Spring, 1914

The monster had been silent for going on two weeks. Hannibal could not tell whether it was deep in thought or deep in shock, and that made him nervous. But then, the boy was technically still human. For all his uncanny power and overflowing evil, his flawless body still seemed to work just about like everyone else's, and he had come terribly close to death by dehydration. That, following a harrowing experience among the demons, might simply have been enough to drive the boy down into himself, too deep for speech.

He recovered, somewhat. First, they lashed him to the cot in the cell, but Green declared furiously that he could not be expected to treat anybody, even a monster, under conditions like those, and they moved him to the infirmary. Sedation proved unnecessary. He had broken quite a lot of his own bones, hurling himself against the door, and did not remain conscious long when they shifted him from the cot to a stretcher. Six ribs, both clavicles, every bone in his right arm, right zygomatic arch, the nasal bone, parts of the maxilla, and the outer rim of the right orbit...

Green set what could be set and shrugged at the rest.

At first, the boy's traumatized stomach rejected food, and though he swallowed whatever was put in his mouth, he vomited up the thin gruel he was given, drifting in and out of consciousness as the broken ends of his ribs grated together. But he retained the weak, excessively sweet tea, and that was enough to keep him alive for a few more days until his body could accept something more solid.

Hannibal took the other bed in the infirmary, and to Green's immense surprise, stayed there as he was told. He was no good at all at obeying doctors' orders, but he'd be damned if he let the boy out of his sight for an instant. Not now. Not after everything. For one thing, he still felt that it was all his fault. All of it, from Barbara, all the way to the evil child in the other bed, his black eyes fixed on nothing. Everything he did only seemed to make it worse. And if it came down to it, if everything passed so far into chaos that there could be no return, he knew where in the infirmary Green kept the morphine, and he knew exactly how much to administer to make those black eyes close for good. For another thing, he did not think everything was that far gone, just yet, and he had seen Lang glance at the drugs chest, and he had no intention of leaving that room long enough for Lang to get his revenge. Not yet.

And for a third thing, being anywhere else would have made it unnecessarily difficult to access his patient.

For the twelfth time, Hannibal waited for Green to dim the lights and leave for the evening. For the twelfth time, Green had suggested that he was certainly well enough to return to his own quarters, if he liked, and once again, Hannibal said that, no, he preferred to stay and act as night nurse. No need to trouble one of the Wardens. Even if the monster made a sudden recovery, he was very thoroughly restrained, and while the makeshift seals scratched into the floor and ceiling weren't as elegant or as strong as the ones guarding the cell, they'd do in a pinch. Once again, Green shrugged and reminded Hannibal not to fall asleep with the lamp on. And then he left.

For a count of thirty after the door clicked shut, Hannibal stayed stretched out on top of the sheets, his ankles crossed and a book balanced on his chest. Then he marked his place and slid off the bed. His stocking feet made no sound when they hit the tile floor, and he was careful not to make any noise as he rolled himself in a blanket and moved the little wooden chair across the room to where the boy lay.

He sat.

After two weeks, the boy's bruises had begun to recede, black and purple fading to sickly green and yellow and brown. Much of the swelling had gone down. He was healing faster than most people did. Not by much, just enough to be noticeable. Hannibal had his theories about the reason for that. He also had hopes of accelerating the process.

In the dim light, he reached out, folded back the blanket, and took the unresponsive monster's hand, feeling the now-familiar connection form. His breath hitched. His pulse quickened and then slowed, muscles relaxing involuntarily. It was not what he had expected, two weeks ago. In the cell, in the dark, holding the creature in his arms, he had prepared himself to be overpowered by carnal desire. Lust was the monster's calling-card. In his desk were letters from that friend who had experienced the monster first-hand, letters describing a red, mindless hunger that consumed everything else. Perhaps it was different when the monster was not broken and starved and terrified. Perhaps its strange magnetism drew out whatever the monster wanted most. In that cell, in the dark, it wanted comfort. Those words he whispered to himself grew in him and crowded out the fear. Pity, grief, love.

Such a little thing, a kiss.

The boy could have made good his threat, could have killed him. Hannibal had believed him before, but it was all the more obvious when his entire world narrowed to that point of contact, pity, grief, love, life flowing out of him and into the shattered body in his arms, mind quieting, the growing realisation that it was not in his power to stop this. He could not have stopped it if he wanted to, and he did not want to. It felt too good, not in the way he had expected, but no less intensely.

It had taken Garner and his rifle to stop it, unfortunately, using the stock as a jemmy.

The boy had gasped out something too garbled to be intelligible, and that was the last he had spoken.

It had been a calculated risk, that first night, when Hannibal dragged the chair over and touched the creature's limp hand. Only dumb bloody luck brought him back to himself in time to put the chair back in its place and climb back into bed before Green's first morning visit. It was easier the second time, easier still the third. He told himself it was necessary, that he was making things right. That he might, through touch, confer something of himself. The compassion the creature had never developed. And, he admitted, a bit of comfort.

What must it be like in that family, he had wondered. If they had no compassion, did they have any love? Had the boy's parents ever held him, consoled him, encouraged him? He had tried to imagine the monster at age seven, age three, as an infant. Who had sung to him? What a dismal childhood.

He gave the creature's hand a little squeeze. At the point of contact, his own skin felt unusually warm. The boy did not react. His weird eyes were closed, for the moment, breathing slow and deep.

Hannibal did not know any proper lullabies. That is, he knew the tunes, but all the words he could remember had been invented by friends and acquaintances during his uni days, and all were highly inappropriate. He did, however, know absolutely everything by Gilbert and Sullivan, so he made do with mumbling numbers from Ruddigore and The Mikado in a keyless, self-conscious baritone.

He did not know any proper lullabies because his mother had hated to sing, a heartless cousin having once compared her voice to that of a squeezed canary. She had read to him, instead. So when he ran out of Pinafore and Pirates, he sent a Warden off to the nearest lending library, and was secretly pleased to find that the selection of boys' adventure stories had increased considerably since his own childhood. They were light, cheerful fare that all ended happily, and the protagonists, if outrageously reckless, were all staunchly moral.

But he could not really know if he was doing any good, not as long as the monster was silent.

He stuck a broad finger between the pages of Treasure Island and laid the volume on his knee, watching his patient's closed eyelids. The eyes of sleeping people twitched. The slight mound of the lens of the eye was visible through the lid, sliding back and forth as though watching passing scenery or jerking about as though reading. The monster's eyes did not move. Did that mean he was not asleep?

'Are you able to hear me?' he asked quietly. 'Or am I talking to myself?'

As expected, there was no response.

'It would be helpful, at least, to know if this condition is something we should be really concerned about. Or is it perhaps something you have done to yourself? Conserving energy to speed your healing?'

He shook his head and glanced at the seals scratched into the floor. Like the seals lining the cell, these should not affect the boy's ability to draw the life out of others, only his ability to twist that life energy into dark sorcery.

'If you are able to draw more deeply from me than you are at present, I invite you to do so. Provided, of course, you do not kill me.'

Nothing changed, and he sighed, drawing his hand away. 'I am going to fetch my field journal, all right? I shall read from it, if you like. All the most recent entries concern you, anyway. I'll not be five minutes, and I shall lock the door. Lang is no good at picking locks, so you needn't worry about him showing up.'

No response.

'Back in a tick.'

He unwound the blanket from around himself and draped it over the back of the chair, belting on a scruffy brown robe, instead, and sliding his feet into his slippers. The key lay in a ceramic dish on Green's desk in the next room, and he checked the pockets of his robe for any new holes before dropping it in the left one.

The hallway was dark and utterly silent, but Hannibal knew every inch of the Academy like... Well, no, he didn't spend much time staring at the backs of his own hands. He knew the Academy like he knew the contents of his journal, backward and forward, including the bits written in secret ink.

He had nearly reached the stairs when the vertigo hit. The floor tilted underneath him, and the walls swooped in at crazy angles. His chest cramped. He stumbled against the nearest door.

A heart attack?

The palm of his left hand throbbed painfully.

No, this was something more metaphysical than physical. A warning bell. There was only one possibility.

His legs wobbled, impeding his attempt to dash back to the infirmary. The hallway was not long, but the seconds it took him to make it from one end to the other seemed to stretch into eternity. He fumbled the key in the lock, dropped it, and nearly managed to lose it to the gap beneath the door. Cursing, he fished it back out and succeeded in twisting it in the lock.

Before anything else, he seized the wire by the door, the one that ran to a bell in the doctor's quarters, and nearly ripped it from its mounting with the force of his pulls. His eyes were watering, nausea clawing its way up his throat. His lips felt numb.

He could tell at a glance that the boy had suffered a seizure. It had passed, but the blankets covering him were mussed, and small spots of blood showed on the sheets beneath the heavy leather restraints encircling the boy's wrists. Specks of pinkish froth dotted his lips, and there was a growing faecal smell beneath the usual carbolic tang of the room.

And he had stopped breathing.

---

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