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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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Lumen falls asleep. Still sniffling, her eyes still leaking, she drifts off and hovers in sleep for awhile, adrift. When she comes to the rain has passed. It’s hot under the blankets, her skin damp with sweat. She sits up, pushes them off.
She looks over. Hannibal is still there, on his side, one arm curled beneath the pillow. The collection of rooms, the orange city lights and neons filtering into their vast darkness, are brimful with silence.
Lumen gets out of bed. Her hair sticks to the side of her face. There are wrinkles pressed into her skin from the sheets. The cool floor eases the soles her feet. She goes into the bathroom; it is a white box, the tiny blue tiles of the bathroom shimmer like a moonlit sea.
She sits down on the toilet, in the dark. She shivers a little. The sound of urine hitting water echoes a little in her head. Her face feels tight, feverish. She flushes the toilet and walks to the sink, looks in the mirror. She sighs. Shadows swallow her mouth, sharpen her eyes into obsidian.
Did he drown in you?
Lumen puts on a robe and walks out onto the deck. The air is cool, damp. Water clings to everything. She puts her hands on the cold rail. The air smells of diesel and leaves. Somewhere distant, a car alarm blasts over and over and over.
The hotel has five floors and peering over the edge produces no vertigo in her; there is no sudden strange desire to jump. She thinks there should be, that there could be. And why not? She is elevated, not so high as other buildings but far enough off the ground to forget herself. There are no windows close to her. Only squares of light, far enough away to be reduced to their brightness, and the color of the sky: deep glassy blue.
“For you.”
She turns. Hannibal is there, wearing a robe, with a glass of ice water with lime in his hand. She takes it. Smiles a little. “Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
She takes a sip. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
He studies her face. “What will you do?”
She shrugs, glances off to one side. “I don’t know. Go home, I guess.”
“Stay.”
She drinks down half the glass. She wipes her mouth. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I don’t think it is.”
“It is very late already. The sun will be up soon.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Allow me to buy you breakfast.”
“It’s…it’s a drive. Not as long as it could be.” Lumen studies his face. “I never intended to spend the night away from home.”
“The sun will rise within the hour.”
“I suppose it will, yes.”
“Please.” A slight smile settles into his face, reflects in his eyes. “Allow me this small gesture.”
She holds the glass by her face. She looks into his eyes, but she does not drink.
He holds her gaze. “Will you stay?”
“Do you think that I wanted him to drown?”
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Desire is made up of many faces. One bears the urge to destroy. But that is only one face.”
“I don’t know if he drowned.” She takes a sip. “But he may have wanted to. I think there is a part of Dexter that has always wanted to die.”
“There is a part of everyone that wants to die.”
“Yes.”
Lumen pulls her robe tighter, it’s raw outside, the air has an edge to it sharpened by the darkest hour of the morning.
“It’s too cold out here. Come back to bed.”
“I like it.”
He holds out his hand. “You’re shivering.”
“I’m okay. Really.” She grins. “We Minnesota girls are tough.”
“Do you remember the Minnesota Shrike?”
“Yeah.” Lumen takes his hand. “Everyone does. Why?”
“I assisted the FBI with that case.”
She takes a step toward him. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“That was the one with…”
“The cannibalism. Yes.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.” She glances at the door. “What I was going to say is, that was the one with the antlers.”
“Yes. That too.”
She looks at him. “All those parallels with hunting.”
“He wanted nothing to go to waste.”
“That’s…I want to say it’s disgusting, the cannibalism especially…but in reality it’s almost admirable.”
“Do you think so?”
“The level of dedication to finding a use for every part of the…the body? Yes.” She looks him over. “Our society is very wasteful.”
He inclines his head. “That it is. Shall we?”
“Yes.”
As they walk back inside, the eastern horizon hazes into a shade of gunmetal gray. The light is gray too; it falls across the floor like ash.
“Do you want to sleep?”
Lumen shrugs out of the robe. “I want to try.”
“You’re cold.” He runs a finger down the outside of her arm. “To the touch, even.”
“I’ll be all right.”
Lumen climbs into the bed. She turns onto her side, tucks the pillow beneath her cheek. She looks out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Hannibal draws the heavy drapes.
He gets into bed, pulls the blankets up over her shoulders. He brings himself close, the heat of his skin pouring into hers. He puts an arm around her.
“You Minnesota girls are very cold,” he murmurs into her hair.
She shivers and laughs. “Only on the outside.”
Lumen closes her eyes. The empty silence of the room settles around her, falls in gentle drifts atop the rhythm of Hannibal’s breath. The bed warms up, heat drowsing its way into her blood.
She thinks about the sky, rain slithering down the other side of the glass and making contrails of the light. She sees it, flickering, the image filtered through darkness. She wants to move but her body feels too heavy.
Dreaming. I’m starting to dream.
She closes her eyes again. She drifts in the darkness for a long time before she rising up into a flickering light. She slides out from beneath the ponderous weight of her limbs and opens her eyes. She sits up. The bedroom is lit with silver, it spills up from the living room where the curtains are still open and oscillates against the white walls. A breeze blows up past the bed; the air is soft, she feels its silken warmth flutter against her skin. It stirs the curtains away from the windows.
Lumen pushes back the covers. She wings her legs over. The floor is buried in rose petals. Their scent fills her head with hot, dizzying sweetness.
The wind gusts, brings with it a scent of salt.
She moves into the wind, follows it to the cavernous living room; the petals swirl, there are all colors, they blow in drifts up against the wall and catch on the legs of furniture. They scatter across the tops of the glass table, the odor of the sea mixing into their perfume, salt and long hours of sunshine, the scent of living things swimming like secrets.
All around her, a flood of moonlight.
Lumen steps out onto the deck. Beyond it stretches the sea, blackened by midnight and shimmering beneath the moon. Petals float on the water, too, a long winding wake of them. Calm, they float on the surface, the water smooth, petals turning slowly down into perfect stillness. The moon, though full, is nowhere near bright enough to bleach out the stars.
She walks to the rail, puts her hands on it. She leans over. “Dexter?”
He looks up. His boat, rocking atop the water, so gentle, the white hull plastered with petals. He’s wearing his black rubber butcher’s apron. He’s got a trash bag in his hands. “Lumen?”
“Yes!” She waves. “Yes! It’s me!”
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “I’m not sure. I think this is a dream.”
Dexter tosses the trash bag into the water. “You should go back.”
“Why?”
“The water’s not good. Unstable. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“But I want to see you! It’s been so long.” Lumen puts one foot on the bottom of the rail, hoists herself up. “Don’t go back in to the shore, not yet.” She swings one leg over. “I can swim to you. It’s not far.”
“No! No, don’t be stupid, there are sharks!” he calls out, his hands cupped around his mouth. “There’s blood in the water, remember?”
Lumen hangs onto the rail, arms stretched behind her. She leans forward.
“No! NO GODDAMMIT!”
Lumen hears him scramble away from the stern, fling himself onto the seat, start up the engine. Its throaty roar booms out over the water’s still surface. Her foot touches the water. It’s cool but not cold, rising up over her toes. She can’t see her skin for the petals.
Dexter yells over the sound of the motor. She’s not sure, but it sounds like WAIT LUMEN JUST WAIT FOR ME
Resistance comes up beneath her toes. Lumen blinks, shifts her weight, and her foot pushes down on something that feels sort of like a mattress wrapped in a thick quilt and sort of like a trampoline net but not much like either.
Dexter drives the boat away from her, swings it around in an erratic arc. The churned-up water spreads out in choppy white rings.
Lumen lets go of the rail. She stands on one foot, arms held out, her back leg lifted like a ballerina poised into an arabesque. Softly, gently, she brings her other foot down. She looks toward the boat and stands, ankle-deep in rose petals, atop the water. Dexter sees her and cuts the engine. The waves cut into the sea by his wake roll beneath her, lifting her up and then down, up and then down. She looks around and smiles. The boat drifts sideways.
“I can walk!” She takes a step, then another step, arms held out against the mild turbulence of the water. “See?” She grinned. “I can walk to you! Let me walk to you instead!”
Dexter looks at her and starts to smile, the fear not quite out of his face, and his desire to smile and his fading fear do a dance on his features while he stumble-steps to the stern and holds out his arms.
(but lumen i have these tickets we can go around the world together)
She frowns, shakes her head.
“Be careful! Watch your step!”
Lumen looks down. Shark fins cut through the water, making elaborate shapes around her feet. They’re small. One heads straight for her left foot and she steps over it. Another heads to her right foot and she side-steps. The water rises and falls, rises and falls. She starts to sway.
“It’s a dance,” says Dexter. “Watch your steps.”
She looks up. He’s smiling at her now, all the fear and unsteadiness has left his body and he’s got that prowling stance that she likes, that she has spent months hunting down in the Midwestern wilderness, and she’s close enough to see the musculature of his arms, the glint of red hairs, those bricklayer hands reaching out…
She looks down. Bleached white faces float beneath her feet. Erosions in the skin show musculature beneath thin curds of fat. It pulls in thin strings away from the bone. It looks like cheap steak. The ball of her foot obscures the mouth and chin of a face she has never seen before: water-blackened hair, stubbled jaws, eyebrows like spread wings. Long dark eyelashes.
The eyelids snap open. The eyes beneath are a bleached-out blue beneath bleared corneas, a color like frozen lakes.
Lumen gasps awake. She pushes the blankets off her neck and closes her eyes, listens to the thud of her heart. Through the glass crawls faint traffic sounds. The frantic race of her pulse subsides and she opens her eyes, looks at the ceiling. It is awash in gray-blue light. Hannibal continues to sleep; his body is turned toward his side of the bed, long white back curved and half-turned toward to the ceiling.
She tumbles out of bed, snatches her dress and underpants off the floor. She picks up Hannibal’s phone, left on the nightstand: 6:14 a.m. She steps into her panties.
She hurries into the living room, dances her way back onto her dress. She picks up her purse with one hand while zipping up with the other. She digs out her phone
(it’s a dance so watch your steps)
She shakes her head. A sound of the ocean rises and subsides in her ears. Her eyes squeeze shut. She puts the phone down, gathers up her hair, fishes an elastic out of her purse. She twists her hair around, puts it up. She picks up her phone.
She lights the screen. She looks over two missed calls, her emails. There’s a text from her mother. Dead faces flash across the back of her mind.
Lumen picks up her shoes by the straps. Her hand trembles. She crosses the room, slips out the door.
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Lumen Obscura