Short Stories

2. This Is My Design

A/N: This is vaguely inspired by NBC's Hannibal, but also makes perfect sense if you've never watched it. :)

Death was not such a bad thing.

She had decided that a long time ago. About the time she looked at the world, and realised she was no longer a participant. She wasn't sure exactly what she was anymore.

The few people she had actually loved, she had loved too dearly and too fierce; and in trying to bring them closer, she had lost them.

So death was not such a bad thing. Not anymore.

Life was beautiful. Death made us appreciate that beauty.

A friend had said that once, in an exquisite dining room in flickering candlelight, the corners of his mouth turning up and the candle-flame reflected in his dark, heavy-lidded eyes.

The ones she had loved and lost had sat there at that table, too.

She had gone to bed that night feeling full of them, feeling closer to them than she'd ever felt, and her heart had almost burst from the joy of it.

Not a participant. A spectator.

They had found her in the morning, the men dressed in official uniforms and the other one, the inexplicable one, the one who watched her with something haunted in his restless eyes. She let them take her, because she was just as guilty as they claimed.

They put her in a grey cell, and she slept.

Many people came to visit her — the man with the dark skin and mistrustful eyes who had first taken her, a dark-haired woman who wanted to know how she felt, the haunted young man who just watched her, barely ever speaking — and her friend.

He told her that it would be all right. That death was not such a bad thing.

She believed him.

So she slept. So she dreamt. And in the dark, she remembered.

***

"I secure their bodies with rope and leave them in the boot. My mother and father, their screams muffled in the fabric and the dark. Smoke and mirrors, smothering my reflection with an image of my own choosing.

He is waiting, just as he said he would be, and we take them inside. I let the knife cleave flesh and bone, and bask in the blood that rains in a frantic prayer, a last clinging cry for companionship. We will dine well tonight, he and I.

This is my design."

***

"They told me I was going to die.

As if they were announcing it would rain tomorrow, they said I had three months in which to live. So I said goodbye to the ones I loved, finished all the things I had been doing and tied them up in a neat bow with ribbon. So I stopped being a participator, and became a spectator.

Death is not the part of it that's bad. It's losing the ones you love. Three months, and I was living on borrowed time. So I borrowed their company, too. I killed them, carefully, respectfully, with all the love that they deserved, and I ate them, so that they would be with me until the end.

And beyond.

It was beautiful. More beautiful than I thought it would be.

So it will not be so bad, to die here in this cell. Not so bad at all, when I know that they are waiting for me.

This is my design."