Blood in the Water // voicesofthemuses
Frank tended to avoid therapy on principal. What was the point, honestly? He already knew he was fucked up in the head; an Omega in law enforcement since he was practically thirteen years old, people just assumed he wouldn’t have trauma from that? No, no, his suicide attempt was clearly out of left field, no one expected that to happen, it was a total shock.
Or maybe the bigger shock was that Frank rejoined the law enforcement world after a year of hiatus. His Otherness was more visible this time; the rage in his eyes that was always burning was noticed, his smiles were more tight than genuine, and people just noticed his aura. He wasn’t the same Frank that so many remembered him being, but again, they chalked it up to trauma, stamped a seal of approval on his papers, and by the time he was twenty three, he was actively teaching FBI recruits in classrooms while consulting on a few cases here and there.
And in between that, he hunted.
Five years was a long time before anyone even thought to bring Frank back out onto the field with his special ability, but Jack Crawford was an ambitious fucker, and once he had heard of what Frank could do, he all but dragged the man out by his shirt collar. The case with Garret Jacob Hobbs was when Frank’s two lives very nearly blurred together, but he got away with killing the man because he ended up rescuing Abigail in the process. And just to make sure he didn’t lose himself completely, Jack made Frank go to therapy.
How curious that he chose Hannibal Lecter to be his therapist. Because as soon as Frank had met the man in Jack’s office, he knew he was Other, just like Frank. The only question was, was he the kind Frank needed to hunt, or was he the kind who hunted the way Frank did? Was he a threat? Was he a potential ally?
It was professional curiosity that led Frank to accepting Hannibal as his therapist, and spending two nights a week at the man’s office, talking about anything and everything as they slowly cracked each other’s shells. He just didn’t expect to slowly feel himself begin to fall in love in the meantime. This prim and proper Alpha with one of the sexiest accents Frank had heard had slowly wormed his way into the Omega’s chest, and now they were at an impasse. There could be no moving forward unless Hannibal knew everything, and Frank didn’t know what might happen if he did.
Fate took that out of his hands. A year into working in the field again and attending therapy hadn’t helped Frank with his bursts of severe aggression, and so he kept up his Polaroid Killer side life; this night, he had tracked down a serial rapist of an Alpha named Philip Jones. Using his specialized weapon in the form of his own slick in a beaker, he lured the bastard into an alley thinking he had found a distressed Omega in heat, only to end up with a bat to the back of his skull to knock him out. When he awoke hours later in one of Frank’s warehouses, it was to the torture that was awaiting him. His screams for mercy were like music to Frank’s ears, until he ripped the guy’s tongue out and taunted him with how his own victims had begged for mercy.
“It had to be an Omega who took you out,” Frank said casually as he got to work on castrating Philip while he wailed in agony. “You won’t touch anyone ever again.” Once the dick was sliced off, he shoved it into Philip’s mouth like a gag and held up his camera. “Say cheese!”
The next night, Philip was dead, so Frank moved the body to the nearby dump site. Let the trash find the trash. Except as soon as he was done posing the body and stapling the Polaroid picture to his chest, he caught the sound of someone else huffing a bit nearby, and he slowly moved forward, edging around the piles of trash until he found what he was looking for.
Hannibal stood there, dressed in the strangest plastic suit over his own, hard at work with a dead body of his own, inside the little shed that overlooked the dump in general. Curious, Frank watched him for a long moment, tilting his head, before he leaned against the doorframe as he realized just what he was looking at. The Chesapeake Ripper in his element. How quaint.
“I love your work Dr Lecter,” Frank said quietly, smirking a little. “Very artistic.”
