Chapter Text
THE BODY ELECTRIC
A Fan Fiction
Their relationship has a great deal to do with the penetration of Clarice Starling, which she avidly welcomes and encourages. It has much to do with the envelopment of Hannibal Lecter, far beyond the bounds of his experience. It is possible that Clarice Starling could frighten him. Sex is a splendid structure they add to every day.
Chapter 103 of Hannibal by Thomas Harris
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
“I Sing the Body Electric” - Walt Whitman
We get down every Friday night
Dancin’ and grindin’ in the pale moonlight
Grand Ole Opry, feelin’ all right
Mary prays the rosary for my broken mind
“Body Electric” - Lana Del Rey
PART ONE: THE ART OF FUCKING
Chapter 1
Dr. Hannibal Lecter wouldn’t call it “love making.” Implying that such a hedonistic act was connected to the concept of love was an attempt to make deeper meaning where there was none. When he reflected on the matter, the most appropriate word that came to mind was “fucking.”
Fucking. A crass term, yes, but far more on the nose than “love making.” And, it was the phrase Clarice had chosen when inviting him into her for the first time.
Over the last few months, Lecter had learned how large his blind spot was into the nuanced personal pleasures of fucking. He had believed that his hobbies and other leisurely pursuits fully rounded out the faculties of emotion. His indulgences in art, food, wine, fashion, vehicles, taste-making and the occasional foray into murder had surely fully circled the drain of all pleasure principles.
Sex was complicated in that it required a partner. Furthermore, the commonplace assumption that sex came prepackaged with feelings of love was another roadblock. Sex could threaten his ability to live the secluded, pleasure-filled life he wanted; killing everyone he slept with would have been impractical unless he envied moving frequently and covering tracks.
Simply put, the art of fucking never appealed to Lecter.
When the doctor abducted Special Agent Clarice Starling and nursed her back to health half a year ago, his intentions were utterly asexual. As Clarice resisted his efforts to reverse entropy and bring forth Mischa, like Jesus beckoning to Lazarus inside his tomb, Lecter faced momentary indecision over his captive. He had put real consideration into eating Clarice; he dreamed of what an utterly visceral experience it would have been to feed Paul Krendler and Starling to one another, alive, in a delightfully bloody ménage à trois — complete, perhaps, with a Prosecco and orange sherbet for dessert.
He hadn’t indulged this vision, but it wasn’t because of love. Even seeing Clarice dressed in the bespoke cream Givenchy gown that night, which framed her breasts beautifully in the dining room’s candlelight, was only an experience akin to viewing the Venus de Milo come to life — it was striking to be in the presence of such breathtaking beauty, especially one crafted by his own hands, but it was not seen through the rose-colored glasses of love.
Clarice was the wind that arrives on the cusp of a thunderhead. She was unpredictable. She was insufferable. She was quick-witted. She talked back to him, often preferred a neat glass of whiskey over his Lillet with orange and smoked the rare cigarette when stressed; at his requests to put it out, she would either let out a drag of smoke in his face, or, once, she had burned the starched collar of his white button-up by dashing out the embers on his neck.
After that moment, he had walked inside to their kitchen, pulled out a teacup and dropped it to the floor. It shattered. The white shards remained on the floor until he swept them into the bin. Again, he had considered what a savory meal Starling’s sweetbreads could make. Again, he paused. It wasn’t love. It was, perhaps… respect.
Yes, they had been fucking at this point, but Hannibal the Cannibal had hardly been turned into an obedient church mouse due to it. Clarice knew this. She typically ignored any evidence of his darker passions; once, while stowing away that week’s fresh groceries from the local market, she had carried on a fluid conversation with him while stocking and rearranging the freezer — until she stopped to ask if he could possibly move the decapitated head inside the chest to the freezer in the garage instead to give them more space.
The National Tattler, a sleazy American tabloid that lived up to its reputation, cashed in on the rumors circulating around Starling and Lecter’s disappearances; the paper hadn’t been so successful since their own Freddy Lounds, a reporter who tried to tango with the murderous Red Dragon for fame, had rolled up hot and crispy to the paper’s front doors.
HANNIBAL THE CANNIBAL ABSCONDS WITH FBI’S DEATH ANGEL —
this was the headline hitting stands less than 24 hours after the events at Mason Verger’s estate began leaking into the public eye. The flames of a sexual conspiracy were fanned due to Starling’s close work with Lecter during her pursuit of Jame Gumb and the subsequent rumors that she assisted in the doctor’s prison break out of unrequited love for him.
The editor-in-chief of the Tattler believed the two had died during the Verger catastrophe, so he felt no fear pimping out the could-be couple for coverage during slow weeks — “Lecter and Ex-FBI Agent Starling Spotted on Lover’s Cruise!” “The Monster Takes a Mrs.: Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling Secretly Wed in Vegas?!?” And, Lecter’s personal favorite of the bunch, “Love Bites: Hannibal the Cannibal Bemoans Lovers’ Quarrels in Untraceable Call to the Tattler!”
Lecter and Starling were the new age’s sexy Bigfoot story, spattering the sidebars of every mainstream gossip paper in America and even a few international publications. When there’s no news, anything can be news — and nobody could prove it wrong. Ardelia Mapp, Clarice’s roommate and best friend from the academy, spent many sleepless weeks hunting down any traces of truth behind the headlines, only to come up with smoke. Mapp didn’t put much real stock in the stories, but she hoped that the fantasies were sprouted from a single seed of realism.
Clarice sometimes wondered if the truth of the situation would hurt her more.