Chapter Text
s a t u r n
1. the ruling planet of Capricorn, exalted in Libra
2. possibly derived from satu, meaning "to sow"
3. (Roman mythology) founder of civilizations and social order; concerns a person's sense of duty, discipline, responsibility, and endurance under hardship
4. (astrology) Saturn's return to the same point in the sky it occupied at the moment of the person's birth signifies crossing over a major threshold to enter the next stage of life
5. transition; change; transformation
The Madman—that’s what Will calls him—is livid against the darkness, fingers digging deep into his own child’s spine, teeth tearing at flesh, whole limbs torn from the body, bone crunching between jaws. Eyes haggard and yet driven to complete his task—to destroy, to devour—driven by some invisible, intangible force. If Will had to put a name to it, she would call it—
“Will! There you are,” Alana huffs, breathing somewhat rapidly as she materialises through the fog of Will’s thoughts. Her presence is like a cool breeze whispering through the feverish humid sunset of a Lousiana summer eve. “Listen,” she says, “I’m sorry, but I have to leave.”
Cold shoots through Will’s spine— “Alana, I only came here because you asked!”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she fusses, hands fluttering before they settle on Will’s arm. Her distress is genuine; it does nothing to calm Will. “But you’ll be okay—you’re already halfway through the night, just do as you’ve been doing and you’ll be fine!”
“Alana, please, I don’t even see the point of—”
“Will,” Alana’s voice is firm, stalling her before she can even think of finishing her sentence, “you promised me. We had a deal. I agreed to let Jack have you back as long as you followed my suggestions. Or am I going to have a talk with Jack tomorrow?”
“That’s blackmail,” Will says, faint. She feels faint at the thought of losing her privileges, again. Alana will argue that staying away from the cases is healthier for her sanity, but the guilt Will would suffer from taking the easy path—from staying away—would be just as detrimental, if not more.
“I am not as virtuous as I make myself appear, Willow Graham,” Alana teases with a warm echo of the friendship that could have grown between them before Jack had picked her to evaluate Will’s mental stability. Now the law and her license stand between them, a solid wall of resistance: no warmth pierces through. “I just have a minor emergency at the hospital,” she explains as she pulls her coat over her shoulders. The tapered cut cinches around her slender waist in a warm, elegant hug. “One of my new patients—very delicate—she needs me there now, more than you need me here.”
“I’m shocked,” Will mocks, an attempt at lightening the leaden feeling in her stomach. “Am I more stable than your other patients, Alana? Jack would rejoice. You should tell him tomorrow.”
She laughs. “What do you think I’ve been telling him for the past month, Special Agent Graham?” Her smile softens, entreating. “Stay, Will. Please. Enjoy the exhibit. I want to hear what you think of the art tomorrow afternoon. You don’t have to talk to anybody if you don’t feel like it, just—it would be good for you to have something else to dwell on other than the cases. Okay?”
“Okay,” Will quietly agrees, knowing the taste of defeat all too well. Alana is as immovable as Jack when she wants to be. “Fine.”
Will escorts her to the lobby and watches as she rushes into her awaiting car, taking the keys from the valet with a quick smile. Night has fallen over Baltimore. The city comes alive with lamplight and the brisk chill of an approaching winter. The car weaves out of the driveway, taillights diminishing in the growing dark. Will feels a slow, creeping sense of abandonment as she heads back inside.
The Baltimore Museum of Art is bustling with activity tonight, people casually walking to and fro, flutes of champagne or half-empty wineglasses in hand, all of it a delicate dance of polite lies and pageantry. The opening night of a special touring exhibit from the Museo del Prado in Madrid: this is Alana’s design. Will never would have gone to such a thing. But she promised—she had a deal with Alana—so she wordlessly bleeds back into the fabric of the crowd. The strap of the chiffon monstrosity she was forced to wear itches against her left shoulder as she wanders the wide halls without a steady thought or specific direction. Before long, she finds herself standing where Alana found her earlier, in front of one of the exhibit highlights.
Looking upon the work of art, something stirs deep, deep underneath the gentle arching cage of her ribs. The pendulum doesn’t swing—she is no psychic, her gift has its limits—but somehow, Will understands. Despite her woeful lack of education in the finer points of art theory, despite her marked disinterest in the field—she can understand. The canvas blisters with the violent force of an emotion unnamed: it colors every stroke, guides the gradation of shadow and light—a force so fierce it leaves a gaping hole in its wake, in her chest, as she attempts to grasp it, as it eats through her, this dark heart of a maelstrom, the inspiration behind the madness—if Will had to put a name to it, she would call it— “Love.”
It slips from her lips, soft as a whisper. Meant for nobody’s ears, except—
“An unusual evaluation of this particular piece, I must say,” the voice comes from beside her, quiet but with an accent. Foreign—European? Almost degraded from years of speaking English. “Most would attribute darker emotions to Goya’s work.”
“Love has no colour,” Will responds, quick, quiet, without further prompting or reason. Why am I talking, she wonders. What am I doing. “And I’m unfortunately not most people.”
Will turns to see her erstwhile companion—black suit, three-piece, expensive material, oxblood shirt, glimmering cufflinks, immaculate posture, fine hands (musician? surgeon? artist?), blond and tall, red wine in hand—she moves aside, focused on removing herself from the man’s admittedly intense presence. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—monopolise the painting—sorry.”
“No, you are not,” the man softly responds, a heartbeat delayed, stalling Will’s retreat.
“Excuse me?”
“You are not most people,” the man clarifies, “for most people have neither the willingness nor the capacity to understand that what society calls madness is but a permutation, albeit intense and horrific, of love.”
Will blinks, falters in her retreat.
“One hypothesis would be that most people simply do not have the constitution for it,” the nameless man continues, seemingly unperturbed by the awkward fact that they are standing before a disturbing portrait of filicide, conversing as complete strangers about—love? “But, like you have said, you are not most people—not, shall we say, a fragile little teacup.”
Will lets out a short, startled laugh. Then she catches herself. But the laughter quietly returns. The man gives her a small, almost imperceptible smile, the effect of which is charming.
Before she can catch them, the words are spilling from her tongue, and she finds herself offering, “Will Graham. Well met, Mr…?”
“Hannibal Lecter.”
Hannibal, Will thinks, the name of a conqueror, the words of an orator.
“Please,” the man demurs, charming smile softening a notch, “Hannibal is enough of a mouthful. Just Hannibal.”
Will snorts inelegantly. This man has no business being ‘just’ anything. “Well, Just Hannibal, I’m Just Will.”
Hannibal, visibly entertained, acknowledges this with a gallant nod. “It is good to meet you as well, Just Will.”
Will can feel her own soft smile stretching, lingering, almost an alien feeling as it pulls on muscles so rarely used. She watches Hannibal sip the blood-red wine.
“Are you here for Goya’s work, Will?”
Will returns her eyes to the piece before them. “I am here,” she says, “to ‘find peace and relief in the beauty of art’. It was my ps—friend’s idea” Goya’s depiction of Saturn devouring his own son hangs suspended on the white wall before them. The irony is almost too much.
“Ah,” Hannibal nods, similarly amused. “There is more than a small measure of peace to be found in death, I imagine.”
Will frowns at that. Death, from the perspective of the dead, seems… empty. “How can we experience peace if there is nothing to compare it against?” she says.
“Is life not enough of an appropriate comparison?” Hannibal counters.
Will turns back to the painting, eyes roving over the crazed light in Saturn’s eyes. “True,” she murmurs, recalling the peace in Abigail Hobbs’ eyes, so removed from Saturn’s manic frenzy, as her blood warmed Will’s hands, as the light dulled from her vision, as she sank—finally—into sweet oblivion. Freedom. “Life can be full of monsters.”
Hannibal Lecter hums beside her, gaze settling upon the Goya once again. A thought tickles Will.
“If it isn’t too forward of me,” and there it goes again, the indulgent, charming smile, “…shall I call you Dr. Hannibal Lecter, psychiatrist?”
This time, it is Hannibal who is startled into a delighted chuckle. “I’m afraid you have me, Will.”
A sigh escapes Will. She has to marvel how full of surprises this man is—but more than that, she is most surprised at herself. “I must have some form of pheromone specific to psychiatrists,” she smiles self-deprecatingly and rather lopsidedly, because her face has forgotten how. “My friend who sent me here is also a psychiatrist.” She doesn’t say Alana is her personal psychiatrist.
“Ah,” Hannibal nods, and then he leans forward into Will, making a show of it, and takes a deep inhale.
Will gapes. “Did you just—you just sniffed me.”
“Hmm, I did,” Hannibal easily responds. Playful, open. “Making certain of those fine pheromones, I hope you don’t mind.”
Disbelief keeps Will agape until the absurdity of the situation catches up with her. Then she has to laugh. Wait until I tell her, she crows to herself, Alana will love this. She’ll ask how my night was—and I’ll tell her I got sniffed. “I don’t know what to think about how inappropriately flattered I am when I should be frankly alarmed—you just sniffed me!”
Hannibal Lecter, for his part, pulls a convincing picture of a man contrite. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to alarm you, I just found you, well, scintillating.”
“So you decided to sniff me.”
“Hmm, yes.”
Will stares for a moment, smile still on her face, laughter still bubbling in her throat. What an odd man. When was the last time she had laughed like this? “You are a strange man, Dr. Lecter.”
“Why, thank you,” the man smiles, folding a hand over his heart. “And please, just Hannibal. I used to be a psychiatrist, once upon a time—now no more, if that is of any comfort to you. Now I am a surgeon.”
“Oh? What made you quit psychiatry?” Why the hell do you need to know, Willow Graham?
Hannibal sips his wine again and contemplates for a while. “The… more conventional reason is my concern for self-preservation, I suppose?”
“And psychiatry is not conducive to your self-preservation?” Will asks. Oh, if Alana were here, she would love this man. (Will feels a tiny part of herself oddly glad that she isn’t here.) “Safer to be in your own office than to work in a hospital environment, surely?”
Hannibal tips his wineglass and challenges, “On the contrary, Miss Graham, nothing is more dangerous than subjecting oneself to the designs of a foreign mind.”
“Dr. Lecter! There you are!”
A voice approaches from behind them, and in her mute shock at the aptness of Hannibal Lecter’s words, Will can only move aside. Hannibal’s acquaintances look as if they stepped out of the glossy pages of Vogue Italia, leaving Will feeling ill-fitted and uncouth. Their pleasantries are lengthy and allow her to gently slip away, before they notice she was even there. Will feels a tad disappointed—more than a tad, if she’s being honest with herself—but Hannibal Lecter, no matter how intriguing a specimen, inhabits a whole different world from hers. Will is woefully out of her league.
She leaves the exhibit not too long afterwards and takes the hour-long drive to Wolf Trap at a sedate pace. Her feet are hurting in a way they haven’t done since university; the four-inch heels she deposited on the passenger seat the very moment she got into her car are at fault. Her toes are cold but no matter: it keeps her awake. She will not realise until the next morning that for the first time in a long time, she considered someone other than Alana—a complete stranger, at that—for something beyond friendship. What little thought lingering in her head revolves around the sad fact that Hannibal Lecter never told him what the unconventional reason for quitting psychiatry was. She had wanted to know.
And, one other thing.
The torn, bloody flesh of Goya’s art is of the same red as Abigail Hobbs’ blood on her hands. Headlights flash from the other side of the freeway — they linger even past her thoughts, even in her dreams. They make the slick shine red on her palms. She stands at a crossroads, shoulders shivering in the cold, paths forking ahead into darkness, lights speeding past her on either side, blood dripping from both her hands. Above her, the night is soft and moonless. Around her, the quiet timbre of a familiar voice—nothing is more dangerous, it croons, warm and close, so be careful, Will.
When she wakes, it is with a horrible sinking feeling, and when she looks into the bathroom mirror, it is Garrett Jacob Hobbs who stares back.
REFERENCES
(1) The painting in question is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, one of the Black Paintings.
