silverusagi

Word Count: 4400
Genre: Slash, Drama
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence

Summary: Sequel to When the Devil Smiles Back. Three years after Hannibal Lecter’s escape in Memphis, Clarice profiles Will Graham. From there, nothing at all goes as expected.

-----

1

Clarice Starling had a box in her closet that she never opened.

On the plane back from Belvedere, she had taken out a notebook and furiously scribbled, writing down everything she could remember from her conversation with Dr. Lecter and Will Graham. From there, the words flowed backwards, and she continued, describing her first meeting with Will, and anything else she could think of about either of them. She only stopped writing when the plane landed.

When she got home, she took the notes and reports she had made after her initial conversations with Dr. Lecter, put them in the new notebook, and shoved it all in the box she kept her old college essays in.

And then she forgot about it.

At least, she didn’t think about it, which was nearly the same thing.

-----

Time passed.

Her career was off to a promising start, and while nothing she worked on was as high profile as the Buffalo Bill case, she had more than enough to keep her busy. She contributed to profiles, pored over forensic reports, and was soon being assigned cases of her own. She began to have a high solve rate, and Crawford didn’t hold back on giving her the tricky ones, new agent though she was.

What he didn’t do, somewhat to her surprise, was give her anything related to Dr. Lecter.

The one time she asked about it, he said, “Catching Hannibal Lecter isn’t your concern.”

“I just thought, since I had experience with him—”

“No,” Crawford said, not glancing up from the papers on his desk. “You got away from him. Leave it at that.”

“It’s my job to—”

“Your job is whatever I say it is,” Crawford barked, head snapping up.

Clarice nodded. “Yes, sir.”

He sobered slightly. “Listen up, Starling, because I’m only going to say this once. I’m not losing you to him, too.”

Clarice knew that he had lost others, and she knew that it had brought his own career under scrutiny and himself under reprimand. She’d known that Crawford had a rocky career before she started the program at the Academy, but she hadn’t known the finer details until a few months ago, when an offhand comment she heard in passing prompted her to do some in depth research of her own.

When she’d discovered that he had misused his position and had sent people after Dr. Lecter in an unofficial capacity, it hadn’t exactly shocked her, but it had made Clarice more aware of how she fell into that pattern. But she didn’t hold the past against Crawford; if anything the knowledge had solidified her own principles. She would do her job without question, but she wouldn’t be party to anything underhanded in the future, no matter who asked.

But there was nothing suspect about the current situation, and part of her felt like Crawford was now overcompensating for having risked her initially.

“I have no intention of being lost,” Clarice said. “And with all due respect, sir, your job isn’t to protect me from doing mine.”

He sighed. “Sit down, Starling.”

She did so.

“With Hannibal, it’s always been personal for me,” he said slowly. “I can admit that. Sometimes, I can’t see past that. And that’s gotten all of us to where we are today—which is with Hannibal loose,” he emphasized. “If I want another shot at catching him, it has to be by the book. Or I’ll be gone for good this time and my only legacy will be a footnote in his twisted story.

“And on a more practical level,” Crawford continued, “you’re a profiler. We don’t need a profile of Hannibal Lecter. What we need is a tip. And when we get a tip, we’re not going to send a profiler; we’re going to send a SWAT team. That’s assuming Hannibal is even in the country, which I doubt. Then, even if we get a tip, it becomes a matter of inter-agency cooperation.”

Clarice processed that, unable to find fault with anything he’d said. “Have there been tips?” she asked.

“Barely any in the six months since Hannibal’s escape in Memphis, and all of them were bogus. They know how to disappear, and they’re not leaving any traces.”

There was no question of who ‘they’ referred to.

“All right,” Clarice finally said. “I shouldn’t have pressed, but thank you for explaining yourself.”

Crawford nodded. “Hannibal Lecter is at the top of the wanted list, but we have nothing to investigate unless we get a legitimate lead. When we do, I’ll assign it to someone. It might be you, it might be another agent—whoever I feel is best equipped for the job.”

“I understand.”

And she did, when it was framed like that. There were new bodies to process every week, and active murders they had evidence on took priority over chasing ghosts overseas.

Clarice wasn’t one to dwell on negatives, and she found more than enough satisfaction from catching the killers that she could catch without worrying about the ones she couldn’t. Crawford’s mistake had been to make it personal, and she wouldn’t do that. Dr. Lecter needed to be caught, but she couldn’t let solving any case become her life.

Ironically, that advice had come straight from Dr. Lecter.

-----

Time passed.

There were cases, and killers, and eventually, a promotion. It was a title change and a slight raise, though her daily work wouldn’t be changing at all. But it was recognition, and while based on her collective efforts, it came after the successful apprehension of a particularly gruesome killer.

Now the day was over and she and Ardelia sat in Clarice’s living room sharing a bottle of celebratory wine.

They had worked together several times during Clarice’s first few weeks as an official agent. Ardelia was someone Clarice had known in her classes, though they had never been more than acquaintances in passing then.

But she had been pleased to quickly hit it off with Ardelia. They worked well together professionally, and had soon become good friends in general. In the two years since, Clarice could easily say that Ardelia was her best friend, just as she was Ardelia’s.

“One more?” Ardelia asked, reaching for the wine bottle with a smile.

“Why not?” Clarice said, holding her glass out. Almost half the bottle was gone, but it wasn’t like either of them had to work tomorrow.

Ardelia topped off Clarice’s glass before refilling her own.

“So,” Ardelia said, “since we’ve already celebrated your commendation and are definitely going to finish this bottle, we should move on to something that’s more fun to talk about while getting drunk.”

“Like what?”

Ardelia smiled. “Deep dark secrets?”

Clarice laughed, her head rolling back. “Secrets about what?”

“You. Me.” She shrugged. “Anything secret.”

“I don’t have any secrets.”

Ardelia looked unimpressed. “Everyone has secrets. And you know all of mine!”

“I’ve never done anything.”

Ardelia raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, Ardelia,” Clarice said, taking a drink. “I’ve got nothing. If you’re looking for something like me stealing a car when I was sixteen, you’re going to be disappointed.”

“First, it was my boyfriend’s car, and he said I could borrow it anytime.” Ardelia grinned. “He just didn’t know I would end up taking that literally. And his parents didn’t know at all. Hence the confusion. I was never—”

“—never charged, I know. But—” Clarice spread her hands, “—I’m boring compared to you. I never even snuck into a movie without buying a ticket. You grow up in an orphanage, you either break all the rules, or you become terrified of breaking them. I think somehow I thought that if I did something wrong there, I’d end up somewhere even worse.”

“Okay,” Ardelia said, trying to lighten the mood. “It doesn’t have to be something bad or something you did, just something big, something no one else knows. You have to have something.”

Clarice mulled it over. The only thing she could think of was the story of the night she ran away from the ranch, and that wasn’t big or bad, just personal. But she wasn’t opposed to telling Ardelia about it. It would probably do her good to actually share it with someone; it was a something she had kept locked away, something she had only spoken about once— Clarice’s train of thought immediately halted, another thought occurring to her.

She took another drink of wine, a long one, as she turned it over in her head.

When she went for too long without speaking, Ardelia snapped her fingers in Clarice’s direction.

Clarice refocused, still considering. “I suppose it goes without saying that nothing leaves this room?”

Ardelia nodded, leaning forward expectantly.

“Well, there is one thing,” Clarice said. “Though it’s not something no one else knows, and I’m not sure it’s technically a secret. I just… don’t talk about it.”

Ardelia looked like she was resigning herself to hearing disappointing gossip. She gave Clarice a good-natured grin. “You’re not really selling this, you know.”

Clarice met Ardelia’s gaze, pressing her lips together before they turned up in a slow smile. She realized that even though she considered her ‘conversation’ as simply something that had happened in her life, objectively, it ventured into the unbelievable.

“If I shock you enough,” Clarice said, “you have to buy us the next bottle.”

“Fine, but don’t hold your breath.”

Clarice took another drink of wine, before looking Ardelia dead in the eye and saying, “I’ve been alone in a room with Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham.”

For a second, Ardelia didn’t have a reaction. Then she laughed. “Right. Good one.”

“No, really. You know I met Dr. Lecter when he was in prison,” Clarice said, matter-of-fact. “Well, he found me after that.”

Ardelia’s brows rose almost to her hairline and her mouth fell open. “You can’t be serious.” She set her glass down on the coffee table.

Clarice nodded. “I’m dead serious. I sat across a table from both of them, and I walked away in one piece.”

“How?” Ardelia asked, stark disbelief stamped across her face. “When?”

“In Belvedere. The day after I caught Buffalo Bill.” Clarice’s solving of the Buffalo Bill case was well known; the fact that she had consulted Dr. Lecter was less well known, but was in the records for anyone who cared to find it. “They found me right after Dr. Lecter’s escape. The three of us had the conversation Dr. Lecter wanted to have, and then they left together. And that was it.”

Ardelia still looked stunned. “Hannibal Lecter just skipped out on killing a perfectly good FBI agent?”

“Thanks,” Clarice said dryly.

“You know what I mean. No offense, but you dead would have been the perfect way to top off his escape.”

“Crawford said as much,” Clarice said, taking another sip. “Dr. Lecter said to my face that he didn’t have a reason to kill me.” She paused. “I think he would have considered it rude. Or maybe I just amused him.”

“Are you profiling Hannibal Lecter now?” Ardelia’s tone was half-teasing, half-serious. “Because maybe you should be.”

“I don’t pretend to understand him. There’s only one person who does, and he’s certainly not going to be writing any papers on the subject.”

“Well, you must understand something. You’re still here.”

“He found me interesting.” Clarice gave a slight shrug. “Things either interest him or they don’t. And there’s no understanding or predicting that.”

Only a fool would claim to be an authority on Dr. Lecter, and even though Clarice had navigated him well enough, she had no aspirations to share her experiences or to claim that they were in any way replicable. Beyond being polite, she couldn’t point to anything she had done that made him decide he preferred her alive.

“Well,” Clarice said after a moment of silence. “I guess this qualifies as a good secret, then?”

“Yes,” Ardelia said. “I can’t believe you’ve never told anyone this before. Are you under a gag order?”

“No.” Clarice hadn’t spoken to anyone about her last meeting with Dr. Lecter, not since that morning in Belvedere when she had told Crawford. He had been serious when he’d said that he would be the last person she discussed Dr. Lecter with, as he’d flatly informed her that her formal report shouldn’t contain anything beyond the Buffalo Bill case and her encounter with Will Graham at Gumb’s.

“So, why is it a secret then?” Ardelia asked, picking up her own glass again and taking a drink. “You could probably get something for a story like that.”

Clarice stared at the wine in her glass. “Dr. Lecter’s attention is… uncomfortable, even when it’s benign. I’m not going to do anything to make him think of me more.” She didn’t think that talking publicly about her interactions with him and Will would be enough to bring him to call on her, but she wasn’t about to do so.

Ardelia raised a brow. “More? Does that mean he thinks of you now?”

Clarice stared at her glass, frowning at the lapse she’d made. She was starting to get too intoxicated for this conversation.

“Clarice.”

“He sends me Christmas cards,” she said. The cards never contained any personal message, and were tasteful and expensive, with typical season’s greetings printed on them. But they were always signed.

Ardelia’s mouth fell open again. “Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

Ardelia took Clarice’s glass and set it down. “All right, you have to tell me everything. Starting with Buffalo Bill.”

Clarice did.

She skipped over the bare facts of the Buffalo Bill case, which Ardelia already knew. Instead, she spoke of her original meetings with Dr. Lecter in a broader sense—how he had acted, how he had asked for personal information about her. How he had abducted and drugged her in Belvedere solely to finish that conversation. Clarice told her what they had talked about, even relating the story of the lambs. She told her how neither Dr. Lecter nor Will Graham had shown any interest in killing her, and how at the end, they had simply left.

In a way, it was a strange relief just to tell someone. She had never felt particularly burdened by any of it, but the simple act of saying it out loud felt good.

Ardelia stared at her in rapt attention throughout, never once interrupting. When Clarice was done, Ardelia slowly blinked, exhaled, and then looked at the glass she held in her own hand, before taking a drink and finishing it.

“If I didn’t know you,” Ardelia finally said, “I’d accuse you of making that entire thing up. But,” she continued, “I’m definitely going to have to buy you a bottle of wine. Maybe two. Jesus, you’ll have to show me the Christmas card this year.”

There was a pause. “Well,” Clarice said, “I still have the others.”

Ardelia gaped at that and demanded to see them. Clarice led her to the bedroom, and dug the box out of her closet. The cards were on top, the box only having been opened in the last two years to toss them in.

She passed the envelopes to Ardelia.

Ardelia slowly opened the first one, pulling the card out and opening it to stare at the signature. Then she laid it down in front of her on the carpet before repeating the process with the other one.

When both cards were spread before her, Ardelia stared at them for a moment before giving a minuscule shake of her head. “Hannibal the Cannibal sent these. You actually have mail from Hannibal Lecter. Personal mail.” Ardelia gaped at the cards again. She had clearly believed every word Clarice had spoken, but it was like seeing something physical had driven the story home. “Jesus, Clarice, doesn’t this worry you?”

“No.”

Clarice had never truly worried, though the continuing one-sided correspondence had been slightly unsettling. She imagined that was half the fun of it for him—it was a polite formality that he enjoyed observing, with the added amusement that it wouldn’t be entirely welcome to the recipient.

“Why not?” Ardelia asked, her expression one of horrified concern. “Because it should.”

“He never includes a recipe,” Clarice said bluntly. “With the others, he does.” Both Drs. duMaurier and Bloom received cards from Dr. Lecter under the care of the FBI. They were stored and never forwarded, with prior permission from the addressees, who had long stopped having regular mailing addresses.

“You said you didn’t understand him. What if you don’t understand this?”

“What I understand is that he had the opportunity to kill me and he didn’t. The last time I saw him, I was helpless. He engineered that, and he left it at that. These?” she said, gesturing at the cards, “These aren’t a threat; they’re his idea of fun.”

Ardelia still looked dubious.

“There was also this,” Clarice said, pulling out the note she’d received after her graduation, where Dr. Lecter had said that their paths wouldn’t cross again.

Ardelia took it, opening the envelope and reading the message on the paper inside. She pressed her lips together, then exhaled heavily. “Does Crawford know about all this?”

“He knows about everything that happened in Belvedere.”

Clarice had never mentioned the cards. They had seemed strangely personal. She was aware that thinking of anything as personal was not entirely recommended, but it was almost like the cards had been a courtesy in their own way.

More than that, she hadn’t wanted there to be cards. Telling someone they existed would be admitting that Dr. Lecter still thought of her. She had assumed that he would forget about her entirely, having more interesting things to occupy his time, and she didn’t quite know what to make of the fact that that hadn’t been the case.

Ardelia picked up the cards, carefully putting them back in their envelopes and handing them to Clarice.

“I can’t say that this seems like anything other than dangerous,” Ardelia said. “But… I suppose I’ll have to defer to your expertise.”

“I’m not an exp—”

“Apparently you are,” Ardelia cut her off, giving her a completely serious look. “Maybe you don’t understand him clinically, but you understand him in relation to you. You survived—that’s not nothing.”

Clarice put the cards back in the box, her eyes falling on the notebook that she hadn’t opened since she wrote it. For the first time in years, she wondered exactly what it said.

“Have you ever tried to profile him?” Ardelia asked.

“Profiling him won’t help catch him,” Clarice said. “There are dozens of profiles on Dr. Lecter.”

“But have you tried? Or even written something up, just for yourself, as an exercise?”

“No, I haven’t.” Clarice stared at the notebook, which was a transcription of dialogue from memory, but nothing more. “Maybe I should.”

-----

Clarice did not start on a profile of Dr. Lecter immediately.

It was hardly a priority, but more than that, she knew she needed to be in the right headspace to work on it. On a night two weeks later, she pulled out the notebook she’d written, curled up on her couch, and began to read.

It was strange, revisiting things she hadn’t closely examined in years. While her memory was accurate, and she found nothing to challenge her overall impression of the experience, reading over conversations that were in some cases nearly word for word was an interesting exercise. Clarice was glad that she’d had the foresight at the time to make a record. There was nothing she read that she didn’t remember once prompted, and it all seemed very familiar as she went through it, but it wasn’t something she could have created from memory today.

Once finished with the notebook and all that it contained, Clarice set it aside and took out a new pad of paper and a pen. She made a few immediate observations in bullet format at the top of the page.

Then she stared blankly at what she’d written, unsure of where to go from there.

Part of the problem was that she was doing the profile backwards. Her job entailed looking at crime scenes and looking at victims, and using the evidence left behind to narrow down the characteristics of the person behind the acts, to hopefully predict their pattern and lead to their arrest.

This was not that. She wasn’t looking at Dr. Lecter’s patterns; she was looking at Dr. Lecter himself.

Clarice clicked her pen several times, not able to find anything to say other than the obvious. That was the problem; everything that could be said about him had been said. Right or wrong, it had all been said. And while Clarice flattered herself that she could manage to write things about him that were correct, she found herself unable to come up with anything other than a bare list of facts.

A list of facts did not make a profile, and they certainly didn’t show understanding.

She sighed and put the notebooks away, deciding to try another time. Sometimes she did her best thinking when she wasn’t actively thinking; maybe all she needed to do was let her brain reflect on things by itself for a while.

For the rest of the evening, she didn’t think of Dr. Lecter once. She made dinner and went through her nightly routine.

When she was brushing her teeth, she had the idle thought that doing the profile was wasting her time. There were already dozens of profiles of Dr. Lecter. There was no point in doing another unless it was going to help catch him, and a profile wasn’t going to help catch him. He had no traceable motive, and if he was caught, it would be because of dumb luck.

Dumb luck or Will Graham.

Clarice blinked, having the proverbial light bulb moment.

Obviously Will Graham was not going to catch him this time, but an idea had been triggered. What she needed to be doing was profiling Will Graham.

-----

The next night, Clarice was at her kitchen table, her notebook and papers spread before her. She had the urge to work, as well as the familiar spark of inspiration that she got when she knew she was onto something.

She started ripping pages out of the notebook, putting them into two piles: information on Will Graham, and information not on Will Graham. Everything that was related solely to Dr. Lecter or their conversations about her, she put into another folder and placed to the side. Then she began reading the pages that mentioned Will, highlighting anything that stuck out at her and spreading the pages over the table.

While she didn’t have proof, Clarice recognized that Will was a killer. What she needed to figure out was what type of killer he was. Dr. Lecter couldn’t be traced, but he was with Will, and perhaps Will could be.

When she was done, Clarice looked at the pages arranged before her, eyes skimming over the highlighted parts as she tried to put together the pieces.

Will had done something brutal to Jame Gumb, and what he had said to her at Gumb’s house could only be interpreted to mean that he had originally intended to kill Gumb himself. Her own observations about Will at the time had been that he was incredibly intelligent and effortlessly manipulative. As such, there was surprisingly little that was of use to her from her own conversations with him. He had danced around issues and in several cases flatly refused to answer her questions.

He and Dr. Lecter spoke a language they both understood, and she had been on the edge of it in Belvedere. The three of them had exchanged words, but some of the points that they had traded between themselves seemed just beyond her reach. Will had shown no interest in killing her, but a great deal of interest in killing Jame Gumb. But the same could be said for Dr. Lecter in a way, and Will didn’t have Dr. Lecter’s whimsy. What she needed to figure out was why Will was interested in one but not the other.

Clarice pored over her notes again, considering each point she had marked and mentally weighing it. She copied down several lines that struck her as important onto a new page.

Clicking her pen several times, Clarice looked over her work. An image was beginning to form in her head, a profile that seemed incredibly likely.

It wasn’t anything Will had said. But perhaps it was somewhat fitting that the two lines that solidified her theory had come straight from Dr. Lecter.

‘This killer would have been too much for Will to ignore.’

‘Will would get nothing from killing you.’

The first had been in reference to Gumb, and the last had followed Dr. Lecter’s comments that the only reason to kill was to achieve a desired end.

If Will would have gotten nothing from killing her, what would he have gotten from killing Gumb? Her gut response was satisfaction. Will had wanted to satisfy something, or he wouldn’t have mutilated Gumb’s body the way he had. And it was definitely situational, or simply taking apart any body would have done for him.

Clarice realized that when she’d encountered Will in Memphis he had been hunting Gumb. He hadn’t just been looking into the case, he hadn’t been drawn back into catching killers because of a national headline—he’d been hunting Gumb as surely as any killer hunts their victims.

Buffalo Bill had been too much for Will to ignore because he’d been sensational, because he had been the worst serial killer since the Tooth Fairy.

Will enjoyed killing other killers.

It wasn’t an entirely surprising conclusion to draw, given that he was former law enforcement. On her pad, Clarice wrote:

Will Graham = Vigilante

She stared at it a moment. It was close, but not quite right. On the surface, his actions might look like those of a vigilante, but the motivation seemed wrong. After another moment, she crossed it out and wrote:

Will Graham = Righteous killer

Clarice clicked her pen again, then underlined the words with satisfaction.

It was an excellent starting point.