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Lumen Obscura	By : PinkSiamese Category: -Misc TV Shows > Crossovers Views: 1077 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Hannibal or Dexter in any of their incarnations (TV shows, movies, books). I am making no money off this story.

Chapter List
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The light touch of Lumen’s tires on the pavement brings her into the moment. It feels like a dream, the road unspooling beneath her, floating up, like silk, just brushing the undercarriage. Air pours in, tossing her hair, smelling like pine and heat. The wheel hums in her hands.
Once upon a time, she had a dream just like this. A long road, speeding in the dark, a deep woods ahead. Her destination a forest wrapped tight around a steaming hot heart. She was driving. A child appeared in the backseat, small, pale, her knees up beneath a dirty white dress.
A psychiatrist would say, this child, Lumen; she is you. She held Lumen’s dark eyes with her blue ones. “May I have my vitamins when I am at your house?”
Lumen nodded. Smiled. “Yes, of course you can.”
The wind in the windows slashed inside, reeking of hot springs. Shadows rippled onto the little blonde girl’s white face. They loosened her hold on reality, washed her back out into the night.
Here, though, there are no hot springs. Overhead, rushing by though she can’t see them, wanton with summer, stars. The woods rush by, lovely dark and deep.
The tightness in her belly comes. It directs her gaze to the place where the road folds into the earth, a seam of dirty purple light and felted ground.
until he unclothed her in his garage and showed her

how neatly his knife glistened in moonlight
Her lips move around the words. Her hands hold the wheel. Her tongue smoothes them down. Her foot, numb on the pedal. They wait for her voice.
Here she is, back in this cold place, in the familiarity of Owen, an ease bred out of childhood and nurtured by a collection of chipped and dented experiences. The Man Of The House, he is working. They’ve got him on nights, every other week, gone seven p.m. to seven a.m. He leaves their home larger than it should be.
Once upon a time, Owen pursued an English degree. This, fresh out of high school. The grip of literature faded, but left scars.
“Here’s a poem for you,” he said, turning the screen around.
A Serial Killer’s First Day In Medical School.
Lumen felt her flesh, pounded thin and defenseless by the racing of her heart. But, she smiled. Leaned into the words.
“It’s interesting.” He watched her read. “Yes?” He did not read her face. “Gruesome, a bit, but the language. It’s interesting.”
He breathes slowly, his eyes flitting behind closed eyelids,

unable to deal with shriveling, boring sanity,

then he becomes a man with a helpless twitch
How to say Owen, I have knives that I bought in Miami, just before I left. They were very expensive. How to say I keep them in a velvet roll, their sleek little bodies waiting to gleam? How do I say that on nights when the air is humid and thunder mutters over the distant water, when you are sleeping or gone On The Night Shift, I take them out? Hold them? Watch the lightning flicker in their stillness? How to explain that I run my tongue along their dull spines while fantasizing about the sharp side, a whisper of pain, the taste of my own blood?
“Yes,” she had said. “Interesting.”
Lumen looks out the window. Leans one hand out, the wind in her eyes. She weaves her fingers into the slipstream. Her hair flutters around her neck.
“His dead people were warm people,” she whispers. “a few moments ago, whose hearts terrified were pumping iron. Like convulsive lashing of a drowning man.”
*             *             *
Outside, the air is so soft. Hot. She shivers.
Her first time, the man didn’t know what to do. In the blue and pink and purple dark, trapped there, his breath heavy with beer and the calluses on his hands all wrong.
Tonight’s bar is not the same bar. It is too modern, like a kitchen or a morgue, all bare gleaming surfaces.
She had liked the way he looked from the back. That first man. The cut of his shoulders, the way his neck disappeared into the sharp cotton collar. The reddish hue of his close-cropped hair was good but his hips were better. She watched him walk, gliding through blue light, heavy backbeats. The rhythm of his body flooded her mouth.
Lumen strides out of the car. The parking lot sparkles with broken glass. Each strike of her heels ignites a spark inside her guts.
She passes through blood red doors. Refrigerated air falls upon her skin, heavy. It does not stir with the passage of bodies but instead remains limp, passive. She takes a seat at the bar, glances at herself in the mirror.
She waits.
Her skin numbs to the temperature. She holds her drink. There are eyes on her, coming out of the corners, moving through the cultured light, taking her measure. They are not what she needs. She looks into her glass: bubbles and ice and mutilated light.
She becomes more aware of the noise, the low hubbub of it, murmuring, rolling up against the walls when an accented male voice unfolds from it. “Do you know the story of Sif?”
Lumen turns her head. The man’s hand gathers up the thickness of her hair. First she sees a suit, its color the deepest blue, its cut bespoke. The quality of the fabric is gentle, lush, kind to the skin. The soft weight of her hair moves through his fingers. “In the old legends of the Norse, her hair was as wheat in the sun.”
He has a strange face. High, prominent cheekbones. His dark hair sweeps across his forehead in a wave. Eyes like shaded bedroom windows. His mouth is overripe.
He settles onto the stool beside her. “The trickster god, he came to her and cut it while she slept.”
She twitches her shoulders, turns away. “Don’t touch me.”
“What are you here for?”
She glances at him. “I’m bored.”
He orders a glass of wine. “Me too.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d prefer to be bored by myself.”
He salutes her with his wine glass. “Ignore me, then.”
She counts the bottles behind the bar. She smells him, the heat of his body, a collection of subtle fragrances murmuring of money. She sits up, sucks down the last of her drink. Ice rattles.
“Would you like another?”
Lumen shakes her head. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.” She laughs, turns toward him. “This fucking piano music.”
His eyebrows lift.
“Look, dude, clearly I’m in the wrong place.” She picks up her purse. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I should get out of here. I’ll just…go.”
“You were hunting,” he murmurs, “following the scent of something, all the way to this place, yet you found yourself in the wrong place.” He meets her eyes. “Yes?”
Her mouth fills with the tinny taste of her pounding heart. “Uh—yeah, I guess so. Maybe.” She studies his face. “Do I know you?”
He sips his wine. “What do you want?” He sets the glass down. “What is it you’re…” He pauses. “Hunting for?”
She leans back, drapes her arm on the bar. She smiles a little. “A good time?”
He looks into her eyes. “And what makes, for you, a good time?”
“I…” Heat rolls through her. “I guess I know it when I see it.”
“Unusual,” he says. “Most people have no idea what they’re looking at.”
“Are you staying here?”
He looks around. “At the hotel? Yes.” He nods. “But you…you are not.”
“No.” She crosses her legs. She tilts her head. “But what makes you so sure?”
“You’re not dressed for it.”
Lumen opens her mouth. She sighs. “Okay.” She shoulders her purse. “Look, I suppose it’s the height of entertainment to you to insult me…but me, you know, it’s not working. For me.” Her feet hit the floor. “So have a good night.”
“What I meant is that you’re dressed as though you’re looking for companionship,” he said. “Not as though you’ve spent the last two days in a seminar on the psychopathology of adults, which is precisely what most of the people in this bar have been doing.”
“You mean I’m dressed as though I’m looking for sex.”
He finishes off his wine. “Sex is a form of companionship, is it not?”
“Are you trying to pick me up?”
“Yes.”
“Then cut to the chase, will you?”
“What is your name?”
“Lumen.” She folds her arms. “No last names.”
When he smiles his strange beauty cracks, the angles softening. It carries the dark eyes, the red lips, into warmth. “Do you mean as in intraluminal? That space within the vessels where the blood flows?”
“No, as in units of visible light.”
“Of course.” He holds out his hand. “Hannibal.”
She takes it. “So…you’ve spent the last two days in a seminar on the psychopathology of adults?”
He inclines his head. “Guilty, I’m afraid.”
“What do you do?”
“I am a forensic psychiatrist.” He lifts her hand to his mouth. “What about you?” He kisses her knuckles. “What do you do?”
She blushes. “Nothing anywhere near that interesting.” She pulls her hand away. “After the intraluminal comment, I would’ve guessed something more medical.”
“I did attend medical school.”
…to sand down the imperfections in the room,

in the young teacher whose age much lesser

than the number of nails he has driven into necks and spines
Lumen shivers. “So, are we going anywhere?” She glances around. “I don’t know how I feel about this bar.”
“Yes, you do.”
She meets his gaze. “All right.” She licks her lips. “It’s cold.”
“Go on.”
“Like a morgue. The A/C in here is out of control. Even the lighting seems...designed to flatter pale skin.”
He chuckles. “Then we should go.”
“Yeah.”
He offers his hand. “Come.”
*             *             *
That first time, with that first man, Lumen kept her eyes closed. She allowed herself to drown, in sound, in frantic fingers. Music so loud she could not hear her own breath. Stink of cigarettes. Hot air wet with perspiration.
She drove a long time that night, so long the roads were gone, the sky, the trees, until she was alone in her abjection, naked, her skin clawed away by tears, her veins throbbing their ferocity into the crystalline cold air.
Swing her hips against it, shatter. Falling snow. Eyes swollen tight against the cold.
The parking lot looked warm. The neon, too.
Light poured out into the blackness, flickering like a fire.
*             *             *
The word forensic lodges itself in her. She breathes on it and it starts to glow.
Lumen walks with Hannibal through the bar. His palm is warm, soft and smooth.
The lobby is huge and open, its recessed lights like hot gold, huge and garish paintings splayed across the walls. Faces, lips, all stylized, deconstructed, laid out like insects pinned to corkboards, flowers torn apart into still-lifes. Tears floating on faces. White hands. Broken leaves. They are the night turned inside out, stardust shaken loose onto deep fields of black velvet.
The walls are white. The ceilings are white. The floors are long hard rivers of polished milk, the doorways sewn of bridal silk. There is so much light.
He pushes a button to open the elevator doors. Once inside, surrounded by mirrors, he uses a key.
Smooth momentum flows into her feet.
She watches him, split apart into facets. The precise gleam of his hair. The light inside the elevator is weak, it is cool but not cold, it sharpens everything. The blue of his suit reveals the lines of a subtle plaid. His shirt pale, not white but close to it, a gray the color of water. The tie an iron blade dividing his chest. His hands are long, symmetrical, veins like vines.
“No last names,” he says. “What else?”
She stares at her own reflection. “I’ll make it up as I go.”
He gathers up a handful of her hair. Gooseflesh prickles her scalp. He leans in a little. Her mouth opens. “Cherries,” he murmurs. “Cherries and wood, with a little something.” He lowers her hair, watches her eyes in the mirror. “Gardenia?”
She turns her face toward him. “I don’t know.”
He strokes her hair between his fingers. “Tell me about yourself.”
She watches. “If I don’t want to?”
“Lie.”
“What’s the point, then?”
He drops his hand. “I assure you, Lumen, that lies are nonetheless very telling.”
“If I were to say to you that I am a murderer,” she says, watching him step behind her, “that I have killed, what sort of thing does that say to you?”
Hannibal glances at the reflection of her face. “I would explore, in my mind, how a revelation like that would benefit you.”
“And?”
He pauses, smiles a little. “Are you trying to shock me?”
“I don’t know.” She lifts her chin. “Am I?”
He murmurs into her hair. “Why don’t you try again?”
“Could I shock you?”
He brings his lips to her ear. “I doubt it very much.”
A hot little shiver trickles down her spine. “Okay,” she sighs. “I used to work at a bank.”
“Did you like it?”
“No.”
The elevator doors slide open.
*             *             *
Deep woods, broken beer bottles, big trucks. Blood had flown through the air of this place, trampled into the gravel. It was a story told by grimy fists.
Big men in a small space, a collection of women crumpled and tossed into the corners. They perched on stools like leftover bits of tinsel and cheap ribbon, flashy, sad. A veil of smoke hung on the blue and pink and purple light. Their half-melted eyes moved behind it, darting after the rhythm of her legs.
The jukebox wailed out the hardships of life.
He came out of the throng, a velvet Elvis, a crude portrait drawn in slashes of acid light with a cartoon sticker for a face. She went to him. Let the music push her body around. She put a finger on his mouth and grinned.
I don’t even want to know your name.
He crammed her inside a bathroom stall and held her up by her thighs. The small of her back thumped hard, sticky, against the paint.
The knife in her purse flickered. It burned a long cold vigil.
*             *             *
“Make yourself at home,” he says.
Lumen slides her purse off her shoulder. A tin lamp casts a net of shadow across the white ceiling. The floorboards are black; they gleam with a low sheen. The furniture is geometric, cream-colored. All of the table tops are made of glass. Recessed lighting pools brightness around paintings, spare little groups of furniture. Floor to ceiling windows frame the night sky.
Hannibal walks to a small wet bar. “Would you like anything to drink?”
“Water.” The space amplifies the slow click of her shoes. “Ice. Lime, If you’ve got it.”
“I do,” he says.
At the wall of windows, she stops. Beyond them is a long deck arranged with sleek patio furniture. In the distance, lightning stutters and flashes.
“Here you are.”
“Thank you. It was the word forensic.” She looks out the windows. She sips. “That means you study serial killers, right?”
He moves away from her. “Yes.”
“That’s where I came up with it.” She glances at him. “The murder thing.”
He takes a seat at the end of a white sectional. He leans back, crosses his legs. “I suspected as much.”
She shrugs. “The bank thing I made up out of whole cloth.”
He drapes an arm along the tops of the cushions. “Go on.”
“I never worked for a bank.” She turns her back on the panorama. “I haven’t worked for almost a year. I have a master’s degree in sociology. I used to work for Planned Parenthood.”
“Was that rewarding for you?”
“No.” She shook her head. “There was never enough money and it’s like…it’s like people are just, I don’t know, devoted to being cattle. They want to be led around. They crave it.” She takes a sip. “They have no interest in education. The thought of responsibility…the weight of it…it terrifies them. You can smell the fear.”
He glances at her mouth. “On the parents? On the children?” He looks into her eyes. “The adult patients?”
“On all of them.” She drifts toward him. “The workers too. The doctors. Nurses.”
“It made you angry.”
She sets her water on the coffee table. “Yes.”
He tilts his head. “Does it make you angry still?”
“No. Why should it?”
“You haven’t worked in nearly a year.”
She folds her arms. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
She turns away. “I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore.”
“Why don’t you tell me about your murders, then.”
She looks over her shoulder. “The murders that aren’t real?”
He smiles. “Yes.”
“They were men. They did bad things to me.”
“How many?”
She moves closer to him. “Two.”
“Do you know that it would take three murders to classify you as a serial killer?”
Lumen dumps her purse in a chair. She steps out of her shoes. “Really?”
“Yes.”
She sits beside him, her knees tight together. “I guess you learn something new every day.”
“What sort of bad things?”
“Rape.” She sucks in a breath. “Torture. They were going to kill me…but I got away.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
Lightning flashes. Shadows jitter and disappear.
“Killing them?” She studies his face.
“Yes, Lumen. The ending of their lives.” Hannibal lowers his voice. “Did you enjoy it?”
“Would it make me a monster if I did?”
“No. You would be a woman thankful to return to a sense of safety.” He watches his finger as he traces the crest of her shoulder blade. “It is only human to desire the restoration of your world.”
She closes her eyes. Beyond the glass, the gentle humming silence of the room, the slow even measure of his breath, the first drops of water strike the deck. He traces the round of her shoulder and her mouth opens on a trembling breath.
“I had a...a boyfriend,” she whispers.
“Yes?”
“He was special.”
He runs a light fingertip along the length of her collarbone. It unzips her spine, rains gooseflesh down her limbs.
“Do you miss him?”
A boom of thunder pushes aside all sound, leaves a pulse of sizzling adrenaline in its wake. It burns off until her skin begins to sing.
“I-I don’t…I’m not sure, I do sometimes, but it’s not like that.” Lumen swallows. “It’s not simple. It’s more c-complicated.”
He moves her hair aside. “What did he do for you, Lumen?”
“He killed,” she whispers.
Hannibal leans in. “These men you spoke of.” His lips brush her neck. “They are not fictions.”
She exhales in a hot rush. “No.”
He slides a hand up her thigh and the fabric of her dress is restless, slippery. He worms his fingers beneath it, squeezes hot skin. She arches a little.
“He is the one that you hunt for in the night. Some shadow of him, this man who killed, who bled them of their power to wound, to maim, to kill.” He nuzzles her cheek and his breath quickens. “Some…taste, of this man. You hunger for it.”
She pushes his hand up her skirt. He runs his thumb along the seam of her pussy. She grabs his forearm.
“Yes,” she breathes. “Yes.”
“Lumen.”
“Yes!”
“Open your eyes.”
The rain draws silver contrails on his skin. Outside, the wind flings itself against the glass. His eyes, dark, without stars, drowse their way into her body. Lightning flickers, tracing the shapes of the bones beneath. His gaze is bold like velvet. His lips tremble close; his breath washes over her, smells of earth, honey, dreaming grapes.
“Kiss me.”
She presses her mouth against his, tight, like it’s a wound, as though she’s bleeding from her voice. With tender fingers, he removes first one earring and then the other.
“Come to bed,” he whispers.
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Lumen Obscura