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wastrelwoods · 1 year

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Do you have any more stories with Abigail? Your story with the college party was really good and now I want more

not to be a requests guy but it turns out sometimes a nice ask is all it takes to get me fervently drafting up an idea i was meaning to write many moons ago YEAH i got more ABIGAIL for ya! hell yeah i do!

Abigail’s first visitor brings her flowers.

Her throat hurts inside and out, all at once a sharp pain and a strange numbness. The raspy ache of extubation, the dull prickle of stitched-together skin. It makes her feel like a paper doll. Rips and tears all patched up with tape, the edges not meeting quite where they should.

Her vision has been foggy in the brief drifting snatches of time she can keep her eyes open. For a moment, she thinks the figure silhouetted in the doorway is her father.

“Expecting someone else?” he asks. She doesn’t recognize him. It’s hard to remember if she ought to. Thoughts come like the slow drip of syrup out of a bottle. Once the foggy quality of her vision ebbs a little she can piece together his features in more detail, but the only one that stands out is a blotchy red mark on one cheek. A port-wine stain or a scar left behind where a birthmark was removed, maybe. Something it would be rude to stare too long at.

Hannibal always said smell was the sense most closely tied to memory. Abigail closes her eyes and inhales, long and slow and shaky. Under the heavy floral perfume of the lilies in his arms he smells like soap and unfamiliar hair gel and cologne applied with a heavy hand. Hannibal always wore cologne, and hair gel too. She thought it made him smell strange and formal. It reminded her of a cathedral, of the single Catholic mass she remembers attending while visiting cousins in Naperville. The starched stiffness of a borrowed church dress, the French braid her mother arranged her hair into pulling uncomfortably at her scalp. The liturgy humming in her ears in a language she couldn’t understand, echoing off the high vaulted ceiling. The big white pillars of the altar looming behind the priest, stained glass saints hovering over his shoulders. Otherworldly and a little frightening. With time that formality managed to become something familiar. Something comforting.

Mostly, the last time she saw him, he smelled like blood.

She opens her mouth and the only thing that comes out is a huff of air, the start of a sound that feels strangely disconnected from the real idea of spoken language. Her mouth knows what it is she means to say, but the thought of the word is foggy, uncertain, lost somewhere the yawning void of all the possible words she could mean to say like a needle in a haystack. The stranger watches her search a little longer as he arranges the flowers in a vase on the table.

“I’m a psychiatrist, Miss Hobbs,” he elaborates. “Not your psychiatrist, of course, but a colleague of hers. Frederick Chilton.”

Not her psychiatrist, of course. Abigail feels her mouth fold into a strange wavering shape, caught between a smile and a frown, before she stumbles with more clarity over the memory of pushing her psychiatrist out a window. The white animal terror of her eyes as she fell backwards, just like a doe hearing the crack of a rifle firing. Just like Nick Boyle looked at her with a knife buried to the hilt in his stomach.

“Dr. Bloom sends–” Chilton stops, tuts softly under his breath and starts over. “Well. I suppose she doesn’t send her regards, but rest assured I believe she would if she could.”

Abigail’s throat burns around a swallow as her breath comes faster in her chest, and this time a sound does slip out of her mouth, high and plaintive. “Did I–?” she asks, and then freezes again, half in shock that she does remember how to speak after all and half in irritation as the last word slips out of her grasp again. Hurt her? She knows that she did. Kill her? That would be tantamount to a confession, and Abigail can’t bear the thought of confessing her sins to this man she doesn’t even know.

Dr. Chilton glances at her, apparently aware enough of her difficulty not to expect her to finish her sentence. He smiles a thin, professional kind of smile. “Alana Bloom is made of resilient stuff. Stubbornness, some might call it. It serves her well when it serves her.” He clicks his tongue again. “It has a tendency to blind her to danger when it does not.”

Something pangs in Abigail’s chest and burns behind her eyes. She feels caught out, unsure if he means to include her in the category of dangerous things or the category of people who should have predicted that they would end up wounded.

She cannot say that she expected Hannibal to turn the knife on her. She can’t say, truthfully, that she was surprised.

“But I did not come here to compare scars or expound I-told-you-so’s,” Chilton hums, briskly changing the subject. She appreciates that he does not seem to be the kind of psychiatrist to sit and stare until she gives the right response. Maybe he would be if Abigail were a little more talkative. He sits in the plastic chair beside the desk and folds his hands in his lap. “We are the survivors, and we cannot change what has already happened to us. We must all decide where we will go from here.”

Abigail exhales again, fantasizing that she can hear the air whistling out between her stitches. And then a little less sure that she is fantasizing, lifting one hand to press her fingers to the hollow of her throat, where there is an odd kind of plastic collar looped around her neck and the intrusive, uncomfortable sensation of a cannula protruding from the skin.

Dr. Chilton raises an eyebrow at her prodding. “I imagine they’ll be ready to remove the tracheostomy sometime in the next few days. I have been advised that you may also experience some long-term effects of cerebral hypoxia. Trouble with balance, vision, speech, that sort of thing. The human brain does a remarkable job at regaining function over time, and young minds are particularly elastic, but I can imagine the frustration nonetheless.”

Abigail stares hard at him. Not quite a glare, but probably verging on it.

Chilton smiles and retrieves the pocket square from his jacket, wiping at the red blotch on his cheek until the makeup smears and the true depth and width of the scar becomes apparent, the particular round puckering of a healed gunshot wound. He pulls at the waterline of his left eye and a contact lens slides out of place, leaving the socket to droop awkwardly over a clouded pupil. The smile droops too as he slides a partial set of dentures out of the same side of his cheek.

“Hannibal Lecter,” he says, the words slurring ever so slightly after the removal of the plate and false teeth, “Set up of one of his patients to put a bullet in my head as I was in the process of being framed for his murders. Both of Alana Bloom’s femurs are currently held together by a magnificent array of plates and screws. Jack Crawford had a two inch piece of glass removed from his neck, in addition to facing forcible retirement from his position at the bureau. Every major vein and artery in your throat was severed with a linoleum knife. He did not intend for any of us to survive the way that we did. We are loose ends.”

Knowing it doesn’t make the words easier to hear. Abigail curls her fingers hard in the scratchy cotton of her hospital gown and stares bleakly at the fluorescent light fixture overhead.

“Will Graham, on the other hand…”

Abigail had been making an effort not to think about Will either. She shuts her eyes against the phantom sensation of his rough fingers cupping her neck, his hoarse sobs in her ear, the wet heat of his blood spilling all over the kitchen floor, soaking his shirt, soaking her where they were curled up side by side, gasping and watching Hannibal walk away and leave them for–

“Dead?” she hears herself ask, in a voice strained with disuse and quiet agony.

Chilton stops. Then he laughs, as if its the funniest thought in the world that Hannibal opening a bloody gash in Will’s stomach as wide as the ones she’s seen used to dress a deer would be enough to kill him. “No, no, quite the opposite, Miss Hobbs. Lecter was careful. He cut Mr. Graham very precisely and left no lasting damage. Missed every major organ, in fact. It was very clear to me that he wanted Will to live.”

Abigail opens her eyes and stares into the blue-white haze of the light overhead a little longer. The coppery tang of blood is still hot and sharp in her nostrils, cloying as it mixes with the sweet aroma of the lilies in the vase. Her vision is going blurry again. She shudders when she recognizes the hot prickling of tears, but Chilton turns away and politely ignores it as the first of them spills over and falls down her cheek to hit the pillow.

“Oh,” she says, after a minute.

Frederick Chilton has replaced the false structures that hold up his drooping face when she glances back again, and his mouth is drawn in a faint sympathetic frown. Whatever psychiatric practice he usually deals in, it must not involve many interactions with children or families. He looks a little out of his depth. “I am sorry,” he says, very softly.

There is a part of Abigail that badly wants his pity, but it is manufactured in the same part of her brain that remembers plucking out sheet music on the harpsichord with a bandage secured over her missing ear, glancing sidelong across the room at Hannibal over and over to gauge his reaction, feeling warm with pleasure when he finally caught her looking and offered a smile tinged with unmistakable pride. She swallows around the ache of the cannula in her throat and shakes her head.

Can I see Will, is what she means to say next, but only the first clicking syllable manages to solidify from intention to sound, air twisting off her tongue to hit her hard palate in a harsh choking rattle and then going silent again. Dr. Chilton watches that spectacle without much hope of discerning it, until she stumbles over the start of just Will’s name on its own instead, shaping her lips into the right position and starting over.

“Mr. Graham is recovering at a separate facility at the moment,” he explains, shifting from the chair with a groan and then propping himself against the back of it. “Or rather I have taken the liberty of transferring you to a private hospital. There has been no small amount of media buzz over Hannibal Lecter’s escape and the victims involved. I thought it would be best to spare you that level of scrutiny.”

There’s something in the way he says it that makes Abigail’s eyes widen in uncertainty. She wonders, all in a quick flash, what Chilton knows. What he blames her for. She braces herself, trying to gauge whether she would be able to run now if she tried, where she would go–

–if there is anywhere left to run. Her head spins when she tries to lift it off the pillow. She hears the sharp uptick in her pulse from the beep of the heart rate monitor.

“It’s only a precaution,” Dr. Chilton says firmly. “If you would let me explain?”

She drops her head back down to the pillow and huffs a long, exhausted sigh.

“We must decide where we go from here,” he repeats with an earnest desperation and a clutch of his knuckles against the back of the chair. “Hannibal Lecter is still at large. As soon as Will is recovered he is bound to go looking for him. Dr. Bloom and Agent Crawford will follow suit, along with every other interested party. It is something of an inevitability. This is a very delicate equation, and there are many factors at play, and the safest move for the both of us would be to stay behind and wait for the situation to resolve itself.”

Something wrenches hard in Abigail’s chest again at the thought of Hannibal halfway across the world and she and Will abandoned to lick their wounds. The wild ache of the universe desperate to reassert itself, to pull the three of them back to where they are supposed to be. It calls back the memory of her first and only night away from home at a sleepaway camp in fifth grade, a sticky June night in a cabin full of strangers where the water in the showers smelled like rotten eggs and the bunkbeds creaked and wailed every time someone tossed or turned or got up in the humid dark to pee. The loneliness had hit her like a softball bat to the stomach, kept her up all night trying to retrace every winding turn the bus had taken between Bloomington and Waupaca, worried that if she couldn’t remember the way she had come she would never get home again.

Hannibal used to make cocoa, if she woke in the middle of the night and came to him. Microwaved Swiss Miss would have done, but he would insist on setting a saucepan on the stovetop, grating the chocolate into the milk, garnishing with nutmeg and orange and a splash of brandy that he added with a flourish and a conspiratorial wink right before he ladled it into a mug to hand to her.

“It is also to your benefit,” Frederick Chilton says, “that you and I are at this moment the only people to know of your survival. You will be quite safe here until Hannibal is dealt with.”

The air hisses out of Abigail’s injured throat in a raspy simulacrum of a laugh, balking at the sheer absurdity of the the holding patterns she finds herself drifting into again and again. Living dead girl, left behind, half one thing and half another, never quite free. When she’s done wheezing to herself and Chilton’s bent closer to check that she isn’t choking to death in her hospital bed, she shuts her eyes again and manages, somehow, to vocalize the word tired.

Dr. Chilton straightens again. She hears the woolen rasp of him smoothing down the lapels of his jacket. “I wish you a very restful recovery, Miss Hobbs,” he says. “Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you need anything at all.”

The door closes after him. This time she can hear the mechanism of the lock being triggered, though it doesn’t bother her much. She traces her fingers idly over every place a tube or wire winds around her or sticks under her skin until she can’t lift them any more, and then she turns her face to the side and looks at the blurry white shape of the flowers by her bedside, sitting off-center in the mouth of the vase.

A loose end, she thinks, with the half-lucid quality of thoughts spilling into daydreams. An inevitability. Something half-finished struggling to reassert itself into fruition. However they finish this, all three of them, it ought to be together.

If Will is going to be the one to find Hannibal, then she will make sure he takes her with him.

#hee hee <3 #primavera au anyone #abigail hobbs #nbc hannibal #my fic #im sure im not gonna post like this all the time #i just thought i cld make it short n sweet #medical cw #apologies i know nothing about. medicine at all but i also insist on trying #fadserver #pigeon post

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