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Increasingly as the days pass her by here on the Chesapeake, Clarice Starling has awoken with clarity, as though a waterline of barbiturates were slowly receding from beneath her chin. Today, finally, she is bone dry.
The hangover is stupendous.
Head leaden and stomach sick from all the sugar in the wine and aperitif, it takes her a moment to realize the additional immense pressure all over her front is not an effect of the liquor, but merely the weight of her impromptu housemate-cum-caretaker sleeping on her: she propped uncomfortably against a thin pillow and the arm of the drawing room settee, he askew atop her, cradled between her thighs, head heavy on her breast.
Between the stark lucidity of her mind and this… proximity, Starling makes a few bodily microadjustments—jaw, kegels—to take stock of things. No pointed soreness, no pleasant buzz of friction between her legs—it seems what images she can conjure from last night, frottage and panic and a crossbow leveled at her head and a kiss that broke the whole inebriate scene to pieces, were as far as things got.
So she didn’t fuck Hannibal Lecter; that was good, right? Probably worthy of a little pride, but she can’t muster it up.
Lecter may well be dead for his stillness, were it not for the steady thump of his heart against Starling’s belly. On the floor by the ashen hearth lies the crossbow, still cocked. Starling feels too warm, suddenly, and does everything in her power to shuffle quite gingerly out from beneath her companion’s weight. She’s surprised when all Lecter does is grunt softly, taking her place against the arm of the settee with his face buried in the cushion, arm slung overhead. Distantly Starling feels as though she’ll look back on this image one day and laugh.
It isn’t funny yet, though. Just strange.
She goes to the kitchen to splash her face with cold water from the sink and instead comes upon Krendler, duct taped to his chair with a crossbow bolt jutting out from his haphazardly recapped skull, and freezes like a deer, cold all the way down to her toes.
She lurches forward to vomit in the sink basin. Dinner makes its way up and out, a cleansing purge. Not quite long enough for the proteins of his brain to break down in her body, she thinks. Hopes. It is the sound of her sickness that rouses Lecter; she hears him shift on the settee and stand, pad through the dining room towards the kitchen.
“Clarice?” He sounds cautious.
“Don’t.” Her voice comes out husky, and echoes, still hunched over the sink basin as she is. She can feel him hesitating in the threshold, refuses to look at him for fear of the rage that might envelop her. “Doctor, I’d like to be alone now.”
Starling hears him swallow.
“I’m sorry about him. I’d meant to—after dinner, but…”
But you’re still alive, against my better judgement, Starling finishes for him, in her head.
“I’ll deal with him.”
“I’m going outside,” Starling says. “Down to the beach.” Which she has not as yet seen; what little wandering she’s managed over this past… week, give or take, has been entirely inside the walls of the Chesapeake house.
There’s a large chef’s knife in the sink beneath her, only slightly spattered. She fancies wheeling around and chucking it into Lecter’s head for a fraction of a second before she has to shut her eyes against the hideous thought.
“I might suggest a jacket,” Lecter says quietly. “It’s been very cold.”
She goes out the back door without one, or shoes. Wordless, into the saline air.
***
Clarice presented herself to Lecter, and the careful calculations in his brain were suddenly scrambled. She has that effect on him.
His feet moved by themselves, towards her; knees buckled as though they’d never been used.
There have been many surprises over the past few weeks as Lecter has reintigrated himself into the American public. Clarice has been the basis for a majority of them—last night was no different.
Chateau d’Yquem had never tasted so sweet as it did off the surface of Clarice’s salty skin, trickling down the curve of her breast. Nor had any music sounded as beautiful as her raspy exhale, more relief than pleasure, a foregone conclusion. Lecter, single-minded, would have been pleased to kneel before her seat until the liquor was drunk; it was she who pulled him nearer, let him brace his hands on the arms of her chair and press feverish kisses up the expanse of her collar, her bared neck.
It was she whose hand found his waist, tugged him closer and locked him in with her heels at the small of his back.
But it was he who, when their hips ground clumsily together, lurched back as though bitten by electricity, calves knocking against the coffee table.
“No, no, this isn’t right.” Lecter shook his head, unsettling strands of hair over his brow. “You’re not supposed to—this is—” His breath came quick and heavy, arousal burned away for frightful clarity. “It isn’t you I want.” Words unconvincing even to him; Clarice looked entirely nonplussed.
“Tell me this, Doctor,” she said calmly, fiddling with the neckline of her dress to put herself back in place. “When you kill me, put Mischa in my place, how’s it meant to work? You gonna treat her like Mason Verger did Margot, or will your attraction to me be entirely out of the equation?”
“Don’t say that. It’s—the universe will right itself, time will right itself.” Lecter backed up, towards the doorway between the den and the dining room; Clarice stood to follow. In spite of himself, Lecter chuckled, breathlessly. “You have no imagination, Clarice, and there’s nothing I can give you for that.”
“Convince me. Convince me you yourself believe anything will come of this but me lying dead on the floor with a hole in my head—” advancing on him, Clarice jerked her chin in the direction of the kitchen—“just like our friend in there.”
“Come any nearer to me and I will not make this transition as painless as intended.” Lecter’s eyes flicked over his shoulders to right himself; he saw the crossbow on the table, surrounded by so many flowers.
“Why are you afraid of me, Doctor?”
Denial caught in his throat. Lecter grit his teeth. They both lunged for the weapon, but Lecter had it—lifted it, leveled at Clarice’s forehead. She put her hands up, nonchalant.
“Know, Clarice,” Lecter breathed heavily, ignoring the sting in his eyes, “that I do this only out of—the deepest, dearest reverence. None in the world are so worthy as you.”
“Doctor Lecter.”
“There is so little humanity left in me. Too little to spare.”
“Doctor, please.” Clarice was insistent, not panicked. He led her back into the drawing room, she now stepping blindly on careful feet. Behind her silhouette, the fire hungrily blazed.
“Sit. I don’t want you to fall.”
“Doctor Lecter.” Ignoring his command, Clarice’s hands raised minutely higher, a warning. She stepped towards him, towards the crossbow. “You remember what you told me, about my father?” She rested light fingers on the stirrup of the bow, led it gently away from her face. With her other hand, she reached toward Lecter, frozen as a cornered predator. Rested her palm against his temple, wrist warm on his damp cheek. “What more of Mischa do you need than what’s already in here?”
Lecter’s hands trembled as his nerve ebbed. Slowly, he shook his head side-to-side beneath Clarice’s touch. “There’s so little of her,” he murmured. “I never got to know her.”
“You didn’t get to know who you’d be with her, either,” Clarice concurred. “That’s so sad, Doctor Lecter. It’s terribly sad, and I’m so sorry. But I don’t think I can ever take her place. I don’t think you can go back to the person you were before you lost her. I don’t know if I can say that’s all right, or you’re better off for it, but…” She shrugged. “Here we are. Here I am.”
And then she stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. Chaste, flavored with the salt of tears. He could never predict her. He didn’t think he ever would.
Separated, Lecter found her eyes, calm and gentle and filled with empathy. Against his ear, her pulse, revealing her: rabbit-quick.
“Here you are,” Lecter repeated in a whisper. He lowered the crossbow, lifted a freed hand to touch Clarice’s wrist. “Your heart’s beating so fast.”
Clarice smiled, just a little. The shine of tears waiting beneath her wide, bright eyes. “I’m very frightened of the idea of being shot through with a crossbow, I’ll admit.”
The weapon thudded against the floor, and then Lecter’s knees as he sank before her once again, letting the hand against his head slip loosely into his own.
“I’m sorry,” he said numbly. Then, tight with pain: “God, I’m so sorry.”
Clarice didn’t let him remain prostrate for long. She knelt with him, wrapped her arms around his shoulders, their temples pressed together. His hands lifted weakly to her back and he held her, warm and alive and very much her own.
“Do you have any idea how desperately I adore you?” Lecter muttered tiredly into her shoulder.
“An inkling, yes,” Clarice smiled against his.
***
Starling breaks out in a run on the hard-packed sand of the Chesapeake Bay, its friction making angry swishes beneath the pound of her feet. Her ears, one whole, the other bitten through and misshapen by Evelda Drumgo’s bullet, burn with the cold of wind whipping around her head. At the turn of the house’s private cove around a fall of large, rough black rocks, she spins and sprints back the way she came, past the steps up to the house and all the way down to the cove’s other end. She does this three times, back and forth, five-minute miles that leave her with the ravages of bitter, dry cold in her chest and throat, and then collapses, sitting panting on the sand with her head tucked between her knees.
It is the sight Hannibal Lecter returns to, some hours later.
He has bagged what remains of Paul Krendler and loaded him into the back of the gray truck, covering the body with a camouflage tarp so angled to look like it hides a rack of antlers, the crossbow in its case, and a smattering of blaze orange accessories. He drives south, deep into the Shenandoah Valley, high into its bare hills. When he returns, he is tired, sore, but he puts on a pair of heavy rubber gloves and scrubs the kitchen clean, clears the dining table of its extravagant settings and scours it, too. He doesn’t have a mask to protect his sensitive nose from the pungence of bleach, and his sinuses ache until he escapes to the den at the rear of the house, stripping the gloves and cracking the windows.
Lecter looks out at the tiny figure of Clarice Starling for a while, then showers, redresses casually. He wears two coats when he goes out the back door, and, on purpose, slams it loudly shut—down below, Starling’s ears prick to the sound.
Lecter takes his time meandering down the steps to the beach, longer still crossing its grey expanse to find her, loafers crunching over broken shells.
Her hair is askance, extremities red with cold.
“May I sit?” Lecter asks quietly.
Starling jerks her chin to indicate the space beside her.
With an effortful sigh, Lecter lowers himself, and sheds one of his coats, heavily lined corduroy. He places it in the space between them, and after a moment Starling takes it and shrugs it over her shoulders, exhaling heavily at the relief of its warmth.
“How long have we been here?” She asks, eyes fixed on a thin ribbon of yellow on the horizon line.
“Nine days.”
Starling rubs an eye. “Is it the new year yet? That’s—it is, isn’t it?”
“Just,” Lecter smiles, a little. “I’d have gotten champagne, but you were still—alcohol wasn’t advisable.”
There is a low boil of unhappiness in Starling’s gut, then—not anger; the running has tempered that. But she is displeased, and Lecter feels it in the air between them. “What were you giving me?”
“Stimulants to keep the tranquilizer from stopping your heart. After the first one rendered you unconscious, a second dart hit your shin,” Lecter begins clinically. “Small doses of sedatives to help you sleep, and scopolamine, for nausea. Barbiturates as hypnotic aids.” Disinterested, as though the latter is an afterthought.
“You were hypnotizing me?”
“How else do you expect I was able to connect you with your father, Clarice, a seance? I cannot raise the dead.”
“Last night you would have claimed otherwise.”
That bristles between them. Lecter looks pointedly at his feet.
“I will admit my mind has been… scattered, recently. Perhaps fanciful. An affliction I attribute entirely to your proximity.”
“Oh, well, forgive me, Doctor. I didn’t mean to drive you so mad with passion you got to meditating on the—the entropy of the known universe.”
Lecter makes a huffing sound that Starling belatedly realizes is a small scoff.
“Next time you get on a pseudoscientific bent, could you leave me out of it, please?” she presses.
“I have already apologized. If it pleases you, Clarice, I’ll do it again. I am amenable.”
“Amenable, that’s just how I’d describe you,” Starling cracks quietly. Then: “Where did you go, just now? Earlier? I heard the car—the truck, not the Jag.”
“You would know a Jaguar’s engine by ear, wouldn’t you,” Lecter muses fondly. “Presuming you intend to return to Washington now that you’re well and lucid, I believe I should not tell you, for your own security.”
“Ah,” says Starling, comprehending. She sits with it, the death of Paul Krendler. Obviously his absence from this life does not sadden her, but she is not pleased to be complicit in—not his death, necessarily, but its gruesome nature, the symbolic significance Hannibal Lecter evidently ascribed it. She remembers feeling this way about Miggs, too. Horrified and, deeper still, a little tickled by the unflinching act of chivalry. But she hates the word, shudders to think of herself as someone receptive to it. Hannibal Lecter is many things to her now, but she has no interest in his being her knight.
“I haven’t decided anything, by the way,” Starling eventually rejoins, resting her chin on her arms crossed over her knees. “Not that I’m not weighing my options, such as they are. If I go back, I won’t lie. I’ll confess to trespassing on Verger’s land—they’ll hit me with obstruction of justice, maybe; a few counts of manslaughter. It’ll be a miracle if I ever work again, once I’ve served my time.”
Lecter drums his fingers softly atop his knee. “It won’t be much fun running about without you around to chase me.”
“If I begged you—if I told you, ‘if you love me, you’ll turn yourself in’—you wouldn’t do it, would you?”
Just hearing the words on her lips makes Lecter’s heart throb with bittersweet joy. “Not in a thousand years,” he murmurs, looking down into her glittering eyes. It’s the first time they’ve looked at each other all day, since the events of the previous evening. “There are so many things you could ask me to sacrifice, Clarice, but I fear my view is not one of them.”
She searches his face, and Lecter lets her. His eye is no longer swollen shut where the cattle prod struck it, but there are pink marks of new tissue above and beneath the orbit, where the prongs landed, and he holds the eye in a nearly unnoticable squint—perhaps even to him. His expression is calm, a little sad. It reminds her of the first time they parted ways, under presumption that it would be the last. She knows he finds her very beautiful; he’s said as much. He probably doesn’t know how similarly she feels about him, and at the moment, she doesn’t feel like telling.
When she looks away, her brow screws briefly in the effort of curried emotion. “I’m so fucking stupid.”
“That isn’t—”
“I just wanted to do some good, you know? Make something of myself. Help people.”
“The Gumb case; what do you call that?”
“Beginner’s luck,” Starling fires back. “I tried. I really tried.”
Lecter says softly, “I know you did. And you do still. It’s what I appreciated in you, first and foremost.”
Starling gives him a sharp look. “See, and that shouldn’t be worth anything to me, but because I’m so messed up in the head—which I attribute to you, by the way—it still gets me all fucking flustered to know I have Hannibal the Cannibal’s approval.”
That stings them both, more than Starling would have expected it to. She ruffles her hair in both hands, breathing hard.
“It should be enough to have saved Catherine Martin,” Starling mumbles. “It’s like you said; the lambs’ll never stop screaming.”
A pause; no birds fly overhead, as though the only living things that can stand to be out on this cold January day by the sea are this pair.
“I didn’t find mine ever did, if that’s any kind of worthwhile commiseration.
“You know you don’t have to go back,” Lecter goes on, with a charge that implies he’s been withholding the fact. “I like to think I’m very good at living under the eye of the law, and I would welcome your companionship.”
“And carry on in our drugged up domestic bliss,” Starling sneers. “Yeah. Great. How long before I have to whip out another tit to keep you from killing me?”
Briefly enough she doubts having seen it, Hannibal Lecter looks earnestly wounded, and sheepish. Starling sighs.
“If we’re putting all our cards on the table, I don’t want last night, or—my part in last night to seem like… maybe I didn’t know so much what I was doing, but I initiated; I’ll own that. I know it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t started it. You tried to stop, you—you did stop. Maybe I have some hard feelings, but they’re not about that. Bygones.” She’s talking quickly, she knows; roundabout and confused. “Sorry. I’m trying to make sense of how great a fool I made of myself, I guess.”
“Certainly no greater than I did,” Lecter replies wearily. “Clarice, my attraction to you has no part in my enjoyment of your company. If you never wanted to touch me again as anything more than a friend, if I may be so bold, I would be no less pleased to have you at my side.”
Starling digs her heels into the sand. “I’ll think about that.”
They sit quietly for several moments. As Lecter comes to wonder whether Starling might prefer some space again, she reaches over to find his hand, takes it in one of hers and carefully inspects it. A white scar dances over the arc of the knuckles. She does not hold him affectionately, but nonetheless Lecter finds himself moved by the ease with which she touches him—she is unafraid, if only in this small action.
Starling releases Lecter’s hand; it hovers in the air where she leaves it. Silent once more, she stands and walks back to the house, taking the lent corduroy with her. Lecter lingers quite a while on the sand before following slowly after her. He feels adrift.
***
At his harpsichord he means to practice in earnest, distract himself from the sounds of Clarice showering, dressing, pacing, merely existing in her wing of the house that so remind him of an old belfry inundated with bats—but Lecter finds he can do no more than plunk up and down the keyboard, pairing keys and wondering at the harmonic and discordant ways they sing together. On those rare occasions in his cell and then at the Palazzo when artistic inspiration would not come, he would resort to doodling, if one might call it that: very small architectural details and folds in fabric and abstract shapes filled carefully in with hatch marks. It feels the same now, this strained attempt to make music when his muse feels so distant from him.
Starling, to that end, lays atop the bed where she has spent so much time these past nine days—Lecter’s armchair is still pulled up beside it, a familiar comfort even when he is no longer present to observe her.
I’ll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep, Lecter had said last night, swallowing up her gussied countenance with his gaze. You’re quite beautiful.
She remembers that, and so much else, quite vividly. Even with the drugs, the wine, she remembers the titillating comfort of their easy conversation—what wonderful company Hannibal Lecter is when one forgets his preoccupations.
No, maybe forget isn’t the right word. Clarice Starling could never forget that, just as she could never forget her father’s unceremonious death, the slaughter of bleating livestock, Evelda Drumgo riddled with bullets at her hand.
But she can think of these facts now, know their misfortune, and let them wash over her. It is not nearly so excruciating now that she has gone over them countless times in conversation with Doctor Lecter—she remembers every word, if not the typical hesitation that would accompany such painful confessions. Perhaps she can let the facts of Hannibal Lecter merely be, too. Perhaps she can let them exist alongside her fondness for him.
And oh, she is fond of him; that much she’s known long before she pulled a breast from her gown in invitation for him to kneel before her. Since they first met, she has craved his company—prickly and challenging, but bracingly honest. Her logical mind, animal instincts, may tell her to get gone and stay gone, but there is a tug in her heart to his charms, to the way he makes her feel stripped down to the barest, truest essentials of her personhood. Goodness, courage even she cannot see.
She likes herself better with him, whether in contrast or complement. If that were the end of it, she’d drop everything to vacation from her collapsing life with this generous sponsor, no romantic reciprocity expected.
If it were anyone else; if it did not mean a point of no return unlike anything Starling could have fathomed when she entered the academy at Quantico.
If it weren’t Hannibal the fucking Cannibal.
Starling shuts her eyes to revel in easier memories: last night, he at her mercy. Shocking as it may be in retrospect, at the time Starling only felt a settling wash of rightness at the feeling of Lecter submitting to her, like it was a facet she knew was present on the cut of him, invisible at the stark angle in which they first met.
There are so many things you could ask me to sacrifice, Clarice, but I fear my view is not one of them.
No, she supposes she was foolish to posit that he turn himself in, knowing what awaits at the other end of his capture is belated arrest and sentencing, inevitably bureaucratic tradeoffs between the states of his offenses until one bids for his execution.
Lethal injection, electrocution—Starling tries to remember which states still authorize death by firing squad before the pit in her gut indicates this is not a path of thought worth traveling down. What did she rescue him for, anyway, if she were only going to push him back into the hands of those who wished him dead?
Genuinely, what did she rescue him for? Love? That isn’t a notion she can humor, not now, so soon after emerging from a drugged, hypnotic stupor in which she quite willingly ate the frontal lobe of her ex-boss. Maybe she’s still coming to. Maybe if she were really in her right mind, she’d fetch her gun from its place in the drawer at her bedside (if nothing else, Lecter is mighty trusting of her) and lay him flat.
With a sardonic smile, she recalls something he said to her long, long ago, in writing: I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy.
The sentiment certainly goes both ways.
Clarice Starling knows this much: she cannot be complicit in his killing—as perpetrator or victim—nor could she eat another bite he served her if the butchery went on.
There are so many things you could ask me to sacrifice.
With a great, slow feeling of gravity, Starling wonders if Lecter meant to imply what he did in saying that. She thinks of him on his knees before her, crossbow forsaken and weakly pleading forgiveness as though she were some saint with any say in the matter.
Sacrifice. Starling has sacrificed for him twice now—the upkeep of their early communication in Baltimore at risk of her budding career; his life in exchange for the last chance she had at being reinstated in the Bureau. She would do both again, without a moment’s hesitation.
What more is there to it than that, really? Whether or not she pulls the trigger, hers will always be the hand that kills Hannibal Lecter, if she turns him in. No, she won’t do it, she thinks. For whatever reason—affection, selfishness, refusal to add another to her count of kills.
But maybe she can justify this to herself, just as long as it takes her to come to grips with the truth of her feelings.
Maybe, as a bastion between Hannibal Lecter and the rest of the world, she can do one last good thing.
With an immensely peaceful resolve, Starling stands, follows the halfhearted sounds of Lecter’s fingers on the harpsichord.
***
He can hear her coming.
As soon as the house shifts with the weight of her exiting her bedroom, Hannibal Lecter is tensed for the reality that now more than ever before, he hasn’t the foggiest idea what Clarice Starling is about to say or do. To speculate seems worthless—conjuring a possibility makes it foreseen, and thus unlikely. Stiffly, Lecter carries on with his atonal fiddling, waiting for what could as well be a pair of handcuffs as a bullet in the back of his skull. Whatever possibilities fly through his mind unbidden, it seems the optimistic evade him.
Lecter finds he can no longer play when the drawing room threshold creaks beneath Clarice’s lithe footsteps. In resignation, his hands come to rest lightly over the keyboard, settling into stillness as the oxygen of the room is displaced by her presence.
“Doctor Lecter.”
He isn’t sure what he expects to see, if anything; he does not expect the turn of his head to land his chin between her forefinger and thumb as she has easily materialized beside him where he sits atop the bench.
He does not expect her to lean so casually down to kiss him, not dissimilar to last night: deep and firm but chaste, communicative more so than impassioned. He does not expect her to pull back just as soon as he has his wits about him to shut his eyes, leaving him suspended still in the suggestion of her hold beneath his chin.
“Hello, Clarice,” Lecter says, looking up to her. Her gaze is cool, appraising.
“Hi. Just checking something.”
He quirks a brow. As pleasant sober as it seemed last night, perhaps? His heart throbs bloodily in his chest.
“Are you paying attention? This is important,” Clarice says, the pad of her thumb sinking softly in to the flesh of Lecter’s jaw.
“Intently.”
“I think we might have a shot at something here. Bunking up,” she shrugs her shoulders implicatively, “for now. I have stipulations.”
Lecter’s smile feels all the sweeter under the pressure of her touch. “I would expect nothing less.”
“Do not drug me again. Not without my knowing, or my say-so.”
In lieu of a nod, fearing it might free him of Clarice’s hold, Lecter blinks slowly, meaningfully. “Last night’s dose was the last I will administer you. I much prefer you lucid.”
Clarice fights back a withering half-smile. She goes on: “You’re too good a cook not to take advantage of. God knows if I were providing for myself it’d be a sorry sight. That said, Doctor Lecter, do not—ever—offer me human flesh, ever again. Don’t ever prepare it in a kitchen we share; don’t let me find out you’re sourcing it.”
Lecter’s brows raise; in a mischievous streak, he is tempted to prod—reference her enjoyment of it at last night’s supper, push for conditionals—but the magnanimity of the gaze she casts upon him keeps him still. In the end, he settles to roll his eyes, good-naturedly.
“I suppose I can accommodate such a strict culinary preference. One. You’re not allergic to anything, are you?”
Now Clarice does grant him a smile, serene and lovely, and Lecter feels any stubbornness in him settle. It is not an ultimatum outright; they both know this. If Lecter wished to go behind her back, he could, without technically breaking the rules of this contract—but, as in his first six years in Florence, he presently feels no urge.
“The last one is—” is that shyness Lecter senses, in the heartbeat-quick flicker of her gaze?—“if… things were to continue as they did last night, if you wanted them to, I’d only ask that you let me set the pace.”
Lecter registers now the significance, to Clarice, of her hold on him, her kiss. The wonderful courage of it floods through him; his whole body feels light with elation at her nerve. How could he not have realized that all these years of fumbling towards her have been blind, haphazard? That she could become so frighteningly skilled at surprising him?
Why are you afraid of me, Doctor?
Because all the many things he knows mean so little in her presence.
“I am amenable,” he begins with a wink, “to your stipulations, Clarice, in exchange for two of my own.”
Clarice looks down at him dubiously.
“Only answers. Quid pro quo.”
She looks relieved; there is nothing she can’t tell him now, after all their talks. “Go, Doctor,” she prompts him, taking her fingers from his face and nodding for him to make room for her on the harpsichord bench.
“One,” Lecter begins as she sits beside him, “why did you come for me, at Verger’s farm?”
Clarice’s face opens with surprise at the question. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“Verger was working with the FBI, if outside of the bounds of the proper execution of justice. I have never known you to follow rules very carefully; I imagined—however it got done, my captivity, my… incapacitation, you might be satisfied.”
Clarice bristles. “It would take quite a lot more than your track record, Doctor Lecter, for me to comfortably say you deserved the death Verger had planned for you. Maybe I’m a hypocrite for that, or too soft. I don’t know what anyone does or doesn’t deserve; I do know I couldn’t have slept very well at night if I’d seen you taken and sat back twiddling my thumbs. Call it paying back a debt to Catherine Martin, if you don’t want to believe I owed you myself, or that I had a bias.”
Lecter leans forward to rest his forearms against the harpsichord’s nameboard, feeling a bit heavy. “For helping with Gumb.”
“Yes.”
Lecter looks away into the space past the instrument’s propped lid. “I owe you much more, I think, for those first weeks we came to know each other. Nonetheless—” he turns back to offer Clarice a polite smile—“consider us even.”
“Well, I don’t know if I’d say that. You’ve gone and drugged me now; I think it’s your turn to make amends again.”
Lecter lets a wispy laugh peal out of him. “Quid pro quo.”
Clarice nods her assent.
“Why, last night, did you—what was your word for it; initiate what you did? Excepting inebriation; sorry, again, for that. Seduction as self defense? It doesn’t seem your style.”
Clarice looks shifty. Lecter wonders if, beneath her hair, her ears have turned pink. “Come on, I shouldn’t need to answer that.”
“If you want your dietary inclinations respected, you do,” Lecter says, a little singsong and cruel. Then, with a small sigh, he softens, wondering if he can’t guess at her hangup. “Not for any… titillation of my own; I am not trying to duck your third rule. I just don’t understand. I’d like to.”
Clarice looks at him a moment. “I’m not sure I understand it myself. Maybe I’d like to think it was because you were a warm body in front of me; I think it more likely it wouldn’t have been anyone but you.”
Lecter feels shuddery, static in anticipation.
“I don’t know, Doctor; that’s God’s honest truth. I wanted to know what would happen; that’s what drives most of what I do. I knew I could change the direction of the way things were going last night, and that was a tactic I’d—wondered about, maybe. Subconsciously.”
“Is that so,” Lecter murmurs.
“That can’t surprise you,” Clarice says, deadpan and incredulous.
“Nearly everything about you surprises me, Clarice, even the things I think I know of you.” He shuts his eyes, brushes his fingers lightly enough over the keyboard not to draw sound from it. “That’s all. Thank you.”
“That’s all?”
“I’m sure I will have more questions for you. I’m sure you will think of further limitations, designs, to the way you’d like us to exist in each other’s orbits. We don’t know each other outside of our respective captivities, not really.”
Clarice ponders that, it seems. She mirrors Lecter’s movement, a hand ghosting over the skeletal black and white ivory, but does not stop when her hand nears his. She palms over it, takes careful hold of it. Like she did this morning, investigating his scar—but then she cradles it in her own, lifts it carefully by the digits to her lips, and kisses his knuckles, eyes fixed on his.
It is so wonderful and strange. Lecter remembers how thoughtlessly he confessed his love for her last night, wonders how strongly it sticks in her brain. She must know, with these ministrations, these conditions, just how great a power over him she possesses.
When Clarice slackens her hand, he lifts their entwined grips his way, now, and reciprocates the gesture: kisses her hand like it wears the ring of royalty, though in reality it is callused and unadorned. Clarice’s responding smile, at once flattered and amused, is all the jewelry she could ever need.