life entirely.

She couldn’t stay.

It was the hollow, splintering truth: the heartbreak she had known was coming and had braced herself for, only to find that no amount of preparation could dull its sting.
Of course. What had she expected? That a man like Hannibal Lecter, with his genius, his elegance, his impossible charisma, would exist only for her?

It wasn’t his fault. It was hers. She had been a fool. She belonged to another world entirely—the Bureau, the work, the long hours and corridors that smelled of bad coffee. That was her place.

Attraction was one thing. And God help her, she wanted him. But the reality was she could never hold him, never keep him.

Without a word, she slipped away, her exit as quiet as the gnawing ache in her chest. Each step felt like surrender, and yet also a return to herself, to the truth: whatever had flickered between them belonged to another life, another dream.

Outside, the night air pressed cool against her skin, carrying the faint smell of rain. Clarice drew it into her lungs, steadying herself, and leaned against the marble balustrade. A handful of people lingered around her—waiting for taxis, buses, finishing conversations, wrapped in their own small worlds.

A voice broke through the evening chill.

“Did you enjoy the ballet?”

She turned, startled, to find an older gentleman beside her. Seventies, eighties, perhaps. His suit was modest but meticulously cared for, his shoes polished though worn at the edges.

His smile was kind, almost apologetic.

Clarice swallowed, forcing her breath into words. “Very much. It’s… my first time.”

He chuckled, a low, rueful sound. “Mine too, sadly. My wife adored the ballet. She went often—with friends. I never went with her. Not once. Too wrapped up in my own small world. I always told her how crazy she was for liking something as peculiar as ballet. She passed earlier this year.” His voice caught; his eyes glistened with the weight of memory. “And now I finally see it, and I realize how foolish I was. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

Something twisted in Clarice’s chest. She pressed her lips together, then whispered, “I understand. I felt the same way. But I was wrong. It’s… breathtaking.”

The man gave her a soft, grateful look, as if her confession lifted some of his own shame.

Then the man’s eyes shifted, nodding at someone behind her.

Clarice frowned, turned—and her breath caught.

Dr. Lecter stood just behind her, the glow of the streetlamps catching in his pale eyes, blue and unreadable, yet fixed wholly on her.

He studied her for a moment, as though weighing whether to speak. Then, without a word, he slipped his jacket from his shoulders, the movement precise, fluid, almost ceremonial. Before she could protest, he settled it around her—warmth still clinging to the fabric, the faintest trace of his cologne rising up to surround her. The velvet brushed her bare arms, decadent against her skin, and she shivered—not from the chill, but from the intimacy of the gesture.

“Forgive me, Clarice,” he offered, his hand lingering for a moment on her shoulder, steadying the jacket in place, steadying her. “I wish to apologize for that spectacle. It was discourteous of me.”

She smiled, or tried to. The whole ordeal had pierced her deeper than she dared admit, yet she brushed it aside with a shrug, pretending it was nothing.

“Why did you leave?” he asked, his voice low. She caught the faint, heady trace of cognac on his breath—rich, smoky—almost tasting it.

“It seemed pretty private. I didn’t want to intrude.”

His reply came at once, low, resolute, and carrying the weight of a vow. “She intruded. Not you. You could never intrude upon me, Clarice.”

The words unsettled her. She tried to laugh, but the sound faltered.

“That girl—Isabelle—she’s… stunning. You two dated?”

Something shifted in his expression, a shadow. 

“Yes. Isabelle de Broglie. What can one say? She seemed like a good idea at the time. Lust disguised as a promise of uncomplicated romance.”

Her throat tightened. “And now?” she whispered. “What seems like a good idea now?”

His gaze locked onto hers, dangerous, unblinking.

“Now?”

He leaned closer.

“Right now, Agent Starling—a good idea is not some romance with an uncomplicated princess, but with a woman from West Virginia who hunts monsters for a living; albeit a huntress who wears too much green and has dreadful taste in shoes.”

She snorted while his breath brushed her cheek, his words sinking into her skin.

“Right now, Agent Starling, what seems like the only good idea left in the world is doing what I’ve wanted to do since the very first moment I saw you.”

Her pulse thundered in her chest when Lecter tilted his head, his eyes never leaving hers—patient, reverent.

“May I?”

She couldn’t speak. Only a low, trembling hum escaped her—a surrender, a permission, a plea all at once. She nodded.

His lips claimed hers. Soft and warm at first, tentative, seeking her trust, and when she parted for him, the gentle brush of his tongue sent a dizzying shiver down her spine. Her knees threatened to buckle, and his hands slid to her hips, firm, grounding her in a world stripped bare of everything except the heat between them. She moaned against him, helpless, lost, every nerve singing with want.

It was fire. Ache. Benediction.

The ride back had been wrapped in silence—but not an awkward one. It was weightless and warm. Once, twice, his hand had brushed hers, lingering just long enough, a silent reminder that what had happened hadn’t been imagined.

She had felt it—his searching for words, the perfect words that might elevate the evening from extraordinary to unforgettable. And yet, words seemed unnecessary. The kiss had already done what words never could.

At the duplex—with the porch light spilling over him like a halo—Hannibal Lecter lingered in the doorway. His voice, when it came, was low and gentle.

“It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen someone so wholly undone by a ballet, Agent Starling. I think watching your reaction moved me more than the performance itself.”

His voice wrapped around her, seductive and dangerous in her ears—but what struck her most wasn’t the sound itself, it was that damned “Agent Starling.”

Part of her wanted to tease him for it, to say, Agent Starling? Is that really what you call a woman you’ve kissed within an inch of her sanity? But another part of her—deeper, more fragile—clung to it. Because, just maybe, the formality of his words was the only distance keeping them from being utterly consumed by the fire building between them.

“I do hope you enjoyed yourself.”

She nodded, forcing herself to meet his eyes—and in that instant it struck her: she didn’t want him to keep that distance. She wanted the man, unguarded… all of him.

“I did,” she managed at last, her voice softer than she intended. “I… erm… it was amazing.” The words felt clumsy, small against the enormity of what she felt.

His smile came slow, as if her answer had untied a knot in him.

He stepped closer, erasing the fragile space between them. The scent of him—cognac, cologne, something beneath—slid into her lungs while he leaned in, unhurried, and pressed a kiss to her cheek, soft as breath.

Clarice’s pulse thundered. That was all? A kiss so chaste when her whole body ached for more? And yet it undid her completely—the gentleness, the reverence, the unbearable suggestion that he was holding back for her sake.

Her skin burned where his lips had touched.

“Goodnight, Clarice Starling of the FBI.”

Her heart lurched. No—she wasn’t ready to let him go, not when every nerve in her body was strung tight with want. She caught his hand before he could step back, her fingers curling desperately around his.

“Wait.” Her voice was a whisper, trembling but sure. “The evening isn’t over… is it?”

His eyes narrowed with a slow, dangerous smile. Then he tilted his head, feigning confusion, though the heat in his gaze betrayed him. His eyes lingered on her lips, her throat, the slight flush of her skin begging to be touched.

“I mean…” she added, trying to sound casual as she pressed her body into his, then whispered an unmistakable invitation against his ear. “Don’t you want your jacket back?”

***

When they crossed the threshold into her bedroom, his hand warm in hers, Clarice’s fingers trembled.

She turned, suddenly shy—awkward in a way that felt almost girlish. A wave of self-consciousness rippled through her as his eyes swept the room.

It was so ordinary. Small. Austere.

Hannibal Lecter did not belong in such a room, she thought—he belonged to chandeliers and Parisian balconies. He belonged to opulence, not to her modest duplex. And yet here he was, impossibly real, his presence filling the space in such a way that it no longer seemed plain at all.

He didn’t move at first. He simply stood there, leaning against the door, watching her.

For the first time in her life, she felt herself suspended on the edge of something impossible, delicious, utterly consuming. It coiled deep between her thighs—an ache that pulsed insistently, demanding attention.

God help me, she thought. I want him. And I want him to want me—not the warrior, not the agent, not the mask I wear for the world. Me.

That hunger frightened her.

No other man had ever made her feel like this. She was raw, trembling, undone—as if every rule dissolved the moment his gaze lingered too long. Desire quivered hot and dizzying inside her, yet beneath it all, there was a flicker of nerves—of green, untested longing—caught between craving him and fearing the intensity of what she wanted.

At last, he smiled and closed the distance—one deliberate step after another, the space between them charged to the point of breaking, until his breath ghosted across her lips.

His eyes searched hers, bright and unflinching, and yet, in their depths, she glimpsed something unexpected—something beyond desire: a flicker of hesitation, even… fear?
“Do you really want me to stay?” he asked, each word low and intimate, vibrating through her chest. “It could be… more than you expect. It could change our lives—forever. Don’t you think that’s a little dangerous, Agent Starling?”

Her own voice was steadier than she expected, low and measured, edged with raw heat.
“I’m an FBI agent, Doctor. Danger comes with the job.”

He chuckled, low, erotic, his pale eyes never leaving hers; not when his fingers slipped through hers—warm, commanding—nor when he lifted her hand as if it were the most precious thing in the world. When his lips grazed the soft curve of her knuckles, a delicious, almost unbearable shiver tore through her body. The kiss was feather-light, but the effect was devastating.

And when he cupped her cheek, she leaned into it, helpless, a soft whimper escaping her lips. Her thoughts scattered in a haze of need and want, every nerve screaming for his next touch. She was his, and God help her, she wanted nothing else.

“Please kiss me again,” she muttered.

Before the words had died, his mouth was on hers—soft, devastating, inevitable—a claim. He tasted of cognac and desire, dark and intoxicating, and with every brush of his tongue against hers, her body trembled beneath the mastery. She moaned into his mouth, helpless against how he unraveled her with his lips. It was as if he were playing an instrument, a melody he knew by heart.

The ache between her thighs deepened, pulsing with need, insistent, begging for his attention.

“Allow me,” he whispered, and began to ease the velvet tux jacket from her body. The fabric shifted against her skin, whispering down her arms, slipping free, falling soundlessly to the floor.

Her cheeks flushed. He hadn’t even touched her yet, not truly, but the simple act of undressing her—slow, reverent, unhurried—was enough to make her knees threaten to give way.

“That’s better.”

His mouth began a slow descent along her jaw, her throat—each kiss unhurried, deliberate. When his teeth lingered at the hollow of her neck, she tilted her head back, surrendering, every nerve straining toward the promise in his lips.

“Clarice…” The sound of her name on his lips was edged with steel—dangerous, reverent, a promise and a warning all at once.

Her body jolted in response, arching into him, undone by nothing more than his tongue at her throat. The truth crashed over her—she wanted him to strip her of control, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but heat, hunger, and intoxicating pleasure.

His hands, deft and unhurried, found the fabric of her dress at her shoulder, gathering it delicately between his fingers as though it were a veil. He didn’t tug, didn’t rush, didn’t tear. He peeled it back with a patience, as if every second of delay was part of the ritual—unveiling her like something sacred.

Every inch of freshly exposed skin was claimed immediately—lips descending from her collarbone to the slope of her breast, soft and lingering, branding her a dozen times over.

When at last the dress slid from her shoulders, Clarice gasped—not from modesty, but from the raw immediacy of it, stripping her completely bare. She had worn no bra, no barrier between her body and the weight of his touch.

But he didn’t touch her. Instead, he stepped back—just far enough to take her in, to let his gaze fall over her with a slow, deliberate intensity that consumed her. His eyes traced her throat, lingered at the rise of her breasts, swept lower across the delicate plane of her stomach and the secret curve of her hips.

Every inch of her responded to him—her nipples tightening into aching peaks, gooseflesh rippling down her arms as he drank her in. She wanted to cover herself, to hide from the intensity of his gaze—yet at the same time she wanted to burn in it, to be devoured entirely by the unblinking hunger in his eyes. It was almost unbearable. And beneath it all, there was that pulsing ache between her thighs, screaming to be touched, to be claimed, to be filled—yet he watched, savored, forced her to drown anticipation until a small sound escaped her lips—half moan, half plea, rawer than she meant, pulled from someplace deep she couldn’t cage.

It filled the silence like a confession.

When he spoke, his voice was reverent, hushed, as though he were kneeling at an altar.

“Exquisite,” he murmured, then closed the distance in a single, unhurried step, his hands settling at her naked hips. “My brave and beautiful Clarice.”

Both of his hands drifted lower, then inward, lingering before he hooked two fingers under the hem of her panties and slowly peeled them down until the silk whispered past her thighs and fell away completely.

Clarice shivered, utterly bared to him. Still, she noticed it when his breath caught, the faintest fracture in his control, and she felt it like a secret victory.

He watched her, allowing his thumb to trace along the curve of her lower abdomen, slowly, deliberately, lingering just above the apex of her heat, each movement a promise. Her skin tingled beneath his touch, hips shifting almost of their own accord, thighs trembling with want as his thumb glided upward toward the swell of her breast, and then finally, deliciously, the hardened peak of her nipple.

Clarice shivered under the touch—a low, helpless moan escaping before she could stop it.

She pressed her lips to his, deep and urgent—a reflection of the ache throbbing between her legs as she began undressing him—fingers sliding beneath the straps of his suspenders, tugging them down with deliberate reverence.

Then her fingers hovered at his neck, tracing the silk of the bow tie. She tugged at it gently, letting it fall away before she undid the buttons of his crisp white shirt, slow and teasing, peeling the crisp fabric from his shoulders until he was revealed—not the public, flawless figure, but a man of flesh and blood, every inch of him alive and trembling under her hands.

The man behind the genius.

Her mind was dizzy with desire as she drank in the sight of him—the planes of his chest, the salt-and-pepper chest hair that sent shivers down her spine—he was utterly, devastatingly real.

He was older, yes—but somehow it only deepened the pull she felt, a dangerous magnetism she could neither resist nor fully comprehend. The skin bore the traces of his years lived. Yet beneath it, the muscles remained lean, honed for motion, strength, and subtle power. A testament to life’s forging—magnificent, magnetic, timeless.

And as her fingers mapped his torso, feeling the subtle give of muscle beneath her touch, Clarice’s stomach tightened with need, the ache between her legs pulsing, wet, almost unbearable.

Her fingers traced lower without hesitation; and as she worked the fastenings, she felt it—the hard, insistent proof of him pressing through the fabric. Warm, alive, demanding. The sensation of his hardness against her knuckles made her head swim.

Her breath faltered, and Hannibal’s hands slid around her waist, steadying her even as her body threatened to float away in the heat of desire. He remained perfectly still, eyes locked on hers, calm and focused, yet consuming in their intensity.

His own hands slid the final barriers away—trousers and boxers falling at once—until he stood before her, utterly naked. Every line, every curve of him revealed, impossible to look away from.
She wanted him, and he wanted her just as fiercely.

Her lips sought his with hunger and surrender. Her hands threaded through his hair, the press of her breasts against the warmth of his chest, the friction of their hips, the weight of his hardness pressing insistently against her own aching need—it was dizzying, overwhelming.

“I… I can’t anymore,” she whispered, voice trembling, lips parted. “I want… I want you—now.”

His eyes darkened with a slow, deliberate hunger. In one graceful motion, he cupped her bare behind and lifted her onto the bed with a gentle, possessive ease, making her giggle until she sank into the pillow with a soft, shuddering sigh, the cool sheets doing nothing to quell the fire between them.

His gaze never left hers—burning, intimate—hovering above her as if measuring the very air between them.

Then his lips trailed down her neck, hot and slow, each kiss drawing a moan from her. And when he finally took her nipple into his mouth and suckled it with exquisite patience, Clarice arched, a desperate cry escaping her throat.

“Please…” she gasped, fingers digging into his shoulders. “Please, I need you. I want you inside me.”

He lingered for a heartbeat, eyes locked on hers, drinking in the quiver of her body before, at last, he gave her what she begged for.

Hannibal’s lips lingered against hers as his hardness lingered against her wetness, gliding against her slick folds with a tantalizing, teasing slowness. Each rub drew tremors from her, moans that mingled with the low hum of his own desire, the tip of his erection tracing her most sensitive places, circling, probing—agonizingly close to tipping her over the edge.

Every movement was deliberate—a masterful choreography, perfectly synchronized with the delicious ache between her own legs—promising heat, surrender, and the inevitability of everything they had both been craving.

Her body arched into him, teeth grazing his chin in a sharp, pleading bite.

“Stop torturing me, you brute.”

A slow, mischievous smile curved his mouth. Then he bit his own lip and paused for a moment—hovering above her, entirely still, as if savoring the last seconds of a mystery before finally, he entered her.

The feeling sent a delicious jolt through her. She gasped at the initial pain, a whimper escaping her throat, her back arching as the moment of discomfort gave way to something else, and the world reduced to a single exquisite sensation: the friction of him as he filled her completely.

He paused, waited, allowed her to adapt before he began to move—slow at first, exploring, testing, every motion eliciting response, drawing out soft cries and trembles that seemed to make him shiver.

He leaned closer, lips brushing hers, tasting the pleasure that spilled from her throat with every achingly deliberate thrust that pressed her into the mattress.

“God, you feel so good,” he murmured, low and rough, his eyes on hers as the words vibrated through her. She was lost, dizzy, consumed by the heat of him inside of her.

Soon the rhythm began to build, each moan fanning the fire, winding tighter with every thrust of his hips, every brush of his tongue, every graze of his teeth, claiming, teasing, coaxing shivers as her hands clutched at the sheets.

Their hands found each other, fingers tangling as the pleasure built, scorching, unrelenting, a crescendo of sensation driving her closer to the edge, a brink she’d never imagined—exquisite.

Then he moaned, eyes locked on hers, and the sight of him—lost in pleasure while so utterly focused on her—was enough to shatter her control; and she crumbled, fell, collapsed into her orgasm—an explosion of bliss under the weight of him.

Pleasure tore through her in dizzying, trembling waves, leaving her gasping and lost in the delicious, intoxicating fire of his body, every inch of him consumed, every thought obliterated, surrendered wholly to him.

His own climax followed quickly—his body tensing, then shuddering against her, inside of her, each quiver sending a fresh wave of pleasure through her own body, rippling and delicious, until it felt like she would dissolve entirely into the exquisite heat of the moment.

Hannibal sank fully onto her, his head nestling in the hollow of her neck, breath hot and ragged, mingling with hers, their hearts hammering in a shared rhythm. Time seemed to dissolve, the room shrinking until nothing existed beyond the press of his skin against hers.

She was deliriously happy.

And then—cutting through the haze like a sharpened blade—came a voice. Sardonic, deliberate, laced with a cold amusement that made her blood run cold. It was Hannibal’s voice, unmistakable, yet somehow different—more dangerous.

“Well, well, well, my little Starling,” he drawled, each word teasing and impossibly precise. “What an interesting tableau. Looks like you’ve carved yourself a nice little fantasy here, haven’t you? And with me, no less. I must admit, my dear, I’m… flattered.”

Clarice froze. Confusion blossomed, sharp and cold. She tried to move, to speak, but her body refused.

Then Hannibal lifted his head.

Not the man she knew and loved, not the kind, composed Hannibal Lecter. Not the world-famous genius—but something otherworldly. Something dangerous, menacing, impossible to contain.

His eyes—white as porcelain, the pupils replaced by burning red circles—were fixed on her, searing into her chest with a weight that made her breath catch, mocking her with a slow, exaggerated wink.

His mouth, no longer soft and tender, was suddenly cruel, curved into a slow, sardonic smile amidst a grotesque, clownish smear of blood, as if savoring a secret only he could understand.

A scream clawed its way up her throat, raw and desperate, but no sound emerged. The air thickened around her, pressing in from every direction, bending the walls of her mind under the relentless force of his gaze.

Her body froze, paralyzed by panic. And then—abruptly—the room seemed to fold in on itself, and she jerked upright, into another life, gasping for air as the Red Circle, with its dark hypnosis and suffocating pull, dissolved like smoke in the morning light.

Clarice Starling awoke in her own bed, her heart racing, the lingering echo of a love story still curling through her veins.

Chapter Text

Clarice shifted in her chair, restless under the scrutiny of Dr. Susan Klein’s gaze. As always, the woman’s dark brown eyes were unsettling in their quiet certainty—as if they could see it all, as if she understood exactly what the tape had done and had known it even before Clarice stepped through the door.

What use was confession, then?

“I’m glad you decided to come back so soon, Agent Starling.”

Her voice was even, laced with that peculiar gentleness. She studied Dr. Klein’s face, searching for something in her face, some crack in the woman’s composure, some hint of uncertainty—but there was none.

“I listened to the tape.”

Dr. Klein just nodded, as though she had been waiting for Clarice to say exactly that.

“I thought so. You sounded different on the phone. Like you’d made a decision about something.”

Clarice thought about the choice of words.

Different.

Decision.

Everything felt different now. Since she had been reunited with Hannibal Lecter, her life had shifted in ways she hadn’t anticipated. The questions pressed on her like cold fingers: What would she do with the knowledge of him? With the forbidden desire he stirred, with the part of herself that still wanted to reach out even though she knew she shouldn’t?

Her chest tightened. Decision. She knew she had to make one. How would she navigate the new reality of him back behind bars, how to stand in the world he had touched without losing herself entirely.

Then, with the composure used to talk about the weather, the Doctor asked, “And how did it go, Agent Starling… with the tape? I take it the hypnosis was… successful?”

Words caught in Clarice’s throat. For a while, the silence stretched. But Dr. Klein didn’t rush her. She never did.

“Successful would be one way to look at it,” Clarice managed, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t return it. I broke it… I broke the tape.”

Klein’s head inclined, as though this confession did not surprise her in the least.

“I see. By accident?”

The question hung there, deceptively simple. Clarice’s gaze dropped to her hands, clenched in her lap.

She shook her head.

“No.”

Nothing that had followed her hypnosis had been an accident. Her thoughts paused, then wandered back to the moment she had awoken from the dream, confused, afraid, and mourning for a life that could have been hers.

TWO DAYS EARLIER:

Clarice woke with a scream.

Her chest was pumping, breath ragged—wide eyes darting across the dimly lit room, searching for something—or someone—that wasn’t there.

“Hannibal?”

Her voice was small, tight with disbelief, trembling as it cut through the darkness.

For a long, disorienting moment, she didn’t know where she was… or who she was. She clutched at the sheets, fingers twisting the fabric in a desperate grip, trying to hold on to reality… one reality… one version of herself.

“Hannibal?”

She was in her own bed, her own room, alone. Clarice swallowed, then shifted her gaze toward the radio alarm.

04:37 AM — SEPTEMBER 17, 1993.

Slowly, it began to dawn on her. A shadow of comprehension, a flicker of clarity. Then her mind began racing to reconcile the impossible: the lingering heat of him on her skin, and the absence of his presence.

Between her thighs, the memory of orgasm was still quaking, wet, impossible to deny—a body that remembered desire, pleasure, even love.

“Dr. Lecter?”

Then, like a sudden flood breaking through a dam, the realization struck—cold, merciless. A punch in the gut.

This was reality.

This was her life.

She had been dreaming, lost in a labyrinth she hadn’t known she was in—her own mind weaving a spell so vivid, so intoxicating, that waking from it felt like a betrayal—as if some unseen tether had yanked her here too abruptly, leaving her raw and unmoored.

Everything around her was exactly as it had been before she closed her eyes. And yet… nothing remained unchanged.

She let her head fall back onto the pillow. For a while she just stared at the ceiling, the two worlds colliding in a whirlwind of disorientation, each one clamoring for dominance in her mind, trying to decide which one she wanted to belong to.

She couldn’t.

Instead, her gaze slid sideways—to the nightstand.

The cassette player sat there, innocent in its stillness. But she knew. She knew the thing inside of it had carried her to him. A version of him.

The Hannibal Lecter he could have been—the one he should have been. Tender, patient, universally beloved, and wholly hers. A fantasy so vivid that the crumbling of it left her trembling and mournful.

And then the undeniable truth of who he really was: Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter. A serial killer who would spend the remainder of his life behind a thick pane of glass. Universally reviled.

For a moment, the dream felt like the only life that made sense, the only one in which her love for him could exist without tearing everything else apart, especially herself.

She punched the bed, anger rising up. Her dream wasn’t wrong. This world was wrong. It had been set askew, a cruel misalignment of fate. She wanted to rewind time, to undo everything done to him, and everything he had done to others. She wanted to fold reality back into the shape it should have held.

Her hand trembled as she reached for the cassette player. She pressed the eject button and drew the cassette out, then slid it back into the cover—the plain white rectangle, stamped with a single red circle, a wound in miniature, staring up at her… mocking her.

Clarice’s lips parted in a soundless curse, raw and cracked: “Fucking bastard.”

She hurled the cassette against the wall. The plastic shattered, spinning fragments across the floor, and she screamed a raw, primal sound that made her throat ache.

She buried her face in the pillow, and finally—finally—she let herself cry. Long, shuddering sobs that wracked her chest, leaving her trembling and hollow, yet somehow, in the surrender, entirely herself again.

***

The memory loosened its grip, and the room around her came back into focus—Susan Klein’s office, the Doctor’s gaze still fixed on her.

“I threw it,” she admitted, almost ashamed. “The tape. Against the wall. Smashed it to pieces.”

A flicker of amusement touched Klein’s mouth, not unkind. “It must have made you very angry.”

Clarice nodded, the motion small, restrained. Across from her, Dr. Klein leaned forward and folded her hands atop the wooden desk. The movement was subtle, deliberate—an invitation rather than a demand.

“Do you know why it made you angry?”

Clarice turned her gaze away from Klein’s as she tried to wrestle the words into shape. She drew a shallow breath, bracing herself for what she was about to say.

“Because it made me dream things I can’t have.”

Clarice’s throat tightened, but she forced herself to keep speaking.

“Because when I woke up I realized that… what I want isn’t possible. It doesn’t belong to this world. And what are you supposed to do with life,” her voice cracked on the word, “if the thing you want most is simply impossible?”

The silence after that was vast, aching. Clarice felt her own words hanging in the air like a confession she hadn’t meant to make, and yet couldn’t take back.

“This impossibility you desire,” Dr. Klein said carefully. “Is it simply an idea? Or is it something more tangible? A specific thing, like a job, perhaps… Or…” She paused, watching Clarice’s face carefully, “…a specific someone.”

Clarice’s breath hitched. Her eyes darted to Klein’s face, but once again the Doctor’s expression revealed nothing. Her first instinct was to deny it, to retreat behind silence—but she found she couldn’t. Not here. Not now.

Slowly, she gave the smallest nod.

“Yes,” she said, her voice rough. “Someone.”

Klein’s lips curved just slightly, a hint of a smile she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—hide. It was subtle, but unmistakable: the flicker of the woman behind the clinician, intrigued by the idea of romance.

“I see,” Klein said softly. “The hypnosis… it offered you a romantic vision. A glimpse of a life with this person?”

Clarice nodded again, small, almost imperceptible.

Klein’s tone was gentle but probing, like a hand brushing against a wound, careful not to tear it open. “And this… this longing—does it distress you, Clarice? Because… perhaps the love itself is entirely possible,” she said softly, letting the words linger, “but you’re trying to convince yourself it isn’t… because it frightens you?”

Clarice swallowed hard, the words crawling up from a place she had never allowed anyone to see… not even him.

“Yes,” she admitted, her voice tight, trembling. “I’m… terrified. Terrified of loving him. Terrified of what it means to feel this way. Terrified of seeing him, sick of not seeing him. Terrified of what I feel for him and what it makes me…”

Her hands twisted in her lap, knuckles white. “I’m scared to death because what I want goes against every law. Of God, of man… of ethics. And yet—” Her voice cracked. “The thought of living my life without him… it’s impossible. It hurts.”

She looked up then, eyes wide, raw.

Klein inclined her head slightly, as if weighing the words. She didn’t ask who. Didn’t need to. The silence was already filling with the unspoken shape of a name.

Hannibal Lecter.

Clarice felt it there between them, thick in the air, undeniable. She could see in Klein’s steady gaze that the psychiatrist already knew.

“I see,” Klein said softly, weighing the gravity of Clarice’s confession without judgment. “And I suppose that in this vision you were given, something had shifted? Something that turned the complexity of the impossible into something more mundane… more acceptable?”

Clarice hesitated, then nodded.

“Yes,” she admitted, voice barely above a whisper. “I mean… he was the same person, but also… different. Certain… parts… of him had been… purged.”

Klein’s expression didn’t change, yet there was a subtle understanding in her eyes, a quiet acknowledgment of the truth Clarice couldn’t name aloud. Clarice felt a flicker of gratitude—relief, even—that Klein didn’t need her to speak his name. She understood. That was enough.

She leaned forward again, eyes narrowing with curiosity, as if she’d stumbled onto an idea that could lead to a breakthrough. “And which parts of him… had been purged, Clarice? The way he treated you?”

The concern in the psychiatrist’s voice was apparent. For a fraction of a second, Clarice felt a cold spike of panic. She thinks it’s some kind of Stockholm syndrome. She thinks I want my abuser to love me.

“No,” Clarice said quickly, almost harshly, shaking her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s… not that at all.”

Her pulse rattled in her ears as she tried to articulate a truth that felt impossible to confess without it being misunderstood.

“He treated me almost exactly the same. We worked together, the way we always did—it was a respectful, exciting, stimulating partnership that led to a… an… attraction.”

Clarice studied Dr. Klein’s face, searching for the faintest sign of judgment, any hint that the psychiatrist thought she’d lost her mind completely—but her expression remained composed, almost curious, genuinely weighing the depth of what she had just confessed.

“Go on,” Klein whispered.

“It was everything else,” Clarice continued. “Everything else was different… History… The whole world was… how it should have always been… Fair.”

Dr. Klein let the words hang in the air a moment, letting Clarice feel their gravity. Then a faint, knowing smile touched her lips. “Hmm… I’m hardly surprised your subconscious would create exactly that vision, Agent Starling. A fairer world. Less cruel. Less careless.”

She stared at the Doctor, unsettled by how calmly she had taken it. “You don’t think I’m losing my mind?” Her voice was tight but genuine: “I can tell you’re worried.”

Klein’s eyes softened, her tone measured. “Yes, I am worried about you, Agent Starling. But not about your sanity.”

Clarice blinked, thrown off balance.

Klein continued, her words deliberate, thoughtful. “What you’ve described sounds to me like an affirmation of something I’ve always known—that you are, at your core, a profoundly moral individual. That’s why your subconscious is desperate to create a world where cruelty is reversed, and where dangerous brilliance is sanctioned. Still magnetic, still enticing, but transfigured into protection rather than predation.”

She studied Clarice with a steadiness that was both clinical and maternal. “It seems to me that what you truly want is moral clarity, public acceptance—a world where love does not require you to sacrifice your own values. So, even in your fantasies, you are not surrendering to him. You are redeeming him, within yourself.”

Klein’s pause was weighted, final, as though she had been circling this point from the moment Clarice had walked into her office.

“Your dream tells me something very, very important, Clarice: you do not want Hannibal Lecter to pull you into darkness. On the contrary… you want to drag him back into the light.”

There it was.

Hannibal Lecter.

The name cracked through the air like a gunshot. Clarice flinched at the sound of it, her breath catching in her throat. Hearing it spoken aloud was like having the veil torn away—the dream, the longing, the secrets—all exposed in a few syllables.

Klein simply regarded her with calm, steady eyes, as though to say: Yes. I know. I’m not a fool, Clarice Starling.

The silence stretched, suffocating. She couldn’t find words. Her mind stumbled in circles, tripping over the raw weight of it all—the weakness and shame of it. The shame of being an FBI Agent, the daughter of a marshal, attracted to a serial killer.

And then, cruelly, another layer of shame crept in—the shame of being ashamed in the first place. Because hadn’t that serial killer saved her life? Hadn’t he—when it mattered—sacrificed his freedom, his very safety, to try and wrench her out of Mason Verger’s clutches?

Her chest burned with the contradiction. Was it wrong to love a man who had done monstrous things, even if he had been her salvation? Or was it wrong to let the world dictate what her love meant, as if her heart were theirs to dissect and judge?

She looked at Dr. Klein, hoping for rescue, but the psychiatrist only watched her, patient as stone.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Clarice asked, barely above a whisper. “With myself… with this—this feeling?”

Klein regarded her in silence, then, to Clarice’s surprise, a faint, almost enigmatic smile crossed her face.

“How about… nothing at all?”

Clarice frowned.

“The feeling itself is not your enemy, Agent Starling. It’s no use to tell someone to stop loving, caring, longing… just as it’s no use to tell them to stop fearing. Your feelings are yours… a part of you. The worst thing you could do would be to deny them.”

Clarice stared at her, breath unsteady, as Klein continued: “Whether or not you act upon them is a different matter entirely. Because you must stay honest with yourself, Clarice. Hannibal Lecter is a psychopath. No fantasy will ever change that. He is brilliant and charismatic, yes. But he’s also a murderer who cannibalizes his victims. That is the reality. And you have to hold that truth in one hand, even as your other clutches at fascination… even desire.”

The psychiatrist leaned in slightly, her voice low but urgent. “Please, don’t lose yourself in a simulacrum. I know how seductive it can be to long for a place where your love feels safe. But that world is an illusion. This is your world, Agent Starling. The world where he is dangerous. You have too much to give, too important a life to live, to waste it chasing after a man that doesn’t even exist.

Her shoulders sagged, exhausted beneath the weight of the truth. She wanted to argue—but the fight drained out of her before it could even rise.

A bitter snort escaped instead, half laugh, half sob. She dragged the heel of her palm across the corner of her eye, erasing the tear before it betrayed her further.

“Jesus,” she muttered, her voice raw, cracking at the edges. “I don’t even know what the hell’s wrong with me anymore.”

Klein leaned back, allowing some space between them, the kind that let Clarice’s confession settle in the air.

“I guess this means you’re not going to let me go back to work, right? Tell Crawford I’m a flight risk?”

Klein shook her head, her eyes steady. “No. I won’t do that.”

The words startled her. For a moment she simply blinked, waiting for the inevitable but that didn’t come.

“In fact I think I’ll greenlight you soon enough, provided that you come see me at regular intervals…Deal?”

***

Clarice drove with the window cracked, September air tugging at the loose strands of her hair while Stevie Nicks’s Rooms on Fire flared to life on the radio---and before she could stop herself, she was singing along. Her voice raw… but steady.

She smiled. For the first time in months—maybe years—she felt almost like herself again.

Confessing it all—saying it out loud to Dr. Klein—had been like cutting a rope she hadn’t known was strangling her. The feeling wasn’t gone, but the suffocating weight of silence had lifted. She didn’t feel like she was alone with her secret anymore. Klein had heard it, seen it, metabolized it—and somehow the world hadn’t collapsed. She wasn’t locked away, stuffed into a straight-jacket, branded insane, damned.

She was still here.

She was still Clarice Starling.

The thought of it brought a flicker of hope so intense it almost frightened her.

Dr. Klein was right. Whether her feelings were forbidden or not, she had to live alongside of them. Perhaps her love could exist quietly, privately, for herself and for him alone. A truth she could cradle , without ever letting it consume her. A fragile talisman.

Part of her knew it was laughable, this fragile bargain she struck with herself, this flicker of delusional hope. Because in her marrow she knew better. She knew their souls were tethered, tangled beyond undoing. But the idea of freedom, mostly from her own shame, was enough to make her believe in the possibility of a future.

Her chest swelled with the fragile comfort of that thought—

—and then the radio cut sharply to a news bulletin.

The announcer’s voice was brisk, but somehow carried a barely concealed relish, each syllable sharpened for maximum effect. “Hannibal Lecter, the notorious serial killer infamously dubbed ‘Hannibal the Cannibal,’ will be extradited to the United States tomorrow. Following his violent capture in Florence, Italy, Lecter is expected to be detained indefinitely at Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

There was the faintest pause, just long enough to let the name sink into the bloodstream of every listener, and then: “Authorities confirm Lecter’s trail of atrocities in Europe—among them the brutal murders of Florence’s Chief of Police Franco Saggio, millionaire Mason Verger, the latter’s assistant Cordell Doemling, and FBI trainee Robby Lansing. The psychopath was finally subdued, gunned down on the Ponte Vecchio by Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI Paul Krendler and his men, following what insiders have called a disastrous mishandling of the case by Special Agent Clarice Starling.”

Clarice’s knuckles whitened against the steering wheel. The joy that had flared in her chest only moments ago collapsed in on itself like paper. The voice went on, feeding the frenzy—she could almost see the headlines, hear the fevered tone of every news anchor in America lining up to feast on Lecter’s name.

Once again, she understood: to the world, he was a monster, he thing they spat at and reviled, the thing they would forever brand as inhuman.

A nightmare made flesh.

And she—she was the woman who had failed to stop the monster. If only they knew she was also the woman who loved it.

Chapter Text

September 20th, 1993.

The mist clung low over Lake Shannon that morning, rolling slow and hushed across the water like a breath drawn from another world—the kind that made every sound sharper, every silence heavier.

Nothing had stirred the pebbled beach for many, many hours—not since the killer. Then, through the treeline, came a golden retriever with a red bandana, tail wagging in a steady beat.

The dog’s snout twitched, working the air, following a trail no one else could see. Step by step, he pushed through the tangled undergrowth and sniffed his way onto the pebbled beach, the lake stretching silent before him.

“Ernie!” a woman’s voice called, distant but familiar. “What did we agree? Don’t you dare get in that water, boy!”

The dog didn’t obey, but still he froze—tail stiffening mid-wag, body taut like a spring. The playful curiosity drained from his eyes, replaced by a wary, almost human knowing. Something was very wrong.

A low whine rattled in his throat as he fixed on something ahead—something that smelled wrong, looked wrong—something too still to belong to the world of living things.

“Ernie, come back!” a man’s voice joined, firmer, impatient.

Walter and Nancy Reinhardt emerged from the trees, breath ragged from the short climb down the embankment. Walter brushed aside the last branches—irritation growing on his lips—until the sight before them stole the words from his mouth.

Behind him, his wife leaned forward over his shoulder, her fingers clutching his arm for support. “What’s he up to?” Nancy asked.

While the golden retriever stood rigid a few paces ahead, ears pricked, tail stiff, Walter raised a hand—a silent warning meant to hold her back—but it was already too late. Nancy’s eyes had found it, and the horror had already stolen her breath.

“Oh my God,” she whispered, the words trembling in her throat. At first, she thought it was a doll.

The figure did not move. It could not move.

It sat perched upon a half-burned log, back to the lake, staring straight at them with eyes wide as saucers—lifeless, unblinking, and utterly unnatural.

Its face was not just pale—it was white as porcelain, like a doll—bright red lipstick on the lips, harsh clownish blush upon both cheeks, and a thin line of black eyeliner tracing the eyes.

A jagged scar ran from the chin all the way down to the abdomen, crudely stitched. He had been opened, stuffed, and sewn back shut. The body was bare except for a thin blanket draped around it. In its small, rigid hands rested a wooden horse, carved and painted by hand—a toy to play with in the afterlife.

Ernie whimpered, circling the figure with nervous steps, tail low, ears flat, nose quivering as he sniffed the unnatural stillness.

“Walt… that’s… that’s little… Please tell me it isn’t,” Nancy’s voice trembled.

Walter’s hand hovered briefly over hers, but he said nothing. He simply nodded, slow and grim, the motion carrying the weight of a terrible certainty.

The child was little Henry Schmidt.

The eight-year-old was the first of the children to go missing, and now he was the first one found. He had disappeared on September first, his bicycle and backpack left abandoned by the Skagit River, with no trace of the boy himself. He had been swallowed by some unseen darkness, and now it had spat him back out, transformed into something that was no longer just a child—he was a warning, a reminder, a new chapter in a nightmare that had only just begun.

“We have to call somebody,” Walter muttered.

Ernie lowered himself to the ground beside the boy, whining softly, nose resting against his tiny, lifeless hand.

Eight-year-old Henry Owen Schmidt was the first victim of the serial killer who would soon be known as “The Skagit River Toymaker.” In one month, he had abducted three children, two of whom were still unaccounted for, their fates unknown.

The news sent ripples of dread through the Pacific Northwest, and soon the panic spread beyond state lines, gripping the entire nation. Parents clutched their children tighter, neighborhoods emptied earlier, and whispers of a predator haunted the streets for months. The FBI poured significant resources into the case, yet the Toymaker left no trail—no fingerprints, no witnesses, no pattern that made sense—every lead dissolved into a blinding fog.

It would take the combined brilliance of Agent Clarice M. Starling and Dr. Hannibal Lecter to finally begin unraveling the twisted mind behind the murders. Until then, the Toymaker remained a shadow in every household, and more children would vanish into the silence.

***

That same morning, Special Agent Clarice Starling ran. Her shoes struck the pavement in a rhythm her body had almost forgotten, breath rising in clouds that broke and vanished in the cold. The street lay quiet, washed in early light, and for no particular reason, Clarice smiled. It was the first time she had gone for a morning run since Florence—each stride a small defiance, each mile reclaiming a piece of herself—a reminder that her mind and body still belonged to her, that she could still summon strength when so much else had been taken.

By the time she reached the duplex, her chest was heaving, hair damp with sweat, body thrumming with the surge of post-run endorphins. She slowed on the steps, braced a hand against the rail, and bent into a stretch, first one leg, then the other, holding the pull of muscle like a small ritual of discipline.

For a moment, she closed her eyes, steadied her breath, and then crossed the threshold.

Inside, the warm scent of toast and coffee lingered in the air. In the corner, the television played the morning news, the anchors’ voices blending with the hum of the kitchen and the distant static of the outside world.

Ripheus sat perched on the kitchen counter like a plump king, working through his breakfast with slow, deliberate movements.

Clarice’s gaze fell on the dish beside him—the one she had offered—still untouched.

“Ardelia,” she muttered, “you fed him again?”

From the table, her roommate straightened the lapel of her blazer and slid a stack of documents into her bag, the quick, practiced motions of someone already halfway out the door.

She shrugged without looking up.

“What was I supposed to do? He won’t touch what you give him. You two have some weird… like… issues.”

As if on cue, the cat’s eyes narrowed into yellow slits. When Clarice passed, he hissed—a sharp, self-satisfied sound, as though declaring victory in some silent war, some petty contest the rules of which only he understood.

Clarice threw up her hands in mock surrender.

“Oh yeah, yeah. I made it back in one piece. Sorry to disappoint you, bud.”

She moved to the counter, poured a cup of coffee, and plucked a hard-boiled egg from the bowl, peeling it with restless fingers. Leaning toward Ripheus, she purred and gave him a sly wink. “Have I ever told you I’m a dog person?”

Ardelia smirked, then drained the last of her coffee—about to leave—when the sound of a single name snapped their attention to the TV screen: “Hannibal Lecter.” The words rolled through the room, sudden and inescapable.

The tone of the broadcast shifted, and so did the air in the kitchen—suddenly tight, charged with an unspoken knowing between the two women.

The image was distant—grainy—but unmistakable. A plane glided onto the tarmac, armed guards flanking the path between the airstrip and a blacked-out van. And then there was him—Hannibal Lecter—strapped into a straightjacket, his face caged behind the muzzle-mask, wheeled across the asphalt. Even through the blur of distance, there was a composure about him, a quiet command that seemed to absorb the frantic energy around him.

The reporter’s voice quivered, high and urgent, each syllable a frantic attempt at suspense: “As we can see, the infamous serial killer is being returned to the United States under the strictest security measures. It’s a highly controlled operation, with multiple layers of law enforcement surrounding him at all times. Dr. Lecter, as we know, is extremely dangerous; in fact, many think he is the most dangerous man alive.”

Clarice lowered her eyes to the rising steam of her coffee, pretending to study it, but her attention betrayed her. Her gaze flicked back to the screen again and again, each glance a confession.

Ardelia noticed. She always did.

“He looks… okay,” she said softly. “Healthy, even.”

Her words were casual—almost offhand—but she watched Clarice closely, reading every twitch of her expression, every quiet betrayal of restraint.

Clarice bit into the hard-boiled egg and shrugged, too careless, too rehearsed. Beneath the pretense, her chest ached. She wanted to be there—on that runway, just for a second, to meet his eyes. To let him know she had not wanted any of this.

She wanted to touch him.

Instead, she sipped her coffee, said nothing, and let the room fall into a heavy, unspoken silence.

Ardelia stepped closer, resting a hand on Clarice’s back.

“Girl, please promise me,” she said softly, “that if you start feeling low… we’ll talk. Don’t let it sit. I’m here… and I’m not gonna judge you… not even about him.”

Clarice nodded—a small, almost imperceptible tilt of her head. She didn’t speak, but the acknowledgment was enough.

Ardelia’s voice grew firmer.

“I want my best friend back in the game. You’re too good to hide on the sidelines, Starling. The world needs you.”

Before she could respond, and as if to prove Ardelia right, the television drew their attention again. The anchor’s face filled the screen—eyes wide with dread and urgency. Behind him, two words burned in stark red letters: BREAKING NEWS.

A photo of a small boy appeared—Henry Owen Schmidt. His pale face, now familiar from the reports of the missing children, stared blankly from the screen, the dates beneath reading 1986–1993.

The anchor’s voice trembled as he recounted the horrifying discovery: the boy’s body had been found, but had been meticulously and grotesquely altered. Clarice felt her stomach tighten, a cold knot forming as the blurry details unfolded.

“Jesus, those poor parents…” Ardelia muttered. “And the other two are still missing.”

“He’ll kill again,” Clarice whispered, mostly to herself.

She knew the way a mind like this unfolded—the precision, the perversity of what had been done. No one worked like this just once. There would be another. The cold certainty was familiar yet ever-horrifying—the bitter knowing of a cop who had seen the very worst of human nature and its nauseating artistries.

The Skagit River Toymaker was only just beginning.

Ardelia’s voice was quiet but edged with steel.

“That’s why we need you back, girl. Who else is going to catch these monsters? You’re the best we have.”

She let the words hang a moment, then reached out and tapped Clarice’s forehead with two fingers.

“How many times do I gotta tell you—go see an optician? You’re squinting at that screen so hard you’ll give yourself another headache. You need glasses, girl.”

“Over my dead body.”

Ardelia smirked.

“Won’t be that long when you’re blind as a bat, girl.”

She rolled her eyes and snorted.

“Alright, I’ll book an appointment.”

Clarice’s hand tightened around the coffee mug. For the first time since Florence, the weight of the world pressed against her shoulders—not to crush her, but to remind her of the task the world had given her.

***

October 1st, 1993

Clarice walked the halls of Quantico with a pace that was steady but unhurried, her heels tapping a rhythm through the din of telephones, typewriters, and hurried voices. Everything was the same—white walls crammed with corkboards, posters, bulletins—the hallways and offices crowded with other agents.

Quantico had always felt like home—and yet a quiet estrangement threaded through it now. It was in the way conversations hushed for half a beat when she passed. In the way eyes lingered too long. She wasn’t merely part of the current that rushed endlessly through the halls; not just another agent returning to work. She was something else—she was Clarice Starling. The woman who had hunted and caught Buffalo Bill, and half a dozen predators since then. The woman who had gone toe-to-toe with Hannibal Lecter, not once but twice—and lived to tell the tale, though the last battle of wits had ended in Florentine bloodshed.

For someone still shy of thirty, she had become something rare in the Bureau: a living myth. Both warning and promise, a reminder—for better or worse—of what the badge could do to you.

Jack Crawford waited for her in his office. The blinds were tilted just enough to let the October light cut across the room, falling over the untidy stacks of paperwork on his desk—the clutter of a man who lived half his life in paperwork and the other half in the darkness they described.

When Clarice stepped through the door, he rose halfway out of his chair before catching himself. The motion was awkward, but the smile that followed softened it—touched with relief, as if some private weight had eased the moment she crossed the threshold.

“Clarice,” he said, voice low and steady.

He gestured to the chair across from him—eyes lingering on her a beat longer than necessary, studying her face, the way her shoulders carried themselves.

“It’s good to have you back. Behavioral Science has missed you.”

“Thank you, Jack.”

She lowered herself into the chair, and for a moment she sat straighter than she intended, as though bracing for cross-examination. Crawford leaned forward, hands steepled, eyes narrowing just slightly—measuring, weighing, seeing far more than he ever said aloud.

Since Florence, Clarice had wondered more than once if he knew more than he let on. Sometimes, when his gaze lingered too long, she could swear she saw it—Florence reflected back at her in his weary eyes. The villa, Hannibal Lecter’s lips on hers, her bare shoulders, his hands undressing her, making her shiver.

Yeah, there were times she thought Crawford could see it—that he no longer thought of her as just an agent of the Bureau, but something else—something tainted by proximity to the enemy. No longer fully theirs.

“Glad to be back?” he asked, voice even, though his eyes kept searching. “Klein told me she’s convinced you’re good to go… but I want to hear it from you. Any more panic attacks?”

Clarice didn’t flinch.

“Not in over a week.”

She paused—measured, deliberate.

“Maybe it’s because I stopped being afraid of having one.”

For a moment, Crawford just watched her, expression unreadable, though she thought she caught the shadow of a smile ghosting at the corner of his mouth. Pride, maybe. Or relief.

“Glad to hear it. Really glad. Well… from where I’m sitting—you look ready to dive back in.”

“I am,” she said simply.

“Good. You can start…”

Without another word, he bent down and dragged a cardboard box from beside his desk. It landed between them with a dull thud. “…with these.” He nudged the box toward her. “They’re cold cases from the seventies, a few older. Look for patterns, threads. Build profiles if you see openings.”

She wanted to argue immediately, to shove the box across the desk and demand her place on the Toymaker case. But she paused, forcing herself into patience. Perhaps there was more to it than met the eye. Perhaps this was tied to an ongoing investigation, something tangled beneath the surface…

She pulled the nearest folder free. The paper was soft with age, smudged with fingerprints from hands long retired, maybe dead. She flipped it open, scanning, then shut it with a snap that made Crawford’s pen roll an inch across the desk.

Another file—even older.

A relic.

A fossil.

Her jaw set.

She lifted her eyes, sharp.

“Most of these are from decades ago, Jack. Some from the fifties, for God’s sake. Why not hand me the scrolls from ancient Mesopotamia? I’ll profile Cain while I’m at it.”

Her sarcasm hung in the air, edged with the anger she was holding down. Her blood ran hot. But Jack met her gaze with that patient look that almost made her feel guilty.

“They’re still relevant. Research matters, Starling.”

“Oh, please. These men are probably dead. Or drooling in nursing homes. And meanwhile, children are—” she hesitated, then forced the words out, “—why not put me on the Toymaker case?”

The silence after that question wasn’t long, but it told her everything. His jaw shifted just slightly. A flicker. That old poker tell she knew by heart. There was something he wasn’t telling her.

“Agent Probert’s running point on that one,” he said finally. “Bright kid. Just graduated, but talented. He’s got a future here.”

Clarice barked out a laugh, too sharp, too bitter.

“That’s bullshit, and you know it. A rookie on a case like that? Jack, come on.”

His warmth cooled in an instant.

“You have to deal with it, Starling. You can’t expect to walk back in here and have everyone trust you at once. You’ve been through hell and people know it. They see it. They walk on eggshells because they don’t know if you’ll—” he hesitated, then continued carefully, “—lose your shit. It takes time to rebuild confidence. To prove you’re steady.”

Her throat tightened. For a moment, she wanted to slam the box off his desk, watch those decades-old ghosts scatter across the floor. She wanted to scream that she had earned more than this, that she had bled for it. But she swallowed it, forced it down like bile.

Instead, she leaned forward, voice low and controlled: “You’d rather gamble with children’s lives than let me do my job.”

Crawford didn’t answer—not with words. He just folded his hands on the desk, his silence a wall she could batter her fists against but never break through.

And in that silence, Clarice felt it again—the strange, gnawing suspicion that maybe she wasn’t one of them anymore.

***

October 2nd, 1993.

Clarice slid on her spectacles and turned another page, the black-and-white photograph of a crime scene from 1958 staring back at her—the blank eyes of a murdered nurse. Jack had called them “still relevant,” but to her they felt like ghost stories, their violence already swallowed by history.

These killers were either dead or dribbling soup in some nursing home. What did it matter if she found a pattern now, a half-century later? The harm was already done, the motives so far removed from modern serial killers that they might as well have been a different species.

She tried to obey Jack, she really did. He had told her to rebuild trust, to show steadiness.
But this… this was busywork, and she knew it. An exile dressed up as an assignment.

It made her think of the heartless truth of it all—that most violence, most human cruelty, was never solved, never answered for. And here she was, entombed in the Bureau’s archives, staring into the yellowed pages of forgotten atrocities while children—living children—were being murdered.

All too often, when she grew too tired to stare at the files, her thoughts wandered where she forbade them to go. Down the road to Chesapeake State Hospital. To him. To Hannibal Lecter.

He was near, and her body knew it… sensed it—like the low vibration of a tuning fork only she could hear: low, constant, impossible to silence. She could almost feel him. The warmth of him, the breath of him.

Sometimes she would stop mid-page, pen hovering uselessly over the margins, and wonder—foolishly, perhaps—whether he was awake in his cell. Whether he thought of her as much as she thought of him.

She would catch herself smiling, remembering him as he had been that night in Florence. The fragrance of his cologne, the taste of the meal he had prepared with his own hands, the weight of him pressing her into the carpet, the warmth of his body pinning her as though the world outside no longer existed.

And then—like a lash—the memories turned bitter. She would shiver at the memory of him with Cordell’s blood on his face, his expression transfigured into something ancient and merciless. One moment she was warmed by the intimacy of his touch, the next chilled by the violence he wore as naturally as breath. He was a forbidden flame, warm and searing all at once.

She remembered the way he had asked her—his voice almost tender—whether she would leave Florence with him. And sometimes, against all reason, she wished she could go back. That she could change her mind, whisper yes instead of no, and take his hand. She wondered what it might have been like, to belong only to herself and to him.

But reality scratched at the corners of her mind, refusing to let her drift too far into fantasy, reminding her of who she was—born to serve and protect the innocent. She couldn’t turn her back on that. Not even for him. Not for the promise of some seductive exile.

***

The weeks ahead promised darkness—not just longer, colder nights, but horror unfolding along the Skagit River in Washington.

On the morning of October 17th, nine-year-old Dylan Fischer vanished on his way to school in the small town of Lyman. The morning newspaper, left on her desk in the breakroom, offered no explanation—only a small, freckled face staring back at her, wide-eyed and innocent.

She could easily predict the next steps: Agent Probert fumbling with reports, getting nowhere closer to a profile or arrest, the press clamoring for answers. And yet, she would be instructed, politely, firmly, to “stay in her lane.”

She had studied monsters her entire adult life, cataloged their methods. She knew she was one of the best, and the feeling of being sidelined gnawed at her patience like acid. She had returned to the Bureau to fight monsters, not shuffle papers.

But still, time passed, indifferent to her frustration…

…until the night of December 24th. On Christmas Eve, the Briers sisters—Hannah and Opal—who had been missing for two months, were found. Like Henry Owen Schmidt before them, the little girls had been transformed into what could only be described as porcelain dolls: hollowed out, holding hands even in death, each clutching a carved wooden horse in the other.

Clarice stared at the grainy crime scene photograph, fingers trembling as the image burned into her mind, breath catching, tight and shallow, as she imagined the fear the children must have felt. It ignited something deep inside her.

She would not wait for permission.

The meticulous nature of the Toymaker’s work, the cruel symmetry of the presentation, spoke of intelligence and ritual, of a mind monstrously warped. A mind young Agent Probert couldn’t even begin to understand.

In the dim light of her office, long after the halls of Quantico had emptied and the hum of fluorescent lights was all there was to hear, Clarice began working on the Toymaker case in secret. Every scrap of information she could scavenge and photocopy—Probert’s reports, local police statements, sketches, timelines, maps—she analyzed with meticulous care.

The work became an obsession.

Nights blurred into early mornings as she moved pins on corkboards, sketched lines across maps, and connected details invisible to everyone else. She could not go into the field, could not interview the locals, could not visit crime scenes—but in her office, she could map the language of the killer and begin to build a profile.

It was the most difficult case she had ever laid eyes on. There was no DNA. No witnesses. No suspect. The kids had simply vanished—gone up in smoke.

It was early January when she gathered the pieces and carried them to Jack Crawford, placing her carefully documented findings before him: cross-referenced patterns, overlooked connections. She was nowhere near a profile, but there were too many oversights.

“You’ll never find him…” she said, voice sharp with frustration. “…not like this. Probert doesn’t have it, and you know it. He’s an accountant, an archivist. He can’t read between the lines and find the patterns. He’s completely blind.”

Crawford listened, the weight of the Bureau pressing on him as heavily as on her.

“Exactly why am I kept off this case?” Her voice was low but fierce, a controlled eruption. “You know damn well I’m the best you’ve got right now. I mean, if there were somebody better, I’d get it, I really would… but there isn’t.”

“I know, Starling,” he said simply. “Trust me, I know.”

The words were true, but insufficient. She could see it in his eyes—he knew more than he was letting on, and the weight of what he withheld pressed between them, a quiet shame he couldn’t bring himself to speak aloud.

“Then what is it?” Her eyes pinned him, unrelenting.

He leaned back in his chair, as if the weight of the truth pressed him into the leather. He swallowed hard, eyes flicking away for a fraction of a second, and then, finally, the confession: “It’s politics.”

The words dropped like a gavel between them.

“Krendler doesn’t want you on high-profile cases. He says it’s your state of mind, your history. He thinks you’ve become a distraction to the Bureau. He’s made it clear that if I assign you to this case, I could lose this unit. Behavioral Science could slip from my hands. His influence is long and deep, Clarice.”

The betrayal was sharp and cold, but not exactly unexpected.

She had suspected Krendler’s meddling in her career before, trying to hobble her—but to hear it from Jack, admitted by someone she trusted, cut in ways nothing else could.

“You’d rather let a child-killer roam free than put me where I belong?” Her whisper carried the force of a shout. “Because you’re scared of Paul fucking Krendler?”

Jack did not answer. His silence said enough.

***

On January 19th, 1994, another child vanished.

Thomas Murphy Jr., only seven years old, joined the gallery of innocent faces on the wall.

It filled her with a rage deeper than any she had ever felt. When she thought of the children—the ones already gone for good, the ones still missing, frightened, crying, all alone—it made her want to punch something. Henry Owen Schmidt and the Briers sisters were gone. But Dylan Fischer and Thomas Murphy Jr. could still be saved, and Jack Crawford of all people wouldn’t let her.

When she got home from work that day, Clarice Starling broke. The tears came fast, jagged, and would not stop until Ripheus saved her. The great beast padded in from the shadows, silent as smoke, and without ceremony leapt into her lap. He settled there, weight heavy, gaze level and unblinking. He had never let her touch him before.

But this time, when her fingers sank into his fur, he didn’t pull away. Instead, he looked at her, understanding, almost as if to say: You know what? Fuck ‘em all.

And in that moment—God help her—she felt it. A shiver, a certainty that bordered on madness: through the cat’s steady gaze, it was as though Lecter himself was reaching for her across the night, consoling her, reminding her that she was not wrong, not lesser. That the world had betrayed her, not the other way around.

She buried her face in Ripheus’ fur and let herself believe it.

Only minutes later, the phone rang.

Jack’s voice came through, worn thin at the edges. She could hear the weight in it—not just fatigue, but the kind that came from years of shouldering other people’s failures… and ghosts.

For a moment, she pictured him alone in his office, tie undone, staring at the wall as if the paint itself were judging him. He was a man who had fought too many battles, and lost too much. Yet now, against his better judgment, he sounded like someone willing to fight one last time—if only for her.

“Take the case,” he said, each word a release. “Find the son of a bitch.”

The Toymaker was hers—finally, irrevocably. Relief, fury, and determination collided within her chest.

“Krendler will have my head for this,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

Clarice shook her head, determined.

“Let Krendler go to hell,” she said, voice quiet but resolute. “I’ll catch him.”

There was silence first, long enough for Clarice to hear him pour a cup of coffee.

Then came the sigh—a heavy, reluctant thing that seemed to travel the distance between them.
“We can’t lose another kid,” he said, voice low, steady, but with something underneath it—something bracing itself for what had to be said. “If I’m going to back you on this, we need every available resource. We need insight… the kind of insight that’s not so easy to come by.”

Jack cleared his throat, as though trying to soften the madness of what he was about to suggest.
“Listen, Starling, I know it’s a lot to ask from you. God knows this might be irresponsible of me, but… maybe it’s time you… consulted with someone who can see the angles no one else sees.”

A name filled the silence—all but spoken.

Clarice closed her eyes. She knew. And Jack knew she knew.

The thought of seeing him sent a jolt through her chest, a wild, hungry ache she could neither deny nor control. It thrilled her, stirred something deep and delicious, yet every flicker of that desire was tinged with terror. She knew the danger, knew the razor’s edge she was about to walk—but still, the pull of him was irresistible, intoxicating.

Above all, she knew it was the best way to save the children—to stop the Toymaker.

Right now, the best way to make the world a safer place was to let Dr. Hannibal Lecter help her find the monsters in it.

Beside her, Ripheus blinked slowly, almost knowingly.

There would be no turning back.

The hunt had begun.

Chapter Text

The Chesapeake Hospital for the Criminally Insane

Clarice Starling called the elevator.

The second time should have been easier. 

It wasn’t.

Memory traveled with her now, refusing exile, whispering of everything that had unfolded between them since Florence.

Their first reunion had been formal.

He had stood before her—civil as always—but with a coldness sharper than she had feared. And she, no less proud, had met him with the same restraint, neither daring to touch the truth of what lay between them. They were matched well, in ways neither dared to admit, perhaps.

Hannibal Lecter was brilliant, dangerous, and complicated. But she could be just as thorny, just as stubborn. And yet they always recognized each other, their longing mirrored in every unspoken word.

She wondered if he had felt it too. The way her pulse had answered his, as though something dark and exquisite, something cosmic, connected them. Because to be near him again—even separated by thick glass—had been undeniably intoxicating: the way his eyes had undone her, the way her name in his mouth had made her ache.

She sighed, remembering the glass between them—the way her reflection had trembled over his, as if some secret version of themselves lived there, bound together, souls entwined and suspended, caught forever, held in glass.

She had wanted to tell him so many things—countless confessions clawing at her chest: that she had not been the one to betray him… and never would be. That she had never wished to see him caged, and that—God help her—she cared for him.

But she hadn’t.

She had buried every word beneath the armor of professionalism, speaking as the Bureau—as society—demanded, not as her heart begged her to. It had taken everything she had to remain steady, to meet his eyes without letting him see the truth that trembled in her every breath.

That she loved him.

Loved him more than she had ever allowed to herself to love anyone.

Him.

Hannibal Lecter.

She told herself it was for the best—the merciful choice, the only one she could make for them both. A kindness. He must have known it too, just as she did, that whatever had existed between them in Florence, could never survive out here.

She was Clarice Starling. FBI agent, bound by duty and law.

He was Hannibal Lecter. Incarcerated for the remainder of his life. Pyschopath.

They were impossible.

Florence had made room for impossible love. But this world could not—would not do the same. Not ever. And yet, in the aching corners of her heart, she wished there was room. Wished the world were wide enough to hold both duty and desire, law and love. 

The elevator doors parted with a hush—like a curtain drawing back on a stage. She drew a long, steadying breath and stepped inside, knowing full well there was no preparation for what awaited—for him, for them—only the restless anticipation of possibility.

Once again, the light flared red against her fingertip—warning her, perhaps, of all the futures that might yet unfold between them. Every possibility, every choice, every ache she had ever felt and might yet feel, pressed into that small, insistent glow.

“Agent Starling!”

She leaned out of the elevator, letting her head peek into the corridor.

There, an orderly was hurrying down the hall toward her—tall, broad-shouldered, with a ring of keys jangling at his hip. There was an unspoken authority about him that made the hall feel narrower. The badge at his chest read Earl.

“That’s me,” she said, extending her hand with a measured calm.

He took it with a quiet kindness, his grip firm yet unassuming.

“You won’t be meeting Dr. Lecter in his cell, Agent Starling,” Earl said, catching his breath as he gently, almost apologetically, guided her back into the hallway. “Orders from upstairs. One Mr. Jack Crawford arranged it. From now on, your talks with Dr. Lecter will take place in the library.”

Clarice blinked. “The library?”

“Yes, ma’am. Ground floor, in the back. They’ve set up a table—gives you both more room to work.” He studied her carefully, then added in a quieter tone, almost a warning: “Two guards at the door. Cameras everywhere. Windows barred. Fire escape locked. Lecter’s restrained. I’m sure you know how to stay safe around him better than almost anyone, ma’am…”

Earl glanced at her again, a quiet caution in his eyes.

“Understood,” she said, voice steady, face composed. She didn’t dare let him catch a glimpse of what she truly felt. That she wasn’t remotely worried about her safety with Lecter. That, if anything, she wished she could take his face in her hands, and finally let him know the truth—the way she really felt.

Still, she folded the thought away, then reassured Earl again. “Thank you, sir. I’ve dealt with him enough to know the risk and avoid their consequences.”

Every single one of them except falling in love.

“Good,” he said, falling into step beside her again.

Moments later, they rounded the final corner and reached the heavy double doors of the library. Two armed guards flanked the entrance, their eyes scanning her from head to toe—measuring, calculating, scrutinizing, leaving nothing unseen. Same old story.

Another orderly stepped forward. Short in stature—roughly her own height—bald, fifties, with a greasy beard. His eyes were small and beady, darting nervously, yet somehow cruelly. His nametag read Scooter. Of course it did, Clarice thought, an almost imperceptible shiver of amusement running through her—yet there was something deeply unpleasant about him, something that made her file him away as a threat.

“Scooter will be taking over from here, Agent Starling,” Earl said.

“You’re Agent Starling, then?” the little man asked. His voice scraped against the air like sandpaper—sharp, almost accusatory—as if each word had been measured against some internal rulebook and she didn’t make the cut.

Clarice inclined her head slightly. “I am, yes.”

Her tone betrayed nothing.

Scooter’s gaze flicked briefly toward the guards, then back to her.

“What d’ I tell you, fellas?” he said, his tone a mixture of mockery and feigned innocence, like a child testing the limits of an authority he deemed unfair.

Clarice narrowed her eyes. What had he told them? That she was exactly what he expected—and if so, what had that been? Or perhaps it was simply a statement of fact: that this was the woman who would sit across from Hannibal Lecter again, the one they had read about in the Tattler and taken bets on what she would look like?

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s get you set up then—”

Clarice said nothing. She simply followed, letting Scooter’s clipped steps set the rhythm as he pushed the door open and led her into the library.

It was a cavernous old thing, its wooden floors worn and dusty under the harsh overhead lights,each step echoing around her like an announcement—or a warning. It was part old gym, part theater, part storage—repurposed for containment and observation. Perhaps the last thing it resembled was a library.

There were bookcases, though most of them carried more cobwebs than hardbacks. They lined the walls and snaked inward like a dark labyrinth, casting long, angular shadows across the creaking floor.

In the center of this maze-like arrangement, a single table awaited her. Seated there, back to her, was Hannibal Lecter. The straps of his straightjacket were drawn taut, the mask secured behind his head, concealing the noble contours of his face. Even in stillness, he radiated a controlled, uncanny presence that made her pulse quicken.

Clarice’s eyes swept the room—the trained eye of an FBI agent. Four cameras hung in the corners, vigilant. Basic but fine. The bookcases however, carved the space into a grid of blind spots where movement would go unseen.

She knew it didn’t matter in her case. He would never harm her. Nevertheless, a flicker of professional unease threaded through her—sharp, insistent. If this was what they called “safe” when it came to Hannibal Lecter, they were woefully mistaken.

As they approached, Lecter remained perfectly still, his back rigid, unyielding—a statue at the center of the room. 

And yet, she felt it before her mind could catch up: a pulsing sensation, a subtle stirring that ran through her body, soft, delicious, undeniable. She couldn’t ignore it—couldn’t pretend her body wasn’t responding to his presence, to the magnetic pull of him, even restrained, even masked.

Did he feel it too?

A few feet away, they slowed down and paused.

Scooter’s voice cut the silence, boorish and presumptuous: “Well, get up and say hello to the sweet  little lady… or do I have to make you.”

He grabbed the baton at his belt, smacking it against his palm with a deliberate, threatening rhythm. The gesture made her skin crawl. It was all he could do short of pissing on the floor to assert his dominance—the crude bravado of a man who believed he could assert control over a situation far beyond his understanding.

Lecter complied without a word, rising and turning with a fluid grace that belied his restraints. He bowed his head slightly toward Clarice, the movement deliberate, almost ceremonial.

“Good morning, Agent Starling,” he said, his voice smooth and unhurried, each syllable carrying a weight that made the air between them taut.
His eyes met hers then—cold, unreadable, like dark water hiding depths she would never  fathom without his permission. Pleased, annoyed, indifferent—she could not tell. The only thing she saw was distance. It broke her heart to think he might never forgive her for what had happened, that he would always hold her at arm’s length—or worse, see her as he had when they first met: an opportunistic, foolish career woman… nothing more.

He had agreed to help her with the case.

He had never agreed to trust her again.

Clarice inclined her head in acknowledgment.

“Morning, Dr. Lecter.”

Her eyes went straight to the restraints, then to Scooter.

“Erm… appreciate the accommodations, sir… I really do… but we can’t work like this.” She gestured to the straightjacket and mask. “How is Dr. Lecter supposed to go through files with me if he can’t move?”

It was as if the words themselves nudged Scooter backward, his body almost retreating under the insanity of her words. 

“I am here to work with Dr. Lecter—for two hours… mostly because two hours is all this hospital is willing to provide. Now, If we are to make the most of that time, and save the lives of innocent children, he needs to be able to do his work. So, if you would be so kind as to remove the jacket and mask, I would be most appreciative.”

Scooter’s eyes narrowed, incredulous. “Lady, it’s for your own good.”

“I understand that, Scooter,” she said evenly. “But restraints like these are technically illegal anyway. That’s not my personal opinion, sir… that’s the law. Now, I understand he’s dangerous, and that, given his history, these measures may seem justified—but he still has human rights, and therefore using these kinds of extreme and outdated, punitive restraints remains outlawed in most jurisdictions, including this one.”

Scooter’s lips quirked into a dry, sardonic smile. “We all have human rights, lady. The right not to get eaten by a maniac being one of them.”

Clarice said nothing more. She simply fixed her gaze on Scooter, steady and unyielding, until his irritation soured into resignation, then reluctant compliance. The man scuffed, reached for the ring at his belt and flicked a key free, holding it out to her.

“All right,” he said. “Do it yourself, then. I’m not gonna be around for it. I ain’t touching that freak except with a cattle prod.”

Then he passed over a pair of handcuffs and a second, smaller key. “If he makes one false move without these on, they shoot him.”

He nodded toward the two armed guards at the entrance, then retreated toward them—seeking their company—convinced their uniforms and guns made him safe.

***

Clarice set her bag down with a soft, deliberate thud.

She swallowed, straightened slowly, then let her gaze settle on his.

For a single, suspended heartbeat, the library, the guards, everything else—fell away. There was only him. Only those impossible eyes, pale and brilliant, cold yet undeniably alive. They carried the weight of Florence, of every word they had left unsaid, every longing they had buried. She felt it deep in her chest, a stirring, a pull that tightened in her lower belly, sharpening her senses, making her skin attuned to his presence.

Without a word she lifted the key, holding it up between them, It was less a tool than a promise, an unspoken vow of what she was about to do. The gesture hung there in the air, a fragile yet hopeful declaration: I trust you. Completely.

His eyes did not leave hers, unwavering, consuming—lit with an intimacy that made her breath stumble in her chest.

He understood. He always understood.

Clarice inhaled, slow and deliberate—and then she moved toward him.

Her steps whispered across the wooden floor, a careful rhythm that carried her into his orbit

She shivered when heat of his presence brushed against her, igniting a desire she immediately fought to contain. She measured every step closer, eyes darting to the guards and the little man by the door, then back to him again.

If they hadn’t been there—God help her—she might have let herself collapse against him, embraced him, breathed in his ear that she loved him. Every inch of restraint felt like a small betrayal to her own soul, and yet she held fast, circling around him with a tension that crackled like static in the air.

Clarice’s fingers hovered for a moment on his shoulder, feeling the taut tension of muscle beneath the fabric. She let the contact linger, just long enough for him to sense her presence—then slid her hand down to the clasps of the straightjacket.

Her movements were deliberate, slow, reverent almost—each touch a silent declaration: I am here. You are not alone.

Again, she flicked a glance at the guards, ensuring nothing she did betrayed her intentions. Satisfied, she returned her full attention to him and began undoing the locks at his back, every movement careful—electric with the silent understanding that she wanted nothing more than to touch him in this way.

Every motion, every sensation mattered. And as she leaned closer, she felt it—the faint tremor in his shoulder when her breath ghosted over the nape of his neck, the subtle shiver that ran through him. Even he—always master of his own body—could not fully mask the effect she had on him. And that knowledge, quiet and electric, sent a thrill coiling low between her legs, a tension she could neither ignore nor resist.

She drew the jacket off carefully, inch by inch, revelling in the weight of him under her touch. She wanted him to feel it too, to memorize the way her hands traced him with the care of someone who loved, who cherished.

She let the jacket fall onto the table with a soft clatter, then moved around him, closing the small circle that brought them once more face-to-face. His eyes met hers—suddenly warm, almost vulnerable—and her breath caught in her throat.

The way he looked at her made her dizzy, made her ache, made her body hum with a longing she could barely contain.

She was utterly, irreversibly in love.

She let herself indulge in the intimacy of it, letting her mind wander, God, I long for him. I have never wanted anyone like this.

It was not just desire, not just fascination—but something deeper, something ancient, something that trembled in the depths of her soul as though it had been written there long before she was born—that she would find this man, and belong to him.

She lifted the handcuffs, slowly, deliberately.

Clarice’s voice dropped to a whisper, soft enough that only he could hear. “I have to cuff you, Dr. Lecter.”

He didn’t hesitate. His hands rose of their own accord, palms open, offering themselves to her without a word.

She slid the cuffs around his wrists, the cold metal a strange contrast to the heat of his skin, alive beneath her fingers. Her thumbs lingered there, stroking lightly, memorizing the ridges of his hands, the subtle tension in his knuckles.

She wanted so badly to bring them to her cheeks, to her neck—to lean into his touch, to let herself melt into it. She swallowed, forcing the impulse down, and restrained herself with every ounce of will.

He must have felt the same. She could sense it in the subtle shift of his posture. How he shivered again as her touch lingered, a subtle, almost imperceptible quiver.

Clarice swallowed hard. The thought that her closeness, her touch could unravel him just enough to remind him what it meant to be human again made her chest flutter. Perhaps that was what she truly wanted to prove, after all—through this gentle, intimate contact: that he was still a man, and that she loved him.

When their eyes met again, she swore she could see it.

That same thing she had seen in Florence.

Impossible love.

The mask came off next. 

She lifted it slowly, savoring the moment, letting her fingers linger and caress along his jaw and cheek, tracing the planes of his face with careful reverence while she undid the straps.

Her body drew close, close enough that he could feel her pressed against him without arousing suspicion from the guards. The warmth of his waist against her abdomen, the rough edges of his cuffed hands brushing her ribs, sent a thrill coiling low in her. She felt him, taut and alive, and the closeness, the forbidden intimacy of it, made her skin tingle and her pulse surge.

Every brush was a small theft, a claim, a whisper of intimacy she couldn’t otherwise permit. Each motion, each touch, was a wordless conversation, a delicate negotiation between need and restraint.

She stole one last fleeting touch before leaning back just enough to maintain the illusion of propriety. 

Then she lifted the mask, exposing the lower half of his face—the mouth that terrified everyone else, yet drew her like a moth to flame. Those lips, devastatingly soft, that had kissed her with erotic reverence.

The air between them pulsed with something raw, secret, forbidden—and all she could do was let herself feel it—the danger, the desire, the impossible pull that had always tied them together.

She would have surrendered everything in that moment—her career, her freedom, even the careful walls she built around her heart—just to feel his lips against hers. 

And yet, she knew it wasn’t possible. The memory of the children, out there, still frightened and alone, held her back. Her desire clashed with duty, that quiet neverending war in her chest—and for now, duty won.

“Thank you, Agent Starling,” he said, his tone carefully measured—neutral enough for the guards, casual enough to hide the undercurrent of meaning beneath it. A performance, nothing more, for eyes and ears that weren’t hers.

“And thank you for cooperating, Dr. Lecter,” she replied, her tone calm and measured while she motioned at the table.

The sight of him in the blue jumpsuit was all too familiar, always just a little too composed, too restrained, and yet endlessly mesmerizing. He made his way to the chair at the head of the table and settled into it, the faint scrape of its legs against the wood echoing through the library.

Clarice gathered her stack of case files—one for him, one for herself—and laid them out with meticulous care. She offered him three thick felt-tip markers, black, red, and green, and arranged the same trio for herself.

He watched her, that slow, deliberate gaze that seemed to drink her in, assessing, savoring… and—she realized with a flicker of awareness—amused. The air between them tightened, every glance heavy with unspoken meaning.

“What is it?” she asked softly, trying to sound casual, but her voice betrayed a note of curiosity—and a twinge of something else, something warm.

He tilted his head, just slightly, the shadow of a smile creeping over his lips.

“Do you enjoy writing with these… childish playthings, Agent Starling of the FBI? They don’t exactly cultivate graceful penmanship.” His voice was calm, deliberate, but underneath it lingered that subtle, predatory amusement.

Clarice tilted her head, meeting his gaze evenly. “It’s all we’re allowed.”

“Nooo…” He let the word drag—cold and metallic—savoring it. “…it’s all I’m allowed, Clarice.” The reminder was sharp and controlled, the unspoken assertion that he remained, always, dangerous. “…Why are you using them, dear? Surely you are permitted… adult tools?”

She nodded, just barely, then lowered her eyes for the briefest fraction of a second before meeting his gaze again. “I guess… I don’t want you to feel demeaned.” Her words were careful, measured, yet the tremor beneath them betrayed a vulnerability—a tenderness that she couldn’t quite hide.

He raised an eyebrow—the prelude to a sharp, biting remark, she already knew. “Ah. I see. Well, I am genuinely amazed—truly—by your capacity for kindness, Clarice Starling, given the world we both inhabit. I realize it is a sad state of affairs when delicate acts of sensitivity such as yours should provoke suspicion in a man… and yet… there are careers and reputations to consider, are there not?”

There was a trace of sarcasm in his tone, a bitter edge, as though he meant to imply that such kindness could only be tactical—a calculated means to some end. That there was some hidden motive, something for her to gain.

Every word hung in the air like a challenge, testing her, teasing her…

Clarice’s lips pressed together lightly, steadying herself. “It’s not intended to manipulate, Doctor, I assure you. It’s not meant to wheedle anything out of you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I simply… wished to be human to someone I care for. If it displeases you, I’ll bring a quill and inkwell for myself next time and let you mess about with a box of edible crayons.”

He allowed himself a long, deliberate smile, that strange mixture of warmth and something darker that always sent a shiver through her. It was acknowledgment, praise, and gentle provocation all at once.

Clarice lifted her gaze from her own stack of files and asked softly, “Shall we begin?”

She slid on her glasses, a little self-conscious as he tilted his head and studied her with a deliberate, appraising gaze, lips parting just enough to lick them.

When their eyes met, heat rushed to her cheeks. She flushed, fought back a smile, and shot him a sharp, half-reproachful look.

“We don’t have time for any of this, Dr. Lecter. Is there something you wish to say, or can we move on to the task at hand?”

He nodded, understanding immediately that her words were more than a mere attempt to change the subject. Their time was precious—every minute mattered if they were to prevent more children from dying.

He placed his hands on the casefile. For a heartbeat, he allowed himself to be fully present, opening the folder with one slow and graceful movement.

And then… he froze.

She noticed it immediately—the slightest hitch in his posture, the faint catch in his breath as his eyes scanned the first page.

She knew it wasn’t the case notes that had him. She knew exactly what he was reading. The words were hers, words she should have spoken the last time they met, but had been too afraid to.

I did not give you up, Hannibal.
I ran after you to warn you.
To protect you.
I didn’t want this.
Believe me.

She watched him, holding her gaze, careful not to blink and miss the tiniest flicker, a shiver, a subtle hitch in his breathing—this impossibly controlled man before her, momentarily undone by her words.

Then his eyes lifted slowly, deliberately, and found hers.

Not with accusation.

Not with judgment.

With something far deeper: a quiet understanding that needed no words.

Clarice held his gaze, letting the silence stretch, a taut wire strung between them, until finally, with a barely perceptible sigh, he returned his attention to the casefile and began his work.

If America had known that Hannibal Lecter was the mind dissecting the patterns of the Skagit River Toymaker, they would have not slept more easily. In fact, their nightmares might have never seized. They would have panicked—not understanding—outraged by the idea that one of the most dangerous men alive was now the one hunting a child murderer.

But Clarice Starling knew better. She alone carried the quiet, iron certainty that this child murderer would be stopped. And that she and Lecter—together—would do the impossible once more.

They would catch him.

The quiet brushes of markers on paper, the faint scrape of file edges—these were the sounds of inevitability, of minds in motion, two forces circling the same darkness, drawing closer to a monster… drawing closer to each other.

Chapter Text

They had been at it for nearly two hours, and all she had to show for it were ink-stained fingers and a growing ache behind her eyes.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Clarice could feel the seconds slipping away. Out there—somewhere—two children were running out of time.

Dylan Fischer.

Thomas Murphy Jr.

Their eyes stared back at her from the school photographs—faces frozen mid-smile, as though they still trusted the world to be fair, kind, brave… still good enough to save them. The weight of it pressed on her chest, each breath coming harder than the last.

Between them, the table had all but vanished beneath a maze of crime scene photos, autopsy reports, transcripts, and her own restless annotations scrawled across the margins.

Her eyes burned from the endless repetition.

They weren’t making enough progress.

If anything, she felt like she was running around in circles, doubling back over ground already covered until the images blurred, the words swam, and ideas bled into one another until, eventually, she felt as though she were losing her grip on the case entirely.

The Toymaker was a shadow, and the more she hunted him across the pages, the more he slipped through her grasp.

It was maddening.

She slammed her marker against the table and let out a long, frustrated sigh—ragged and human against the silence of the library.

In contrast, Lecter had not shifted, not fidgeted, not sighed. For almost two hours he had sat in perfect concentration, utterly still, spine regal against the wooden chair. It was a focus that felt almost… well, not quite human.

She had not been able to stop herself from looking at him, from measuring the breadth of his presence across the table.

His gaze was vacant, hollowed, yet somehow hyperattuned—as though his body was a vessel left behind while his mind had escaped the room, the hospital, the state—and gone elsewhere.

She imagined him prowling the riverbanks of Washington, stalking the woods, visiting the crime scenes—there in the photographs, slipping into the shadows, tracing the invisible lines, seeing what no one else could.

Despite his absent-minded stillness, her own skin prickled again—her body responding to his as though some hidden bell inside her had been struck. Involuntary. Irresistible. She swallowed, licked her lips when her eyes fell on the curve of his mouth—his lips faintly parted as though in the act of some unspoken word.

She told herself to get a grip.

The fact that they were both here—breathing the same air, bound by the same hunt—felt like a miracle. And yet, it also felt inevitable. As though this moment, and all the moments yet to come, had already been written, and  there was nothing either of them could do to alter their trajectory. Not even him.

The thought quickened her pulse. That she was just as inevitable to him as he was to her. That she was his fate as surely as he was hers. That even Hannibal Lecter, master of his own design, could have done nothing to stop their souls from colliding.

The knowledge startled and thrilled her at once—the slow, burning awareness that they were both equally powerless and powerful where the other was concerned—bound by some unseen thread.

“Troy,” he whispered suddenly.

Clarice blinked, uncertain, drawn into the orbit of his voice. Her eyes traced the slight, almost imperceptible tilt of his head, the way his gaze seemed to trace some distant horizon she could not see.

“I’m sorry?” she said softly.

He did not answer yet. He remained still, suspended in the current of his own mind. The word lingered between them, heavy, as if it had fallen from a faraway place only he could reach.

“Yeeesss. Troy.”

Her pulse quickened. She watched him, fascinated and unnerved, trying to read his face, the fleeting flicker in his eyes that hinted at some darkly private reverie—a discovery, perhaps. 

“Dr. Lecter?”

He stirred at last, slowly—the movement precise, almost reptilian—like a cobra that had sensed warmth in the grass, a crocodile fixed on the ripple at the water’s edge. When his eyes locked onto hers, her breath hitched. For two hours he had been lost to the files, a machine of pure focus, marble-still. Now all that intensity was turned on her.

"Where do you go?" she asked. "When you're working like that."

He didn't answer. Instead, his gaze lowered to her stained fingers with an almost imperceptible smile.

His hand moved across the table, unhurried, until the tip of his index finger brushed her own. A whisper of contact. Barely a touch, yet more than enough.

A shiver betrayed her before she could contain it—her eyes dropping instinctively to their joined fingertips, the quiet intimacy of it. Then—against her better judgment—she slid her hand closer and slowly allowed their fingers to join completely.

The warmth of him made her head swim, her thighs pressed together beneath the table, her groin aching, pulsing, a secret she prayed her body would keep. Part of her thrilled at the delicious danger—that he might know it, sense it, smell it, and that in turn, his own body might respond to hers, equally helpless. 

She glanced over her shoulder. The guards didn’t notice. They were muttering to each other by the door. And yet the danger, the forbiddenness of the contact only deepened her arousal. 

But then—as if some evil force had yet again decided they had lingered too long in temptation—Lecter’s eyes flicked sideways, toward the guards, precise and sharp, and his hand withdrew at once.

Had they seen something? 

“Perhaps you should take a break, Agent Starling.”

The words were deliberate and measured. A performance for the guards.

She straightened slowly, cheeks flushed from the thought of him. From the touch. From that impossible nearness. 

She tried desperately to gather her thoughts, to return to the case, to the material scattered across the table—but her body betrayed her. Her thighs ached with remembered heat, her skin tingled with the ghost of his touch, and her breath caught in anticipation, in need, in delicious confusion at how utterly she was undone by the slightest contact of his skin.

She bit her lip—an attempt to ground herself, perhaps—one immediately ruined when he chuckled beside her, softly, knowingly—a low, liquid, erotic sound that set all of  her nerves alight.

The cruel, sadistic bastard. 

“I mean it, Clarice,” he muttered, softly this time, meant only for her. “You seem tired. Please take a break.”

She shook her head, dragging her eyes back to the photographs—the small faces staring out—little Dylan Fischer and Thomas Murphy Jr. She winced, shut her eyes, then opened them again to the same unbearable images.

“A break from what, Doctor?” Her voice was sharp, tight with exhaustion. “I haven’t done anything. I’ve been staring at this stuff for days now, and I just… I can’t see him. I can’t see who he is. No DNA, no prints, no witnesses. No tire marks, no signs of a struggle.” Her throat worked. “He’s a ghost.”

A corner of Lecter’s mouth tugged upward—eyes gleaming, sardonic amusement sparking there as though he delighted in her frustration.

“Ghosts do not whittle wooden horses, Agent Starling. They do not stage rituals. He is flesh and blood, I assure you. Even now he walks somewhere—thinking of his next acquisition.”

Clarice flinched.

She felt the room go cold, as though that last word had drawn a chill over everything. It was something that would never cease to unsettle her—the suddenness of it, the way he could pivot on a dime. One moment, tender, attentive—voice like velvet. The next, stripped bare of warmth, his eyes emptied of all but a glacial, careless brilliance. That mercurial shift—between charm and cruelty—always left her rattled. Always left her wondering which side of him, which face he wore was truer.

He leaned forward, eyes glinting. 

“He will make a mistake, I promise you. He’s walking among them. Eating their bread, buying their milk, tipping his hat. A man, Clarice. A man who will be found—because men always make mistakes. Always. He may catch his own skin beneath the blade. A pinprick of blood on a child’s sleeve. A neighbor who glimpses him at the wrong hour, the wrong place, and thinking nothing of it until much later, when the headlines appear yet again.”

Her eyes flared, bright and fierce. “That may be true, Doctor, but how many children die before he slips? How can I take a break when every second I close my eyes, all I can see are their faces—terrified little boys, hoping, praying, that mommy or daddy or someone—anyone—will open that locked door in front of them.”

She lifted her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose, where it throbbed with a dull ache. Then she set them back on, eyes blurring over the same reports she had been combing all night.

“We’ve got less than half an hour left today. Let’s just keep going… get as much done as we can.”

He considered her, eyes softening into something softer, thoughtful, almost human.

“Then let us go over it once more," he said, "There is no evidence of sexual predation—no impulsive indulgence. This is ritual. Deliberate, meticulous, and obsessively planned.”

He leaned back slightly, eyes never leaving hers, as though measuring the weight of her understanding, perhaps. “The way he returns their little bodies… it is not wanton cruelty or mockery. It is creation. Control. An attempt to impose his will on a world that refuses to acknowledge him.”

Clarice leaned in, drawn despite herself, fascinated as she always had been by the way his mind worked—deciphering, dissecting. His eyes were distant, somewhere far away, yet so alive in their cold, calculating way as he conjured the Toymaker to life. 

“Let us consider what he does to their insides,” Lecter murmured. “The hollowing… the removal of essence, of the soul… for what purpose could it be if not to make room… room for something else. Something of himself. A re-animation of obedience. A golem. A marionette to perform the will of its master via some spell, some incantation… or…”

He turned his head slowly toward her, eyes sharp and glinting, and held up a photograph of the carved wooden horse Henry Owen Schmidt held in his little hand.

“A Trojan horse,” he said softly, deliberately, letting the weight of the words settle. “A vessel to smuggle his own soul, his own will, into their bodies… re-animating them to follow his own command.”

Clarice’s breath caught.

She felt the chill of realization, the impossible horror of the theory, and the inevitable weight that he was, once again, unnervingly, devastatingly correct in his analysis. 

And yet, even in that moment, she could not help but notice the subtle tilt of his head, the sharpness of his gaze lingering on her—testing, guiding, pushing her to understand the mind of yet another madman.

“Are you saying… he’s convinced he’s building a blindly obedient army of marionettes?”

He allowed himself the barest smile, sardonic, predatory. “Did you think him of sound mind, Agent Starling?”

She sank back into her chair, shoulders slumping, the weight of exhaustion pressing her down, and let out a long, ragged sigh, trembling with frustration.

“So what are we looking at?” she muttered, voice tight. “Someone at the bottom of the social ladder?”

Lecter’s eyes remained fixed on her, piercing, unblinking, yet his tone softened, almost contemplative. “Not necessarily. Powerlessness wears many masks, Clarice.”

Her fingers pressed into her temple, massaging in small, desperate circles, trying to release the pressure that had built from too long spent combing through the horrors scattered across the table. 

“Great—” she said, voice low, a bitter edge creeping in, “so we might as well be looking at a brain surgeon.”

Lecter’s face remained an elegant mask of neutrality, betraying nothing. But she could feel it—the subtle weight of his attention, the unrelenting scrutiny, the way his gaze seemed to burrow into her thoughts as fatigue and despair gnawed at her resolve.

“You’re exhausted, Agent Starling.” His voice was silk, almost tender—and yet there was something intrusive. “You’ve not been sleeping well.”

It wasn’t a question.

“I’ve been sleeping fine,” she said, a little too quickly, the lie bitter on her tongue. “Eight hours without fault.”

Lecter’s eyes held her in a gaze that was almost unbearable—keen, knowing, and impossibly intimate—reading the tiny fissures in her carefully constructed facade, demanding confession.

“Hmmm. You know what I think, Clarice Starling of the FBI?  I think you’ve been lying awake at night.”

Her throat tightened as she lifted her eyes to his. She tried for defiance—but it only widened his grin, as if he had read every tremor of her body and mind.

It was about the lie.

He knew she had lied, and now he would punish her for it—slowly, teasingly, shamelessly.  

“Yeees.  Nightmares, perhaps? Have the lambs started screaming again? Or perhaps you’ve been dreaming of the big bad wolf coming to eat you up.”

The chill in his voice—playful yet sardonic—threaded through the room, brushing against her nerves, as if he had reached inside her and plucked the truth from her mind.

The memory of that dream intruded, that other world—that other him—not the monstrous predator, but that equally brilliant, kind-hearted man she had imagined. How she had woken from that dream, moaning, trembling, drenched, the delicious pulse of orgasm still humming between her thighs, the feel of his tongue lingering across her skin.

Her cheeks burned, a hot, uninvited flush climbing her neck.

He noticed.

Of course he noticed.

His eyes flicked to the blush, lingered, and when he looked back at her face there was nothing short of rapture, a suggestive satisfaction curling at the corners of his mouth.

He let her suffer the silence before continuing…

“Ah, but perhaps I am mistaken,” he murmured, his gaze never leaving her. “Perhaps there is a man. A very, very lucky gentleman keeping you up at night. Someone perfectly suitable for our little Starling…” His smile tilted, a blade she could feel against her skin. His eyes glittered. “What kind of man would that be, I wonder?”

She didn’t respond, jaw set, her silence a brittle shield, determined to pretend his words didn’t hurt. But he went on, unhurried, as though sculpting the profile of a suspect.

“Someone unassuming, perhaps.” Lecter leaned back, fingertips steepled, eyes glittering. “Yes. With kind eyes. Or blind eyes rather… as he would never, ever object to your wardrobe, of course—so determinedly plain and charmingly unthreatening… in spite of the absolute Goddess who wears it, so deathly afraid of her own power.”

His voice curled with amusement, savoring every word—his grin tugging wider. 

“And when you think you’ve been daring—like you’ve been today to come and see me—oh, a blouse with a few buttons undone, a skirt without stockings—Oooh, our Mr. Starling would positively swoon at your wild side.”

She bristled, but he pressed on.

“He would adore your noble obsession with saving lambs, I’m sure… your tireless service to a system that doesn’t even remember your name when it files its budgets. He’d snore along sweetly while you lie awake, tossing, turning. Haunted.”

His voice was a mockery of tenderness.

She knew what it meant by now.

The worst was yet to come.

“And when duty gives way to the marital bed…” His eyes narrowed—something between a wink and a leer—mouth curving as he ran his tongue across his upper lip. “…he would accept, with eager gratitude, your monthly ration of sex… missionary diligence. Wifely duty fullfilled. What a tediously perfect man that would be for our little Starling.”

He fixed her with a look that was equal parts revenge and amusement.

“How maddeningly predictable. Is that the situation you find yourself in, my dear?”

She managed a laugh that was too short, too brittle. “That’s—” Her mouth closed on the protest before it could finish. Words felt inadequate, treacherous. “I can’t—”

He watched the failure, enjoying the collapse of her attempt at careful argument.

Still, her head snapped toward him, eyes narrowing. “That’s a ridiculous to say, Doctor.”

“What is, my dear?” His tone was lightly mocking. “That you might be sleeping with a dullard? Or that our chaste FBI heroine would be so recklessly human as to engage in a sexual relationship at all?”

She wanted to laugh at him, spit in his face, walk out the door and never return—and yet, impossibly, a small part of her ached to give him what he so clearly wanted. To peel herself open and let him see her, whole and bare.

Instead, she stiffened. “We’re not here to talk about my sex life.”

But he pressed on, quiet but relentless.

“Hmmmm. Are you quite certain there isn’t a man keeping you up at night?’

“No, Dr. Lecter, There isn’t. not unless you count Ripheus.”

His smile softened with the memory. “Ah, Ripheus. Lucky old beast.” He tilted his head, as though considering something outrageous. “Perhaps there is a witch somewhere… able to weave the spell I need. A little trick of alchemy, a transmutation. Let Ripheus trade places with me. He would live like a king in prison. And as for me… I would be free.”

His eyes glittered, narrowing with a hunger he made no attempt to hide.

“Free to knead my way into your bed and curl myself against you in the dark. To  press my face into the warmth of your thighs. To wake with you every morning, purring, claws in your sheets.”

Her pulse leapt so violently she felt dizzy.

“I could be happy for the rest of my days. Purring to the rise and fall of your chest… the sound of your breath. Content.”

She forced her gaze down to the papers scattered before them, to the safe, procedural order of the case. But it was useless. He suffused the room, inescapable—leaning forward just enough allowing her to feel the brush of his warmth, intimate and invasive.

Tell me, Clarice… Would you let me?”

The silence that followed was unbearable, and yet Clarice found herself unable to respond. Leave it to him pivot from cruel mockery into courtship—as though every barb was simply a prelude to seduction.

“Well…? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten our little game, Clarice. Quid Pro Quo.”

Her throat tightened. “I’m done with your games.”

“Hmmm. Then stop playing.”

She felt his eyes press deeper, stripping her of her defenses layer by layer. When she finally dared to meet his gaze, there was no mockery waiting for her. What she found instead was raw intent—something dangerously close to vulnerability, as if beneath the coldness there flickered a naked hunger that mirrored her own.

“Stop pretending, Clarice,” he whispered. “Be honest with me… please.”

She felt the air shift, as if a door had been opened inside her chest, and all she had to do was walk through it. He was asking her to trust him. To speak what for too long had remained unspoken. To magine her surrender not as defeat, but as a map redrawn.

The library hummed around them—pipes groaning, guards murmuring—yet the world narrowed until there was only the small sound of her confession:

“Fine,” she breathed—voice low and uneven. “If you must know. Yes. There is a man who keeps me awake at night. Yes, he haunts me. In fact, he’s made my life so complicated I can hardly bear it some days.”

Her throat tightened, but the words kept spilling, unstoppable now. The masks she wore, the walls she built, they slowly crumbled beneath his gaze.

“I am head over heels  in love with him—deeply, hopelessly, and completely recklessly. And it makes me deathly afraid. Because if I give him my heart, I don’t know what he will do with it.”

She met his gaze. Her eyes burned, consumed by his—but she did not look away.

“Part of me knows he would die to protect it… my heart. Yet there is that small, gnawing fear that he might just as easily crush the life from it it with a grin on his face. The truth is… I want nothing more than to belong to him—and for him to belong to me… and it terrifies me. Because, to give him all I have… it might destroy me.”

For a breath he simply watched her, the impossible quiet truth settling over his face. No argument came. He simply watched—eyes deep, fathomless—absorbing the confession, understanding it, protecting it, not once crushing the life from it.

“Trust…” he muttered softly. “It’s the most dangerous game we play.”

She nodded faintly. 

His hands, cuffed, lifted toward her face—slowly—drawn by a current he could no longer resist. She felt the ghost of it before it touched her, a phantom caress, every nerve humming, attuned to the possibility he might cross the line, and yet he didn’t—couldn’t.

His eyes flicked sideways—once—toward the guards, the tether of reality snapping him back. And then—immediate restraint. The hand hovered a hairsbreadth from her cheek, before retreating with deliberate, almost cruel precision.

She could see it—the ache in his face, the faint tremor of withheld desire. A man who had killed without hesitation now in distress by the impossibility of touching her.

Torture.

***

That same evening, under the cloak of darkness, a shadow detached itself from the treelines surrounding Quantico. It moved with a careful, unnerving deliberation—circling the building twice as though counting the walls and measuring the spaces between windows.

When he reached the mailbox, he paused, then slid a large envelope with a crudely drawn horse inside. There was a soft, hollow chuckle—strange, disturbingly playful. And then, as silently as it had appeared, the figure melted back into the shadows, leaving nothing but the faint scent of wood lingering in the air.

Chapter Text

Quantico, Virginia.

The corridor to Jack Crawford’s office stretched ahead, flooded with pale fluorescent light that never failed to betray people’s exhaustion in the morning.

The hum of the vending machine buzzed in the distance.

Somewhere a printer stuttered to life.

The sound of a building that never truly slept.

Clarice Starling moved through it with purpose, the weight of the red folder—the still-forming profile of the Toymaker—tucked tightly under one arm, her briefcase heavy in her hand, and a stack of case files on each of the victims clutched in the other. Sometimes being an FBI agent felt a lot like being a glorified paper pusher.

Her thoughts raced ahead of her—rehearsing what she would say when she reached Jack’s door.

He had asked her to come in, to go over their progress. 

Standard procedure—nothing to worry about—and yet a part of her couldn’t shake the fear that maybe he was starting to doubt the whole thing: handing her the case, the secret partnership with Dr Lecter. All of it.

The knowledge that they hadn’t yet made a breakthrough ate away at her. If Jack decided they hadn’t gotten far enough, and lost his nerve, it would all be over.

She told herself to stay calm.

Crawford knew this work better than anybody. He knew building a profile took time—weeks, even months. It was like following a ghost through fog, each step seemingly futile until—suddenly—a shape appeared that made everything make a little more sense.

He wouldn’t pull the plug after just one meeting.

He wouldn’t.

Jack Crawford was too intelligent to consider patience a weakness, even when they were in yet another race against time, the clock ticking with cruel indifference, relentless.

She adjusted her grip on the profile and took a steadying breath.

Inside the folder, Lecter’s handwriting sprawled across the pages—the markers dulling its elegance only slightly—each of the letters still a tiny work of art. Seeing his penmanship had always stirred something in her—something dangerous, forbidden—a pull she had once fought to deny, but no longer bothered to resist. Now, she simply allowed herself the delicious truth.

She could almost see herself again, that first day in Chilton’s dungeon, heart hammering, nearly blinded by fear. And yet, even in that terror, she had been drawn—closer to the glass, to the man behind it. Her mind had protested, but her body and  soul had betrayed her—leaning in—surrendered, captivated.

He had killed Miggs for her after that single, first encounter—an offering, like a cat leaving its prey at the feet of his master, a grotesque act of courtship that had both horrified and captivated her, as it still did. Even then, perhaps, he had already decided how he felt about her—how he would worship her. 

It had taken her just seconds to grasp the truth of it, to understand the gravity of that terrible gesture when Crawford had told her about it over the phone. And yet, it had taken her years to finally catch up and accept her own feelings—and that she, in return, would also worship him.

A smile ghosted across her lips.

She remembered the way he had looked at her the day before, when she had confessed her feelings, desires, fears—laid bare like an open wound. He hadn’t encouraged or returned her sentiments. Perhaps he never would. To speak of love, after all, belonged to the realm of human frailty, human folly—how beneath him.

He had simply looked at her, with that strange, infinite calm of his, as if discovering a rare and fragile creature—something he admired but could never truly become—studying, observing, noting every breath, every tremor, every flicker of doubt into that labyrinth mind of his.

Even now, after everything that had happened between them, it was impossible to know what thoughts lived behind those eyes. Perhaps he had been genuinely moved—if such a thing were even possible for him.

The admission had been terrifying in the moment, yet now, walking toward Jack’s office, it no longer felt like madness. It felt like truth—like a knot had finally come undone, and she was learning, perhaps for the first time, how to live as herself—entirely awake to the needs of her own soul.

She imagined it for a heartbeat: A life spent hunting monsters, side by side with the one who belonged to her.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Her monster.

Perhaps that was enough. A shared longing. A secret love, alive only in the quiet margins of her life—a terrible, impossible dream—yet somehow bearable, because each knew the other felt it too. Perhaps that small, secret warmth could be enough to carry her through the rest of her life.

The prospect was sad, perhaps, but inevitable.

Because, given the choice, would she rather fall in love with someone else? Erase her desire for Hannibal Lecter from her mind? Scrub her soul clean of his shadow, and settle for harmless John Smith from accounting? The very idea was almost profane. An insult. To herself. To him. 

No. It had always been him. She saw that now with the clarity of something eternal. His name had been stitched into her heart before she was born, and her soul had recognized it long before her mind dared to admit it. It had always been him, and it always would be.

A voice tore her from the thought… violently.

Up ahead, someone was shouting, shredding the quiet, furious, relentless. The sound came from behind Crawford’s closed door, like thunder rolling through the corridor. At first she thought she must be mistaken—no one yelled at Jack Crawford… Well, alright… except her.

But as she drew closer, there was no mistaking it. The sound of arrogance and spite.

Paul fucking Krendler.

Even the sound of his voice made her stomach turn. She could picture his gormless mug now: flushed, self-important, patronizing, the stench of his aftershave taking the whole office hostage.

“What did I tell you?!” Krendler screamed.

She imagined Jack there, hunched behind his desk, the lines of exhaustion etched deep into his face—a man burdened with the darkness of the world, the knowledge that evil would never seize—forced to add the extra weight of petty backroom politics.

Poor Jack. He had risked it all for her and this case.

“I told you to keep your little hick princess away from this case,” he screamed—the sound of a man who thought volume made him powerful. “And you will, you hear me!? Or I swear to Christ, I’ll make sure you retire a pariah, Crawford. Everyone in Washington, everyone in the goddamn country will know what a fucking clown show you’ve been running here!”

Jack’s response came quieter: “Clarice Starling is the only reason we still have a chance to catch this guy and actually save those kids. She’s more than earned her place here. What have you ever earned, Paul? You haven’t even earned the right to speak her name.”

“Oh, I’ll do more than just speak her name, you fucking relic,” Krendler hissed back. “I’ll bury her career, then kill whatever’s left of it.”

She stared at the crack beneath the office door, watching the shadow of Krendler’s shoes pacing, pacing, like a rat circling the edge of a trap.

“And when this circus finally collapses, and it will, I’ll make sure your tired old ass goes down with her. You wanna fuck me over, Jack, really? You prepared to lose everything over her—the Bureau, your pension, your goddamn name.”

The cocksucker. She wanted to open the door and shoot him right in the mouth, just to stop the sound of him. It was too early in the morning for this shit.

Then again, it should have come as no surprise after that sickening magic trick he had pulled in Florence—knowing the depths of his depravity and corruption—and yet it never failed to make her blood boil.

Not just because of the things he said to her personally—those had become predictable, the same tired barbs about her accent, her looks. She hated him because he represented everything rotten that still crawled under the Bureau’s polished floors: men who who climbed on the backs of people better than them—men like Jack Crawford.

Jack wasn’t a saint. Many times he had disappointed her. But at least he tried, and in the end the scales would easily tip in his favor. He was more light than blight, always. In contrast, Paul Krendler was a parasite, the kind which had collapsed the foundations of societies all throughout human history.

If only he knew she was working with Lecter. The thought amused her as much as it filled her with dread. If he knew he would find a way to pull the plug—he would call in favours and bring down the whole unit, turn it into a spectacle of power and revenge.

Inside the office, Jack’s voice came through again: “Threaten me all you want, Paul. I’m sick of this bullshit vendetta you got going on against Starling. I’m doing what’s right for those kids.  And don’t forget… you’re not the only one who’s made a few friends over the years.”

Krendler laughed—a high, cruel cackle that scraped along the edges of her nerves, every ounce of it soaked entitlement. The kind of laugh perfectly designed to fit the face of an asshole.

Then the door slammed open.

Immediately, he saw her.

The sneer faltered, just for an instant, before he plastered on that smirk she’d seen a hundred times—the one that feigned politeness but reeked of hatred.

“Well, if it isn’t the Bureau’s golden girl,” he said, voice dripping with mockery. “Oh! I’ll be seeing you about a new job soon, Starling. They taught you how to clean urinals in the orphanage, right sweetheart?”

He strode away, smug, every step echoing with the certainty that he had triumphed over both of them. Once again, the bitter knowledge that a man like him could roam free, threatening with impunity, destroying lives, while Hannibal Lecter—lethal but disciplined and beautiful, now helping them to save lives—was branded the savage beast, became more and more confusing to her sense of right and wrong.

***

Jack Crawford sat behind his desk like a man who had already fought the whole war before breakfast. His tie hung loose, his eyes were bloodshot, and there was a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray—something she hadn’t seen in years.

She sighed, leaned against the doorframe.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said finally, her voice steady but low. “I didn’t know Krendler was this pissed off. Then again, I should’ve expected nothing less from the bastard.”

He leaned back and rubbed his eyes with a low groan while his chair squeaked, then pitched himself forward again, elbows on the desk.

“Don’t waste another breath on him. I’ll take care of it… best I can.” His tone was dry, almost kind. “You just do what you promised me you’d do.”

Clarice nodded. “Catch the son of a bitch.”

“That’s right.” 

“I will.” the answer came fast, certain. “I’m not stopping until he’s behind bars. Neither will Dr. Lecter. He’s absolutely committed to helping.”

She crossed the room and placed a folder on his desk—everything neatly labeled, the handwritten pages and a few typed sheets.

“I know it’s not much yet,” she said, sitting down. “It’s still mostly theoretical—personality mapping, motive dissection, behavioral patterns—but we’re closing in. We’ll hit on something concrete soon. The neighborhood he lives in. Appearance. Something real.”

Crawford flipped the folder open, scanning the first few pages. His thumb lingered over the annotations—especially the writing he knew wasn’t hers.

After a long silence, his face cleared up a little, seemingly relieved.

“It’s great work, Clarice,” he said, “Better than I expected for just two hours. I hate to admit it, but… well, I guess you two just make a hell of a team.”

A flicker of a smile ghosted across her face—proud, grateful.

Jack’s expression was somewhere between awe and unease. “I always had the sense that… maybe we’ve been wasting him,” he said. “Letting a mind like that rot in a cell while he could be doing this kind of work… that’s what’s insane when you think about it. Then again, he’s never been that willing to assist.”

Clarice kept her tone neutral. “He’s been very cooperative this time, Jack. Polite. Curious. Zero problems. He seems genuinely motivated to stop this guy. I think it’s because it’s about kids.”

Jack’s eyes lifted to hers, a weary but knowing smile on his lips. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s because of you.”

Clarice looked away, pretending to straighten a corner of the folder. She prayed her cheeks weren’t turning red. 

Jack continued, his voice quiet but unwavering. “You’re the only one who’s ever gotten through to him, Clarice. He’s never responded to anyone like this. You’ve got him on a leash, I guess you could say—or something close enough to it.”

She shook her head once.

“I wouldn’t call it that, sir. The last thing I wanna do with Dr. Lecter is play power games. I’m genuinely fascinated by how his mind works. There’s no one better at this job. If we’re gonna have a chance of catching this guy we’ll need Lecter every step of the way.”

Jack’s eyes lowered to the desk.

“Unfortunately,” he said, his voice hardening, “that’s already the case.”

Her stomach dropped.

“Two more kids vanished last night. Sarah Norstadt and Olivia Jane Lutz.The local PD’s been combing the woods since dawn. Nothing”

His lips parted as if to say more, then closed again. 

She exhaled slowly, bracing herself. “That’s not all, is it?”

He promptly reached into the drawer of his desk and placed a VHS tape on the polished wood between them. On the label: a crudely drawn horse.

Fuck.

Then he stood, moving with the slow weariness of a man who had lived too many lifetimes in service of the dead, and crossed to the television in the corner. He slid the tape into the VCR. The machine clicked, hummed, and swallowed it with a dry, mechanical sigh.

The monitor flickered to life, bathing the dim office in a cold glow.

Jack didn’t look at her when he said it: “This came in the mail this morning.”

The screen flickered, lines of static crawling like insects across the image while Clarice leaned forward, her pulse thudding.

The tape rolled.

And then the first frame appeared.

***

The Chesapeake State Hospital For The Criminally Insane.

They had wheeled in a television on a rickety cart, the kind used for classroom lectures or training videos, now repurposed for much darker lessons.

Its screen was a small, square, and convex window that reflected the room in a warped fishbowl curve: the long, maze-like library shelves bending inward under the overhead lights while two figures moved there, as if trapped inside of the monitor. 

One of the figures was Clarice Starling. She stood beside the television, remote control in one hand, the red folder in the other. The second figure was Hannibal Lecter, seated at the table, chair turned outward—facing the screen. His posture was composed, one leg swung over the other, both arms at his sides as he watched her set the stage.

“This arrived in the Quantico mail this morning.”

The screen hissed to life with a wash of static, but for a moment longer, Dr. Lecter didn’t look at the screen at all. His eyes stayed on her instead—unblinking, deliberate, roaming the shape of her, tracing the lines of her face, her shoulders, her breasts, hips.

“Hmm—”

He took his time—patiently, shamelessly—studying her as a man might study an ancient work of art: appreciating, committing every delicate line to memory. He licked his lips, and yet there was nothing lecherous in it—only the fascination of a connoisseur savoring beauty for its own sake.

She looked down at herself, puzzled at first by the intensity of his gaze. Jeans. A silk blouse. Nothing remarkable. And yet he watched her as if she were a vision resurrected from a dream.

Then the realization came—slow, inevitable, like the turning of a key in a lock. They were the same clothes she had worn that night in Florence. The night she had gone to him in secret, to that villa shrouded in vines and fog.  It was the same blouse his hands had unbuttoned with reverence, the same fabric that had slipped from her shoulders before his lips had claimed the shivering skin underneath.

Heat rose to her cheeks. Then she glanced at the guards—stone-faced, pretending not to notice while she gave an attempt at authority.

“Pay attention, Dr. Lecter,” she said.

The faintest smile touched his face—quiet, knowing, suddenly predatory.

“I am.”

She cleared her throat, forcing composure while Lecter slowly turned his head toward the television screen—disinterested, almost lazily—as if he expected little from what he was about to see.

But as soon as the first scene unfolded, something inside him shifted.

His pupils narrowed; his posture stilled.

All trace of amusement dissolved.

The man who had been flirting with her was gone now.

The hunter had awakened.

SCENE 1:

A forest. Evening.

The camera trembled—handheld, uncertain—moving forward until the lens steadied on a splintered log. 

A gloved hand entered the frame, slow and deliberate. The glove was pale, almost flesh-like—a workman’s glove. It hovered there for a heartbeat, then placed a carved wooden horse atop the bark—a strange tenderness in the waving gesture that followed—as though he were saying “This is for you, isn’t it beautiful?”

Then the camera moved again, wobbling with each step, until the forest thinned and the familiar shapes of the Quantico training complex emerged from the fog. Unmistakable.

Clarice’s voice broke the silence. “He was there last night. Right where we work. No one saw him.”

The image flickered.  For a second or two, the screen went black.

“There’s more,” she said.

SCENE 2:

Another forest—lighter this time, the light of morning. The same gloved hand placed another horse upon another tree trunk. Then the camera drifted forward, past branches and moss, until it reached a wooden lookout, a red-tiled little structure overlooking a vast sweep of green and mist.

Clarice’s voice again, quieter now: “It’s the Little Mountain overlook in Mount Vernon, Washington.”

Lecter didn’t move.

His eyes never left the screen as the gloved hand appeared once more, placing a carved wooden horse atop an empty chair in the center of the lookout. The motion mirrored the gesture at Quantico—slow, deliberate, almost reverent. “This is for you. Isn’t it beautiful?” A question that hung in the air like a promise.

A threat.

When the frame rolled over into the next one, the camera was in the exact same location. The same overlook. The same wooden roof. But now, a child sat in the center of the frame.

Dylan Fischer.

He was crying.

His small shoulders trembled.

He whispered something inaudible.

Then a man’s voice slid from behind the camera with performative patience and kindness: “Are you cold, Dylan?”

The boy nodded. His voice came out in a broken gasp. “Yes.”

A pause—then the faint shuffle of movement.

When the image cut again, the boy was wearing a jacket—someone else’s.

“You won’t be cold anymore,” the man said softly. “I promise. I’ll take good care of you. You’ll never be cold again.”

The video ended there—suddenly, mercifully.

The hum of the fluorescent lights returned around them, faint and relentless. 

Clarice swallowed. Her throat felt scraped raw.

“Dylan Fischer was found in that exact spot,” she said, her voice a whisper of helpless sorrow. “Dead. Hollowed out like the others. Same story. He’s gone.”

When she told him the other bad news—that two more children,  Sarah Norstadt and Olivia Jane Lutz, had vanished—she was convinced she saw a single, glinting tear gather in the corner of Dr. Lecter’s left eye, catching the light like a tiny shard of glass.

She froze at the sight of it, the impossibility of it. Hannibal Lecter—crying?

Clarice felt it deep in her bones, proof of what she had always suspected: that beneath the myth and the cold brilliance, there was still a soul there, untouched. That Hannibal Lecter was not the hollow, unfeeling creature everyone whispered about. He still had the capacity for grief, for sorrow, for empathy. He could still see the darkness in the world… even feel some of the pain it caused.

She kept talking, though her voice had thinned to something hoarse, held together only by exhaustion and fury.

“The Bureau wants to swarm Mount Vernon,” she said. “Tear the place apart, send a team of  agents just to say they’re doing something. They’ll feed it to the press, call it a breakthrough.” She gave a hollow laugh. “And for what? To make it look good. They know they got nothing solid. Nothing to find him.”

Lecter said nothing. He merely lowered his gaze for a moment, as if even he were defeated.

When he looked back up, he held her gaze. And in turn, she held his. It was all they could do. All they were allowed. But God, she wanted to reach out for him, to hold him and be held by him. She longed for him to tell her that they would catch the Toymaker, that the children would be safe, that somehow, against all odds, they could still set it right.

She ached for the certainty only he could provide, the quiet, impossible assurance that their minds—together—could work miracles once more, just as they had when they had saved Catherine Martin.

But for now, all they could do was lock eyes. And yet the same promise lingered, fragile but unbreakable. 

***

An hour later, Clarice sat with the case files laid out like before her like a deck of cards. Her fingers drummed against the table—frustration knotting her thoughts.

“Fuck’s sake!”

She shot up suddenly, the chair scraping backwards across the wooden floor as she threw a marker on the table and started pacing the floor, hands on hips.

“Those crime scene techies better be doing their job right. I mean… Zero prints? Not a trace of DNA? Not a single strand of hair. I mean, how is that even possible?” She knew better, but the absence of evidence gnawed at her. Then again, perhaps it was an attempt to excuse her own lack of insight in the matter.

Lecter didn’t respond.

He lounged in the chair, angled at the screen, the remote held loosely in his hand. He looked, impossibly, like he belonged there—regal in his casual pose, draped across the chair with the lazy confidence of a king surveying his court. Every now and then he would lift his arm, press the button, and rewind the tape, almost as though the repetition were a private amusement.

She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes—weariness pressing against them—and yawned.

“Come on, Starling,” she muttered, then found her gaze drawn back to him.
The slow, measured rise and fall of his chest caught her attention—a quiet rhythm that stirred something deep and aching inside her. She wished she could lay her hand there, feel the warmth of him beneath her palm, rest her head beside that impossible heartbeat.

Her eyes flicked toward the guards, then back to him.

The absurdity of the thought almost made her laugh—that the most dangerous man alive made her feel safe, as well as the bitter and beautiful knowing that she could never hope to find a deeper peace than against the chest of man she was barely allowed to touch. 

Perhaps she did laugh, softly, without realizing—because when she looked at him again, he was already watching her—calm, unblinking, with quiet understanding—as though he’d heard the voice inside her mind.

“Patience, my dear,” he whispered.

For a heartbeat, Clarice didn’t understand—didn’t know whether he was speaking of the case, of her mounting frustration, or of something else entirely. The words hung between them, soft and deliberate. A promise. A warning. A seduction.

A faint smile touched his lips—quiet, triumphant. Then he pointed toward the flickering screen. The image was frozen mid-frame: Dylan Fischer on the chair, crying, the Toymaker’s jacket draped over his small shoulders.

Lecter leaned back, tilting his head as if to enjoy his own discovery from a different angle. 

“When confidence ripens into arrogance… that’s when mistakes are made, Agent Starling. Our Toymaker believes himself a master of his craft—” He chuckled. “And yet a novice would hang his head in shame at a mistake like this.”

Clarice edged closer to the screen, her brows knitting in confusion as the faint hum of the television filled her ears. She glanced over her shoulder, at Lecter, who was watching her with the serene patience of a man already certain she would find what he had seen.

“Look closely,” he urged. “There is something in the frame that will tell you more about his whereabouts.”

She turned back to the screen, leaning in slightly—drawn, instinctively, as if the zoomed in image of Dylan Fischer might whisper something in her ear.

Her eyes found the jacket. They always did for some reason. The Toymaker’s jacket. She had seen that jacket a dozen times before. It was just a jacket, she’d thought. Ordinary. Anonymous. Something any man might have tossed in the back of a truck or picked up from a thrift store.

She started to turn toward Lecter—ready to tell him there was nothing there—when something caught the corner of her eye.

A patch on the chest.

She froze.

Yellow thread. Black embroidery. Blurry but legible.

La Conner Maritime.

Her lips parted, but no sound came at first. The air had thickened, pressing against her lungs.

“Oh my God,” she whispered finally—barely a breath, the words trembling out of her, almost afraid to be spoken.

Behind her, Lecter chuckled once more.

“That’s my girl,” he murmured, voice low and approving. Then, almost casually, he added, “And there is more.”

He rewound the tape, waving the remote like a conductor guiding an orchestra, until he paused again—this time on the gloved hands of the Toymaker.

Clarice’s lips parted. This time her voice came out more confident.

“Gotcha!”

***

Quantico, Virginia.

Clarice Starling’s voice was steady, but charged with urgency as she brought Jack Crawford the news.

“…La Conner Maritime,” she said—then pointed at the grainy still on the television, her pen tapping the screen, the patch on the jacket around Dylan Fischer’s shoulders. In her other hand, she held a page with a copy of an old advertisement, its logo perfectly matching the one on the patch.

“A shipyard,” she went on. “Boat construction and repair. It employed over five hundred people from the fifties through the seventies—until it eventually went under in ’79. The Toymaker could’ve worked there himself… or might have had family who did.”

Crawford leaned back slowly, his tired eyes shifting from the frozen image on the screen to the paper in her hand, then to Clarice—measuring her, weighing what she’d just said.

“And the gloves,” she said, voice tightening. “Only part of the logo was visible, but I ran a partial match through the archives and cross-checked it against regional ads, able to  trace it back to…Newton’s Home Improvement. A family hardware store. It’s still open”

She looked up, meeting his eyes. “Guess where it is, Jack?”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.

Instead he sat back, studying her face for a moment—the precision in her words, the conviction barely masking the exhaustion. Then he gave a slow nod. “Looks like it’s time we pay the town of La Conner a little visit.”

He paused, pressed his lips together.

“Damn fine work, Starling,” he said, pride softening the fatigue in his voice.

She allowed herself a breath of relief—a small victory breaking through the helplessness.

Jack continued, tone shifting into command, jotting a few quick notes, thinking aloud as much as speaking to her. “You’ll move on site as soon as we can coordinate an operation. I’ll have logistics set it up. But you can’t move in there waving a Bureau badge. You’ll need a cover. Something quiet, ordinary. Let the Bureau descend on Mount Vernon like a traveling circus… you’ll be in La Conner… quietly.”

Jack’s mind was already working ahead, his voice taking on that clipped, decisive  rhythm—the one he used when the pieces were finally falling into place.

He looked up, brows furrowed. “We’ll figure something out. Maybe real estate—someone looking to buy a property, blend in with the locals. You good with that, Starling? You’ve never done this before. This’ll be deep cover. You’ll have to live the part.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. Then, after a beat, she added—evenly, as if stating the obvious. “I’ll need someone with me.”

“Of course,” Crawford muttered, half-distracted as he flipped through the Rolodex in front of him. “Take Agent Probert. He’ll learn a lot from you… and he knows how to keep his head down too—”

“No, sir.”

Her tone was calm. Measured. But it cut cleanly through his words.

Jack’s hand stopped mid-page. Slowly, he looked up. “No?”

She didn’t flinch. “I‘ll need someone a lot more specialized than Probert, Jack.”

Crawford’s brow furrowed. Again he leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking beneath him. His tone was measured, but there was already a note of unease in it—like a man who could see a storm coming.

“And who exactly did you have in mind, Starling?”

Clarice hesitated—not because she doubted herself, but because she knew how this would sound. Still, the words gathered in her throat, certain, firm, deliberate.

“Someone with actual expertise in the matter. Someone who can see through this stuff much quicker than the rest of us.”

Crawford’s eyes narrowed, the first spark of recognition flickering there. And then:

“Oh Christ,” he muttered. “You don’t mean—”

“I do. I mean the man who connected these dots in just two days, Jack,” she continued. “Who understood the Toymaker’s psychology in even less time. Whose eyes noticed the patch on the jacket when everyone else missed it. He put it all together while the rest of us were banging our heads against the wall.”

Every word landed with purpose. She wasn’t trying to persuade—she was trying to make him see the obvious. 

“He’s the best we have, Jack. If those kids are gonna live, I need Hannibal Lecter there with me.”

Crawford froze, his expression hardening by the second. But there was something else there too. Sadness. Regret. The look of a man who feared he was losing someone he’d once believed incorruptible. He shook his head slowly, almost to himself. “You old blind fool,” he muttered under his breath.

Clarice blinked. “Excuse me, sir?”

The weight of the years were pressing down on him. “I should’ve seen it sooner,” he said quietly. “You’re… way too impressed with him.” His voice broke slightly—not with fury, but disappointment. “I hoped you’d never to forget who Hannibal Lecter is, Clarice.”

She sighed and looked down at her hands, fingers tightening. When she spoke, her voice was softer—but there was steel beneath it.

“And what is that, sir?”

He looked at her differently then. Perhaps he knew how much she ached for Hannibal Lecter—how her body longed for him, how often she had lost the idea of herself in the memory of his lips, the tenderness of his hands. Or perhaps he remained oblivious to the truth hidden beneath the one he thought he’d uncovered. Whatever it was, he looked at her as if she were already too far away from him—a presence slipping into a place he couldn’t follow, a woman neither command nor caution could reclaim.

“He’s the most dangerous man alive, Starling.”

“And yet you sent me to him, Jack. You didn’t have a problem dangling me in front of him then, did you? So what’s the holdup now?”

That silenced him.

She felt a pang of guilt. After all, he had fought for her. She knew he’d loved her like a daughter, admired her—and that in that moment, he no longer recognized the young woman before him.

She sighed.

“I’m sorry, Jack. It’s just that… Lecter might be the only one who can help us save these kids,” she said. “You know that. If he’s there with me, we might get the son of a bitch in a day or two.”

She leaned forward, eyes blazing now with a desperate kind of conviction: “Thomas Murphy Jr.,” she whispered. “Sarah Norstadt. Olivia Jane Lutz. They’re still out there. They’re still alive… and Hannibal Lecter can save them. It’s just a matter of deciding whether or not we let him.”

The words hung there between them—heavy, irrevocable.

“Your choice, Jack. I know it's a lot to ask... but there's a lot more than our careers at stake."

For a long time, neither spoke. The only sound was the faint hum of the overhead lights and the whisper of rain beginning against the windows.

Then Crawford finally looked at her again.

He would have to decide—take the most dangerous gamble of his career, the biggest risk imaginable: betting everything on Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter as a team, hoping they could save three innocent lives. He searched her eyes, scouring them for caution, for a trace of doubt, any reason that might let him refuse. And yet, he found only conviction… an unshakable certainty.

Chapter Text

An undisclosed airfield somewhere in Washington – Before Dawn:

Clarice Starling watched the plane roll into the hangar: a midsized Bureau turboprop, its headlights piercing her vision as it moved across the tarmac—slow and measured, thick with the scent of jet fuel—its engines vibrating through the floor and into her chest.

She didn’t move. She felt the cold through her wool overcoat, her pulse steady—the patient, knowing ticking of a clock she couldn’t, wouldn’t stop.

There was something in the air—expectation, dread, and a strange, secret thrill. It was a top secret mission, and when a pregnant hush fell over the hangar, like the moments before an eclipse, everyone in attendance knew exactly why.

Hannibal Lecter was on board.

For Clarice, his presence delivered the strange forgone conclusion that, from this moment onward, no matter what else happened, they would catch the Toymaker. Children would be saved. And yet it was the no matter what—those three quiet words that hid so many dreadful possibilities—that unsettled her. 

Hannibal Lecter was, above all, a creature unto itself—ultimately unknowable, perhaps. He was not a team player, nor a man accustomed to patience and restraint in the face of such crude sadism, especially where children were concerned. He was the farthest thing from a loyal cog in the Bureau’s grand machine, and moved through the world according to laws of his own making—an unguided missile, a mind capable of both genius and ruin.

And as Clarice recalled what he had done to Cordell Doemling in Florence—the calm precision of it, the void behind his eyes, his deafness to her pleas—a quiet voice rose in the back of her mind. You’re out of your mind, Starling.

She drew a breath, fog curling in the morning chill, and felt a shiver travel up her spine. Outside, dawn was still a rumor—only a grey seam of light had begun to thread the horizon. If all went according to plan, they would arrive in La Conner before noon.

She turned, letting her gaze sweep over the vastness of the hangar, swallowing the tight knot in her throat. Behind her, a handful of Bureau personnel moved in preparation. Save for them, the tarmac lay abandoned. The usual mechanics, loaders, and clerks had been sent home—bought a weekend of ignorance, courtesy of the federal government.

A delivery van stood near the wall, its exhaust curling upward like steam. Behind it, a long-haul truck bearing the lettering of Wheeler & Sons sat in the corner, ready to go. And then, the vehicle that would be theirs for the mission—a 1991 Jeep Grand Cherokee, the Bureau’s idea of invisibility, dull and domesticated.

It looked like something a family might drive to church or to the edge of a lake for Sunday picnics. Yet in its reflection, Clarice saw no trace of such innocence—only the silhouette of a woman about to step into the unknown with a monstrous genius at her side.

Jack Crawford walked up to her, their shadows overlapping on the concrete, both of them dwarfed by the hangar’s cold vastness.

“There’s still time to change your mind.” his voice broke the hush, low and genuine. “Truth be told… I wish you would. The risks are… Christ, Starling…”

He didn’t finish the thought. Instead, he closed his eyes, letting the weight of unspoken horrors press behind his lids. Jack Crawford had seen far too much, she knew—enough to make most fears seem trivial. He wasn’t given to exaggeration, nor did he squander concern without reason. If anyone could calculate the risk of a situation with clarity and cold precision, it was him.

His mind was an intricate grid of experience—missteps, triumphs, choices made long ago. If she were honest, utterly honest with herself, she knew he was right. It was dangerous. Reckless. Teetering on the edge of reason, perhaps. And yet, in the marrow of her bones, she was also certain it was necessary.

Her jaw tightened, the tension threading through her voice. “We’re fighting against time, Jack. Those kids—they’re all that matter.”

He swallowed, then leaned closer—the movement slow, deliberate—as if weighing the weight of her words.

“Not all that matter, Clarice,” he said finally, the edges of his voice roughened. “I cherish your dedication… more than most. But promise me you’ll remember your own life matters too. Take care of yourself… and watch Lecter like a hawk. Don’t let him lull you into a false sense of comfort. The moment he senses weakness, he will use it against you.”

She met his gaze, earnest and unflinching. Jack cared for her—she knew that—but she also knew that he would never understand how she felt about Hannibal Lecter. There was no point trying to explain that he would never harm her, that he had already sacrificed his flesh, his dignity, his life for her survival. He had been willing to endure certain torment and death at the hands of Mason Verger’s men, just for her sake.

How could anyone understand that when she looked into his eyes, past the glib tongue,  the cold brilliance, the polished mask he wore for everyone, even her most of the time, she saw it: a love so consuming it burned her from the inside out—dangerous, seductive—and somehow meant to be.  Meant to be explored, meant to be touched, to be tasted, to be undone by—as if the universe itself demanded no less of her. That to deny her feelings would be the greatest sin of all, the one to dwarf even his countless transgressions against God, the world, creation.

“I know, Jack,” she said, her voice quiet and even.

It was all she could say, really. 

He studied her for a long moment, eyes shadowed, perhaps with defeat. Then he reached into his coat pocket. From it, he drew two wallets—one small, black, precise, the kind a gentleman might carry. The other was larger, brown, worn in just enough to suggest a real life. He set them carefully on the hood of the Jeep while two other agents loaded the trunk with cardboard boxes and holdalls—the carefully curated belongings of a couple uprooting their lives.

“Let’s get you acquainted with your new life, then,” he said, his voice weighted with inevitability. “You’re Claire Dickinson. Family therapist. Second wife of George Dickinson—once brilliant surgeon turned medical illustrator. Burnout, mid-career.”

Clarice let out a soft snort at the meticulous absurdity of it all. And yet the knot of anticipation in her stomach only seemed to tighten as Crawford continued…

“You’ve just bought yourself a charming little house in La Conner on FBI dime, Mrs. Dickinson… You and your husband are moving out of Seattle to chase the peace and quiet your stressed-out husband so requires and deserves. Where better than a sleepy fishing town where nothing ever happens?”

He paused, aiming a finger at the long-haul truck marked Wheeler & Sons. “A moving company will show up at your new doorstep later this afternoon with some basic furniture, props, and a communications setup. You’ll have everything you need to stay in touch with us—and hopefully, without anyone suspecting a thing.”

Clarice tensed at the thought of spending days—perhaps weeks—under the same roof as Hannibal Lecter. The closer the moment drew, the more she felt her pulse quicken with a strange anticipation that lived somewhere between dread and desire, electric and shameful all at once. 

She would be confined in a house with him, playing at domesticity, pretending to be someone else—someone ordinary.  Until this moment, she hadn’t truly imagined the day-to-day truth of it. The absurdity of it made her light-headed: Hannibal Lecter, strolling through the streets of La Conner, discussing the weather with neighbors over white picket fences. It seemed so laughable, so impossible, that she almost smiled.

Almost.

“As far as Lecter’s concerned,” Jack said as if he could read her mind, “it won’t be up to you to keep tabs on him, Mrs. Dickinson. He has two subdermal trackers inside of him. If either of those falls off the rader, we’ll be on him immediately.”

“What if he tries to cut them out?” she asked.

“That’s easier saddled than rode,” Jack said. “They’re stuck pretty deep, and he doesn’t know where either of them are. They knocked him unconscious before they put ‘em in. One is somewhere by his thoracic vertebra,” he continued. “Hard to reach should he find it and try to cut it out. Even for him. The other…” He stopped, as though the sentence itself resisted being spoken. “I don’t know either. They didn’t tell me.”

Clarice’s gaze sharpened, her voice quiet but matter-of-fact.

“They didn’t tell you because they didn’t want you to tell me, Jack.”

He hesitated, meeting her eyes with something that might have been fear—or experience.

“You never know what he might be willing to do do to escape,” Jack said at last. “Even to you, Clarice. The less you know the better. Which brings me to this thing…”

He reached into his coat pocket again, then drew something from its depths—a small silver ring. In its center glimmered a milky blue amazonite stone. Beautiful. Jack turned it over in his palm before offering it to her. “It’s a panic button, also a tracker. Press the stone three times and the panic signal goes off,” he said. “That’s your lifeline. The shadow unit will be on you before you can say you’re in trouble.”

Clarice took it carefully, the metal cool against her fingertips. It felt too beautiful for what it was, too gentle.

“What do you mean by shadow unit, Jack?” she asked, her voice edged with steel. “We never talked about a unit tailing us.”

“Relax,” Crawford went on. “They won’t tail you. They’ll stay out of sight—motel off Route 20, same agents posing as Wheeler and Sons. The last thing we need is anyone in that town thinking you’re being watched.”

He paused, studying her face, as if weighing whether she understood the implicit madness of it all: you’ll be alone with Hannibal The Cannibal Lecter for days on end. I moved heaven and earth to make this possible, Starling. These precautions are the bare minimum.

Then the ghost of something—not quite a smile, perhaps, but the shadow of amusement nonetheless—flickered across Jack Crawford’s mouth.

“However…” he said, dragging the word. “Someone else will be tailing both of you. In fact, he’ll be living in the house with you and everything. You’ll hardly know he’s there…”

“Jack…” Her voice came out low, clipped immediately, defiant.

“No, Starling, I’ll have none of it,” Crawford cut her off, the authority in his tone absolute. “He’s the most skilled operative we have when it comes to communication and infiltration.”

He turned his head toward the van against the wall, then brought two fingers to his lips and released a sharp whistle that sliced through the cold air—clean, commanding, echoing across the tarmac.

“Charlie!” 

Out of the back of the van leapt a small cairn terrier, fur bristling with energy. He bounded toward Clarice, mouth open in a gleeful pant, tail swinging like a pendulum through the still air. He skidded to a stop at her feet, eyes bright and unnervingly focused, as if he understood exactly what he was meant to do.

Clarice tilted her head toward Crawford, incredulity shading her eyes.

“You’re joking,” she said, voice tight, patience running thin. “Jack… I can’t deal with this thing while—”

“He’s not a thing. He’s a dog,” Crawford said, his mouth twitching with exasperation. “What’s wrong, Mrs. Dickinson? You’re right as rain with a cannibal at your side, but a dog’s too much?”

Clarice glared at him.

Jack’s voice fell, almost to a conspiratorial whisper. “No one suspects people with a dog. Besides, they’re gossip magnets. Dogwalks are a perfect excuse to roam the town and strike up conversations. And if you wanna snoop in a backyard… you say, ‘Oh, Charlie got away from us—he never does this, it’s because the place is new to him.’ Boom. You’re in.”

The terrier yipped, the sound like an exclamation point, full of mischief and promise.

For a long second Clarice only looked at the little beast at her feet. He looked like an old paintbrush, chestnut brindle fur and eyes that held the blunt, unabashed intelligence of an animal who knows when he likes someone.

“He’s a rescue,” Jack added. “We’ll find a good home for him after.”

First Ripheus and now this thing.

She bent, almost against her will, and took him in her arms. The absurdity of cradling a terrier while preparing to share a house with a cannibal made her want to laugh and cry at once.

It was ridiculous. It was dangerous. It was the only possible way.

***

There was a burst of static, then a sharp, surgical beep that sliced through the heavy silence of the hangar.

Behind them, one of the agents raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth. The speaker crackled with coded murmurs. He listened—eyes narrowing—then gave a single, silent nod before shifting his gaze to Crawford.

“They’re ready to bring Lecter out, Sir.”

They turned toward the plane. It loomed there, much bigger than it was—the man inside, and the idea that he was about to descend the staircase of the plane—unshackled, unbound—was enough to make even the armed men in the hangar seem smaller, unsure of their own weapons.

“Alright, send him,” Crawford ordered. “Everyone in position.”

Clarice drew a deep, calming breath. Her hands were steady, but the tremor began somewhere else, somewhere deeper—in the chest. This had been her idea. She had argued for it. But now, standing here with the sound of walkie-talkies hissing and the taste of adrenaline turning her mouth dry, the reality of it—of him, of what they were about to do, all of it held together by the fragile illusion that she could control the situation—descended upon her.

She could feel him before she saw him.

Perhaps everyone else could too, as the air itself seemed to shift. The mere prospect of Hannibal Lecter’s presence seemed to alter the atmosphere. The morning chill began to waver, suspended in that moment, as though the world were uncertain whether to shiver, burn, or stop the clock and time itself.

“Alright,” she whispered, more to herself than to Jack. “Let’s get this started.”

The plane door clicked open with a mechanical sigh, releasing a gust of air that made everyone hold their breath.

Clarice bit her lip—curious, impatient, terrified.

She had seen them wheel him onto the plane in Virginia—bound in his infamous restraints: the orange jumpsuit, the pale straightjacket, the crude mask—the image the world had chosen for its monster.

He had been containable then, wrapped up in leather and steel.

Now, as the cabin door yawned open, he waited at the top of the staircase—unmasked, unbound. A free man—or something that resembled one.

The sight struck her like a physical thing. And she thought, not without a flicker of wonder and dread, God help me, he’s beautiful.

He wore leather shoes, grey slacks pressed to military precision, and a long wool coat that seemed tailored to his frame. Beneath it, a dark cardigan framed a pale blue shirt, its collar open just enough to suggest easy nonchalance. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses—an unnecessary, ornamental disguise for a man with perfect vision—rested on the bridge of his nose, the final touch in a portrait of harmless respectability as carefully painted by the Bureau.

They had even done something with his hair. She couldn’t quite tell what—only that it was no longer slicked back and severe. Now it was softer, gentler, with the faintest parting to one side. The change was subtle, but profound.

If she didn’t know him, if she had passed him on a street corner, she might have thought he was a professor, a rare book collector, or an antiques dealer—succesful, handsome, and more than charismatic enough to bag a much younger wife.

And yet—beneath the civilized exterior, beneath the carefully muted tones and softened edges—Hannibal Lecter waited.

The tiger may change its stripes, Clarice thought, but never its hunger.

His eyes swept the hangar in one fluid, predatory motion—calm, calculating, taking in every every armed silhouette before their restless search stilled.

They found her. Those fathomless eyes.

And in that instant, everything else fell away. Only the space between them remained.

A ghost of a smile touched his lips—almost tender. It was the kind of smile that carried recognition, and the relief of a promise kept. He had been told she would be there. And now, seeing her standing before him—his Clarice—Crawford’s vow had been fulfilled, and the stars had aligned.

He nodded once, then descended the staircase with the unhurried grace of someone for whom the world itself would always move a second slower. Behind him, a small SWAT team poured out in a black tide—men encased in armor, rifles raised, red lasers and dots converging on his body at all times.

She could hardly blame them. And yet—she hated the sight of it.

The coat he wore flared in the wind as he reached the bottom, the fabric floating around him like a living thing. Each step was measured, elegant and perfectly timed. His movements had always whispered of the highest art and the oldest sins. He did not pretend to be harmless, nor did he strain to appear dangerous.

He simply was.

Effortless.

A gorgeous creature—not by any ordinary definition, perhaps. She couldn’t even tell if he was handsome in the conventional sense. Perhaps not, but the sheer magnetism of refinement and self-possession made her breath falter—her body betraying what her mind knew too well had to be kept secret: that she ached for his lips on hers, his hands on her body, his chest pressed against hers.

He closed the distance between them with that slow, deliberate gait that turned every step into a quiet performance. His eyes never left hers—unblinking, intent. When he stopped, the air between them tightened, charged with recognition.

He winked—knowing and suggestive—as though to remind her that whatever names they were about to wear, whatever fictions the Bureau had written for them, he understood what truly bound them. Something real.

His gaze traveled over her, slowly, appreciatively, taking in the woman who was now, for the purposes of this masquerade, his wife. The corner of his mouth curved, not into a smile but something quieter, more dangerous—a promise disguised as amusement.

“You look lovely, Agent Starling.”

She too wore a long wool coat, paired with a respectable dark green skirt and a cream blouse with her glasses tucked in the collar. Over the shirt, the Bureau had layered a grungier, ill-fitting patchwork waistcoat in a clumsy attempt at “uniquely quirky”—a personality she would have trouble performing, if she even understood what it meant. 

Her hair had been lightened to a caramel blonde, softening the angles of her face, muting the sharpness that had once marked her as unmistakably Clarice Starling. It was enough to make her someone else entirely, someone who might go unnoticed by those who remembered her faintly from the Buffalo Bill case and the media frenzy that surrounded it. 

Lecter raised one eyebrow.

“They say gentlemen prefer blondes,” he murmured, voice smooth as silk.

Clarice let her eyes roll—an exaggerated gesture, more for Crawford than for him, a little performance of  professionalism while the flutter in her stomach betrayed her amusement.

“You’re not a gentleman.”

One side of his mouth lifted in a slow, knowing grin, the other remaining perfectly still, a study in controlled amusement. Their eyes stayed locked, the unspoken tension hanging like smoke between them—until Crawford’s voice cut through the air, pulling the plug on the moment.

“One chance, Lecter,” he said, his voice like a guillotine. “You fuck this up… you harm one hair on her head… or the dog’s head… and I’ll make the rest of your incarcerated existence a living hell.”

The threat hung there—certain.

He regarded Jack with amused patience, as if Crawford’s menace were a petty trifle and he were indulging it for sport—either scenario so far beneath him it was an affront to his private sense of morality and dignity.

“Don’t worry, Jackie boy,” he murmured. “I’ll bring our little Starling back home safely. Pinky Promise.”

Then he turned his attention to Charlie, letting a single finger trail along the terrier’s bristling head, precise and deliberate, as though measuring the dog’s very essence. The little hound’s eyes closed in quiet appreciation. Clarice could have sworn the dog’s small body trembled with the same electricity that ran through her.

“Yours, Mrs. Dickinson?” he asked.

“Ours,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. “Another excuse to roam the neighborhood and hear the latest gossip.”

Jack cleared his throat, the gesture of a man trying to reclaim the reins.

“Remember, Lecter,” Jack said. “You’re wearing trackers. Try anything and we’ll hunt you all the way to the ends of the earth. Don’t t even think we won’t shoot to kill.”

“Jack,” he said, as if addressing a dear and meddlesome relative, “it would be terribly gauche of me to attempt anything… theatrical…during my first mission as an FBI operative, wouldn’t it? Especially when I’m looking to dazzle my new wife.”

He stretched the last three words—savouring them as though they were delicacies— his eyes sparkling with mischief while Jack’s jaw tightened so fiercely it seemed he was grinding his own teeth into dust.

“So?” Clarice said at last, her voice cutting through the poisoned air between the two men. “Are we ready? Because there’s still the small matter of a serial killer out there.”

She slapped the wallet—George Dickinson’s new identity—against Lecter’s chest with a sharp, decisive motion. He caught it effortlessly, eyes glinting with quiet amusement. Without waiting for a reply, she turned away, opened the Jeep’s back door, and lifted Charlie inside.

The little terrier nestled beside a box of supplies—canned goods, bottled water, coffee. Temporary provisions for a newlywed couple settling into their quiet coastal life. Clarice stared at them a moment too long.

The thought struck her like a cruel joke: grocery shopping with Hannibal Lecter. Hosanna be merciful.

“There’s just one more thing,” Crawford said, his voice severe, carrying the gravity of a confession. “The finishing touch to make this… sick charade… a tad more convincing.”

When she turned to face him, Crawford was holding up a small, transparent plastic bag. Inside lay two rings—wedding bands—plain, unassuming, yet heavy with implication.

She swallowed hard. For once, even Lecter offered no mockery. He regarded the rings with a calm detachment, as if their presence were inevitable, neither surprising nor amusing. Yet the moment was not lost on her, though she longed for it to be. Clarice did not think of herself as sentimental, and yet the small, glinting bands seemed to mock something sacred within her—a fragile longing—something impossible.

They each slid the rings onto their own fingers, the metal cold and heavy, a perfect fit that seemed almost too deliberate.

She avoided Lecter’s gaze while he circled the car and quietly settled into the passenger seat. 

Jack handed her the keys.

“You can do this, Starling.” His voice came low, steady, carrying the weight of trust and warning both. “Trust your gut. But don’t hesitate to call for backup.”

Clarice pressed her lips together, then placed her hand on his cheek.

“I know, Jack. And… thank you. I know you’re taking a huge risk.”

He nodded once, hard and brief, while she turned and sidled to the door, then slid into the driver’s seat, the leather cold under her, then glanced at Lecter. He didn’t meet her eyes; he simply stared ahead, inscrutable.

“Buckle up, George,” she murmured, the name tasting foreign on her tongue.

The engine thrummed beneath her, a low heartbeat.  Ahead lay a quiet town, a house, neighbors, errands, gossip—and a thousand unpredictable possibilities.