#consultingempath

alternate universes.

 Bedelia has lived in this world for fourteen years. Don't look so startled; there are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, and even beyond. There is such a thing as an universe next door.

Although whether it's a hell of a good one or not, she can hardly say. One brother, one sister; one sister, one brother; the one of them forever seems destined to survive. 

There's the reason she hasn't revealed herself to him. As much as they've loved each other, the loving has been at a distance. Distance has been their friend, as much as their enemy. You can't be let down when your expectations are limited to a mind palace.

But he is as drawn to her as she is to him, and someday...

That poor girl, Abigail. She must have meant a great deal to him.

Michaela Lecter smiles at another of Hannibal's jokes, and eats veal.

she survived

Mischa does not remember Castle Lecter as it was before the soldiers came. To her, the soldiers have always been here; to her, the castle has always been dark and small and dingy.

The only glimpses of previous glory are in her brother's stories, in the black swans that come every spring, and in the eggplants that are grown in the vegetable garden. One thing that has not changed is her love of aubergine - that brilliantly dark purple color that makes her feel happy. Like autumn, and sunshine.

But boys do not like aubergine, Hannibal tells her. Boys are not supposed to like aubergine, and Mischa must be a boy, or they will be separated. 

She listens. She remembers. When their uncle finds them, she is a girl again; and he and Lady Murasaki indulge her in as much color as she wants; and her teenage years are a blazon of color, every one she can find. 

Hannibal protects her. Hannibal has always protected her. When he goes on his bloody rampage, he leaves her out of it, and Lady Murasaki forbids her to ever see him again. She lives with her uncle and his wife in Japan for several years. And then she doesn't.

She is too much like her brother, it seems. But at first, she is less subtle; so she runs, changes her name and adds a mouche, changes her nose, her face, her name.

But she is not so unlike Hannibal again that she does not recognize him.

He knows. She knows. But neither of them know.

And that - that is the map of the labyrinth between them.

a girl to a woman

Give me the fucking fruit, some Persephone said. Bedelia has always known what Hannibal was. She has been haunted by his ghosts, plagued by his sadness. She has been fascinated by the person suit he wears - and it is a person suit, as much as he denies it.

Some people would be scared by staring into the psyche of a serial killer. But Bedelia has always known that the abyss was staring at her, and she has never done anything but stare straight back. She has different standards for company than most people she meets. But then she always has.

(The first ghost she ever met was the ghost of her brother. A child of six - and she had to choose between loving him, and loving her father.

She chose her father, of course. What child wouldn't? But because of that, the choices she's made have always been different than other people's choices. She's always been fascinated and curious about darkness, and how it touched the people around her.

Her father killed her brother when he was twenty-three. Bedelia was born when he was thirty-one. She still knows her own crimes. She chose to forgive her father. She chose to ignore her brother, crying out for revenge with his wringed neck and disemboweled stomach. She chose to ignore the screams coming from her meat, the blood seeping out onto the tablecloth, the extra perception given her by some fluke of God or nature.

Bedelia's always been an abettor, not a murderer. And besides - the ghost that haunts Hannibal is more interesting than most.)