#eldon data

⋆ Detailed Headcanon Prompter! ⋆

❋ } belief they have

            Eldon believes that the world has a personal vendetta against             his family, because he is a shitty person. He thinks that due to             being terrible to his parents as a youth,  they  were  killed,  that             because he wasn’t there for his brothers, they were killed, that             because he was reclusive and  cold  to his only living relatives,             everything bad is  happening  to  him now.  But  he  refuses  to             change because he hates them that much.

✬ } something minor they enjoy

            He enjoys taking care of birds.  It’s  a rather pleasant pastime            for him, because birds  don’t  try  and  bring him down or try to            chat about frivolous bullshit. Also, birds can’t judge him for all            the fucked up shit he does.

✮ } a moral standard

            It is against Eldon’s morals to hurt a child.  He will never, ever,             ever try to hurt anyone  under  the  age of thirteen. He will likely             react violently towards people who  would hurt kids in that age            group,  also.  Like,   nowadays,   he’d  probably  stab  them  or             something. He’s fucked up.

✰ } weird thing they want to try or have tried

"Fear tastes acidic."

The words leave Eldon's lips absently, as he glances down at his phone. A message, still alight on the screen, was quiet confirmation of the terrible act he'd set in motion, and its inevitable conclusion--dinner. The ecologist set down his phone with shaking fingers, still rattled despite many hours passing and feeling less at home in his own skin than he had before. Dr. Lussac had been right, and he knew it. He was slipping. His medication, neglected in his drawer, was a thin lifeline he'd been rejecting for months and now it reared its ugly head like a viper, reminding him of just how dangerous his own mind could be. If he took his medication, this wouldn't have happened--she wouldn't have had to die.

That's what she was, he supposed. Dead. Eldon had done everything except outright tell Hannibal to kill her. He'd told Dr. Lecter where she lived, why she was causing him a bit of trouble, explained everything to the best of his ability in an even voice so the other man wouldn't realize just how terrified he was. And Hannibal had understood. He'd understood too easily what the ecologist wanted, and it scared the hell out of him. Was it really so easy to expect something so vile from him?

Maybe he was crazy. Maybe Hannibal was humoring him, lying to him about killing her. Encouraging his madness. Eldon knew damn well and good what he was capable of doing to him. What he'd done to Will.

Will. That was right. The ecologist had almost forgotten about him. Well, not forgotten about him--but forgotten what he'd been through. Hannibal had destroyed him and turned him into something worse, something evil. Something just like him. The ecologist shuddered at the thought of winding up in the same darkness, and he picked up his phone again to read the invitation. Dinner. Maybe complying with the invitation would provide him solid proof that she was dead. Maybe--maybe if he ate her..

He shuddered violently. He couldn't.

"Fear tastes.. like.." He was still talking. He wasn't sure if it was to fill the silence, or if it was to distract himself, as he left the lab in favor of his bunk. His nicer clothes were there--if he was going to go to Hannibal's, he needed to dress nice. Especially today. If he was going to face sin head-on, he needed to be dressed for the occasion. The devil need not be unimpressed after he'd already delved so deeply into the unforgivable.

He did not take long to find something to wear. Spidery fingers sought out a suit that Hannibal had given him--a three-piece, gray plaid ensemble with a dark gray tie and fine, leather shoes. When he'd first received it, he'd actually been rather cross with Dr. Lecter for the purchase; he thought it too expensive, and swore up and down he would not wear it. Yet now slender fingers shed his clothes onto the floor like he was shedding old skin, shedding whatever it was he'd been in that room with Dr. Lussac in favor of something else. In favor of something that definitively wasn't himself. As he tightened his tie against his throat, he examined himself in the mirror and swept his hair back, away from his face. Perfect. Dressed to the nines and looking less like a shabby ecologist, more like a man who knew success as well as he knew the back of his hand. He thought, perhaps, he looked sane.

Funny, that. Hannibal always dressed this nice, and yet he was the farthest thing from sane that Eldon knew.

He took a cab to Hannibal's house. He could have walked (he usually did), but somehow he felt it more appropriate to be driven, led to the destination rather than travelling their entirely by his own will. This was a careful method of detachment--trying to tell himself that he was not going fully by choice. That the world was carrying and shoving him onto Dr. Lecter's front steps like a blade in his back, the point digging into his spine as he ascended and raised his hand to rap weakly on the door. It opened to a familiar face. One that he was, in this moment, scared to admit he was grossly fond of.

"Hello, Dr. Lecter." His lips curled into a weak smile. He couldn't hear what Hannibal was saying, though--everything sounded like a dull roar, a buzzing and an immense pressure in his brain that gave everything the essence of bright red foam. He only followed the man's gestures, stepping inside and following to the dining room table. It was amazing how similar, and yet how different it was from the room he'd been familiar with in his youth. He marveled at it for a moment, still deaf to the hum of Hannibal's voice as he dropped into his seat.

After a few minutes, he interrupted the man. "I can't hear you," he said quietly, splaying his palms on the table and staring down at the gaps between his fingers. "I hear.. buzzing, I think. And my heartbeat. But I can't hear you."

He didn't know if Hannibal silenced himself after that. But he did think it strange that he wasn't panicking--his fingers were trembling, still, and he could hear his heart wild in his ears, pounding against his ribs and trying to burst out of his chest, but he wasn't stammering. Wasn't screaming, wasn't stark raving mad as he'd been when Dr. Lussac had threatened his job. As he'd been when he hung up on Hannibal and trashed his lab. Now he was.. calm. He was put-together. He was sane.

Or at least, he liked to believe he was. Insanity was unpredictable and shaky fingers remained a constant, as his emotions pitched and turned in turmoil but the unsettling, agonizing guilt was something that stayed buried in the depths of his stomach. He held on to that guilt, letting it overtake him and draw him into silence, and he wanted to call that sanity. Because guilt was predictable. Guilt was simple. Guilt gnawed at his heart and ate it away more than life already had, as he watched Dr. Lecter set up the table with distant blue eyes. He knew the man was talking, likely explaining what they were eating, but he didn't hear it. He sincerely doubted he would have understood it, anyways--everything Hannibal made was long and hard to pronounce.

"Was she scared?"

He watched Hannibal. Stared at his moving lips, but still heard just the buzzing. The roar of his blood and his heart, as Hannibal's form was illuminated in the red foam of a feeling he had yet to place--anger, maybe. Guilt ascending into something yet unnamed. The blood in his ears was starting to feel less like a distraction and more like a driving force. Was she scared? Was she scared? Was she scared?

Eldon stared at his plate as if it would offer an explanation, but it didn't. He and its contents only stared at one another, as if he could still see the strained smile of Dr. Lussac in its depths. Whatever this dish was, it wasn't like what Hannibal made usually--meat was more obvious, more the main identity rather than simply part of what made the whole. There would be no ignoring what he was eating.

To think that he'd shuddered about this earlier, and now he was almost numbly carrying sin into his mouth, fingers trembling and eyes pressing shut as he chewed. This was confirmation. This was confirmation of death elevated into art, into an undeniable form riddled with the implication of finality. In the back of his head, he wondered how her body would turn up. Or if any body would turn up at all.

"I heard somewhere that animals should be stress-free when they're killed, and if they're not, the meat takes on something.. else." He looked up at Hannibal. Blinked. He wondered which one of them was really the monster, now. Wondered how Hannibal saw him, now. Would they treat one another differently? He wasn't sure, but it worried him. They could either grow closer or farther apart, and Eldon didn't know which he preferred. Because God, he ached to get closer, because Hannibal would be the only one he could talk to about this, and yet.. yet... he wanted to step back, to turn tail and run, because if it wasn't for Hannibal Lecter, Dr. Lussac would still be alive. Eldon wouldn't be a murderer by proxy, and now a cannibal by choice.

His fork made its way to his mouth again. "I was wondering about what fear tastes like earlier," he said, talking with food in his mouth and momentarily forgetting his manners. The ecologist swallowed with some difficulty. Keeping food down felt hard, but he was determined to finish. If he didn't, the nagging fear and guilt would consume him entirely. "And I think I've come to the conclusion that it tastes of pineapple."

An arched eyebrow. He saw that plain and clear, even if he couldn't quite hear what Hannibal was saying. Blue eyes wandered back down to his food, which he now picked at with his fork. "Because there's.. there's an enzyme in pineapple called Bromelain, which digests meat proteins." He tapped his fork against the plate. Speared something, carrying it to his mouth and setting the cold metal prongs against his lower lip as he slid the meat off the fork with the front of his teeth. This time, he swallowed it whole, forcing it down his throat and letting the immense discomfort of murder become palpable.

The problem with mandatory, yearly psych evaluations was that they were completely and utterly unavoidable. Were they optional *like many other tests and evaluations he received notice about), Eldon would have sooner cut off his other leg than so much as think about letting some stranger root around his cranium. 

There was no getting around it, though. He'd already "missed" the appointment, the reschedule, and the reschedule for the reschedule, to the point where polite notices became passive-aggressive e-mails about wasting time and job security. The ecologist never responded, of course. Why should he? They'd just schedule another appointment that he would miss again, and they were ever-so-keen on him "not wasting their time." He was practically doing them a favor.

Perhaps that mindset was his downfall. Because he'd forgotten the definition of mandatory and he thought that psychiatrists, like ecologists, didn't leave their offices (which was funny, considering how close he was to one psychiatrist in particular).

As such, when he stepped into his lab that afternoon, the sour-faced young woman sitting at his desk caught him completely off guard. She looked a mixture of both furious and exasperated, staring at him from behind thick-rimmed blue glasses and steepled, manicured fingers. The picture of bitter professionalism.

"If you weren't going to come to me," she said, rising to her feet and crossing to lead his eyes towards the couch, "then I had to come to you." She settled neatly in his favored armchair, crossing her legs at the knee and balancing her clipboard on her thigh. "Please sit down, Dr. Pheyst. We have a lot to talk about."

That had been three hours ago. Now they were... staring, her expression cold and his contemptuous, as she leafed through pages of his file like she'd read it a thousand times already. Which, of course, she had. "You know," the woman began, "being uncooperative only makes me stay here longer." Her eyes flicked down to her watch. "But I must admit, being silent for three hours is quite the feat. I almost want to applaud you."

By now, professionalism had withered into an obvious desire for things to be over and done with. She had dealt with Eldon Pheyst before--last year, actually--and he hadn't been remotely uncooperative. He'd been docile, actually. Open, even. He'd told the truth and met her gaze and she'd only had to push slightly to delve further into the depths of his fragile psyche.

But now? Now he was like talking to a brick wall. A scrawny, scowling brick wall that looked anywhere but her eyes and tensed when she asked about "anything new". She wasn't an idiot. She knew he was hiding something. And, God be damned, she was determined to find out what it was.

"I've noticed that there are a lot of empty bottles in the garbage. Do you drink often?" Eldon's fingers curled over the arm of the arm of the couch and pushed into the leather. Yes. "Alcohol doesn't mix well with your medication, you know. Are you experiencing any side effects?" His eyebrow twitched. Blue eyes shot towards his desk, then down to the floor.

Her eyebrows raised sharply. Red flag.

"Are you taking your medication, Dr. Pheyst?"

His fingernails delved into the leather couch, and he removed his glasses, pretending to inspect the lenses.She could tell, even in the terribly dim lab light which he'd insisted on maintaining, that he was significantly paler. Bingo.

"So that's the problem, then. You've neglected to take your pills and now you're slipping, aren't you?" She leaned forward in her seat. Suddenly Eldon was much, much more interesting. "You're losing your mind. You think that's better than the numbness. I remember you complaining about it last time." She turned her eyes down to her clipboard, lifting a few pages to peer at the notes beneath. Her tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth. "Yes, that's right--'I hate that I don't have the capacity to hate,' you said. That was only last year."

Her eyebrows raised. Eldon looked ashen--his glasses were back on and he had twined his hands in his lap to silently watching his thumbs tap out a tune she couldn't recognize. "What happened? Did you run out, skip a few days?" She scrawled a few notes on the topmost page. Even if he didn't talk, his physicality said enough.

"You were doing so well, Dr. Pheyst. You had everything under control--you were practically the master of your own mind. Don't you want that?"

A slow, hesitant nod was all he gave. Progress, at last. Minuscule in nature, but progress nonetheless. "Then why not take your pills?" she asked, drawing back to sit normally in her chair. The picture of detached professionalism, again. Slipping into the role she'd intended now that he was behaving less like a brick and more like a person. There was no need to strain anymore now that he was breaking down. The way she knew Eldon, he was like a glass dam--all she had to do was crack the surface, and the pressure of what he withheld would do the rest.

"I--" His words caught in his throat and he grit his teeth to bar back a confession, instead glaring at the far wall. The woman barely stifled a groan of frustration, instead biting the end of her pen to contain the steadily rising contempt.

"You what, Dr. Pheyst? Prefer episodes, nightmares, and depression over control? Because you know that if you go off the deep end, the PPDC--" She paused. Perhaps she got ahead of herself in her desperation to find his reason for preferring misery over sanity. Severely muffled, mind-numbing sanity that turned him into a zombie, sure, but still legally sanity.

"The PPDC what?"

Their eyes met and she knew immediately that she should have watched her tongue. Those blue orbs were suddenly filled with fire, with desperation, with a primal fear that made her hands feel a little clammy. She knew how important working for the PPDC was to him. Any threat to that, even while he was medicated, put him so sharply on edge that she tended to try and tiptoe around the subject entirely. She had know Eldon long enough to know what he was capable of; if he felt threatened, he could turn so quickly from man to animal that she often doubted it was safe for him to work with deadly chemicals and biohazards. If he snapped with a container of kaiju blue in his hands, only God knows what he'd do with it--to himself, and to others.

"The PPDC," she began, uncrossing her legs and setting her clipboard to one side, "has a strict policy on the sanity of its employees. Especially for the people working with Jaegers and with the very expensive, very dangerous Kaiju samples." Her expression remained neutral, and she hoped he fed off of that.

Unfortunately, Eldon and neutrality never mixed well in situations like these. Rather, his shoulders tensed and his nails dug into his hands, knuckles white from how hard he was clenching. He felt insulted. Threatened. "So if I don't report f-favorably on this evaluation, I'll lose my job?" His eyebrow arched slowly, in stark contrast to the shaky, strained quaver of his voice. The woman knew she'd made a mistake.

"I'm not at liberty to discuss--"

"I'm not an idiot, Dr. Lussac!" His voice raised so sharply that she almost flinched. Almost, but not quite. "You quite literally hold the fate of my occupation in your hands, and if you tell them I'm not medicated, they won't like it." He paused for a few seconds. Blinked, as if struck by a new thought. "If you tell them anything, they won't like it."

She wished he was quiet, now. His voice was getting louder, getting shaky, and he leaned toward her instead of away, as his hands settled on the narrow coffee table between them. "If anything you have written leaves this room, I will be released from my position, won't I?" His left hand slowly began tapping again, in measured beats on the black-stained wood.

"Dr. Pheyst--"

"Don't 'Dr. Pheyst' me!" He slammed his hand down so suddenly that she flinched. This time, she flinched, and it felt so foreign to her that she actually had to pause to collect herself. But Eldon kept yelling. "I am a fucking psychopath. That's what you think, isn't it?!" His voice was an octave higher. Almost hysterical. Not good. "You think I'm crazy. That I'm--that I'm not fit to work! You think I'm a useless fucking crippled nutcase, don't you?!"

And there it was. That ages-old injury he still kept harbored in his chest. That he was useless because he was crippled. Because he was mentally unstable. "You are not useless," she said, slowly. These were dangerous waters she was treading in. "But I do believe you are unfit for your current occupation."

Eldon blinked. Stared at her, his eyes wild and his fingers twitching as they pressed into the surface of the table. She could see blood beneath his nails and grooves forming in the wood. Her hand slipped into her coat, where it felt her pepper spray cautiously to assure it was still there.

The ecologist slid back into his seat, dragging his nails along the coffee table as he went. The wood splintered beneath his nails, but he didn't process it. Or at least, he didn't show that he did--he just slumped back into his seat, stony-faced but ashen, his eyes dancing around the room and refusing to meet her gaze. Now, though, it looked more like he was thinking than attacked. Like he was contemplating something horrible that he didn't want to do.

Dr. Lussac referred to her notes again. The silence, first annoying, then wanted, was now almost deafening. She felt like she wasn't safe. Like Eldon wasn't safe.

"So that's it, then?"

Eldon's voice startled her from her notes. She looked up at him, finding that he was now staring directly at her. Blue eyes were dead-set on hers, boring into her like probes. She didn't like it. "Pardon, Dr. Pheyst?" Her eyebrows raised. She played dumb, for now. Whatever it was he was thinking, she wanted to know.

"That's it, then. You're going to tell them I'm not stable." His fingers strummed along the arm of his chair, then balled into a fist. "That I'm.. unfit to work for the PPDC because I won't take my medication." Strumming again. Then a fist. Strumming, fist. Strumming, fist. She wasn't sure what to make of the tic.

She didn't let it show, though. She simply met his gaze, professional as always, and began to gather her things neatly. The information she'd gained from this conversation wasn't much, but it was enough to get him out of the lab and, perhaps, into a facility where he could get the care he needed. Clearly, his problems ran deeper than PTSD. As she stood, she kept one eye on Eldon, smoothing out her skirt and turning to fetch her briefcase from her desk. Into this, she placed her files and notes, sealing them neatly inside. "I think you should begin searching for alternate means of employment," she said, offering him a sad smile. "I will not lie to you, Dr. Pheyst. You are unstable, and you need psychiatric help. Severely." She checked the location of her pepper spray again, then began to walk to the door.

"Okay."

He didn't get up when she passed. He didn't even stir. The word left his lips almost subconsciously, as he trailed her with his eyes all the way to the door. She turned to look at him over her shoulder, fingers closing around the door's cold, metal handle. "Have a good evening, Dr. Pheyst." She offered him a smile.

He did not smile back. "You too." His response was almost automatic. Dr. Lussac blinked, hesitated, then turned and left the lab, leaving the ecologist to his own thoughts. He listened to the sound of her retreating high heels on the tile until they faded into silence. Then, with trembling fingers, he reached into his lab coat and procured his cell phone. It took three tries to punch in the number he knew he needed.

As the phone began to dial, he pressed it to his ear and swallowed hard. He had to do this. He had to do this. The phrase repeated over and over in his mind until he heard a familiar voice pick up the line.  

"Dr. Lecter." His tongue flicked across his lips nervously. Dr. Lecter. Like he didn't want to call Hannibal by his first name when he was about to ask him something so terrible. Blue eyes traversed his lab to reaffirm his fondness for it before he spoke again. He needed to make sure this was all worth it. His sin by proxy had to be something he would not regret. "I.. I need you to take care of a problem for me."

Dr. Lussac would not return home that night. Her evaluation would never reach the Marshal's office.