(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]

[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.]