Dr. Hannibal Lecter (pitiless_table) wrote in crownplazaic, @ 2020-10-12 22:23:00 |
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Hannibal had been wandering through the candy landscape when he came upon this beautiful grove, the colors practically thrumming, the scent of the sugar trees and candy flowers and lemonade brook wholly pleasant and quite enticing. He was not one to eat anything he was unsure of, even though he was increasingly tempted to just nibble on a buttercup, or just crunch on a sugar twig. Still, he moved on, allowing his other senses to drink their fill. He had walked a little ways when he came upon a little clearing, where the floor was a deep green cushion of moss, dotted by delicate golden mushrooms. Hannibal blinked and stooped down, plucking one of the mushrooms and examining it carefully. It was a Cantharellus cibarius, also known as a chanterelle. He brought it to his nose and closed his eyes as he inhaled its scent, a warm apricot smell infused with a hint of pepper. Perfect. He took a small bite, and the taste was so exquisite that he took another, and another, and another, until he had consumed the entire mushroom. He looked down again at the patch of moss, and tilted his head as he saw the colors of the moss and the mushrooms moving, blurring, other colors blooming forth, until the swirl resolved itself into the Memento Mori mosaic from the chapel at Palermo. He looks up, and the trees stretch toward the sky, arching above him, turning golden and glimmering white, the leaves rearranging into mosaics of saints and apostles, the tree trunks whitening into marble, until he was within the Palatine Chapel. This place was the heart of his mind palace, and he had spent much time within it in the torturous three years that he had been kept isolated within a glass box at Chilton's mental hospital, but never was it this beautiful, this vibrant. Hannibal began to walk down the nave. He heard the sound of a heart beat, and looked to the side, where he saw a body folded up like a heart, like the one he had left in this very chapel for Will to find, drawing him back with his broken heart. The heart was beating, and dripping blood. Looking more closely, he recognized the body by the tattoos. It was the Red Dragon. He turned to look at the other side and there was another heart made from a gruesome human origami. It too was beating and bleeding. A wriggling eel made it clear that this was Mason Verger. Not his kill directly, but might well have been. Another man might have been horrified, but Hannibal was not. He was predominantly proud of his work, of the beauty of these "human" hearts, yet also aware of the deep grief signified by the beating an bleeding. Every beat was a cry for his friend, lost again and perhaps forever, And every drip of blood is a tear. Anyone in the psychedelia forest might come across Hannibal walking slowly through the trees, looking from left to right, seeing things that aren't there, with a smile that is both calm and wistfully sad. When they approach they take a role in his hallucination. What will that be? |