Synopsis: reader is forced into treatment by Hannibal Lecter with the reluctant assistance of Will Graham; in time it descends into something more...
Starting to upload on ao3: MANNA
NOTE: I'll be incorporating the drabbles into the main fic soon (they are not all chronological atm, more like snapshots of a timeline. In a few weeks I'll be continuing from what comes after the escape incident).
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Chapters in chronological order beneath the cut, click ''keep reading":
COMPANY PART 2— A Conquest x Gender Neutral Reader Darkfic
Synopsis: Reader attempts to recover from Conquest's attack, despite Cecil's insistence that he is dead
Trigger/ Content Warnings: Rape/noncon, violence, blood as lube, Pet names, brief necrophilia mention (not Reader as victim, just typical Conquest evil background stuff)
Read under the cut
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Conquest is dead; Cecil had told you so, but still you don’t believe it. It has something to do with the quality of his eyes when he’d said it. Something artificial in their expression. Something rehearsed.
You cannot prove that Cecil has lied, of course, and certainly he denies it when you press him in the following days. Nor does he concede when, in paranoia of the Viltrumite’s return, you beg Cecil to modify your abilities, to enhance them, make you stronger than you are. Enough to face down the monster again.
“They say that’s what happened to Powerplex,” you announce in a kind of fever. “Someone fixed him. You experiment on people in the Pentagon. You can make superheroes better—”
“Powerplex did that to himself,” says Cecil, knuckling the bridge of his nose. “And whatever gossip goes on around what we do here—well, it’s a lot more complicated than you’ve been told. If we could just boost everybody’s powers don’t you think we’d be doing that already?”
You keep your arms crossed, unimpressed.
“Synaptic,” says Cecil. “Listen to me. If we had the knowledge and the resources to give you what you’re asking for I’d offer them to you purely out of goodwill. As it stands all I can do is suggest somebody to help you train your abilities naturally. But I can see that it’s not enough.”
His attempts to soothe seem disingenuous, are in some fashion part performance. Cecil has been in this role for so long by now that he has little human feeling left that is not twisted by duty into a generalised empathy, corporate and impersonal.
You want to seize him by the collar and shake the life back into him, and almost do.
“You’re damn right it’s not enough,” you bark at him. ‘I’m never going to get over what that freak did. Everyone saw what happened, Cecil. People filmed it.”
“And I’ve done my best to remove every single recording from the Internet,” he says, “and I’ll keep doing it as many times as I have to.”
Your upper lip curls.
“It doesn’t matter. It still happened. You can’t take that away for me.”
Cecil accepts the anger in your voice without criticism or complaint.
“No. I can’t. Nothing’s going to change what Conquest did to you. But you can rest easy knowing it’s not going to happen again.”
Rest—you have scarcely slept since the attack, waking at random intervals in the night palsied with the fearful expectation of Conquest over you, his robotic hand pinching your throat, the other tucking himself into your defenceless form.
You toss your head in disgust. Sleep will never be your solace again.
“So many lies,” you say. “So many mistakes. You’ve given me no reason to trust anything that leaves your mouth, Cecil. I’m going home.”
Cecil reaches out as you stride for the door, careful not to physically touch the arm that swings an aggressive rope of power in rebuff. You do not think he cares to console you as much as keep you as his ally rather than another of the dangerous vigilantes that have broken away from his side to work alone.
“Wait a second,” says Cecil. “Take some time off. Don’t do anything risky.”
You throw him a filthy look over one shoulder.
“Like what? What could I do, Cecil? What can I possibly fucking do?”
If he answers you do not hear him, having slammed the office door so hard behind you that the hinges pop loose, toppling the entire thing free of the frame.
*
Almost out of spite against Cecil you continue taking on missions around the city, as many as you can handle, pushing your capabilities to the edge. You train constantly, finding yourself continually frustrated with your limits, and how easily you tire.
Still you grind on, ignoring the strain on you, not wanting a moment idle to think and remember what had been done to you. The public nature of that crime makes this impossible, however; wherever you go you endure the pity of others, their glances and whispers, their hands on your shoulders, patting you like a sick dog due to be put down.
You smile grimly, and then entrench yourself in the graft until you live to work, and work to forget.
This, too, fails you in the end.
There is a day you’re rebuilding a bombed out playground, quietly putting together ironwork and chain-link strands, that you feel what you had the last time you’d been assaulted.
A heaviness across you in the air like a ghost ship come to ground.
“Did you miss me while I was gone?”
You press back against a wall that is not there and tip back on your knees in the dirt.
Conquest floats above your head, naked from the uppermost inch of his pate to the soles of his feet, the masculine core of him angled upright like the nose of some hunting beast. Liquid twinkles on its flushed round tip.
How ready he is to rend you asunder, to return to the same evil that has torn you down from the person you were to a hollow.
“You,” you say softly. “I knew that you weren’t dead. Cecil lied to me.”
Conquest’s posture squares in arrogant dismissal.
“Viltrumites are nearly indestructible. Your people tried to hold me prisoner. Probably kept me alive hoping to get something out of me. They should have known better.”
You fly off a foot, holding both arms aloft in case you should have to propel him back with a concentrated weapon of power.
“So now what are you going to do?” you ask guardedly. “Like it or not, you lost against Invincible and Atom Eve. Doesn’t exactly bode well for your takeover.”
In Conquest’s working eye there is a flash of dismay, even shame, a capsule miracle.
“I will report back to our leader,” he says. “My mission was a failure. I’ll accept whatever punishment Grand Regent Thragg deems necessary. But, before I confess, I have something left here to do.”
The vile grin that has turned through your nightmares like a broken wheel makes his awful face come alive again.
“Are you going to kill me?” you ask, and Conquest’s grin extends ever further.
“No, honey. Once Earth has been taken over you’re going to be mine. I want another taste of what that’s going to be like.”
He begins his approach, gliding in a sort of airborne prowl. Again you retreat, the many eyes in the city beneath you making your skin prick.
The people know what to expect, this time, recognising you from the news, the most infamous of Conquest’s many victims.
“I was too weak to stop you, last time,” you say. “Don’t your people only value strength or something? Why would you want me back?”
“Because I won you fair and square,” says Conquest. “Means I own you. Besides, I like you, squirt. It felt good to hurt you. You fit the hole in my heart.”
He touches his bare chest, and you are forced to acknowledge the thick lodes of muscle wrapped around every bone, hawsers of scar bound tight across chest and limb.
"I won't let you do that to me again,” you tell him.
The muscle above Conquest's right eyebrow twitches.
"Oh? And what are you going to do to hold me back?"
You launch a wild spray of power towards him, doing no more than tossing him on the air. In truth you intend for him to kill you before he can enter you again, or else end yourself, if you must. Whatever the case, you will fight and fight him off until one or the other position takes over.
Drifting about you in a lazy circle Conquest sizes you up, taking in the determined fix of your jaw, the twitching of hands that hold no more power than a flea in the face of his.
“I see your game,” says Conquest. “You must think I’m stupid.”
You bat at him again, clenching his groin with a force that makes the vulnerable flesh strain in an invisible fist. Conquest rips aside out of range of your power, licking his lips as though the pain and threat of castration only excites him. From the hardening of his cock as you let it go you suppose it must.
“I’ve lived long enough to learn just about every move you could pull on me,” Conquest tells you. “On long dead planets I watched grown men slit their own throats when they saw me coming. Women drowned their children rather than let me get hold of them. A few of them drank poison. Such a waste.”
Conquest casts himself across the air, amused as you slap him back with a telekinetic palm. A wisp of blood lifts up on the wind like a poppy head. You smell him in your nostrils, male flesh and the savoury reek of his injury.
You wonder if Cecil is already watching, but do not expect him to save you, if so.
“There was a girl in some city I dominated,” says Conquest in loving recollection. “She cut her wrists when I came along, only she wasn’t dead yet by the time I got to her. I was inside her body as she died. So if you want to kill yourself, sure. I don’t mind. I just want to feel it as it happens.”
Again Conquest grabs at you, holding onto you only long enough to lick a teasing stripe up your cheek before you blast yourself away through the face of a nearby clock tower. Glass and bits of brick rain down through the building as you soar through it to the other side, wincing at the screams of civilians below.
Conquest tails you like a hunter after a fresh scent, rubbing himself in tender motions with his one good hand.
“You’re fucking nuts,” you spit, shaking glass off you into the air. “Invincible must have turned your brains inside out.”
The old man’s nostrils flare briefly, then the smile is back on his face again, seeming to dismiss the slight.
“You’re chatty,” he says. “That’s a good thing. I want to get to know you.”
Then he is at you like a great white ape, wrestling you in his mechanical grip so that your head is down at his bruised sexual organ, the protesting mouth already over the tip.
“Maybe I can start here,” says Conquest, and he pierces your throat with the oozing meat of him, the head of his erection stripping a bit of skin from your inner throat.
He imprisons you like this, his ordinary hand joining the other atop your head, forcing your body to dance like a suicide, watching blood cloud the air as he rapes your mouth as nastily as he had the other hole.
You do not take it easily.
Two limbs of power you aim at his legs, working at the bone with want to break them through; another loans strength to your brittle human teeth, forcing them through the skin of Conquest’s throbbing width until you feel the vibration of his grunt in a volcanic rumble.
His grip on your temples deepens, and agony like a giant’s migraine overcomes you. Tears fall from both of your eyes, and even without being able to see you know that they’re filled with blood.
“Try that again if you feel like having half a head,” says Conquest. “Looked good on Eve. Hers grew back. I figure yours probably won’t.”
He attacks your face like this on and on, the slime of his arousal hot in your throat, the thrilled knocking of the pulse in his wrist a war rally at your ear. Your neck is on fire with the stretch of him through it.
Wanting death over more of this you eagerly rip at Conquest with your power, going for his intestines behind the firm oblong belly, reaching up to wrap a telekinetic strand close around his heart.
Sighing, Conquest removes himself from your mouth and hits you hard in the middle, standing on a platform of open air to watch as you roll a mile to the applause of horrified screams far below.
Panting, you struggle upright, battling for enough breath to speak.
“I hope your leader fucking kills you for losing against Invincible. I hope he tears you in half.”
“The only one that’s going to happen to is you,” says Conquest, sneering. “I’m going to make your eyes roll back like I did the last time I mated with you. Did you like the world watching you come, sweet pea?”
Then he’s like a knife thrower’s blade through the sky after you, taking you in a vicious hug against the hard curves of his body. He kisses your ear, nibbling it with his rough teeth.
“Kill me,” you tell him. “Kill me. I don’t want them to see you do that to me again. All those people. Please, not where they can see—”
Conquest stabs a hand between your thighs and begins to pull off the suit, thread by thread, taking his time with the performance of it, even lifting one of your legs with his knee to enhance the view from below.
“You haven’t figured it out yet, have you?” he says. “You can’t bargain with me. There’s only one thing I want, and you’re it. You mean everything to me.”
You begin to create a wound in your own throat, then, but Conquest slaps a hand to it, squeezing down so tight upon it that you begin to hack and choke.
“You want to die on me?” he asks. “Let me show you what I’ll do if that happens.”
While you’re still star brained with airlessness he pulls you along with him to the ground, dragging your writhing body through a crowd of petrified onlookers.
You feel the pop and snap of bone, warm flesh pouring over you like some stew.
What scream you’re able to make through the pain of this is muffled by the mess. Only a halo of your abilities shields you from being equally shorn down by the dead.
After some minutes of this Conquest lifts you out of it again, driving the stone of his lusting cock into a hole that had never quite healed from him.
He is like some nuclear construction within you, his every organ as deadly as the brain that would devise such slaughter. The thump of him against your inner muscle sickens with the spread of pain, and seeing that he'll give you no reprieve you sink your hands into the muscle of his shoulders, holding him the way you'd bite a belt against like agony.
"That's it," Conquest murmurs. "Hold me. Nobody's ever done this for me before."
His thrusts quicken, delighted by this perceived amour, and even across the shriek of wind and the yells of the dying you hear the sopping noises of this thing he calls sex, no better than stirring of a finger in a wound.
You let go of him and turn to bite your arm instead, inducing a new pain to outdo the other. But this, like your fighting, fails you; all you experience is him, the loving glaze of that golden brown eye, the corpse blindness of the other, and the cock that like a burrowing worm seems to find greater depths of you with every minute he's inside you.
He carries you low over the city, pulls out of you only to put you on your belly against a fire escape, your bloody cheek cut up by one of the steps.
"You're starting to learn what Mark couldn't," Conquest tells you as he strips your suit from you as he might gut a carp. "You have a place in this world. Either you keep to it, or people die. You want more blood on your hands, angel?"
Conquest pauses, admiring the blood and organ matter soaking your shaking body.
"I don't mind if you do," he says. "It looks good on you."
"Don't," you say, your voice made flat and desperate with pain. "Don't kill anybody else."
"Then you better let me love you."
Conquest lowers his face to your buttocks and licks you from the hole up to your back, the white scruff of facial hair burning the flesh with its savage bristle.
"Best thing I ever tasted,” he says.
As he encloses himself against you again you grind your teeth into the stairwell, using your power to bite through the metal, anything but allow yourself to scream. You don't dare fight Conquest now, don't even dare die in the dread of him using your body to swipe through the city like a Morning Star.
Metal squeals under the impossible force of Conquest ravaging your flesh, peeling the fire escape away from the wall. He kisses your neck and back, forces your jaw away from the stair to attack your mouth with the mollusc of his tongue.
"Die," you whisper as he lets you draw breath. "Die. Die. Die."
"No," says Conquest. "Not when I've got you to love."
You shiver, repulsed by his delusion.
“You don’t—fucking—love me,” you spit at him. “You don’t love anything.”
With a savage grunt Conquest launches into the sky, punching at a great altitude, using you like some device made for sensual play.
“Once,” Conquest says, “all I had in my life was the work my empire put me to. But I see now how much more there is. I’ve always wanted someone to come home to. To hold in my arms. I’m going to cherish every moment with you.”
Air whistles over you both, and a cloud breaks across your head like a white bomb. You’re twisted and turned again, your bare chest together with Conquest’s, legs forcefully entwined.
“I just can’t wait to come home to you every night,” he says. “Tell you my war stories. Take you to bed with me.”
You flutter violently against him like paper in a breeze.
“You’ll be dead,” you say. “If your Regent doesn’t kill you Mark will.”
Conquest leers.
“You think he has it in him? You’re not too smart, then, are you? Mark’s weak. He couldn’t take me down alone.”
Conquest’s thrusting slows into harsh knocks. His hands grope at your body, raising welts and the most hideous bruising wherever they go.
“He will,” you say, hysterical. “He'll kill you. He will.”
Conquest’s mouth turns downwards at its edges.
“Sounds like you’ve got a crush.”
Is he jealous? You think he might be. He flies you higher and higher, nauseating you with the altitude. The cold is so severe that you can only shake helplessly in his grip.
Suddenly you’re hit with the absolute terror that Conquest will kill you by accident through the passion of his possessive envy. He will not mean to, but he will, regardless, carrying a rigid corpse back to his own world.
“Stop,” you cry out. “Let me go. You can come back for me. I’ll wait for you.”
You don’t mean a word of it, but you make yourself believe it, for the moment, make yourself cling tighter to Conquest even as his motions increase to a vicious fervour.
“Will you, now?” he asks.
You nod frantically, opening your mouth in desperate submission to his kiss.
“Sure,” says Conquest. “If you’re not there when I return you know what I’ll do.”
He sinks his teeth into your neck and sucks, placing a love bite upon your throat where anyone who sees it will know what has been done to you, that you are claimed. His hardness drums you at a nauseating depth, and then there is moisture flooding your entrance, freezing upon your leg in the cold.
Conquest groans, and then with a quick grin he opens his arms, allowing you to fly away from him, alone. You look away from the blood and intimate fluid on his phallus, the remains of the day that he wears like a suit over his nudity.
“Go on home,” Conquest says. “I’ll find you, angel.”
Then like a falling star in reverse he vanishes into space, his exit leaving an ice rush of air as his train.
*
He never does come back for you, though you wait for him, convalescing in your home in bitter isolation.
The second time Cecil tells you that Conquest is dead you neither believe nor disbelieve it, only stand, letting him talk at you, a sound like electric interference in one eardrum. The way Conquest had hit you had broken something in the delicate building of the skull, and even the doctors within the Pentagon hadn't quite managed to repair it.
"Synaptic," says Cecil. "Did you hear what I said?"
"Yes," you say dully. "Should I be thanking you or something?"
"You don't have to. Invincible is on Earth. I've asked if he'd be willing to talk to you. I didn't expect you to trust me after the last time, and I knew I had to make it up to you for how badly I let you down. Apologies won't cut it. Besides, hearing what happened from the man that killed Conquest is the nearest thing to closure you're likely to get."
Cecil looks at you warily, perhaps expecting a verbal or even physical attack, yet he is not without pity for you even now you have all the reason in the world to see him dead.
"Invincible."
You repeat the name with a kind of detached wonder. You have never met Mark in person, only seen him on television screens and magazine covers. Across the sky, once or twice, he has passed you, the clashing colours of his chosen suit like a beetle shell over the sun.
"I don't know if I'd be comfortable talking to Mark about what happened," you admit. "He's a stranger, and what Conquest did was just so personal. Maybe someday I can talk about it, but for now I can't. I just can't."
Cecil nods.
"That's alright. He said you can meet whenever you're ready to. There are no time limits or conditions to this. You can go see him whenever it feels right."
You intend to prolong that conversation indefinitely, find your solace in Conquest's emission from existence instead. But then there are mutters of another great war amongst the other heroes, looks of concern directed at you that imply they think of you as a victim of it before it's even begun.
The retirement Cecil had suggested you claim after Conquest's first attack is no longer possible; if you may be of use to your planet then you must serve or see it bred and become a slave land, knowing you had not lifted a finger in its protection.
You band together with a small, independent group, those suspicious of Cecil, and in charge of their own dispatch. On the way back from a minor mission you encounter Invincible by accident, sitting on a roof with his legs dangling, eyes unreadable behind dark ovular lenses.
Still, you interpret from his posture an unhappiness that you can understand, and so you cautiously sit down on the roof with him, leaving a respectful distance between you.
"Thank you," you say, "for killing Conquest."
Mark nods, then glances sideways at you, taking you in.
"It took a long time for me to get to the point that I could take a life. So many people got hurt because I didn't feel like I could do it. This time I didn't hold back. I'm glad I did it, but now I'm afraid that I've let something out I can't put back."
One of Mark’s hands clenches, but not as Conquest's did; he is only afraid, not chasing violence like a cosmic dog after a meteor’s tail.
"It must have taken a lot of strength," you say. "I owe you a lot. I couldn't do it. Don't know if I could even if I had enough power to do people like him any damage. So I'm grateful to you. More than I can say."
Invincible smiles, but it's only a movement of the muscle, no joy in it, no peace. He means to comfort you, nothing more.
"I'm going to keep fighting," you say. "Even if it's just something to do. So that I'm not a bystander."
"Are you sure?" asks Mark. "You're still hurt. No one would blame you for staying behind."
"I'd blame myself."
You're silent, then, both of you, looking at the quiet road beneath the house, an idyll of suburbia.
"Then thank you," says Mark. “We need all the help we can get.”
I really hope Ariana Grande is okay. People are being cruel under the guise of faux concern and that's absolutely not going to help her. Nor are people insisting she's fine. Having an ED in the public eye must be so challenging, and while I don't agree with everything she's ever done I have a soft spot for her and seeing her go through this is terrible. I hope she has support being the scenes and gets through this despite the vitriol she's facing
Dark!Hannibal Lecter x Reader x Dark!Will Graham fic
TW for grooming, CSA references, eating disorders, noncon/rape references, Daddy kink, Stockholm Syndrome, death, abuse, drug use, murder
Specific chapter warning for grooming/CSA—The History is back, and wherever Léon is I warn for it as his perspective is very triggering
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Like bacchants after the festivities are done with you three go to your beds, Will lingering at Hannibal’s doorway, considering for a lengthy minute taking to that room rather than his own. But then he looks down at you, leaden-lidded in his arms, and turns instead into the spare bedchamber, whose atmosphere has retained his scent even through the long nights between his last stay.
You are asleep the instant your side strikes the mattress, Will seemingly taken likewise into his own slumber. When the first finger of daylight prods you awake he is still under its influence, his face—crested by the sun—as close to peaceful as you’ve seen it.
Feeling your stare, an eye opens, laxly focused.
“It’s around seven,” you say, having read the digital clock on the nightstand with a wince. “You can probably get another hour.”
“So can you,” says Will. “As many as you want. You don’t have anywhere to be or to do. You should enjoy it.”
He shifts forward to kiss you softly on the mouth. His breath, foul from sleep, does not repulse you, only fills you with affection for his humanity.
Still, when you kiss Will back you hold onto a mouthful of air, watching the dark fibres of his curls flutter in the eventual exhale.
“Don’t know if I can sleep again,” you say. “I’ve been thinking about the way Hannibal killed Tara-Lynne. How you would have liked to see it.”
“I would have,” Will affirms. “I wish I’d been standing there with you. Able to feel the vibrations of the killing blow. The heat of the open wound. See how Hannibal moved. What he felt as he did it.”
“He was... triumphant,” you say. “Finally he’d found a way through to me. To help me kill with him as the knife. He made the whole thing look like one of those art pieces where living people are a moving part of it.”
You shift onto your back as you talk, chasing lazy dust motes with your finger.
“But the body—it stank,” you say, matter-of-factly. “The smell got in my hair. Hannibal had to wash it for me. He told me it would be like that, though. Death itself is kind of gross.”
“So’s living,” says Will. “It just has a better reputation.”
He watches your side profile, and you feel behind his stare the helpless rankling of envy, resenting that you—the shallow child protégé—had been death’s witness, too green yet to appreciate its majesty.
“Are you going to say something about there being merit to the grotesque?” you ask, only half-teasing. “Forgive me, oh wise craftsman, for being such a rube. I guess my eyes just weren’t open enough.”
“They were,” says Will. “You saw it. The beauty of it. You reached for the blood; Hannibal told me.”
The fern of your fist closes at the memory.
“It looked like red diamonds coming out of her.”
“There you go,” says Will, satisfied. “You made the association. Whenever you think of that moment you’ll always see it that way. As priceless art.”
Will brushes a hand easily from your naked breast to your stomach, which jumps inwards at a learned impulse. Then, as the fingers spread and the palm lies, warm and damp as the heart of a pastry left to harden you let that hand remain there, knowing there is no judgement of your body in that touch, only acceptance.
Only love.
“I also saw it another way,” you say.
“What way?” Will asks, and you poke at his twitching groin until he laughs and smacks your fingers off him.
“You thought about ejaculation,” he says. “There’s a reason people consider death and sex as the head and tail of a coin. One end you only ever flip once.”
“Not when it comes to Hannibal,” you say. “He flips a coin and other people die. I can only imagine one person in the world ever flipping his.”
You turn again on your side, nuzzling into the sour moisture of Will’s t-shirt collar, the growing-in scraps of his stubble.
“I’m not going to kill Hannibal,” Will says. “Haven’t we decided that the three of us are going to stay alive?”
“But if someone were going to kill him,” you say, “or if he gets really old and sick one day and wants somebody to hurry things along—that’ll be you. And it won’t be morphine or putting bubbles in his tubes the way it is with other people. That would be too... prosaic.”
Distantly within some inner pocket of the mind you’re disturbed by your own ease with such talk, that you’ve leaned in so far to this killing character that the same excitement you perform is a spark through your wiring. A very real joy.
“I can imagine Hannibal in bed with you, just like we are now,” you say. “How you’d put a knife to him the way he did to Tara-Lynne. So gentle, at first. Like you’re fixing his shirt. Only you’d give Hannibal a knife, too, and he’d put it out just here, in your belly, like he was opening your belt, and then you’d cut each other open. And that would be bliss to you both. That’d be love.”
“You’re waxing poetic,” Will comments, smiling.
“Yeah,” you say. “I suppose I am. I have started writing again. Art inspires the artist.”
Sleep whispers at your ear once more, and you yawn, content to embrace the temptation of a longer rest, after all.
“And where would you be in that ideal ending?” Will asks.
“Oh, I don’t know,” you say vaguely. “One of you would find time to squeeze me in somewhere. Room for a little one.”
“No,” says Will. “You’ll outlive us. Bury us. Live in your own house somewhere, wealthy from the stories you’ll write about the horrors of captivity. And you’ll buy wine without checking the calories on the label, or looking them up online. You'll eat breakfast at a café on a street in a European city, and let yourself feel full. You won’t even think about it. Death won’t find you until you’ve lived a long enough life to have earned it.”
You punch Will gently in the arm.
“Wouldn’t you love me enough to kill me?”
“We’d love you enough to let you live without us.”
Will tightens the covers around you both, a coffin of warmth. Your death, for all his talk of a merciful release. Life had been done with, long ago.
“Let’s catch up on more sleep,” says Will. “I don’t know if I can face one of your hangovers.”
*
Later in the morning you awake alone, electrified by the terror of a single thought: something terrible is going to happen because of what you’ve done.
Of course it must. You’d been a fool to be caught up in Hannibal’s madness, coaching yourself to celebrate. A crime done cannot be undone. You must give back for the life you’ve taken, a karmic cycle of repetition.
You tremble with fear and regret, those words that had cracked sleep in two like a warning from the divine. Through the slow paring down of your character you’ve become a triplet to your enemies, a killer who delights in slaughter’s justice. You have lain with such creatures. You have eaten a young woman’s flesh and had not thrown it up, had in fact sucked your fingers and the solemn white face of your dinner plate for the last of her.
You have earned the loathing you have held for yourself, now, are as callous as you have long conceived. There is a satisfaction in meeting those expectations, as though you had known it from a mystic’s spread of cards and not the mutterings of the mind.
Under the oppression of this mood you go down the spine of the house to Will and Hannibal, wanting to be consoled by the instigators of your every grief. The lower floor reeks of Black Ivory coffee, suggesting many a cup has been served there, drunk casually in spite of the cost. Hannibal’s wealth is of some fathomless number, fortunes spirited off and stored where no investigation could find them.
And like rich men your captors stand, laughing, their heads thrown back, identical, if one had been watching at a distance.
You cannot approach quietly in your condition, but the men are so involved with one another that they don’t yet attend to you.
Will stands with his back to the refrigerator, looking up at Hannibal through the web of his lashes in a flirtatious form. For his part Hannibal stands rather closer to Will than is necessary, taking groceries out of a bag at an unhurried pace, extending his excuse for such proximity.
You study the elder man’s back under his shirt, trying to picture him trotting along the aisle of some store with a shopping cart nudged before him, or a basket over one arm, jolly and domestic.
Hannibal seems to enjoy such things, the contrast between his dark nature and twee daily activities amusing him.
“You said you’d speak to him,” says Will. “Smooth things over. If this is your definition of smooth I’d hate to see the alternative.”
“It’s not my definition,” says Hannibal, reaching up with one toned arm to put something away in a cupboard. “It’s his. Questionable, certainly, but we are familiar with the logic of such a mind, and the effects of petty jealousy upon the choices made when its constructs have been interrupted by artists of a similar ilk.”
Will scoffs, though his eyes go as yours do to the hand reaching back into the bag, the athletic lines of Hannibal’s body as he moves back and forth, tempting his attention.
“I resent the implication that we’re anything like the Lover,” says Will.
“Yet, by intent of design, we are,” says Hannibal. “Not in our sensual preferences, but in the particular mode of violence we have made routine.”
“Only for her,” Will says. “It was the only way she’d allow us any authority over her.”
“Still,” says Hannibal, “that we have engaged in the practice incites a particular ire in the Lover that even our friendship cannot abate. Now we have involved ourselves further he wishes to strike out at us as much as his chosen bride.”
Hannibal moves Will aside to access the fridge, squeezing his shoulder in what, in another friendship, would be an affable gesture of play, but between them is the slow and gentle pressure of true affinity and closeness. Will allows himself to be manoeuvred, gazing into Hannibal’s face so intently that he may well have chiselled it into stone, such is the immortalising quality of memory.
“We, after all, have achieved her love in far less time than the Lover has been acquainted with her,” says Hannibal. “And what greater expression of feeling could she have given than her consent for me to kill?”
“And how are you going to manage the problem of the Lover’s retaliation?” asks Will. “It’s not going to go over well with her.”
Engaged in slotting away milk and a wedge of gingery cheese Hannibal is slow to answer.
“How I respond will depend on our daughter,” he says at last. “I’ve begun to defer to her wishes in these matters. We both know too well the cost of forcing a path before she is prepared to make the crossing. She is the wind in our sail; without it, we cannot progress.”
A frosty tingle encloses you, the sensation of a prophecy fulfilled.
Your voice cuts the intimacy of the room like a shear.
“What has the Lover done to punish us for Tara-Lynne?”
Hannibal pivots, his expression, like Will’s, bearing an instantaneous interest in the direction to which your entrance will turn future events.
“Tara-Lynne Hockstetter was found in Loch Raven by a married couple on an early morning hike,” says Hannibal. “The Lover worked quickly, on this occasion, and spitefully. He left considerable evidence behind for the police to find.”
“On purpose?” you ask, picking up on the deliberate emphasis of the comment.
“Yes,” says Will. “Jack wants me over there as soon as I can make it. I wanted to talk to you first, though.”
He moves to guide you into a chair, brought in as a prop for this predicted moment.
“What did the Lover do?” you ask again. “What did he leave at the murder scene?”
“A watch with an inscription on the underside,” says Hannibal. “Signed with your mother’s first name.”
Will does not crouch before you, as Hannibal had done under the news of your mother’s slaughter, nor infantilise in any way his audience. Instead he honours you as an adult daughter, or better still, a wife.
“Your father has been taken into custody. The Lover framed him for Tara-Lynne’s death.”
THE HISTORY
Léon travelled for ten years or so, this time alone, though he was not always without company on his way. There were always little girls around him, in parking lots or record stores or coming out of rest stop bathrooms, girls that giggled at his jokes and skipped along after him, snapping gum or toying with their jewellery. Easy to win.
None of them were Liliane, however. Léon missed her like a lost tooth, feeling her with him wherever he went. Sometimes he’d return to Louisiana to check on things as he’d left them—never for very long, but long enough to know it wasn't the same.
In her brief life she’d changed that place, was at every roadside, in the water.
Léon had to keep moving, after that, find a place to settle and make his own way as he'd planned, long ago. In each city he stayed in he tried out new names, shifted his personalities a little, trying each of them out like a new truck, always preferring the old.
People liked it when Léon played to type, or some exaggerated echo of it, the pretty boy out of the bayou. They liked that they thought they knew who he was; it comforted them, in some way, brought down the guard folks otherwise kept up against a man travelling by himself, far from home.
The easier people were to trick the stronger Léon's disdain for them grew. Without his sister he was aware again of the isolation that came of being himself amidst a shallow mass, attached to no one or nothing, every girl he had no more than sugar to suit a craving, useless once it had melted on his tongue and the rush had passed him by.
Léon had forgotten that the years before Liliane had lived with him were restless ones, had scorned the thought of ever being lonely, yet he was.
The attractions of the road lost shine and color for him, and Léon began to accept that one day he'd have to stay somewhere, make friends among these mindless people.
A realist, he did not set his hopes so high as to find another like Liliane. That they shared a father was what had made her different; Léon had seen parts of himself in her, and besides, she had still loved him after he'd made her his mistress, if not quite in the same way.
He wanted to be loved again, though he would have swallowed a gun before he'd say it even in the secrecy of his own mind. An innocent and unchangeable love—Léon had hit Liliane, had touched her body in ways that had her ascend from it entirely, and still there was adoration in her like an unopened bottle, forever full.
Léon was no fool. He had tasted it once, and had not watched Liliane close enough to keep it with him. He didn't have his father's luck—it would not come back around again.
Years went on, girl after girl left sobbing for the shame of him, their secret. Each going back to their little lives, that would always have a crack down the middle he had driven there, no one to believe them after he'd gone like a carnival into the night.
Tiring of it all, Léon took a sabbatical from his life's habit, burrowing himself into work instead, which as before was odd jobs he took wherever he could find them, or people offered, which they did as eagerly as they had always done. In this way he ended up in Baltimore, intending to stay only temporarily, at the time, roped into fixing a bathroom leak for a couple in their thirties.
They took a liking to Léon, and began asking him over to repair various other problems around the house as an excuse to keep him around.
The husband was an odd bird, of the dull, awkward type, his wife shrill and mouthy, but they became easier in Léon’s presence, lightened by the man he'd made up from his own life.
"Oh, daddy was a gambler, my Maman was a sick woman, my sister, mon catin, I had to leave her behind—"
They hung onto every word, each of which Léon embellished for effect until the fiction felt like fact to him. He would have wearied of it quickly, however, if he hadn't become acquainted with the family’s little daughter through their friendship.
She was three or four when he first saw her, stood sucking her thumb in earnest observation as he fiddled under the hood of her father's car. The girl, ———
(Here, a name had been put down, and violently scored from the page until the pen cut a hole through to the other side.)
The girl, Sailor, was chubby in the way kids tended to be at that age, her belly distended under her pink t-shirt, her arms and legs like little bread loaves. She did not look like Liliane in any way, but there was something of her there, still. The fascination in her wide-eyed gaze. The quietness with which she padded about the driveway in her jelly shoes, only speaking when Léon asked her a question or made some playful remark.
Each time he went over to the house she would trot out of her room to follow him around.
“She has a crush on you,” her mother said, and laughed, thinking it cute.
Léon had laughed too. But under that mirth, in the ash of his heart, something roiled and wanted, something he had let sleep for so long that he did not question giving it what it asked him for.
Léon soon bought a house on the same street, delighting his new friends, who had now begun to include him in social occasions. They trusted him with their child completely, seeming relieved that he was willing to take her off their hands on a regular basis.
Léon was careful with Sailor, at first. He could not, he knew, move too quickly, nor push her particularly hard when she was this young and fragile. Though Léon wished that he had taken Liliane as his lover far sooner than he had, she’d been uniquely resilient.
Sailor was a very ordinary child. She sulked and had tantrums, cried when she fell and hurt herself, loved fast food and Disney princesses and milkshakes. She was trusting, but volatile; she was not ready for him. He could not love her.
Yet.
Léon took Sailor out with him to playgrounds, movie showings, circuses and parades, suffering this mediocrity for the chance to make himself the favored relative, to touch her back through her miniature denim overalls and her warm knees as he hefted her up on his shoulders to feed on the press of her precious form on his.
Yet in doing so Léon was often stricken with random, venomous bursts of hatred towards Sailor for no other reason than she was not his sister, that she was larger than Liliane had been, impetuous and clinging. At such times he felt that spite rise out of him, heard it from his mouth in remarks that made the child flinch and retreat into wet-eyed silences.
She would hold herself differently, afterwards, suck in her stomach in the outfits he had bought for her to wear—short, flouncing dresses, skirts swinging high above the Band-Aids on her knees. As their relationship expanded Léon understood completely the control he had over Sailor, and would nudge her subtly this way and that, sometimes for his own entertainment, and then specifically to train her to his tastes.
He began to spend time with other girls her age, girls that reminded him of her, and of Liliane, if not in one aspect then in another. Girls that were lacking in confidence, isolated from their peers, easy to bring to him and later press into silence.
Sickly girls in particular had a frail vulnerability to them that Léon found he liked. He had enjoyed it in Liliane: her somber turns of reflection on mortality, the way she would look at herself in mirrors and car windows always with the discomfort of not being a girl the way others were.
Léon hoped that trait would come out in Sailor, if he set things into such delicate motion that her soft mind let him contort it in that way. He saw no reason that it would not. From her mouth he’d heard a longing to marry him; Liliane had never said so much, even when she’d come to Léon, half-orphaned, given up to his keep as though betrothed to him.
He began to crave the intimacy of a marriage, which only the threat of being found out held him from. It did not do so for long.
One night he’d stayed up drinking with Sailor’s parents, watching something with them on the television, and he'd heard the floorboards overhead make the unmistakable sound of motion in the child's room.
Something in the idea of her pacing restlessly, not daring to come down after bedtime in fear of upsetting the cantankerous mother, and still wanting to see Léon, to hear his voice—something in the thought of her rolling uneasily back and forth under her pastel bedding made Léon throb with excitement of a ferocity he couldn’t ignore.
Emboldened by drink, Léon went upstairs with the excuse of wanting to use the bathroom and found his girl, yawning and shy, waiting up for him. She had chocolate around her mouth like a dark lipstick; she would hide candy in a drawer next to her bed which she would eat privately in the night. Her breath was sweet with it as Léon bent down to her.
“Ma belle,” he said. “Pretty girl.”
“Uncle Lee,” said Sailor. “What are you doing up here?”
Her voice was nervous, but then he had taught that into her, never at ease unless he gave her cause to be.
“I needed to see you,” said Léon. “I’ve been thinking about you. Wanting to hold you. You drive me so crazy and you don’t even know.”
There were kisses between these words, which Sailor giggled at, initially, then began to flinch away from, her eyes fluttering in discomfort.
“Uncle Lee,” she said again.
He hushed her, put his hand under the unicorn quilt with the princesses on it he always said looked like Sailor, but didn’t.
“You know I love you,” he said. “I’m gonna take you home to my Maman. I’m gonna give you a ring. You want a ring, cher?”
Léon hung over Sailor, muttering sweet nothings. He felt her become like a graveyard angel beneath him, beautiful and cold, like Liliane had been, like so many girls he’d had before.
She smelled of chocolate, and washed hair, and bed. A child’s scent, light and sweet.
After, when the thrill had run out of him, Léon could only smell himself, his excitement and his shame. He had, perhaps, spoiled it all in a drunken moment. Lost this girl as he had his Lili, who had lived in hatred until—
Until.
Léon touched Sailor’s arm, felt how limp and strangely stiff it was at once.
“Baby,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have waited till we got married. You know what, cherie, I’ll save the rest till then. When you got your ring. You believe me?”
But she only lay on her side, open eyed in the dark, looking through it, away from him.
*
They withdrew from one another, then, he in caution of driving her so far from him that she could not be retrieved, and Sailor in horror of his poor restraint.
As with Liliane her moods tended to darkness. She became surly and argumentative, or else tearful and withdrawn. Adverse to touch and affection of any kind. Avoidant, in time, of eating.
This reflection of Léon’s work in her maintained the attraction that would have gone away as she aged. As with his sister he'd found the point from which real love—abstract from appearances—could form, and did.
Still he did not touch her again, kept to his promise knowing her love hinged on it, trust in her uncle's word. She still lingered in his presence, sometimes, looked at him as though she wished they were still intimate in the innocent way they’d been, and at other times as though she saw right under the act of Leland Frost to Léon Frossard and all that the name entailed.
But if she knew she did not tell. He would have known if she had.
omg ik u must get told this a lot but I love ur writing u describe characters so well. I love ur writing style, so beautiful. As of now, I’m reading ‘manna’ omg literally so good. Your ongoing plots remind me of Laura Palmer (twin peaks in general) such devastating yet portrayed with beauty.
That's so sweet of you, my prose style is polarising in the sense that a lot of people understandably won't have the patience for it, so I'm glad I've found my audience ❤️
And I love Twin Peaks, it's one of my biggest inspirations and something I can watch again and again without ever tiring of it which is unusual for me as I tire of things really easily
