#cozeios

[cadisflya]

@cozeios liked for a random setting stater:  It's evening. / There's been a heatwave for days. / You're in the grounds of a country estate. / There's a dream-like feel to the place.

   𝚆𝙸𝙻𝙻 𝚁𝙾𝙻𝙻𝚂 𝙳𝙾𝚆𝙽 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝚆𝙸𝙽𝙳𝙾𝚆 𝙰𝚂 𝚂𝙾𝙾𝙽 𝙰𝚂 𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝙿𝚄𝙻𝙻𝚂 𝙰𝚆𝙰𝚈 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙷𝙾𝚄𝚂𝙴,  and feels the flush of the air cool against his face. It smells like tepid water; the artificial lakes carved into the sides of the driveway are greening since the fountains that aerate them have been shut-off, and the heat has made the water thick with insects and algae. It’s a spongy smell of green-wet decay, organic, and a shade of putrescence that absolutely compliments the one they’ve just left inside the house. Hydrogen sulfide, dimethyl disulfide, toluene—anaerobic digestion, chemical byproducts that a body and a bog have in common. The smooth concrete sides of the ponds are stained where the rainwater has overflowed their contents: brown water and the fermented milk of decaying plant matter, accompanied by the near-deafening sound of frogs. The scene has several sensory layers so particular to Will’s childhood that he isolates them, and momentarily dwells in them, until the SUV is rolling past the arched iron gate and onto the private road that leads through the property and back to the highway.

   The air clears immediately; except for the thick humidity of an August evening in Alabama. Now, Will can smell the heat lightning instead. He’d lived here a few times, too. It’s just like it was: leafy and chartreuse. Somehow manufactured. Magnolia trees and spanish moss. More money, usually. Women who wear hats to church.

   “Jack wants us back in the morning to clear the greenhouses.”

   Greenhouses. More than one. It goes without saying that they aren’t hoophouses for crops, or corrugated plastic wrapped around a plywood frame. Will drums the case folder in his lap closed and slips his glasses from his face so that he can press his fingers harshly into the angry little marks left behind on the bridge of his nose. He presses, and presses, until the sensation in the pads of his fingers satisfies him.

   Beverly is driving. She hadn’t demanded to, and Will didn’t ask, but somehow they always end up like this: Beverly takes the keys, and Will slides into the passenger seat, bone-soft with relief. He glances across the cab at her, at the way the cross-ventilation between their open windows pulls pieces of her hair around her face. She has a lean, athletic neck; an inapproximate canvas to compare. The grip would’ve restricted in a vastly different arrangement to accommodate the strong ridge of Beverly’s pronounced sternocleidomastoid, something the victim lacked. Will slides his eyes away, towards the pinkening-black rim of dark bleeding in above the treeline, and concentrates on the feeling of the wind again. Apparently, they’d both wanted a little air.

   Will shuts the case file into the glovebox, out of sight out of mind, and faces his distorted reflection in the haze of the windshield. By means of some collusive internal apology, he tries to conduct conversation. It’s easier with her than it is with most people. Almost easy all together. “You know anyone that had a greenhouse growing up?”

[writinghannibal]

drabble for bedelia and hannibal's flight to europe!

Bedelia pressed herself against the wall behind her back, her body slightly angled towards the man sitting beside her. She had wondered when Hannibal Lecter would arrive on her doorstep with his human veil in tatters.

She had not expected it to be quite like this.

She had not expected to find herself faced with a decision... to go with him, or to face the consequences of not. Either way, Hannibal Lecter once again happened in her life. Out of her interest in continuing that life and her curiosity over what would happen, she chose to be complicit in her own disappearance.

There would be consequences, of course. Bedelia was sure that the law, at least, would not be one of them. Hannibal would weave a convincing lie for her and assist her telling a version of the truth that did not include her compliance with whatever it was that was happening to her now. No, the consequences were likely to be far darker and more sumptuous than that.

Bedelia watched Hannibal take a sip of champagne. Such a simple act, but it was as good as threading a needle to begin stitching the holes that had been torn in the veil he wore. That veil was a necessity, not only to protect him from the world knowing exactly what it was that moved among them ... but to protect them all from the knowledge that monsters were far closer at hand than was comfortable.

She slowly turned her head and looked out the window, watching the world fall away beneath them.

[stcrlngs]

@cozeios​​ asked: ‘they say it’s bad for you, but then again, everything’s bad for you’ {accepting}

    “ Yeah, well I don’t know who ‘they’ are but ‘they’ are a bunch of assholes.”

     The hood of Clarice’s rusted Pinto had seen better days, a well worn dent settled right in the middle from Clarice’s habit of sitting on her car when she needed to think. The night was relatively quiet, save for the hum of street lamps and  sound of cars driving past the deserted parking lot. Was picking up Abigail Hobbs this late a bad idea? Yes. Was driving to the middle of nowhere just to get the world’s greasiest fast food an even worse idea? Also yes. That didn’t stop Clarice from doing it though.

   “ Everybody’s gotta live.”

[writinghannibal]

when did hannibal decide he was for sure going to kill antony dimmond? did he know immediately?

} ooc:

I have a fic I’m writing that will answer this!

[cadisflya]

@cozeios​ asked:   𝙰 𝙺𝙸𝚂𝚂 𝙾𝙽 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙿𝙾𝚁𝙲𝙷... 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝙼𝙾𝙻𝙻𝚈...

   𝙷𝙴𝚁 𝙷𝙰𝙽𝙳𝚂 𝙰𝚁𝙴 𝚂𝚃𝙸𝙻𝙻 𝚆𝙰𝚁𝙼 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝙷𝙴𝚁 𝙲𝙾𝙵𝙵𝙴𝙴 𝚆𝙷𝙴𝙽 𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙲𝙷𝙴𝚂 𝚃𝙾 𝚂𝚃𝙰𝙽𝙳 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙻𝙰𝙿𝙴𝙻𝚂 𝙾𝙵 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙲𝙾𝙰𝚃 𝚄𝙿 𝙰𝚁𝙾𝚄𝙽𝙳 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙽𝙴𝙲𝙺. Residual heat from the mug that she sets aside on the porch railing, steaming softly in the hard morning air. It’s cold. Of course, she’d known it would be cold. Maine’s like that. He’d warned her of that and she’d laughed at him. Cold’s just cold, and you can always warm up again. The stunning simplicity of the argument had moved him.

   Something he himself might have said, once.

   It’s his house, but she lives in it like it was always hers. Will has the sense that that happens everywhere that she goes, that she’s one of those people, that home follows her around. Or she makes it with a stern resolve. Maybe not for herself. It’s hard to say more. She’s a relatively uncomplicated person, not because anyone is inherently simple but only she’s made a rational choice to be that way, because she's brave, and Will could cut through it if he wanted to, if he applied his particular weapons to the task of opening her up and slipping his mind inside—but that isn’t what he wants to do. It hasn’t been, since the beginning.

   So far, he’s been able to avoid it. That makes him feel good.

   This is what other people talk about, when they talk about how good love is. How long suffering, how kind. The sort of love that allows you to just let the other person be. So you can be together without being flayed open, without making an unspeakable display of the embarrassing and inevitably mundane hideousness of the human meat inside.  In this world we walk on the roof of hell—

   The last line is something about flowers, but Will usually leaves it off when he recites the haiku in his mind. At the moment, that impulse of omission seems plainly dishonest to him. Issa’s point wasn’t about the worlds people occupy;  his point was that flowers grow even on the roof of hell.

   Molly’s hands are warm from the coffee;  she turns his collar up to protect his neck from the bitter weather, knots his scarf tighter, and her hands are warm still when she roughs his jawline to enjoy the tactile grate of his facial hair. It makes Will smile. Her cheeks are growing pink-bitten in the cold and she’s bed-rumpled, face creased from the pillow, hair all out of its bun. Wally will be back tomorrow, staying with his Grandma while they moved their things into Will’s cabin. This is their honeymoon, isn’t it? Neither of them have called it that, but it is. Will feels a stab of something. The dull end of a consciously blunted knife. Still, he feels it.

   “You sure you wouldn’t rather be on the beach somewhere? I don’t know, where do people go? Bermuda. Acapulco—”

   He’s only halfway joking, halfway genuinely apologetic, and Molly doesn’t answer. Just silences him with a look that says that if she wanted to be somewhere else, she would be, and that the matter isn’t up for discussion. Will believes that. He believes her. She’s a difficult person to doubt.

   Maybe there’s one place she’d rather be, but that place is gone now.

   Where would he rather be? Nowhere. Nowhere. Petulantly convincing.

   Will tugs his left hand free from his glove to pull her chin up for a kiss. There’s a sharp, hard sting inside of him that he buries. A moment of internal acknowledgment. Looking himself in the face. It isn’t honest. Dishonest from both of them, in varying ways, but what does the truth do but sow more salt? On their second date, Will had suggested that she might have heard about him, about his work, and Molly had told him that she didn’t really watch the news. Like a cunning animal, he’d slipped into the house through an unguarded gap in the foundation—but that isn’t all this is. She’d said something else, too.

   Nobody tells the truth about the past, Will.

   He’s supposed to be going into town to get another quilt for Wally’s new bed and a gate they can set up to keep the dogs out of the kitchen until they all get settled with one another, but for a long time Will stands on the porch, letting her touch him, and kissing her. The hard dawn frost makes their kisses tacky, punctuated with sticking sounds, and she laughs into his mouth, and Will laughs into hers. They’re newlyweds. This is what newlyweds do. Even ones like them.

   She smells so good;  black coffee, white flowers, and vanilla.

   Proven to reduce the startle-reflex in both animals and humans.

   Will had rarely ever made such succinct note of smells before—

   There’s another of those haikus. He doesn’t intend to think of it, but it rises to the surface without Will’s immediate awareness. Cream, or the bloom of biological scum, needing to be sloughed off of the surface. Something about the autumn wind—here I am, on my pilgrimage to which hell?

[cadisflya]

@cozeios​ said:  𝙸 𝙳𝙸𝙳𝙽’𝚃 𝚃𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙺 𝚈𝙾𝚄’𝙳 𝚁𝙴𝙼𝙴𝙼𝙱𝙴𝚁 𝚃𝙷𝙰𝚃. 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝙰𝙻𝙰𝙽𝙰

    𝚂𝙷𝙴 𝙸𝚂𝙽’𝚃 𝙰𝙲𝚃𝚄𝙰𝙻𝙻𝚈 𝚂𝚄𝚁𝙿𝚁𝙸𝚂𝙴𝙳. It’s a feint, flirtatious response, the kind they both like to use from time to time, and Will accepts it with a half-aborted nod.  “I remember.”

   Any other answer would be too drawing. More attractive, maybe, but Will doesn’t want to catch her interest;  doesn’t want to engage the extra-mental intellect that ticks under the current of sharp emotional intelligence that Will prefers to use in his subjective understanding of who she is as a person. Form-theory curiosity versus a practical in-world decency. He respects both, but that isn’t the conversation that Will wants to have at this moment, isn’t the way he wants her to look at him, so he shapes his response to match an angle that will direct them down the desired trajectory. Light, affectionate. Ultimately meaningless.

   She’ll like what he’s brought for her, Will knows. It’s a simple present. Thoughtful, costing nothing. Nothing but deliberate care. Attention. He doesn’t expect anything in return. Will never expects anything of her, just like she never asks anything of him. That’s their deal. Expect nothing, and you get the opportunity to be delighted by anything that falls into your lap.

   Will is struck again by the thought that Alana is perhaps the only genuinely decent person that he has ever know. It’s like a snakebite, the thought. Guilty, and ringing unpleasantly in his ears. Briefly visible behind his eyes, heavily saturated blue in the warm dimness of her office, in the professional din. Will isn’t looking into her face, but he is looking at her hand that’s holding a slim silver pen. It’s a beautiful object, and he’s willing to guess that it’s effective, as well. Alana likes things both ways.

   Two Stories from The Golden Apples, with illustrations by Mildred Wolfe. Will had found it years ago when cleaning out the boxes in the barn. One of a hundred items he’d inherited from the previous owners of his house—along with most of his furniture and housewares, the books, the ceramic figurines. The mugs and wooden spoons. The bed he’s never slept in that’s in the upstairs master. All the little accoutrements of someone else’s life, already convincingly arranged, that he’s been living in like a magpie in a stolen nest. He had liked that about the house. Complete with the unnecessary clutter of an established personality. Something he wouldn’t have to bother to intentionally accumulate in order to project a comforting degree of mundanity in case of the risk of visitors.

   Alana likes Flannery O’Conner. So, she’ll like Eudora Welty. A week ago, on Friday, he’d asked her if she’d ever read it. She’d said no, and that night Will had taken it down from the shelf and set it on the center of the little table beside his front door where it sat all weekend. Today, Monday, he’d taken it with him in the morning. Placed it on the passenger seat beside him in his Volvo. All in order. A process of intentional regard.

   He just wants her to have it.

   Will sets the book on the edge of her desk, nearer to him than to her, so that she’ll have to reach across to get it once he’s gone. She’ll wait until he’s gone, he knows that. Because it’s what he wants her to do, and Alana has always been surreptitiously accomplished in giving him his space. The cover is still wrapped in its yellowed paper dust jacket, original, like a dried skin under his touch as he drags them across the surface. Will drums the cover twice with two fingers, and the depth of the tone of the tapping combined with brittle flicker of sound that the paper jacket makes is soothing.

   Will resists the urge to repeat the action.

   Alana is looking at him the way he’d anticipated when planning the gesture. Calm and sly, her beautiful face soft with a knowing, faintly curious warmth. Like they’re sharing a secret joke between them, and Will supposes they are. The whole thing is sort of a fucking joke.  We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.  He didn’t wrap it. She would have known the action was performative, so why bother?

   There’s something else there, too. Something else that she doesn’t mean to communicate with the way she looks at him. An involuntary lapse that it feels discourteous to acknowledge. Half-reaching tension that Will understands:  anxiously waiting to see if anyone else is going to step in and claim a dangerous animal to save you surrendering to your own unwise desire to give it a home yourself. Desire, or sense of obligation. Will’s dark lashes hang briefly, a thick, jagged line against his cheek.

   An awareness of and respect for interpersonal boundaries, including her own, is the root of what makes Alana a decent person. It isn’t a quality that Will shares. The awareness, yes. The adherence is externally superficial.

   “I thought you’d like it.”

   Will waits for her to smile, and flickers a brief and genuine closed-lipped facsimile of the same expression, before he slips his hand into his pocket and sees himself out of her office. He leaves the door open, because he knows Alana prefers to keep it that way. His is always firmly shut.

[writinghannibal]

franklyn is seated on the edge of his chair, leaning forward towards hannibal like a pea shoot seeking its trellis. "see, that doesn't surprise me. you're a man of culture; i am too." he smiles widely. "personally, i think my favorite aria is 'nessun dorma.' have you heard the rendition done by luciano pavarotti? nothing is quite as inspiring. i have chills just thinking about it."

Hannibal crossed one long leg over the other and reached for the black sketchbook with Franklyn’s name and a series of colored dots on the cover. The man had spotted him at the previous night’s performance of Turandot at the Baltimore Lyric Opera House. He had managed to avoid direct conversation with Franklyn the night before and had anticipated that the man would bring up the fact that they had been at the same show during their session.

“A well known aria on the voice of a well known and popular tenor. Yes, I have heard it,” Hannibal opened the book in his lap, “Why do you feel you connected with ‘Nessun Dorma’?”

[cadisflya]

@cozeios​ said:  𝚃𝙷𝙰𝚃 𝚄𝙽𝚆𝙰𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙳 𝙰𝙽𝙸𝙼𝙰𝙻 𝚆𝙰𝙽𝚃𝚂 𝙽𝙾𝚃𝙷𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝙼𝙾𝚁𝙴 𝚃𝙷𝙰𝙽 𝚃𝙾 𝙶𝙴𝚃 𝙾𝚄𝚃. 𝙵𝚁𝙾𝙼 𝙱𝙴𝙳𝙴𝙻𝙸𝙰

   𝚆𝙷𝙴𝙽 𝙷𝙴 𝙲𝙰𝙽𝚃𝚂 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙳, 𝙸𝚃’𝚂 𝙰 𝚂𝙼𝙰𝙻𝙻, 𝙼𝙸𝙼𝙴𝚃𝙸𝙲 𝙼𝙾𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽.  The play of a gracious pupil, titillated by their own trial. She’s so eager to give him tests. They always have been. The least he can do is to demonstrate some curiosity over the skill of the delivery, the scope of the questions. She works hard, and he likes her. Will does like her. When it comes down to it, he’s only being gracious. She doesn’t like him, but she likes sitting in her victories over him. So long as she does, Will remains a patient to her, and that is preferable to him. So long as there is satisfaction in her eyes, he knows he is playing an easy part well.

   He’s had thirty years of practice in this role, hasn’t he? Circumstantially, it’s a little different, sure—but there are jokes about doctors just like there are jokes about lawyers. Underneath, they’re all the same.  Almost.  Almost all.

   “Animals don’t know when they’re unwanted. They aren’t sentimental. Animals are—innate in our definition of humanity, but they exist outside of it. We define ourselves by what we no longer consider ourselves to be. Animals. And animals who are redundant or inconvenient to the animal group aren’t unwanted—they’re just... evicted.”

   Will smooths a hand down the lapel of his jacket in a gesture that should be familiar to them both. It’s faint, but the soft whisked texture of the buttons, one two three, passing behind his fingers is liquid, soothing. The performance extends with absolute memorized faith, a displayed intimacy, until one hand twines with the other in a fluid bowl above his knee where it’s crossed overtop his resting leg.  The apathy that the gaze of the animal expresses after combat is the sign of an existence that is essentially on a level with the world in which it moves like water in water.  The wordless voice that is always passing between them murmurs the recitation of his own thoughts in his ear, and Will feels it like a reassuring touch across the back of his hand. He suspects that Bedelia feels it too. Intentionally invoked. It is fascinating, when she deigns to react. When she holds consonants on the roof of her mouth and lets them click against her tongue. When the string of her spine rolls tighter, and she almost shakes her shoulders, very slowly, like a bird shaking out its finest feathers.

   He misses this. Being anticipated. Being anticipated only in a rough approximation, clumsy by comparison, but—Will allows himself to be aware of that now, one of the things that he has missed, the hole in the heart of his mind.  Obsession with undertones of nausea.  She is so close to fulfilling that latent expectation. An expectation that has been slowly going stale in the back of his regressive memories for three years. He takes it out, now, the expectation of her anticipating his next thought, and sets it on the table between them—even knowing that she’s incapable of truly fulfilling it, incapable of giving him what he really wants.

   They have that deficiency in common.

   Will tips his head back, lengthening the line of his neck. It’s a signal of pleasure. He’s pleased with himself. Or he’s about to be. That’s what’s displayed. Not for himself, but...  Will has become increasingly capable in earning the Doctor’s distaste. He thinks he sees it crowning now, a sour rim on the rise of her cool and beautiful face. Will doesn’t smile, but his blue eyes are limpid with interest, with satisfaction, and he sweeps his tongue across his lower lip before he speaks again,  “The evicted animal wants nothing more than to get back into the relative safety of its previous position, Bedelia. It’s a rote, defensive posture. The unwanted animal wants back in—with no apparent awareness of whether it is wanted or not.”