[OOM] for all the ruin she foreknew

[collects_strays]

Lost in thought?
Not lost. Not anymore.

He wasn't spending very much time in reality. It was a door he opened to check in on, every so often. Just to be sure it was all still there. Unlike before, the wall between the world he was in and the one he was experiencing was solid, strong – only occasionally permeated by a sound or movement that caught his attention before he'd stepped back through. Graham knew what was real, and what wasn't.

No.

No, he doesn't. He can only think he knows what's real, and what isn't. But he's far more certain about that divide than he has been in a long time.

His treatment with Dr. Chilton begins with being taken from his cell and put in a three-by-three-by-eight metal cage. Roughly the size of a pay phone booth. He thinks of the empty birdcage in Beth LeBeau's living room, and then of the old canary in the coal mine. It was only listened to when it was dead. Dr. Chilton, if not interested in listening to him, is certainly eager to hear him sing. He sits in a desk chair one of the orderlies brings down, placed behind a dark line formed by the patterned tiles on the floor, and makes sure Graham knows exactly what that line is for. It's the last thing Graham hears Chilton say before he detaches from his little cage perch, leaving nothing of himself for Chilton to grasp at. Defiance would be a kind word for it.

A truer one is fear. Hannibal Lecter had very nearly convinced him he was a murderer. Chilton might be holding an axe where Lecter used a scalpel, but that doesn't make it any less terrifying. He'd seen the mangled remains of Abel Gideon's psyche. Graham didn't know what Gideon's thoughts had looked like before he'd murdered his wife, had ended up here, but he could guess they were made of something closer to brick and mortar, whereas Graham's could only at best be densely-packed sand. He was afraid it wouldn't take Lecter's expert hand to wash him away. As Lecter had reminded him, and as his voice continued to taunt him even when Graham had withdrawn from his cage. (Terrible thing. Lecter's voice, but words he'd never said to him. To have your identity take from you.) And now, those wobbling moorings, out-of-focus memories, and speed-of-light connections that made up his mind – they were all he had.

Chilton's avenues of retaliation for his silence were narrow. He checked off the little boxes for "uncooperative" and "poor candidate for rehabilitation." But he wouldn't deny him visitors – not when it meant collecting the conversations Graham wouldn't have with him. Graham first noticed the light in his cell stopped dimming at night, and then Chilton's eyes flashing from his face to his hands. Looking for signs of sleep deprivation.

When this produced no results, Graham found he was pulled out of his cell and put in that cage more often, and for longer periods of time, apparently meant to sit and wait for Chilton to show up. He didn't wait. Sometimes he'd glance back into reality and see that Chilton had arrived, or left. But he never felt boredom, could ignore the physical discomfort that came with the confined space, and had since peeled off most of the humiliation, like a layer of dead skin. One more thing about him, that had been him, that was lost now.

After that, Chilton began arriving to their sessions so late that by the time Graham was returned to his cell, the orderly had to bring by the food tray again. Graham paid so little attention to Chilton that it's not until he looks in long enough to see the doctor lift a thermos, and feels his own dry mouth, that he realizes this was done with purpose. But Graham only slips away again. Chilton hasn't gleaned much about him if he thinks an empty stomach will test his patience.

When he does finally speak, it's to ask to see Dr. Lecter. He doesn't mean it as insult to Chilton, though he knows it will be taken that way. (Insult would require him to care. He doesn't.) But there's a piece of reality that continues to surface in Graham's mind, no matter how far he pulls away from everything else. The reason Lecter's voice continues to tease at his thoughts.

I can't get you out of my head.

Lecter is the only other person who knows the truth. Regardless of what he means to do with it.

But being in the presence of that truth, as though Lecter were carrying it around inside him, doesn't bring Graham any closer to it. He has knowledge, but nothing, no reason for it. The evidence explains - but it doesn't. His mind whirs with such angry certainty that part of him wants to reach through the bars and tear at Lecter, like he could rip that truth out. But Dr. Lecter stays safely on the far side of the painted white line, beyond his reach.

And you can't rip the truth out of anyone. It was a useless, childish thought. Like the terror that rippled through him in crippling waves – Graham had never felt betrayal of his own before, and the novelty gives him a sense of reversion, all those childlike, elemental questions he'd never had to ask - what's happening, why are you doing this to me -

Abandonment, after all, requires expectation.

Unable to reach that truth outside him, Graham is forced to search back within. Letting Alana enter his mind is less like trust, and more like faith. It's a mutual feeling, though he's not sure she's aware of it. She doesn't approach him with any tools, blunt or sharp. She comes with expectation, but without agenda. When Graham willingly closes his eyes for her, the blue glow of the metronome flashing over his eyelids, her presence feels cool and dark, like he's stepping into a cove.

But what he finds at first isn't the truth, but a palatable disguise. Alana's voice casts intricate shadows through his thoughts, the light ticking and dripping into the sickeningly beautiful feast his mind creates to accompany Abigail Hobbs' ear. Crackling pork skin, ruby red pomegranates, glistening bright squid, narrow white skulls and deep purple blossoms. Warning coloration.

He thinks it hasn't worked, until a few evenings later, when he's cutting into the unknown meat on his dinner tray. As he blinks, light-dark patterns form like spots on his eyes, and he hears someone – in the hall, but it's not, they're not – someone breathing, or struggling to breathe, with sharp, squelching noises that make Graham's own throat contract. Even before the slices fall into place. The spots in his vision are the pattern of his kitchen wallpaper.

The struggling noises are his own.

- a breach of individual separateness.

Fifteen minutes later, the orderly rolls the cart out again, and stops outside his cell. Graham is sitting on his cot, knees up so his feet are resting on the edge, the food tray next to him, untouched since his first bite.

"Something wrong, Mr. Graham?"

He shakes his head, eyes on the concrete floor. "I- I'm not hungry." Graham takes a deep breath, and then slides his feet forward, lifting himself from the cot. He picks up the meal to return it, but the orderly doesn't slide the metal tray through to collect it.

"You stop eating, I have to report it."

Chilton's schemes so far had been unpleasant, but all external – he couldn't touch him without a reason. A hunger strike would be a reason.

Graham looks up the orderly: the identifier tag reads 'Matthew Brown.' His eyes are wide, lending to his perpetual, wire-thin smile that wasn't caustic, but also wasn't kind. When they meet eyes, Graham feels like he's being let in on a secret, though he doesn't know what that is. Brown steps back away from the bars, and puts his hands on the cart again.

"I'll come back around."

The cart rattles away. Reluctantly, Graham returns to his cot, and sets the dinner tray in his lap again. He swallows, his throat dry and raw, and his hand trembles as he picks up the plastic fork again, and pokes at the soft green beans. He knows he doesn't have a lot of time, but he can only stand to press a single piece onto the fork tongs at first. It's tasteless, leaving no impression on his tongue and thankfully little in his throat. He collects more the second time – his hands steady, the cold, vibrating horror the memory had left him with beginning to warm up inside him. It's real, not just a jump he can't explain. This truth is part of him now, too. It's not just a flare of knowledge, but of the actual defiance he can finally have.

A few minutes later, he's almost eagerly scooping up the pasty mashed potatoes and ripping into the bread roll. Graham slides the empty tray back when Brown returns, and crosses the cell, running the sink and cupping his hands for another drink of water. Full and thinking clearly, he knows this shouldn't be a moment of fear, but one of relief.

But Jack Crawford didn't see it that way.

Graham had prepared himself for Alana. Even before, he'd felt how every word she spoke to him seemed weighed against her better judgment. Faith is what you have to have in something you can't fully trust.

He hadn't been ready for Beverly Katz. But he mostly blamed himself for that – she had shown what she meant the moment she walked through the door, and it was his own overflowing desperation that had let him ignore it for even a few seconds. He'd been caught off-guard, and he couldn't afford that in here. Not even for a moment.

But he couldn't have prepared himself for Jack, not now. The fevered excitement that had come with his discovery hadn't cooled off. Jack's plaintive voice, and his eyes – he looked so sad - only stoked the coals, flared him again. Later, with time and separation to detach him, Graham could see how it must have looked, like even with the encephalitis gone, his head was still on fire. And a fire needs to be contained. He had never been claustrophobic, but as Jack spoke to him, Graham could feel the doors slamming, pressure building against his skin, against his heart, like he would be crushed down. We took his DNA. We took his fingerprints. We found nothing.

He realized, then, how much he had been counting on the investigation just needing a push in the right direction. But it won't be about that. The evidence won't explain, won't save him. All that matters is what they see.

You stood over Cassie Boyle's body in that field and you described yourself to me. Graham had imagined how they saw it, Jack and Alana and Beverly, him slicing through Donald Sutcliffe's mouth, ripping out Cassie Bolye's lungs while she was still breathing. Not what it would be like, as he would picture before, but images of himself doing it. A sputtering facsimile of the person they knew, who wears his face and his skin, is unfamiliar – but not unthinkable. In retrospect, he could see it so clearly – no one would ever need an orgy of evidence to convict him.

I have clarity. About you.

Jack's retreating steps, the buzzer at the end of the hall, lock the reality of it firmly into place. Graham lingers at the bars, almost afraid to step back between the walls that seem close to caving in. That flame his memory had lit felt pounded down, so that now just delicate spurts of it remained. At its worst, this cell had felt like a neat little storage box, one he could be pulled out of and returned to as was needed. But it's not that. This isn't that kind of box.

This is a coffin. This is a coffin, and he's going to die in it.

The hours following Jack's farewell were the most time he had spent in reality since that cell door had first locked behind him.

---

She's crouched in the tall grass along the riverbank, peering into the forest, one knee curled into the soil and the other brought up against her chest. Graham steps softly up from the shore, lowering himself to the ground next to her. Abigail's gray eyes glance up to him, and she smiles. His own heartbeat quickens as he picks up her tingling sense of excitement and nervous anticipation.

"He's out there," she whispers. "I saw him moving between the trees."

"He's close?"

She nods. "But wait for your shot. You'll have to be what he expects, right up until you're not. He'll run if he catches on."

"Then what if he hears us?"

Abigail grins, and Graham could hear the sing-song note to it. I know something you don't know. As she shakes her head, "You don't have to worry about that. You can snap a few twigs and it'll be okay. They rely on smell. If he smells you coming, it's over."

"How do you stop that?"

She lifts her hand, holding out a single piece of red thread between her thumb and index finger.

"Watch the wind."

A moment after she speaks, the wind picks up. The branches in the trees above them sway, leaves rustling into a chorus that swells like breaking waves. Abigail's hair flutters around her, but her eyes are on the single piece of thread. It's caught safely between her fingers, and whips back, toward the river. Graham watches the thread, and then meets her eyes, and they both look into the forest, wind against their faces. He doesn't see any movement among the black trees, but he hears it in the rustling, a loud clack, as though it were approaching not over the soft forest underbrush, but along stone.

I will find it.

"One you stalk..." Abigail murmurs.

Graham's eyes are already open. But his focus shifts. The trunks and low branches fade into the slices of light across the wide hall, the lines formed by the tile floor, the bars of his cage. The wind is only his own, slow breathing. The clack is Alana Bloom's heeled boots as she walks down the staircase. She keeps her eyes down, like she needs to step carefully, but Graham knows that it's because in the cage, he's hard to look at.

Dr. Lecter turns back, offering her his hand as she reaches the last step.

Graham lowers his eyes. The thread flutters in his mind; he keeps downwind.