#moldcore

Glass.

Everywhere, glass.

Champagne glasses. Framed glass. Polished marble reflecting expensive shoes beneath warm amber light. Gold melted across the gallery walls in soft strokes, turning every face into something theatrical. Artificial.

Step. Step. Step.

Leather soles against marble.

Fizz.

Champagne bubbles collapsing quietly.

A woman laughed too loudly near the entrance. Sharp. Hollow. Like a fork scraping porcelain.

You stood still in the center of it all.

Watching agony.

The painting in front of you was ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ by Francisco Goya. Violent blacks. Bruised browns. Wet reds. A god crouched in madness with blood slick on his fingers and horror bursting from his eyes. The body in his hands looked unfinished. Torn apart. Half-eaten.

Most people looked at the painting and saw cruelty.

You saw panic.

You tilted your head slightly.

Interesting.

The brushstrokes were frantic near the mouth. Goya must have painted those parts quickly. Maybe trembling. Maybe starving. The red was old-looking, almost brown at the edges, like dried blood beneath fingernails.

You wondered what Goya smelled while painting it.

Oil paint.

Sweat.

Rot.

Maybe himself.

The room around you dissolved softly at the edges.

You were sixteen again.

Rainwater gathering inside your shoes.

Which always bothered you.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The alley behind your childhood housing smelled like wet concrete and rusted pipes. There had been a man on the ground beside the dumpster. Not dead yet. His nose broken sideways. One eye swollen shut.

He had cried.

That was what stayed with you.

Not the blood or violence.

The sadness.

The terrible, animal sadness leaking out of him while he tried to crawl with shaking hands.

You remembered kneeling beside him and waiting for something inside yourself to react correctly.

Pity.

Guilt.

Fear.

Nothing came.

Only warmth.

Blissful.

Like a missing puzzle piece sliding perfectly into place somewhere deep inside your chest.

Click.

Completion.

You had spent your childhood watching other people experience emotions like spectators at church watched God. Reverently. Confused. Your mother crying over dead relatives. Children crying over broken toys. Girls your age crying in bathroom stalls over cruel words.

You copied their faces well enough.

Tilt your eyebrows.

Lower your voice.

Touch shoulders gently.

But it always felt translated. Distant.

Like reading grief from behind thick aquarium glass.

But agony.

Agony was understandable.

Agony made sense.

There was honesty in it. A person stripped completely open. No performance left. No social mask surviving pain.

You loved photographing mold for the same reason.

Decay never lied.

Your photographs hung one room away.

Close-up shots so magnified they became almost abstract.

Veins of crimson fungus spreading through white walls, black spores blooming like bruises across fruit, soft velvet rot consuming peaches from the inside out. 

Critics called the collection intimate. 

And disgusting.

One woman earlier had described your work as “a meditation on decomposition and rebirth.”

You almost laughed in her face.

Laughed at the performance of her understanding.

Step.

A figure stopped beside you.

“Most people avoid that one.”

His voice entered softly. Cultured. Smooth enough to hide teeth beneath it.

You already knew the voice.

Hannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, stood beside you with a champagne glass balanced elegantly between his fingers. The red pocket square in his suit looked almost wet beneath the gallery lights.

Reflection caught him strangely.

Fragments of his face shimmered across the black glass frame of the painting. Eyes. Mouth. Teeth.

A broken mirror version of a man.

You smiled faintly without looking away from the painting.

“Most people dislike the discomfort of seeing themselves in art.”

You finally looked at him.

Hannibal smiled politely, though something behind the expression changed slightly, almost invisible unless someone knew where to look. You did.

That was the problem.

You had known who Hannibal Lecter was long before tonight.

Baltimore psychiatrist. Esteemed host. Elegant conversationalist.

And beneath all that… 

Something else.

Something familiar.

?

You had spent months studying him the way some people studied wild animals before attempting to hunt them.

You knew what wines he preferred.

You knew he killed people.

Not legally.

But you knew.

Because monsters recognized mirrors instinctively.

“You’re the photographer,” Hannibal said after a moment.

Not a question.

Your gaze drifted toward the next room where your photographs sat beneath soft spotlights.

“Yes.”

“The mold.”

There was amusement hidden beneath the words.

You smiled slightly wider.

“The decay.” you corrected.

Hannibal hummed softly.

“Hm.”

His eyes lingered on the painting again.

“People usually photograph flowers when they wish to preserve beauty.”

“Yes,” you said quietly.

The corner of his mouth twitched upward.

Clink.

Whisper.

Fizz.

A waiter passed carrying glasses of red wine that reflected like spilled blood across silver trays.

You looked at Hannibal’s hands.

Elegant hands.

Precise hands.

You imagined them severed neatly at the wrists.

Displayed on the silver tray that reflected red wine like spilled blood.

The thought settled warmly inside you.

Want.

The purest form of artistic curiosity.

Killing Hannibal Lecter would feel like finishing a masterpiece no one else was capable of touching.

You wondered suddenly what expression would finally appear on his face right before death.

Fear?

Relief?

Recognition?

Hannibal tilted his head slightly, studying you now with unnerving stillness as you stared at him so openly. 

“As fascinating as your photographs are,” he said softly, “I think what interests me more is why someone would devote themselves to capturing rot so intimately.”

There it was.

Investigation.

You looked back at the painting.

At Saturn’s wide animal eyes.

At the wet red painted around his mouth.

And smiled.

“Because,” you said quietly, “everything beautiful eventually learns how to decay.”

Hannibal laughed softly beside you.

Low.

Warm.

Red suited him.

You wondered whether arterial spray would too.

Fizz.

A bubble burst quietly inside your champagne.

Hannibal said something else beside you, smooth and intelligent and charming, but you barely heard it now. Your mind had already wandered somewhere warmer.

Somewhere underneath skin.

You imagined his death carefully.

Not rushed.

No.

That would be vulgar.

A man like Hannibal Lecter deserved precision. Attention. Reverence, even. You wanted to peel him apart layer by layer until you finally discovered what lived underneath all that elegance.

You wanted to see if monsters looked frightened when faced with themselves.

Your fingers tightened slightly around the stem of your glass.

And for the first time in weeks,

Maybe months,

You felt genuinely excited.

A small smile touched your mouth.

Killing Hannibal Lecter, you thought, would be tremendous fun.

─── ꒰ 🥀 ꒱ ───

hannibal nbc taglist . . .‧˚꒰🔦꒱༘‧ @ilovehorror-18 @kashimeowr @afw5 @andyinthemiddleofsixx

a/n: hey guys, you might wonder... jinx what IS this? I also wonder that myself.... I dont know ... I feel like I have lost all my sanity and this is what you get! Lord forbid a girl ever writes something....