(no subject)

[anewlanguage]

[PRIVATE to DEAN and IRIS]

Bring me up to date on these murders. I was assuming they're like all the other slash and run numbers we get when it's too quiet, but sounds like people are all on edge about this one.

[PUBLIC]

Hey, kitchen staff, I say we get a little festive.

As a globe trotter, I don't really put much meaning to seasons; one hemisphere's fall is another one's scorcher, and all. But hell, maybe it'd help calm down the psychopaths if they had something regimented to focus on. They had some bullshit program like that in the prison I landed myself in back home.

Comments

[routemistress]

[The common perception of hypnosis involves not remembering, not being consciously aware of the process. Iris is capable of doing that, but she doesn't: this is a journey together. Iris' presence is a formless knot of affectionate commentary coiled behind Cain's eyes as they travel over his recollections.

She doesn't communicate in words at this level; it's more like a second set of thoughts, thinking themselves in parallel with Cain's own. She watches Hannibal's hands, chopping and peeling, unobtrusively competent, and she watches his eyes, impenetrably smooth as river stones. The only people who might have seen anything real from this man had already had their eyes dug out; that, she realises now, is what she found creepy, the too-perfect blandness of his disguise, calculated to the finest degree not to arouse suspicion.

She's impressed without admiring: so much groundwork, so much intelligence, put in service to such a pointless end. Such a tortuous way to pump his ego. No doubt he thinks of that, too, as a gourmet: it needs the equivalent of forcefed geese to satisfy it.

She's aware, too, of the undercurrent of wordless, pitiless curiosity: she shares it, to some extent, because learning what would break this man would be a valuable thing to know. She's not repelled at it; but she wouldn't approach Hannibal that way and she doesn't want Cain to. Zane's words come back to her, and she holds the shining memory of Zane's uncomplicated insight: it would be letting him win, and she knows it for truth. Hannibal wouldn't be the first to accept death and torture as a price for the equal damage done to his torturer. He'd use it to foster an unwanted intimacy. We can do better, Iris thinks, and she doesn't mean that in kindness or compassion; she means they can come up with something far more efficient, that if/when they choose to attack him, they need to choose a different battleground.]

[anewlanguage]

[This is the way he would have preferred it. He knows something about hypnosis, about dreams and trances, but not much about how to share them. He's heard it's possible, but has never had real need for it. His job is to shoot holes in heads, not to investigate them.

He reaches much the same conclusion. Hannibal has been doing this a very long time. Probably, in Cain's expert opinion, his whole life. Children aren't so innocent, and given the right combination of chemicals and environment they can become violent criminals before they even understand mathematics.

Yes. We can.

Frankly, the challenge excites him in a way his work once had.]

[routemistress]

[This is a large part of why Iris is pursuing this herself. It's perfectly true that her enthusiasm and interest is engaged in the actual objective: Hannibal is fascinating in his own right as a case study and the crime prevention angle is largely a convenient excuse for a bloodless dissection.

But Iris rarely comes at anything with only a single motive, and Cain himself is a stronger one for her. They both know holes in heads can't be the job he does going forward; they both know he's too vital, too sharp to take well to retirement.

And she loves working with him, loves his sharp sense of purpose and his curious intelligence and the clean ruthless energy of his mind. She's no less focused than he; but Iris is never entirely singleminded either, and her pleasure bubbles irrepressibly round the edges of the work, colouring all of it in the scent of champagne and white ginger.

What triggers Hannibal, she wonders - none of Cain's memories cover seeing him with his victims. What mixture of opportunity and desire selected those specific people for him?

She picks up his excitement and echoes it in her own mind. She'll go through the comm records, talk to the Emperor (the most resilient of the targets, and there's a brief sideportrait in her own memories of the complex, fascinating depth of him; he's become dear to her in his own right).

She's excited now, too, and that expresses itself as a shiver of her mind down the nerves of his spine. This is her kind of hunt; it's delightful to discover, as she fully expected to, that Cain's specific skills translate so well to it.]

[anewlanguage]

[He's thinking about the Hannibal under the mask, the one who butchered and cooked his victims. Does he smile when he does it? Is it literally a trophy hunt, or does he view it as dispassionately as a mountain man skinning a rabbit?

Think he gets real pissed off sometimes? I wonder when he's happiest.]