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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
- 18
- 19
- 20
“God, let me out of this car,” she says, pushing the door open. She turns her knees and sticks her leg out, scrapes the pavement with her heel. She glances at him. “You coming?”
“Yeah.” Will climbs out of the car.
Lumen stands. She shoves the door closed, takes a couple of steps toward the dunes. The wind blows through the silk, ripples it on her skin. Buried in the dark, the glittering of the fabric becomes winter stars reflected in deep water. She holds her hair away from her face. She gathers it, lifts it up off the back of her neck. She turns her face into the wind. “So what did you want to talk about?”
“What?”
She turns. “What did you want to talk about?” Her eyes gleam black in the bruised light. “You said earlier, on the phone, that you wanted to talk to me.”
“I…” Will closes the car door. He scratches the back of his head. “Yeah.” He shrugs. “I wonder.”
She drops her hair. She watches him. “Okay.”
He circles around the back of the car. “I…I spend a lot of time just…thinking, wondering about things. I guess you could say that’s what I’m paid to do, really,” he says, mouth twisting into a brief smile, “when you strip away all the fancy jargon. I get paid to wonder.”
Lumen takes a step. She turns her back on the sea. “Yeah?”
“And…”
Will reaches out. Lumen steps back, hesitates; he closes the gap between them, touches a tiny scar on the outermost curve of her collarbone. It lies flush, a white butterfly wing afloat on currents of moonlight. Lumen watches him trace the outline of it with a fingertip.
“I wonder about these,” he murmurs.
“You noticed my scars?”
He looks into her eyes, nods. “Yes.”
Lumen sighs. Her mouth slants to one side. “Of course you did.”
“Yeah.”
She tilts her head and the color of her mouth disappears into shadow. “Does it matter to you?”
“I think it does.” He nods. “Yeah. It matters to me.”
“That’s not all, though. Is it.”
“No.” Will moves his hands over her shoulders, slides them down to cup the backs of her arms. Wind blows her hair into her face, wraps long strands around her neck. “I want to know…I-I want to know what you’ve done to think that I would have any professional interest in you.”
“Okay.” She cuts her eyes away. “If I don’t want to tell you?”
He lowers his voice. “Would you permit me to guess?”
Lumen looks at him. She searches his eyes and he glances away, drops his hands. Her eyes narrow. He stuffs his hands into his pockets.
“You mean permit you to do your job.”
Will looks past her. Her words sting in his face the way a slap would. He presses his lips together. He watches the silhouettes of palms move in the dark, the tips of their fronds limned in moonlight.
Lumen touches his jaw. “You…” She turns his face toward hers and her eyebrows draw together. “You want to profile me.”
He closes his eyes, nods. Opens them. “Yeah.”
She turns her hips away from him and folds her arms. A shadow passes through her eyes, changing the shape of her gaze. He watches them soften, yield. “Am I…” She swallows. “Am I going to like this?”
“I-I don’t know. No. Probably not. I don’t know.” Will sighs, shakes his head. “I don’t have to, we can just…” He waves a hand. “Forget it.”
“No.” She steps back. “Okay.” Her mouth presses into a sharp line. She holds his gaze, lifts her chin. “Fine.” She nods. “Go ahead.”
“You don’t have to. I don’t have to. It was just…a thought.”
“No.” Lumen’s eyes are on his face. “No.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“This is you, and I want to see it.” She tips up her chin, her mouth tight. “Do your thing, Will.”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll do it.”
Wind gusts between them, burdened with a scent of salt and flowers. He closes his eyes, lets out a breath.
“The scars are the way in,” Will murmurs, “and these scars you have, you’re not shy about them. Dexter knows their story, Hannibal knows their story, things leave…” His mouth quirks. “A signature, a belt, a whip, a piece of wire, a switch cut from a tree, the physics are the same: the tip of the instrument travels exponentially faster than the hand that does the casting.”
He listens to the deepening of Lumen’s breath, her heat and humidity leaving her body, the work of her lungs a slow deep pull in the darkness. Muscles jump and flutter in her throat, her lips; they carve subtle patterns into the air’s flow.
“I-It breaks the skin.” He swallows. “In a predictable pattern but your pattern it crisscrosses your back in layers, one wound overlaying another, wherever you were, however you were held, in what chains, in what spaces, you didn’t sleep, you didn’t eat and the skin became compromised. You were held so long that the skin became compromised. The first wounds struggled to heal beneath the infliction of the last wounds.”
Her breath ramps up. Will opens his eyes. She flinches.
“But there was more than one. Yes? Each wound tells its own story, independent of the others. Each scar belongs to a different hand. How many? How many men? I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “Three? Four? Five?”
Lumen looks at him with wet eyes, jaws clenched. She hugs her waist. Her chin trembles. She lets her tears fall.
“You were so…”
He lowers his voice, clears it. He reaches for her hands. She steps back.
“So green, so fresh, so raw. Naked. Lost. An abandoned girl stranded on a beach, at a bar, looking around, set adrift. You had no anchor. You broke your chains, let them rust. It was so easy for them to come along and pull you, exhausted, out of the water. So tired. Worn out,” he whispers. “You had been treading water for so long.”
Lumen’s mouth trembles; her face twists in on itself. The sight stabs him in the gut. She lets loose a harsh sob, claps a hand over her mouth.
“Shhhh, it’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s okay.” Will pries her hand away from her mouth. With his fingers he wipes her cheeks. “Shhhh. Take your hand off there. Now breathe.”
She nods, draws in a deep shuddery breath. Holds it. He takes her face into his hands. Her body folds in on itself. The daytime sun burns, feverish, trapped in her wet cheekbones. The red skin whispers of the beach.
“Of course you were tired,” he sighs. “It’s hard to tear down a life, to burn it, turn the earth, salt it over, run as far away from the ruins as you can. Childhood, those first steps, what you’ve picked up over the course of a lifetime, it dies hard. You were so good for so long. You did everything you were told and believed that what you were building with your obedience was…was a stronghold, a safe place, a fertile place, a place to grow and…a-and bloom, and thrive, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. Sometimes family is a lie. There was no view. No air. No sun. You had no wings,” he whispers, “because there was no room for them to open.”
“No.” Lumen wipes her nose. She moves into his arms, up against him; she surrounds him like a wave, a trembling current. Her fingers tangle into the roots of his hair, cast a sharp net of gooseflesh across the surface of his skin. “There wasn’t.”
“What happened to you, it wasn’t a punishment handed down by God. This was nothing noble, nothing divine, it wasn’t karma. There’s no riddle for you to solve. There’s no message.” He tightens his arms around her, gathers silk into his hands. He smells cherries and gardenia trapped in her hair. Breathing slow, breathing hard, she brings her lips to his throat. He buries his mouth in her hair. “You killed them,” he whispers.
Lumen’s breathing stops. She stiffens, her body jerks and when she pulls back he grabs her wrists, holds her still.
“You did it, you ended them, it’s the only thing,” he whispers, “you killed them, you took them out, maybe you drugged them, lured them, you got them alone, cut them out of the pack one by one and put something in their drinks and then…then…”
Lumen grunts, struggles against him. He tightens his grip until she whimpers, until she opens her mouth and pants against his shoulder.
“You had an axe, or something,” he murmurs, “a machete, it was the kind of thing that feels so good when you swing it. You kill him when he’s down. You need the movement, the work of trembling muscles.”
She lunges, knocks him off-balance. Will shoves her arms behind her back, hugs her tight. His mouth hovers over her ear.
“You had to push the rage through or it wouldn’t come out,” he bares his teeth, grinds his voice into gravel, “and there was so…much…rage, how dare they, those animals, they trapped you, they killed you.”
Lumen arches her back, cries out.
“They picked at your corpse until you couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream, until there was nothing left.”
She pants. “Let…go…of…me!”
“It’s like labor, though, right? All that rage, you’ve gotta work with it, you gotta let your body tell you when to push.”
“No!”
“It’s a lot of hard work to butcher a man,” he rubs his face into her hair, his voice is silky, “it takes so much rage to get through all the bones. It takes so long to pick up the pieces. There’s lots of swamp down here in Florida. Whole lotta water that no one ever sees. Did you drag those pieces onto a boat, take it out, past the mangroves, the cypress trees, underneath the moss…did you feed the pieces of him, of them, to the gators? You let the soil drink his blood?”
She catches his neck in her teeth and bites down. Pain rushes him, comes like a weight and makes his breath tremble, makes it shallow.
“The water, he sea,” he half-whispers, half-moans, “the waves, under the waves, in the sea, the current, the Gulf stream, gone. Scattered limb from limb, bone from bone, the flesh is gone, it’s food for sharks, no one will ever find them, not so much as a…a-ah…oh God,” he gasps, “that hurts…fuck, I-I think you’re…I think you’re…” His voice breaks; he struggles to catch his breath. “You’re hurting me, you’re gonna break my skin, you’re gonna…do you…do you want me to bleed in your mouth?”
Lumen bites harder. He cries out, the pain breaks open, it hums in his blood. His muscles tighten, his cock a hard line against his thigh, runaway pulse trapped in a dark corner. The pain of her teeth crawls, burns, throbs. She writhes. He pins her wrists tight to the small of her back.
“You liked it,” Will growls, pants, “the blood so red up to your elbows, thin silk gloves, delicate garments stitched of blood and sweat, a knife …y-you needed that, the blood, the pulse, the way it vibrates up the blade throbs the metal until there’s nothing left, not a drop, not a…twitch. You milked out that last breath and kept it for yourself while the skin, the bones, the blame got cast…into…the sea and I don’t blame you, I don’t, it’s a heavy price to take back your nights, it’s a tax carried around, dragged from place to place, a bag of bones, chains to keep them quiet, padlocks to keep them safe and you ask anyone who ever queued up to sit inside a tiny glass room and watch a man get strapped down to a table and they will tell you: it’s a heavy damn price and the only thing that pays it is death.”
He swallows. His hands twitch. Her heart pounds against his, flutters like a rabbit’s. He lets go of her wrists. She licks the wound. He breathes through his mouth.
“I drew a little blood,” she murmurs, “but only a little.”
He closes his eyes. “I’m glad they’re dead.”
“I’m glad they’re dead, too.”
“I’m not sorry.” Will looks into her face. “You asked for it.”
“Fine.” Lumen looks up. “I’m not sorry I bit you.” She slides her hand down, palms his crotch. “You’re not either.”
He takes gentle hold of her wrist. “No.”
“Aren’t you afraid I might kill you, too?” With a light finger, she traces the shape of his cock. “We are very alone out here.”
Will’s breath flutters. “No.”
Lumen lifts her eyebrows. She starts to smile. “No?”
He covers her hand with his. “No.”
She tilts her head. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing.” He shrugs. “It’s not like you’ve confessed or anything.”
She nods. “I suppose that’s true.”
He gives a brief smile. “There’s no supposition involved.”
Lumen steps away, turns toward the water. She looks back, keeps her eyes on his face. “Are you going to show me your crime scene?”
He lifts his eyebrows. “Do you want me to?”
“If it’s something you want to do. If not…” She shrugs. “I’m not sure what else we’re doing here.”
Will starts to walk. She steps ahead of him, reaches behind her. She takes hold of his fingers and moves through the heavy blue dark like a thought, a sinuous shadow. He takes her hand. At the edge of the parking lot, she eases the high heels off her feet and loops them over her fingers.
“The sand is still warm,” she says.
The wind blows through the thick brush and rakes his hair off his forehead. The water shifts, black and glinting beneath a sky full of stars.
“It’s a long walk,” he says.
She looks at him. “How long?”
“About a mile. Let’s move closer to the water. It’s easier.”
Lumen lifts the hem of her dress off the sand. “This thing is going to get so wet.”
Will stops. He begins to unbutton his shirt. “Take it off.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” He shrugs out of his shirt. “Take it off. Wear this instead.” He holds it out. “There’s no one here to see you.”
“What should I do about the dress?”
He turns, sweeps his arm at a row of beach loungers. “Leave it on one of those. The shoes too. We’ll grab them on our way back through.”
“Okay.”
She glances away, smiles a little. Will watches her as she tosses the shoes onto the sand and shrugs out of her thin straps. She wraps his shirt around her shoulders. The wind flattens it to her body and she turns her back, threads her arms into the sleeves. The pushes the dress down and it slides past her hips.
“I’ve got it,” he says, bending over to pick it up.
“Thank you.” Lumen looks down, buttons up the shirt. “I’ll get the shoes.”
He shakes the sand out of the silk, holds it out into the vigorous wind. He drapes it over his arm, the silk is thin as a whisper, soft as the evening. The dress is still warm. He carries it to one of the empty loungers. Lumen follows, she wipes the sand off her shoes and uses them to hold down the gown.
“Better?”
She nods. “Yeah.”
He watches her walk down to the water. “You’ve got a lot of confidence in your body,” he says. “More than I would have thought. More than what is…usual, for a woman. I’ve seen it before.”
She turns. “Seen what?”
“It happens sometimes when a woman kills a man. The way she walks, the way she carries herself, the way her body moves…it changes.”
“How so?”
“It’s looser.” He shrugs. “It takes up more space. Some would probably say that it becomes more masculine but it doesn’t.” He looks at her face. “It’s just become more predatory.”
“Are you trying to be an asshole?”
“No.” Will puts his hands in his pockets. “I’m trying to be honest.” He glances at her mouth. “I can stop if you’d like.”
“Part of me wants to take you up on that offer.” Lumen wades into the shallow water. “But the rest of me is too intrigued.”
“Honesty intrigues you?”
“Yeah.” She chuckles. “It does. You know how rare honesty is? I mean real honesty, not selective honesty, but I guess you probably do know how rare honesty is, whether it’s real or partial or total or whatever.”
“No one tells the truth in my line of work.”
Lumen looks into his eyes, her mouth moves like it’s starting to grin but can’t decide whether or not a smile would be welcome. She draws a circle in the hair beneath his navel. “Except for you.”
“Yeah.” He pulls his belly in. “Except for me.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Not exactly.” Will exhales in a rush. “It’s ticklish.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
Gooseflesh ripples up his back. “Yes. No.” He puts a hand over hers. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I like it but there’s too much of it.” His breathing slows. “I have to…I have to get used to it.” He glances away, lowers his voice. “No one’s touched me in a long time. Well…” He shrugs. He looks at her. “Not like that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He lets out a sharp sigh. “Really.”
“Sorry.” She holds up her hands. “If you want me to stop, I’ll stop.”
“I didn’t say that.”
She lifts an eyebrow. Her mouth softens. “You didn’t.”
He shakes his head. “No.”
Lumen puts a hand over his navel. She watches her fingers rise and fall with his breath. “Is that okay?”
“Yes,” he murmurs. “That’s okay.”
“If I move…”
Will sucks in breath. “Yeah, that’s what does it. The…uh, hair.”
“It transmits sensation.”
He watches her hair, how the wind sifts through it. “That is a thing that hair does.”
“I told Hannibal. I told him about…” Lumen trails off, looks toward the water. “I talked about what happened. I didn’t give him a lot of detail…but I did tell him.”
“I know.” Her hand burns hot on his skin. “He thinks he’s made that knowledge into a hook and I think he’s tried to use it on you.” He puts his hand beneath the tails of his shirt, runs it down the curve of her hip. He follows the line of her nape with his eyes. “He underestimated you, though.”
Lumen looks at him, studies his face.
He looks into her eyes. “Your ability to wriggle free.”
“Yes.”
“There’s no catching you unless you want to be caught.”
“Yeah,” she sighs, moving hair out of her face. “He’s…”
Will runs both hands up over her waist. “Manipulative?”
“Very.” She looks down the beach. “How much further?”
“Why do you want to see the crime scene?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “Why not?”
“By now it’s not going to look like much of anything. You should know that. It’s just beach, and more beach.”
“Did you want to show it to me?”
“I’m willing to,” he says, “but that was not my design.”
Lumen walks, takes slow steps. Her ankles cut into the shallow water. She glances over. “Your design?”
He puts his hands in his pockets. “My intent.” He looks down, watches the water break against her feet. “I’m not going to get any specific benefit out of showing you, but I’ll do it if it will bring you satisfaction.” He looks at her. “I enjoy your satisfaction very much.”
“Ah, yes.” She laughs. “I imagine you do.”
He smiles. “Uh huh.”
“Did you think I wanted to fuck you on it?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugs, glances toward the dunes. “It crossed my mind, yeah.”
“It crossed mine, too.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s weird. Everything about this is weird. It could be, it could’ve been, the…I don’t know, the crowning weirdness. A finale event.” Lumen tucks hair behind her ears. “There’s always that drive to find symbolic meaning in things, the idea that symbolism makes something more meaningful. You find it, use it to freeze a moment in time, to fix it in your memory, like a bug in amber. There, in Florida, that time I fucked a guy at a crime scene. On a night far enough away from Miami to leave the light pollution behind, here: look, the stars, the purple sky, here is the wind coming in off the water and the sand is still warm beneath your feet, and you did this thing because…I don’t know, the night called for it. From a future standpoint, looking back, it might’ve had meaning even if it’s not obvious now. Especially if it’s not obvious now.”
Will looks at her. “You’re not sure what else to do.”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I’m not.” She chuckles. “I didn’t even know I was going to do this.”
“What, come with me here?” He grins. “Suck me off in the car?”
“Leave with you.” She gestures at the horizon. “Abandon Hannibal in the middle of his grand gesture.” She chuckles. “Yeah, suck you off in the car, while you’re driving, that wasn’t my design. I mean, it wasn’t until I did it.”
“Spur of the moment doesn’t count as a design.”
She laughs. “I didn’t think so.”
“Did you hope the crime scene might tell you what you’re doing here?”
Lumen sighs, looks up at the stars. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s a thing to do.”
“A reason to walk down the beach, in the dark, and talk. In the dark. Where it’s easy.”
“It is easy to talk in the dark, but it didn’t have to be this dark.” She looks at him. “You were driving. Why come here? Why here, of all places? Why not go back to your hotel room?”
“I didn’t know sex was going to be involved. In lieu of any knowledge of that nature, taking you back to my room seemed both presumptuous and weird. And…creepy. Like the only reason I’d want to be alone with you is for that. I didn’t want you to think that because it’s not true.” Will shrugs. “And I like the beach.”
“Fair point.”
“Not that I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not. I’ve, uh, been thinking about you since that day on the side of the highway.”
“So you said.” She watches the water roll up onto the sand. “Or texted, rather.”
“Why did you follow me?”
“I don’t know.” Lumen shrugs a shoulder. “I wanted to. I can’t explain why I wanted to. I think…I think I wanted to feel safe and thought that following you would make me feel safe. I’d know where you were. I’d know if you were following me or not. That sounds so stupid when I say it out loud, oh my God, but…” She rubs her face with both hands. “Yeah.” She glances at him. “There it is.” She lets out a bitter laugh. “There’s my stupid for you.”
“I don’t think you sound stupid.”
“You still scare me. You…arouse me. Not just physically, though, yeah…yeah. There’s a lot of that. Um. I…don’t think I’ve ever been this honest with anyone before, so give me a break, I have no idea what I’m doing.”
Will remains quiet.
“You…you make me feel things I don’t have names for. I know it’s dangerous, that I shouldn’t be here, with you, that I shouldn’t even be talking to you let alone doing…other things, with you, but I don’t care, and I don’t care, and I just don’t care. I try to, you know, to make myself do the right things and think the right things, but being near you makes me impulsive and stupid and I just keep coming back, even when you told me not to. I want to see you, I have this…need, to see you, I want to fill my eyes with you, I want to fill my skin, my mouth. With you. It’s stupid and wrong and I know it’s wrong but I just…” She flings out her arms, gives a hard little shrug. “Can’t seem to help it. There. Is that honest enough for you? Should I look you in the eye and say it? You said you wanted that, you wanted me to look you in the eye. Will that make it real?”
“No,” he says quietly. “I don’t think so. I think it’s real enough.”
“What if I want to?”
Lumen steps up, stands between him and the horizon; she looks into his eyes, holds them, he turns his head and she takes hold of his jaw and turns his eyes back to hers. In the blue, in the drift of waterborne darkness, her eyes are black, they’ve abandoned their rich brown to the shadows and when he looks into them he sees a weight of black that is like the warm tropical sky they stand beneath. Their blackness spreads over his skin, it bears down on him, he tries to look away but she will not suffer the absence of his gaze, she takes it all, drinks it down, pours him into herself; she tugs his regard into her flesh, makes it into an anchor.
“I fear you,” she says. “I fear your ability to turn my desire against me, I fear your ability to make me say things I don’t want to say, your ability to coax them out of me. To seduce them out of me because yeah, it wouldn’t take much, the right look, the right tone. You don’t even know. I’ll tell you what it feels like, though. It’s like you’re gonna reach inside and pull it out of me like it’s a surgery, you’re going to cut out my heart and split it open and read the rings inside its walls like it’s a story of my life because it is, it is the story of my life, the most secret story, and if you want it you don’t even have to do that because I’ll just…give it to you.” She breathes hard through her nose, her eyes on his. The corners of her mouth tremble. “That is what makes you dangerous.”
“There are many things that make me dangerous.”
She turns away, wipes her mouth. She takes in a deep breath and shakes her head a little, starts back down the beach.
“Hey.” He takes a step. “Where are you going?”
“Back to the car.” She glances over her shoulder. “I think it’s time to leave.”
Will watches her walk away. She keeps close to the waterline. Her feet carve deep divots in the pale sand. Water wells up from beneath, slow, it fills her heel prints. The thin waves spill into the holes left behind by her toes, erode them smooth.
“Wait.”
She doesn’t. Light reflects off the wet sand, carves the shape of her into shadow. Her hair unfurls into ribbons; the wind tosses it past her shoulders, toward the land.
“Lumen, wait!” He strides after her. “Will you slow down?”
“No. I won’t.”
“I don’t know what to say to you.” He reaches out, grazes her shoulder with his fingers. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I just…don’t. I have to think. I’m sorry.”
“I just want to go home, Will. I’m tired.” She laughs and it’s thin, ragged. “I’ve had a very long week.”
“I know.” He moves alongside her. “I have too.”
“Like many things in my life, this was a mistake.” She looks down the beach, looks at the sand. She hugs herself. “I’m sorry for dragging you into my shit.”
“You didn’t drag me anywhere. Me being here has nothing to do with you. I mean…me being in Florida to begin with. I’m here because of my job. That you’re here too is a coincidence.”
“It is,” she says. “No, I don’t know anything about these murders, before you ask.”
“I wasn’t going to. I know you don’t.” Will touches the small of her back, lowers his voice. “Would you please slow down?”
Lumen turns toward him, her arms folded across her chest. She stops. She lifts her eyebrows.
“I said slow down, not stop.” A smile twitches across his mouth. “But if you want to stop, I guess it will do.”
She sighs. “What?”
“Nothing.” He puts his hands in his pockets. “I just…I don’t want you running away from me.”
She tips her head back, lets out a breath. The tightness of her stance wilts. “I’m not running, I’m…” She looks at him, shakes her head. She smiles a little. “Walking fast. I don’t know.”
“If you want me to take you home, I will.”
“Take me to my home, or take me to yours?”
He shrugs, holds her gaze. “Whichever.”
“Okay.” She lets her arms drop. “Okay.” She looks around. “Let’s go.”
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Lumen Obscura