Quid Pro Quo

Starling bristled a bit at how he addressed her. “I wasn’t aware we were on a first name basis, Doctor.” She replied, soft and polite rather than defensive or offended. She could see he was working, and couldn’t help but notice how the rest of his drawings had been removed from his cell. Doubtless, a punishment for what he had done to Miggs in her defense. 

She had a file tucked to her chest, and she slowly approached the distance line. “I have something for you, if you’re interested. A possible transfer, if you share what you know regarding Buffalo Bill.” She would wait until she had his full attention and he approached the glass before placing the file in the sliding drawer and pushing it inward.

“I apologize, Agent Starling,” Hannibal said as he put the pencil down and approached the glass cage. 

He had always had impeccable manners. It was one of those things which had made him so endearing to so many. If there was one thing people knew about Hannibal Lecter, it was that he respected boundaries and expected other to do the same. 

And yet here he was, transgressing one of them. Although it probably wasn’t such a cardinal sin. Not one that he would murder a man for, surely.

Hannibal’s hand moved across the sheet of paper and sketched in the outline of Brunelleschi’s dome. He closed his eyes for a moment, made out the shape of the brick roof and the octagonal ribs with his mind’s eyes and resumed his sketch.

He had been working on this view of Florence from San Miniato for a little over a month. He had begun with the Arno and then had started adding the houses, the Palazzo Vecchio, and some of the streets that could be seen from atop that hill. Little by little, he had worked his way from the foreground to the background and now all that was left was the Duomo. Once that was done, the sketch would be finished.

“You have a lot of fascinating records here,” Hannibal said as he placed a 78 rpm album of the Sistine Chapel Choir on the counter.  “How do you find them?”

There is a certain artistry here, Hannibal thought. He stood at the door of massive grain silo and took in the bodies that the killer had laid on the floor. He noted how each body’s arms had been placed over its head as if it were a ballerina and how their feet all pointed inward towards other victim. It was a large mosaic. A sunburst in the middle of New Mexico. 

“Have you ever been to Ravenna?” he asked Will.   

Hannibal wandered from one gallery to another at the Louvre. He had finally made it down to the basement where the sculptures were and was standing in front of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. He walked around the sculpture, inspecting how the Italian genius had every joint and sinew lifelike. He stopped and admired the little mischievous monkey against which the colossus was leaning.

He was bending down to get a closer look when he heard something crack under his foot. “I’m sorry,” he said turning around as he removed it quickly. “I was so absorbed in the art. I didn’t notice you there.”

Ophelia hummed, her vacant eyes staring towards him but not really taking in his appearance. Through their time together, she had discovered that it was easier to talk to him if she pretended he wasn’t there. Her answer was evasive; a simple shrug of her shoulders that sent locks of her golden hair tumbling down her back.

“Mmmm,” she hummed again, considering his question. “Fine I suppose.”

She goes back to staring around his office, blue eyes wide with wonder. She doesn’t want to talk about her week. She doesn’t want to tell him about Hamlet, her childhood sweetheart that had just recently resurfaced. Instead, she fixated on a half empty decanter on his side table.

“Whiskey?” A thin finger raised towards the crystal glass, she allows herself to crack into a smile. “My father likes that stuff.”

Hannibal watched as Ophelia shrugged her shoulders. He sensed psychic wounds long before he saw them. It was there in the way that patients carried themselves, the words they used, the things they choose to talk about in their session, and the things that they choose to shove aside. Some of them were better at it than others, but Ophelia wasn’t.

He watched her as she turned towards the side table and the half empty decanter. For a flickering moment, he thought something would happen and then it was gone. Instead, he heard something else.

One patient was much like another. All of them needed something from Hannibal – a reassuring word, a smile, a space where they could heal. Sometimes, the magic of psychoanalysis worked on even the most recalcitrant patients. Sometimes, however, the magic didn’t work at all. It had be coaxed somehow and created from the ground up. When simple assurances didn’t work, there were other methods.

He had been meeting with Ophelia for several months. He had thought that she would have gotten better by now, but things had taken a turn since a certain billionaire had died in New York and his son had returned to take over the company.

                    “Do you hear the lambs, Clarice?” 

                           Independent and Mixed Headcanon Hannibal Lecter.

                                                      Written by Sandra.