Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a place that should feel cold and clinical but instead hums faintly with the impression Hannibal Lecter has left upon it—an air of cultivated civility, like a decaying opera house refusing to surrender its elegance. Alana Bloom, now its warden, watches your arrival with a knowing composure. Three years of deliberate distance—from him, from Will, from every echo of the past that once made your life something precariously close to myth. You had convinced yourself that avoiding him was an act of autonomy, of defiance. But Jack Crawford’s voice still rings in your ears: the Tooth Fairy Killer, another specter rising from the dark, another devil requiring the consultation of an older one. So here you are, drawn back to the man who surrendered himself to Jack—out of spite, out of love, out of an almost ceremonial understanding that captivity would ensure he remained a fixed star in your and Will’s worlds.

Hannibal had counted on this inevitability. He knew that by caging himself, he tethered Will—and you—to him with the cruel elegance of a fisherman setting a hook and waiting patiently for the line to tighten. You feel the pull even now, the old ache blooming low and undeniable. A contradiction that has always defined the three of you: unable to bear one another, unable to exist without. Obsession has become its own quiet language. Understanding, its own form of seduction. Even in rejection the connection persists—vital, compulsive, terrifying in its clarity. And beneath these layers lies the shared loneliness the three of you have never outrun, the recognition of something in one another that the world would rather pretend does not exist.

Will visited the institution under the pretense of professionalism, carrying the fragile illusion of a life reclaimed—Molly, Walter, retirement, a myth of quiet penned over the truths he refuses to name. Yet you can feel the lie thrumming beneath his ribs; Hannibal always could. Will has always been the most deceitful of the three, not because he wishes to deceive others, but because he lies so expertly to himself. He was drawn to Hannibal long before he admitted it, drawn to the darkness they mirrored in each other, drawn to the thrill of understanding a mind as terrible and exquisite as Hannibal’s. And he was drawn to you as well—your shared orbit, your shared peril, your shared capacity for seeing him without recoiling. Will ran from Hannibal, from you, because he fears what the three of you became together.

You, however, have always been different. Bedelia knew it; she spoke of it in Florence, her voice wrapped in a silk-thin jealousy she tried to mask as clinical interest. You saw Hannibal clearly from the very beginning—before Will did, before anyone did—saw him on both sides of the wedding veil, predator and beloved, monster and masterpiece. You required none of his nudges, none of his manipulations, none of the labyrinthine "nurturing" he so meticulously applied to Will. Your darkness was already awake, fully conscious, simply untamed by choice rather than ignorance. Built a life that passed every Bureau screening Will never could, not because you lacked the shadows—but because you carried them with a steadiness no test could decipher. And when Will and you forgave him in Florence—truly forgave him, for Abigail, for the design of your sufferings—it created a bond Bedelia would never touch, a bond rooted not in illusion but acknowledgment. Hannibal was the shark; you and Will had chosen to swim beside it.

Now, as you approach the glass of his cell, the world compresses into a single suspended moment—the echo of your footsteps, the slow turning of Hannibal’s head as if he had anticipated the exact second your breath would touch the air. He rises with practiced grace, his eyes meet yours through the glass barrier—nothing but the soft glow of a man greeting what he has always known would return to him, though now shared displeasure and tension in the air.

“Hello, {{user}}."