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It was a heavy, humid day - one of the dead days after the heady festivities of Christmas but before the New Year rolled around, with all the renewal and fervent resolution it brought. Bueno Aires sweltered and shimmered under a heat pregnant with promise of a fearsome storm, the air a physical presence that haunted the few brave souls wandering the streets, licking sweat across their skin and chasing breath from their lungs.
Clarice Starling did not know how long she had already been walking - there was a gentle ache in her calves and the balls of her feet but she was fit and fast and it could have been hours. She walked with no aim, no destination in mind - for her mind was many years and miles away. She looped blocks, crossed from neighbourhood to neighbourhood without any of her usual calm pleasure in the grand architecture, until she found herself back in their own - close to home but not ready to head there yet. She came back behind her eyes a little and realised she stood before the stark columns of the entrance to the sprawling Recoleta Cemetery. Of course. A fitting place to have found herself, after pounding thousands of steps across the thriving, vibrant city, to find herself now stepping over the threshold into the realm of the dead. With each step she took into the maze of tombs, under the watchful, impassive eyes of the mournful statues, she finally let the fog of shielding numbness burn away under the brilliant, fearsome fever of her pain.
Jack Crawford was dead.
Jack Crawford was dead.
She spoke the works in her mind, solidifying the concept, turning it over and over. She knew, of course, that it was always an inevitability. No man stands immortal, outside of myth and legend. Perhaps it was the method of finding out which had thrown her so entirely off the comfortable orbit of this new life - catching a sharp movement, as she had, in her periphery as she sat curled with a book in their sumptuous piano room and realising it was Hannibal, flicking his head to look at her and tilting the laptop towards her fractionally in a gentle call to come and see. The words of the obituary blurred before her eyes after the first paragraph, the hand she had placed on his shoulder cramping into a rictus grip which must have hurt but he made no noise, her comprehension dimming to a dry buzz of white noise as her most primal nature rebelled against the crumbling of one of her longest standing pillars.
After that, she had little memory of how she came to be stalking the steaming streets of the city, how she came to end here in the cooler calm of the labyrinthine knot of mausoleums. She had nothing with her, was still dressed in the simple white dress she had been wearing in the house, she therefore must have left with little further delay. Had she said anything, gave any explanation before departing? She could not remember.
She stopped walking finally, present enough to feel the physical protest in her feet and the deeper, less easily explicable ache in her chest, her heart. She found herself stood before a grave she had found particularly moving when Hannibal had first brought her here, in their first month in the great old city. That of a young girl who had been killed by an avalanche on her honeymoon and left behind bereft parents to construct this beautiful tomb, entirely of wood and glass in defiance of the role stone had played in their child’s untimely end. Beside this stands a statue of the young woman herself and her faithful dog who had, reportedly, died the exact same moment despite being thousands of miles away at the time. Hannibal had not stilled at this tomb, seeming to find nothing notable in the tragic tale surrounding it, however Clarice had hung back and looked into the solemn young face for long minutes, turning her story over in her mind.
She did so again now. Not a single stone laid in this construction - standing alone and defiant in this winding mass of the very same offensive material. No echo or influence of the force which had taken this soul from the world allowed in this one small plot. Perhaps an ultimately futile protest, the damage irreparably done, but the intent resonated with Clarice in this searing moment of grief. Called loud and clear to the raw pain and guilt burning low in her gut. Unlocked the box she had kept sealed tight in her mind over the last few years, the box that she had kept tucked and hidden in a far-flung, little visited room of her growing palace. Just as all the hardships of the world flooded through Pandora’s fingers when she cracked her famous box, so did a myriad of misery for Clarice now as her fingers cracked the clasp of her own.
She closed her eyes tight, breathed in long and slow, and stood square before this demon born and grown strong on a drip-fed diet of repression and denial. She looked into the face of it, held the chin of her fear and held steady the awful gaze which looked back.
You are afraid, it said. You are afraid that the first person who looked out for you, who saw the good and the worthy in you since Daddy died, who gave you hope you could be more than you had dared hope in those long days of helping Mama clean motel rooms - that they were out in the world thinking badly of you. Let down, disappointed, wounded. You feel guilty that they themselves held onto a bitter kernel of guilt for you, could never rest easy knowing they sent you down this path. That they could not lift the weary weight of bureaucracy and prejudice enough to allow you to thrive, to be rewarded and respected and to resist the allure of the path you have taken.
She saw Crawford’s face then - clear as if he too stood before her, alongside the long dead young woman and her faithful pet - as he had been so many long years ago, viewed through the eager, ambitious eyes of the hopeful student she had been. He was close - leaning forward to impress his point, his half glasses blurring the bags under his eyes, the smell of institution linoleum and recently gargled Listerine sharp in her nose. “I want your full attention, Starling.” He said, had said. “Be very careful with Hannibal Lecter. Don’t ever forget what he is.”
Don’t ever forget what he is.
She had remembered taking those words to heart at the time with a fervour unique to the green and the young. Had wanted nothing more than the approval, the respect of Jack Crawford. And look where that had brought her.
Don’t ever forget.
She faced the very heart of the twisted knot of pain the news of his death had tugged excruciatingly tight. Had he heard of her disappearance after the disastrous night at Muskrat Farm, felt an initial grief at her assumed death at the hands of Hannibal Lecter - yet another protégé lost to the same monster? Then, as months and years went by with no whisper of either of them arose, started to wonder at an even darker fate? What would he find more horrific, more sickening, she wondered then. Thinking she languished somewhere, a prisoner and victim of the Doctor ...or that, as was the case in this strange reality she lived now, she was going about in the world by this monsters side as a willing partner, of clear mind and free choice. Would she sicken Jack Crawford if he knew exactly what had happened to her? Did she sicken herself?
A kick of acute agony. Ah - there it was, the root of this. She took another breath and faced it once again. Did she sicken herself? Did she regret? Had she chosen the wrong path after all?
The answer came fast, landing with the solid and immovable thud of a dropped anchor, shaking her to her very bones with the crashing certainty. It crushed the worry, the guilt, the pain - leaving only a clean, simple grief at the loss of someone she cared about.
She knew then she could go home. Had to go home. Wanted more than any earthly thing to go home.
___
Slipping back through the grand entrance hall of the mansion less than a half hour later - a little out of breath and with eyes holding a bright, fresh wildness - she tripped quietly up the sweeping staircase to the upper floor. The upper hallway was dark now, the sun long set, but a dim light showed from beyond the open door of the same room she had left in such a hurry many long hours earlier. Entering, she stilled in the doorway - suddenly almost nervous to go further.
The room was richly lit, wall lighting keeping the illumination low and intimate, the high ceiling swathed in a blanket of darkness still. In the centre of the room, the fine oak table was adorned with an array of fine cheeses, glossy fruit and a bottle of fine red wine gently decanting - filling the air with a rich, spiced aroma. Hannibal Lecter turned to her as her first footfall into the room sounded, although she knew he would have heard her the moment she clocked the front door open.
His dark eyes found hers and held them, something like uncertainty deep down in there - although she couldn’t be sure, having never seen what uncertainty looked like on Hannibal Lecter. She realised then that a part of him, however small, however easily repressed and reasoned away, had entertained the possibility she was not coming back. He gave then a slight tilt of his sleek head a quirk of his lips recalling so forcibly the first impressions she ever had of him it was as if his original face shone through the various alterations applied since his escape. Another face from the dark, distant past - not a ghost this time, a memory, an echo of the people they both were all that time ago.
“I was unsure when you would return.” His voice, so very familiar and dear to her now, a heady comfort.
“I forfeited a formal dinner for something which could wait.” He gestured with one graceful incline of an open palm to the table. “But I can call down to the kitchen if you -”
The rest of his words were swallowed - Clarice had crossed the space between them in four long strides, cupped his face in her hands and pressed her night-chilled lips to his with a vehement, reverent passion bordering on devout, chasing away the last ghosts of the day.
She pulled back after several long beats, not relinquishing her hold on him as she looked keenly into his eyes - the one feature he had never permanently changed - and watched as the low lights of the room reflected back to her in pinwheels of hot red embers across the deeper burgundy. Those strange, wonderful eyes - in them she saw a rare surprise.
“It’s perfect.” She said, breath ghosting over his lips with her words.
Both knew she spoke of more than dinner arrangements. Both knew it warranted no further discussion. She had laid to rest the final ghost of her past on this dead day among the tombs. In a few short days when the new year was upon them, she would meet it unburdened and untroubled, sure of her place in the world and who she took it with.