Sweet Ophelia (Hannibal Fanfiction)

Reba

Reba McClane didn't have time to process that Francis Dolarhyde had not died in front of her before she learned that he was dead for real this time.

It didn't matter at this point whether he was dead or alive. She still woke up screaming from nightmares of being tied up in the back of his rattling van, his painful grip on her face as he whispered hoarsely about his brilliance, the stench of gasoline in her nostrils, the burning heat and the crack of the shotgun and the hand she placed in what she thought was his brains...and the pure, pulsating fear of thinking that she was going to burn to death in his house.

The smoke still hung in her nostrils, an insidious smell of burning hair that could not be shaken even as day passed into night passed into day again. The nurses marveled over how her burns were much better than they could've been: mostly first- and second-degree burns, only requiring a hospital stay of several days. Reba took this information in silence. She didn't need other people to tell her that she was good at staying alive.

As numb and shellshocked as she was, Reba didn't expect the next visitor to her hospital room to be Jack Crawford and not Will Graham.

She didn't expect to hear that the man who almost killed her — who said he loved her and professed his impulses to kill her in the same breath — who had shot himself after leaving her in his burning house — was actually alive and had paid Will Graham a visit.

She didn't expect to hear that not only had the body she'd put her hand in not been D's, but he was now actually dead, and at the hands of Will Graham.

She didn't expect to hear that Will Graham and the infamous serial killer Hannibal the Cannibal, who had escaped from the BSHCI around the same time, were nowhere to be found.

On second thought, numb and shellshocked were good. They meant that she took in the information without really processing it, without applying real-world logic to it or comprehending fully that it had happened. Numb meant that she didn't have to think about how good being with D had felt, or how she had attracted a wolf in sheep's clothing. Numb meant she didn't feel the pain of knowing that she'd been so careless and trusting, had allowed herself to think that she had found a true gentleman.

Numb meant that she didn't think about how she'd fallen in love with a serial killer.

Numb meant that she didn't think about the fact that another potential serial killer had comforted her in this hospital room only a few days before.

Numb meant that she didn't think.