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"Didn't anybody ever tell you not to touch other people's toys on the playground?"
The toy in question is a Neo-Nazi with a penchant for sticking his hands down the pants of little brown kids whose families are fleeing violence that other white people started so they could steal natural resources and generational wealth.
Villanelle could have just stopped at the Neo-Nazi part. Eve could have stopped at that part, too, but these days, it's easier on her conscience to have a laundry list of reasons together before she packs the two of them up for a hit.
The man messing with her toy is blond. Tall. High cheekbones, jaw that could cut diamonds. Very aristocratic in that old Eastern European way. She can tell he sees this piece of shit Nazi as meat and nothing else by the way his back almost seems to relax when he hears her voice. There was tension there before, but not the bad kind.
The kind of someone having a grand old time.
Villanelle's seen that kind of comfort with a kill before. The second or third time Eve had buried the axe in Raymond's back, a kind of lucidity had come over her, even through her shrieking and crying. It's easier to kill someone when you think they deserve it.
"He was supposed to be mine," she says, and idly, she flips the triple edged knife in her grip. This had been filched off of one of those Japanese Imperial Army war criminals that had about nineteen different dead comfort women to his name.
This one had been somewhere in Essex. They had gotten in because the prick wanted a nice Korean cook with big eyes and nice tits. Apparently their hands were good for cooking and serving his meals and not much for anything else.
The knife, of course, had been a gift from the German military. That piece of shit had been a big deal back in his day. Eve had spat in his bibimbap every day as she cooked it. A little less than a week passed, then it was a little bit of nerve agent in his humidifier, and the job was over.
They had been paid handsomely in cash, and the first thing Villanelle did with her cut was buy Eve the most resplendent red and gold hanbok she could find.
"My apologies," the man says, slowly turning.
Underneath his stupid plastic onesie is the kind of suit Villanelle knows has no label because it is custom. Even his little pocket square (a quite violent blue) screams of old money. On his one gloved hand (which artfully handles a meat cleaver as if it were a cellist's bow), there is a bump on his finger that indicates he is married. Villanelle raises her brows, one hand in her pocket, the other flipping her knife as she strolls toward him.
"Had I known, I would have waited. It is very rude to hunt on another's territory."
She puffs up her cheeks and blows out a raspberry.
"I'll say," she responds. He only turns to face her, still leisurely holding the meat cleaver. A great big waft of blood and fresh death reaches her as she approaches. "I was going to off him for half price. I always give a discount on Nazis."
The man cracks a small smile, but now that Villanelle is only a few feet away, she can see the very wide nothing behind his eyes. It's one stop short of breathtaking.
And she had thought the suit he was wearing was fine. This second one is much better, carefully constructed, stitch by stitch to make this man into something he is not.
"How generous of you."
"I think so. My rates can be very expensive. I like the finer things."
"As you should," he replies. "You seem to be a young woman of good taste."
"Thank you," she preens, feeling breezy and delightful in the deep red sleeveless silk blouse she wears.
The cavern of this dipshit's chest has been hacked open without any art to it, but the the indelicate butchery has been sewn up with a surgeon's precision. There is a small cooler beside the chair where the corpse is sitting, the open lid of which shows several carefully wrapped bundles.
"Black market organ transplants," she hedges, then nods approvingly. "Cool. I hope they're for Black people. Or Jewish ones."
The man tilts his head imperceptibly at her, now curious.
"You do not think they would be disgusted or deeply unhappy at least, to find out an organ keeping them alive was taken from someone who prayed for and tried to enact their extinction?"
She scoffs.
"I think anyone with a decent sense of vengeance would love to see your work," she gestures vaguely at the upright sitting corpse, an Arrow Cross flag shoved into his mouth, swastikas carved onto either cheek, his eyes permanently sewn open.
"Looks personal," she muses. "Guess you don't like Nazis either."
"I have an aversion to them, yes."
"Cool," Villanelle replies. "But I don't like poachers. I'm way more subtle than this. No one will believe it's my work."
The man lifts one aristocratic eyebrow at her and turns just-so, angling his body away from the kill so that the coming fight won't damage it. That is art to him.
She thinks, 'It's art to me, too,' as he rushes her, his eyes dead and dark.
He's faster than he looks like he ought to be, silent even in that plastic eyesore which ought to squeak and rip every which way as he moves. Villanelle ducks as he charges, flipping her knife and aiming for his guts. He twists his abdomen, aiming an elbow down that jams into her shoulder. He follows up by tossing his meat cleaver into his other hand, and she's sure he's carved up enough bodies to sever her shoulder from her torso with maybe three whacks.
She doesn't give him the chance.
She squirrels away, bouncing from one foot to the other.
"Not bad for an old man," she teases. "What are you, pushing sixty? Do they call you the Cataract Killer? Because of the eye thing?"
"Are you normally so chatty?"
They seem to come together magnetically, Villanelle reaching out and slamming the edge of her forearm into his throat, this cannibal stranger nailing a right hook on her jaw that she's pretty sure loosens a tooth.
"Yeah," she says, spitting a touch of blood. "Does that bother you?"
"Not at all," he wheezes. Villanelle plants her foot on his belly and shoves. "It's quite refreshing."
"Shame you're trying to kill me though."
His returning smile is sincere. He's having fun.
"You are trying to kill me, too."
He drops the meat cleaver and it clatters to the ground. Villanelle tightens her grip on her own knife. He was a head taller than her and probably had somewhere between sixty and a hundred pounds on her. He's some kind of doctor, which means he knows exactly how much pressure it would take to crack her skull, or even better, how to snap her neck if it gets between his arms.
He doesn't need any other weapon to kill her.
"You took my kill first."
His fist meets her gut hard, and Villanelle doesn't spare the time to cough. She flexes her core as hard as she can and lashes out with her knife, snagging a thin red line down his long pretty face.
There's something vaguely familiar about him, this close up.
"I did apologize."
He wipes his blood off with one of his plastic forearms.
"That won't get me my money back."
She heaves a quick jump, landing her hand on the back of his head and shoving her knee up to meet his nose. She gets some cracked cartilage, but it's a clear mistake. He doesn't drop his hands to cover his stomach in pain, but he throws his arms out and grabs her by the waist, before slamming her into the ground.
She doesn't let go of her knife, even has he looms over her, one hand on her chin, the weight of him pinning her down. She flips her knife in her grasp and shoves it into his thigh. He doesn't so much as grunt in pain, but when she twists it, he only lifts her chin and throws her head onto the ground.
Not cracked, not with how many times she's been hit in the head in the past, but definitely enough for a concussion.
"Hey!"
Eve's voice enters the air like a whip cracking in silence, splitting the space between their labored breathing. Distantly, Villanelle hears her click the safety off of the little black pistol she keeps tucked into the belt she wears on top of her blouse and underneath her coat.
"Step off, asshole, and I'll let you keep your skull."
The cannibal on top of her doesn't so much as look over his shoulder. The hand on her chin travels down to her throat, like he isn't even worried that Eve is behind him and aiming to kill. Villanelle will complain later about the grey matter staining her new red button-down.
Now...
Now a memory swims out at her from far reaches and stranger places. A face that she blocked out, that Konstantin taught her to block out when he first found her, a feral child in the winter, eating raw snow rabbits and sleeping on a mound of their bloody pelts. Stealing his rations.
It's her mother's face. Her birth mother's face, not the false mother with the shitty hair her tutors had told her was Oksana's mother, and now hers, because she was now Oksana.
Her mother's face. Her father's big dark eyes. Villanelle's own eyes, staring back at her. The color may have shifted, but the shape was the same.
She reaches for them, leaving her knife behind in his thigh, her thumb just barely touching his cheek where she cut him. His blood now clotting. Her blood, really. His blood was hers. Only forgotten, but never really lost.
She wheezes, her hand on his face, his fingers around her throat, "Hanni?"
In the kitchen, Hannibal moves with the same ease he uses when he kills. He gathers together cream cheese, buttermilk, ground vanilla paste, sugar and salt into a food processor, and the noise of it humming overcomes the noise of Will and Eve in the other room asking leading questions about the other.
Will (Hannibal's husband) had showed up shortly after Eve had, with yet another gun pressed to the back of her head. Villanelle had called her brother's name and had all but scrambled off her like he was holding something that was at once extremely hot and invaluably precious.
They had just stared at each other until Hanni had said, "Zuiki?", and Villanelle had all but thrown herself to her knees to hold his face in her hands.
She's sitting on the kitchen counter, kicking her legs out like a child while she watches him putter about.
"You didn't eat me," she says. "I know they fed you that Albanian kid because they killed him first. I watched them do it. They woke both of us up that night while the rest of you where sleeping, and took him into the barn first while another looked after me. I heard the kid start screaming, so I turned around and punched that guard in the back of the knee as hard as I could, and when he was down, and I took off. They probably figured I'd die of exposure by morning, because they didn't come looking."
"But you did not die," Hanni says, artfully pouring the mixture of milk and sugar and cream into a bowl and covering it with a fine film of saran wrap before sticking it into the refrigerator to chill. "You became a contract killer."
"It pays the bills," she replies.
Hanni had taken a look at her pupils, gently apologizing for the concussion and the bruises currently blossoming on her abdomen. Villanelle had only giggled and did not apologize for the awful wound in his thigh. Hanni didn't seem to notice. He was too busy touching her face and mussing her hair and kissing her temple like he had when they were little and all they had was each other.
"Very well, I might add, if you can afford to let your customers keep half your earnings if your mark has politics you don't agree with."
Villanelle snorts, still watching as he prepares his counter for the arduous task of making wheat noodles from scratch.
"You eat people, Hanni," she replies blithely. "People who you think are rude. I don't want to hear it from you."
Hannibal raises his eyes, still working at the dough forming in his hands.
"A suave European man with a much younger dark haired partner bouncing across Europe stealing organs and killing people with no discernible pattern for no discernible reason. First in Florence, an uptick in murders after a nearly twenty year silence, then popping back up in northern Germany. And then, coincidentally, in Vienna."
"How clever of you," he says, reaching out to buss her lightly on the cheek with one of his flour covered knuckles.
"Not me," she replies. "Eve. She's getting even better at tracking people down than I am. 'Roman Fell' was next on our list. Someone's widow is convinced you did the killing."
Hannibal hums to show he's listening. He covers the dough as well to let it sit, then pulls out all sorts of pots and pans to prepare the rest of the meal. She lifts an eyebrow at the meat, and idly reaches out one foot to tap it on his hip.
"Don't feed me people, Hanni," she says. "Eve wouldn't like it either."
Hannibal gives her a game smile, one that she recognizes through the fog of her childhood, and her upbringing with The Twelve.
"Only beef, I assure you. I do keep some on hand when I am between bodies."
Villanelle grins right back, and he sets the beef bones and cartilage into the water to simmer. The green onions are freshly chopped on a small wooden cutting board beside the stove, white onions and garlic beside them, waiting until the meat starts to release some of its flavor before being set in to cook as well.
"This Eve of yours," Hanni begins, looking down at a menu card scrawled over with impeccable cursive to check the recipe. "She's MI6?"
"Your Will is FBI."
"How long have you known her?"
"She's stabbed me."
"It's serious then."
"Has Will stabbed you?"
"Metaphorically speaking, yes."
"So you stabbed him, then."
"Yes."
"A lot."
"Yes," a third voice chimes.
Will is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, Eve hovering just beside him.
"Does it make you better to know he did it because he likes you?" Villanelle asks.
Will, who doesn't seem to look at her, but firmly at the bridge of her nose, scoffs at the question.
"We've been married a little over three years," he says out of the pursed curve of his mouth, at once grimacing and smiling. "Does that answer your question?"
"Is that why you stabbed me, Eve?" Villanelle asks, tilting her head. "Are you going to propose to me?"
Eve doesn't dignify that with a response. She seems more interested in the cooking happening in the kitchen.
"What are you making?" she asks warily, slipping past Will to stand more firmly beside Villanelle. Eve is much less comfortable than she is, but then again, she was raised like a normal person. Villanelle and Hanni didn't have that luxury, and Will seems like he's been different from the day he was born.
"Gomguksu with poached eggs and fig reduction," Hannibal answers, looking up at her with a smile. "The reduction will go over some of the leaner meat that we'll have on the side."
Eve lifts an eyebrow.
"May I see your recipe card?"
It makes something in Villanelle flutter to see Eve question Hanni's clear authority in the kitchen. It seems to satisfy something in her brother as well, because he hands over the card with a simple, "Of course. Will, meškiau, would you please bring out one of the reds?"
Will nods and goes to do it, passing Hanni and getting just enough in his space that Villanelle can feel that they feel each other.
"What a happy little family," Villanelle croons, drumming her fingers on the countertop.
"Do continue with your story, zuiki," Hanni says, "and Eve, if you would like to help me with the gomguksu, I will defer to your authority."
"I don't know about authority," Eve replies, rolling up her sleeves to wash her hands in the kitchen sink. "I burn most of what I cook. But I watched my mother make enough noodles to know how to do it well enough."
"Eve's husband was the cook," Villanelle adds.
It raises some tension in Eve's back, and she licks her lip then smacks them in a firm attempt at ignoring Villanelle.
"Did you kill him?" Will asks, plucking a homebrew out for himself, and pouring the rest of them wine.
"Only a little bit," Villanelle responds. "Eve is still angry with me over it."
Will nods in understanding, taking a swig of what's probably Hannibal's special-just-for-Will brew.
"Hannibal killed one of my friends, froze her body, then cut her corpse up into six slices he framed in glass."
Eve looks over her shoulder at Will, and then at Hannibal with a face twisted with disgust and overt fascination. That same something in Villanelle that lit up when Hanni asked for Eve's cooking advice, lights up all over again.
She's happy. They may not like each other, but they are interested in each other, and to Villanelle, those were very close to being the same thing.
"And you still married him?" Eve asks.
"You find men for my little sister to kill even though you stabbed her in the stomach, Eve," Hannibal says, swirling his wine and then taking a neat delicate sip of it. "The heart wants."
"I will give you a list to memorize," Hanni says, packing up the gomguksu in fine glass containers once they finish their late lunch. "They are the houses that Will and I use on our travels. There are extra rooms in all of them. Please feel free to use them as well."
Villanelle is pleasantly wine drunk, belly full of noodles and beef, a smear of warm runny egg yolk half dried at her chin. Hanni licks his thumb and rubs the smudge away, putting the leftovers in the fridge and taking out the ice cream he had prepared earlier.
"I imagine your sweet tooth has not changed much."
And he's right to guess so. Villanelle had eaten more than her fill every day since she got away from those men who took her and Hanni hostage. Sweet things she devours with the upmost ferocity. It's hard to find sugar in the wilderness. Her mind remembers that scarcity, that starving feeling every time she opens her mouth for a new meal.
Her brother seems to understand without her saying a word.
"Why 'Villanelle'?" he asks, giving her three large scoops of ice cream, sprinkling freshly grated chocolate flakes over the top, sticking a fresh hot waffle into the side of the bowl. Only her dessert is so flashy; he, Will, and Eve only get two scoops and slices of waffle.
Hannibal leaves to present the fine dessert to Eve and Will in the study, where the two are bonding over bourbon and the two headaches still in the kitchen. Villanelle has finished half of her ice cream by the time he returns.
She tears into the waffle, which is fluffy and dusted with powdered sugar, crisp at the edges, too. She doesn't speak while she's chewing, because she knows there are limits to her brother's patience. She knows there is quite a bit she can get away with, but there is a lifetime large gap between the two of them.
It's almost funny how they both ended up in the same place. Physically and murder-people-to-cope-ly speaking.
"They moved me to Russia and put me in school. And in school, we had to memorize poems and codes that could be attached to them. I remember you used to memorize some, but I don't know the words to those anymore. There was one in French that I liked. J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle: / Est-ce point celle que j'oy? / Je veus aller aprés elle. / Tu regretes ta femelle, / Helas! aussi fai-je moy, / J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle."
"I have lost my turtledove / Isn't that her gentle coo? / I will go and find my love. / Here you mourn your mated love; / Oh, God—I am mourning too: / I have lost my turtledove."
"Show off," she says, scrunching up her nose at him.
Hannibal only chuckles and spoons some of his ice cream in his mouth. When Villanelle finishes the rest of hers, he passes his bowl over to her without asking if she wants seconds.
He had done that, too, when they were children. Gave her half his sweets. That is something that she knows, clear as day. The sweets she had gotten were always sweeter when Hanni gave them to her.
"They were the only kind of poem I liked," she says, taking his bowl into her hands, and using part of his remaining waffle to wipe up the cream at the bottom of the bowl, one large globe of ice cream rolling around and chilling her fingers with sweetness. "The form was easy to hold onto. I would recite them during my combat exercises, when I learned how to shoot, how to cauterize a wound."
"Were you dissociating?"
Villanelle rolls her eyes.
"Don't psychoanalyze me, herr doktor."
"To be entirely fair, zuiki, if anyone is qualified to psychoanalyze you, it would be me."
"Does Will diagnose you when you're in bed together?"
"Don't be crass, zuiki. Forgive me, but I'm not ready to have that particular conversation with you yet."
She tilts her head, gnawing on a bit of waffle.
"Do you still see me as the little bones in your bowl of soup?"
He puts his hands on the kitchen counter -now pristine, and shining as if Eve hadn't elbowed her way into the kitchen just to end up preparing the noodles herself, throwing instructions to Hannibal over her shoulder as he focused on the fig reduction, a smear of flour widening across her forehead each time she used the back of her hand to wipe sweat away- and levels her with his big dark eyes.
Their father's eyes. Mischa doesn't remember much about their father, or their mother. Only vague impressions of what they looked like. The two of them are alive in Hanni's face. Hanni probably sees the same thing in her.
"I must admit that I do."
"Well don't use me as an excuse for why you eat people now," Villanelle says, sticking her finger in the bowl once she swallows the last of her waffle. Her finger scoops up the remaining cream, and her clear delight at the excess of sugar he's given her seems to please Hanni as much as her devouring her first and third bowl of noodles had earlier at the table.
"Believing I had eaten you was likely the catalyst for my later behaviors. But I am a grown man, zuiki, and even before today, I would not lay the blame for that at your grave."
"Were you always so fucking poetic?" she asks.
Hannibal smirks at her.
"You are the one that just recited a villanelle in perfect French," he returns. "I imagine poetics and theatrics, too, both run in our family."
Villanelle shrugs and with the gesture, concedes the point. When she finishes fetching the melted cream out of her bowl, Hannibal whisks it away to the sink, where he washes it with a quick efficiency before getting her a glass of water, which he places at the curve of her elbow.
"You're walking well despite my stabbing you," she muses.
"I did go to medical school, zuiki."
"Hmm," she replies. "I went to murder school."
"And you did very well. If you would ever like to join Will and I - ,"
"On one of your grocery shopping trips?" She lets out a low whistle. "I'd have to think about it. I don't want to eat people, Hanni. You'll understand my trauma, won't you?"
Hannibal lifts an eyebrow at her and waits until she's finished her interruption to continue. The simple way he shames her makes her purse her lips; maybe some things really didn't change with time. Being the younger sister to a brother raised to be a Count (and a real stickler for the rules of polite society) seemed to be one of them.
" -- here, or anywhere else, you only need to say so. I would like for the two of you to get to know each other. I would like to get to know you as well. We are much different than we were when we were starving children."
Villanelle purses her lips, biting them onto each other.
"Is Eve invited too?"
Ever since Rome, since leaving Eve with a bullet in her belly bleeding out on the warm stone ground with the sun high above them, Villanelle doesn't much like the idea of having Eve out of her line of sight. When they sleep together, face to face, Villanelle always finds herself reaching out to close the distance, fingers curled around a lock of hair, one foot tucked under Eve's, so that if she rustles in the night to leave, Villanelle will wake up and notice.
"But of course," Hanni responds, dispelling that particular fear as if it were only a boogeyman and no real thing that deserved any of Villanelle's fear. "It's clear to me that she's important to you."
"What else did you do to Will, Hanni? And what did he do to you?"
Hannibal tilts his head at her, like an owl.
"Eve stabbed you, and you nearly killed her husband. I imagine you stabbed her back eventually, or shot her. She favors one side, like Will does. The damage you have done to each other more firmly ties you together, does it not?"
Villanelle's eyebrows reach her hairline.
"You did something awful, didn't you?"
"Yes," he replies. "But it made as much sense as you trying to kill Eve's husband, or as much sense as Eve stabbing you. We subconsciously know we do these things to people we love as signs of our affection, of our interest. Revenge is just as intimate as sex, when you look at it from that point of view."
"You are a terrible therapist."
That gets a laugh out of him, and seeing him laugh is -- it's indescribably good.
"For some, yes," he replies.
They stay until early evening, and leave after Eve gets a phone call for their next job in Cyprus. Hannibal puts their food in a little paper bag, and a half drunk Eve prattles on to Will about growing up in the States versus in Europe as they head for the door.
Hannibal doesn't pull her in for a hug because it's clear Villanelle is not the type. Sex is one thing, it's easy and transactional. Real affection was harder won from her. He was her brother, alive out of nowhere, yes, but they were still strangers.
He respects the boundary, and kisses the top of her forehead before placing her clean three-edged knife discreetly into her pocket.
"You can call me 'Mischa', Hanni," she whispers to him when he's close. "I’ll allow it."
'Rabbit' had been her father's nickname for her, and Hannibal had used it in those early days. She had responded to 'zuiki' more commonly than her own name. Konstantin had called her 'krolik' in those early days, after the rabbits she hunted and ate and slept on.
"You have not been Mischa Lecter for some time," he replies. "I would like to call you the name you have chosen for yourself. But I do appreciate your permission, dearest."
"I only say so because I don't want you naming any of your brats after me," she returns quickly.
Hannibal blinks at her, surprise as evident on his face as any other emotion. Which is to say, carefully constructed and concealed, only sincere if you knew how to look for it.
"Will and I don't have any children."
"I have eggs, Will has sperm," she replies, waving her hand. "You can give me the hysterectomy. I don't care. You're a doctor, aren't you?"
For the first time since looking at her and knowing she was his sister, Hannibal seems at a loss.
"We both win," Villanelle continues. "You get to build your happy little murder family, and I get to stop having periods. Besides, I hate hospitals. We can do it in your little villa in Malta when it's nice and warm. I'll have Eve schedule us a whole vacation."
Hannibal reaches out, and places one of his surgeon's hands against her face. Villanelle twitches with the intimacy of it, but finds herself leaning into the warmth of his hand anyway.
"Thank you," he says, with all the feeling inside of him, which is a vast amount, though it isn't the way normal people feel, "I will ask Will how he feels about this at a later time."
Villanelle shrugs, and uses the gesture to move her cheek away from his hand. Hannibal allows it, but gives her a soft little smile to let her know he understands.
"Clock's a-ticking," she responds.
When she takes the bag of food from him, Eve now out of the door after managing to get Will's cell number punched into her phone under the name 'Wilhelmina', she unlocks the car waiting in the driveway, and slides in the passenger seat, not even bothering to be okay to drive.
Bourbon agreed with Eve, it seemed.
The cool outside air and the last of dessert did their job in sobering up Villanelle. She gives Will a firm nod and a smile, which he readily gives back. He even looks her in the eyes when he does it, and that feels like a kind of little victory.
It's clear that Hannibal is one of the only people Will will give his eyes to.
"I'll see you around, Hanni," she says, turning over her shoulder when she's already halfway to the car. "Don’t have too much fun without me, understand?"
Will snakes an arm around Hannibal's waist, taking some of his weight. Hannibal raises a hand to wave at her.
"We'll be in La Palma around the time you finish up," Will replies.
Villanelle lifts an eyebrow at him, before lifting a hand to hide her mouth, and mock whispering, "I like him!", before she hops the rest of the way to the car.
She sets the food down between Eve's wobbly legs and starts up the car. It comes alive with a sweet purr, and Villanelle leans back in the driver's seat, watching Will and Hanni wave at them until they turn a corner.
"Y'er brother's a -- fuckign cannibal," Eve moans, running her hands over her face, pulling some of her bouncy black curls with her. "The Chesapeake Ripper. The -hic- Mosnter of Florence. What the fuck."
"Yeah," Villanelle says, reaching out to tuck a bit of Eve's hair behind her ear. Drunk, Eve bats the hand away only to take it between hers and plop all three in her lap. It was just as well. Villanelle only needs one hand to drive. "Isn't it awesome?"