Her vocalizing of his thoughts might have been strange on any other day, but today it felt natural. Somehow right. He didn't think she'd read him, not like River could do. Just that they shared the same knowledge and instinct about their surroundings.
It was refreshing to find somebody who could observe and be a part of and yet not rail against. It felt to Hannibal that she understood just as well as he did that they were here and there was no changing that fact. That they should make the best of the situation. Live with it, change with it. Use it to their advantage. Something that very few actually did. Most of those that he encountered that had been brought instead of born did their best to fight against the City and all that it sent their way. They wanted out. They wanted their friends, their families. Perhaps it was the lack of such that had given him the advantage.
Perhaps it was other things.
Hannibal did not move when she began to play with his hair. He let her do so as she pleased. It could be taken many ways, he supposed. And if a certain girl were to walk upon them, she might have been none too happy about it. But the touch to him was intimacy of a different kind. Two sharing a thing. But the thing was not yet in front of them.
It was coming.
"I am honored." Hannibal looked up at her again, this time for longer. Allowing the side of her hand to brush his cheek as he did so. Baba. There was a Baba in his knowledge of folklore. Something that he had heard children speak of, something he had read about himself. She was Baba Yaga, wise and wicked. Both sides of the same coin. She could offer help to the lost souls, or she could kidnap and consume your children. It did not strike Hannibal as strange, the idea that this Baba before him and the one he had grown up knowing might very well be one and the same. "You are no crone, however."
It had been an understatement, his thought that she was a being of power. She was one of great power. He would be a fool to underestimate her again.
The couple having the picnic had caught his dark attention. Mostly because of their fighting. Their very humanness. The way that each of them became distracted from their lover by such simple things. The others, though, would be just as good for choices. The women who were now spreading themselves into shininess with the oils they put on their flesh to attract the sun. The males who had become brutish in hopes of attracting their attention. But his focus kept returning to the couple.