Maryann had accidentally-on-purpose forgotten to mention to Hannibal she had a client meeting that day, as well: the Crawfords. She felt slightly guilty for not telling Hannibal she was taking on an extra project, though it was so very necessary. He'd only chastise her for exacerbating her wounds, and with valid reason: he'd had to repair popped stitches twice. (Although she imagined it ought disturb her, his concentration as he firmly pushed the curved needle through her existing stitch hole was arousing.)

Jack had commissioned her to build a relatively small plant bed for Bella to enjoy from their bedroom window. It was a simple project, without the formality of the contract between Maryann and Hannibal, and within a few minutes of discussion Maryann was certain she could deliver what Jack wanted.

"Are there any plants that can attract hummingbirds?" Jack had asked over the phone. "Bella loves them."

Maryann had smiled. "There are many, and they're all blooming right now. I'll pick the best ones."

"Money is no object. Chose the biggest ones." Jack had audibly swallowed over the line. "She won't be here to enjoy them growing into themselves."

Maryann's throat had constricted empathetically. "I understand." After a pause, she asked, "What are her favorite colors and scents? I can work those in, too."

So she spent an hour driving to a small nursery known for its large plants, and wandered with one of the nursery staff who helpfully pulled the ever-filling cart of material. As she carefully stepped over a water hose, her phone rang with La Cucaracha.

"Hola, Moses," Maryann greeted the caller cheerfully. "Como estas?"

"Muy bien, y tu?"

"Muy bien, amigo. Trabajo hoy?"

"Si, si," agreed the Latino on the other line. Moses was her go-to for day labor: he was strong, skilled, and slightly enamored with her ass. But then, he couldn't be more than twenty, and her ass was magnificent, so Maryann couldn't seriously blame him.

"Um, twenty of the Pennisetums, please," Maryann whispered to the cart puller. "The 'Little Bunny.' Bueno, amigo! Te recogeré. I hurt myself, are you gonna help me?"

"Hurt yourself?" echoed Moses concernedly. "You workin' too hard!"

Maryann laughed as she helped load the cart. "Not hard enough, if I still need you!"

She pulled up in the driveway of the single-wide he shared with his extended family with the load of plants in the bed, tarped against the wind, and a trailer of mulch, soil, and tools. "Tu estas aqi, Moses?" She called towards the makeshift garage, where she knew he'd be.

Moses sauntered out and looked at the bulging load, smiling. "Mucho trabajo?"

"Si," Maryann replied. "But it will be a short day, I have to visit a friend."

They caught up as they worked, with Maryann skillfully deflecting his flirtatious behavior and trying not to pop her stitches in the process of working.

The ground was tilled and amended, then the weed excluding fabric laid and tacked. With Maryann sweating with strain and pain and Moses doing most of the work, they mounded good soil in a suitable form and compacted it slightly.

With the plants laid out with Maryann's careful attention and staging, she set Moses to digging the biggest holes and tackled the smallest ones with one hand and a wince. Her shoulder wound was pulsing with her heartbeat.

"You okay, Mari-yan? You face white."

"Fine, just sore," Maryann ground out.

"How you hurt?"

"I fell on a knife," Maryann lied guiltily.

Moses made a noise of alarm.

"It's okay, I went to the doctor and got stitches," Maryann assured him.

Moses seemed mollified by that, and fell silent as he worked. Maryann was grateful, as the more her pain increased, the tougher it became to make pleasant conversation. So instead, to distract herself, she turned her thoughts to Hannibal.

She recalled the time she saw his inner beast immediately after he'd killed Tobias Budge. She remembered the creature that had played with her and Gideon, and completed Gideon's knifework on her flesh canvas.

With gentle fingers, she touched the wounds: the stab in her breast that might have robbed her life, and the three marks on the opposite shoulder. It still sent goosebumps over her arms to think how closely she'd come to death.

Had Hannibal saved her, or simply delayed his own gratification?

Maryann had to admit her own confusion. This was the man who allowed her to live in his home, eat his food, and touch his body. Yet, when provoked, the intensity of the darkness that roused was terrifying.

Or at least, it should be. Despite literally carrying evidence of the reality of Hannibal's alternative nature on her skin, Maryann could not fathom meeting the monster with anything less than confidence. The first time, it had startled her. The second, it had made her angry.

Now she was starting to understand how it behaved, and what it wanted.

Well, she wanted things, too. She could satisfy Hannibal and his beast and still get what she desired: healing from the last psychopath to damage her, companionship, sex... and so much more. The heady power of having such a dangerous lover was intoxicating.

She'd been surprised at her own boldness in the closet that morning, but completely unabashed. And it seemed to have paid off with a promise for later that night.

She wondered what he'd be like in bed, and spent the rest of the project daydreaming fit to leave herself pink in the cheeks.

Maryann had given Moses several large bills and released him into the care of his fiesta-bound cousin by noon. She had just finished neatening her work and cleaning up behind herself when Jack came home from work early to hand her a check and give his stamp of approval.

A huge weigela with it's magenta tube flowers and contrasting purple leaves was the centerpoint of the round bed. It was flanked by an overarching arbor of pink honeysuckle, and flooded at the base with a swath of bee balm in many colors. Around the edge, there were dwarf fountain grasses to add movement and negative space, and a defined cut stone border. All in all, a simple design.

Maryann walked through the bed with him, explaining the bloom times and the color spectrum hummingbirds liked.

"Will she approve?" the gardener asked. "I'll email you some info on their care and needs, but they're all low-maintenance."

"She loves magenta, and the bee balm smells like oranges," Jack marveled, touching everything with delight. "How on earth did you...?"

"It's kinda my job, and my passion," Maryann deflected humbly. "But I'm glad you like it. I hope Bella does too." Maryann reached into the bed of her truck and withdrew a shallow decorative pot with a very robust thyme plant. "This is from me, personally. Please give it to Bella. Thyme will help with the throat rawness from coughing. Just chew on a few leaves, no need to swallow. I'm sure she isn't keeping much down, right now."

Jack took the plant carefully, belying the sudden mistiness in his eyes. "She'll be ecstatic. I can't thank you enough." The man's voice cracked a little on the last word.

"Oh, hey now," Maryann soothed, feeling moved enough to embrace the large man despite the sweat and dirt.

Jack squeezed her back once with a juddering breath before letting go, thumbing his eyes and gathering himself. "Will any of these plants come back?"

"Every one of them," Maryann confirmed.

Jack nodded and stared at the new bed, as though wishing his wife might be resurrected in the plants this time next year.

The death of the judge spared Will from the gavel's ring, but not the noose of government-sanctioned rehabilitation and incarceration. He laid out Chilton as bait for Hannibal, culminating in putting himself exclusively under Chilton's care. Remembering what Hannibal had deigned he forget while under truth serum was a fortunate stroke, like tying the same blood knot he daydreamed showing Abigail around a present.

Yes, he'd been tactilely manipulated by Hannibal all along: his encephalitis encouraged, his seizures triggered at will, his mind toyed with.

It was well and truly enough. Will would see his suspicions confirmed, come hell or high water.

He didn't expect his doggedness in that pursuit to bring Katz into the crosshairs. When she told him she'd had Hannibal consult on James Gray's autopsy, Will nearly had a stroke right in his seat.

"Stay away from Hannibal Lecter!" he vehemently told the woman.

In his heart of hearts though, he knew the damage had already been done. With blood scenting the water, there was naught left for the shark to do but hunt.

"Kathy!" yodeled Maryann from the driveway as she drove up.

The woman in a frumpy cardigan looked up from the hive she was checking, and gave a careful wave. The swarming cloud of bees around her was imbued with smoke from the spouted can in her hand.

Maryann ducked into her friend's house to borrow a bee hat from the rack at the front door, and traipsed into the field. There were at least thirty hives spread over an eighth of an acre, and the sheer volume of noise was akin to an airport. The remaining three acres of Katherine Pimms' property were planted thickly in a wide variety of flowering perennials, from salvias to buddleia. There wasn't much rhyme or reason to the layout of the pollinating fields, or any real way through it, save for the occasional deer path. The flowers had been left to rise and senesce on their own, devoid of human intervention, which left the effect of the vast, colorful field utterly wild.

Maryann knew that wild had a place and time, when it was on purpose. Despite her respect for Katherine, though, the lack of care evident in the flower fields made Maryann's fingers itch. If anything was worth doing, in her opinion, it was worth doing in an orderly fashion.

The gardener approached the woman in the field with an appraising look. Katherine had always had eccentric and outdated fashion sense, but the mismatching of her clothes was more pronounced than usual. Her hair had not been brushed: at best, it had been run through with her hands. Her face had the blank wide-eyed look of one who wasn't sleeping well.

"I brought you some verbena bonariensis," Maryann said in a soft tone as she drew close. "You should see my patch: the girls land on them so thickly the stems bend."

"That's nice dear, thank you," replied Katherine, sliding the wooden frame laden with comb back into the hive. She sounded distracted, but Maryann was not deterred. Katherine had taught her how to walk among the stinging insects without protection, or fear. It involved a high level of mediation: the thoughts dictated the scent of the human. However, she also knew it was ill advised to bring unfamiliar scents to another woman's hives. The bees knew their true queen.

"How are they doing?" the gardener asked her mentor. "Did you get any blight this year?"

"They're safe here, and they know it," Katherine replied, moving slowly and gracefully to the next hive. "They have no need to stress. Did you have blight?"

Maryann migrated with her. "Not a drop."

"Good. How is Zeus?" Katherine lifted the box lid and peered into the depths of the hive, which was only half full of frames.

"Procreating like her namesake. They all but spring from her forehead," Maryann chuckled.

Katherine huffed a soft laugh, sending a drone before her face scurrying.

Maryann observed her friend with care. There was something weighing on her, something amiss, but she couldn't put her finger on it. "How's the practice?"

Another bee flew off at the suddenness of Katherine's glance at Maryann. The microexpression Maryann tried to catch might have been one of guilt, or suspicion, but Katherine quickly hid it. "It's going well, if you can call a lot of sick people a good thing."

"At least they have you to care for them," Maryann replied. "No one else could do what you do."

Katherine barked a sharp, sardonic laugh, replacing the hive lid with enough force to startle the inhabitants. "No truer statement," she said. With a sigh that seemed to deflate her, Katherine beckoned Maryann to follow her out of the hive arrangement with all the carefully measured gait of a priest, the smoking can leaving a trail like a censer. "Do you ever wonder, Maryann," she said contemplatively. "If some people wouldn't be better off dead?"

"What, like some chronically ill people?" Maryann asked.

"Yes."

Maryann sighed in turn, removing the bee hat as they ascended the porch. "Yes, I have. And some of those very people would agree with me."

Katherine paused at the threshold and regarded her mentee, intensely studious. "And you don't find that thought grotesque?"

The gardener's brow furrowed. "Not especially, no, if I ain't the one putting them down. Katherine, is something wrong? Are you sick?"

The older woman laughed bitterly. "Me? No. It's the whole damn world that's sick."

"Kathy, you aren't making a lick of sense."

Katherine Pimms scrubbed her face, and set the still smoking can on the railing. "How long have we known each other, Maryann?"

Maryann hesitated. "It must be going on a decade now. You've been like a mother to me. Kathy, you're scaring me."

"Do you think I'm crazy for thinking these things?" the older woman gestured at her own frazzled head. "For thinking like God?"

Maryann kept a tight rein on her disturbed emotions, and cautiously but firmly placed her hands on Kathy's shoulders. "Kathy," she began with quiet insistence. "What have you done?" The gardener had known, for years, that Kathy wasn't completely balanced. A hundred little inkling and a thousand tiny things had finally come home to roost.

The older woman's breath hitched just once, like a spasm of repression. "They just keep coming," Kathy said in a dead voice. "Bodies all used up. Tickers failing. Chronically pained. Organs losing steam. Sick, sick, sick. Some can't find a single second without pain. When they wake, it's there. When they sleep, it invades their dreams. Can you imagine that, Maryann? Not even a second without pain throbbing in your body?"

Maryann swallowed hard. "No, I can't."

"Because you're young, and still strong. But the people that come to me, they're not. Sometimes the bees help. Their venom can reverse some things, reteach the body to deal with pain, condition it. I open their dammed up pathways with living needles."

Maryann nodded. "I've seen the miracles, Kathy. Your therapy works - "

Kathy was shaking her head before Maryann finished, a growl growing in her throat. "But not all of them! I still fail!"

Maryann was bewildered and becoming increasingly uncomfortable. "It's not failure, Kathy, if it's beyond your ability to help. You do your best, you always do."

Kathy pinned her mentee with entreating eyes. "I can't treat the root cause of some people's ailments, Maryann. It's stress. It's killing every. Last. One."

"It's not your job to give them peace, Kathy," Maryann insisted. "You can't. It's not in your power."

Kathy's bright, pleading eyes turned the faintest shade of something Maryann couldn't place, as though glazed by the disturbia going on behind them. "But I can give them peace, Maryann," she hummed.

Maryann's skin crawled in gooseflesh. She knew that look. Gideon. The thing that lurked under Hannibal's skin. The vestiges of what haunted Will. "Kathy," Maryann repeated. "What have you done?"

Kathy took a deep, steeling breath. "Come with me, and I'll show you."

The woods were near a meadow filled with flowers. He was draped in the crotch of a tree as though he'd stumbled and then settled, covered in bees. What was left of his face looked peaceful.

Maryann swallowed the bile rising in her throat and took a closer step, though it was difficult. "Are these your bees?"

"Yes. You shouldn't get too close. Here," Kathy pulled off her cardigan and handed it to Maryann. "You'll smell like me now."

Maryann shrugged on the cardigan, and took a moment to marvel at her own precarious calm. Perhaps living with a monster was increasing her tolerance for monstrous things. She didn't look the gift horse in the mouth, though: she needed calmness right now.

The bees buzzed past her head curiously as she crept up on the dead body. She covered her mouth and nose at the lingering scent of rot as she peered at the corpse. "What are the two holes above his - ?" Maryann stopped, turned to look at her surrogate mother. "You lobotomized him."

"I quieted his mind," Kathy said with small smile. "He didn't feel a thing: I numbed his meridians, paralyzed him."

Maryann returned to Kathy's side, facing away from her, contemplating a nearby stump blankly as her mind struggled.

"There was nothing else to do," the older woman said softly. "So I gave him serenity. In his last hours, he rested in it: he wandered this meadow - isn't it the prettiest? -and felt the companionship of the bees. You know how it feels when they're in tune with you, Maryann. That utter stillness of soul. He slipped back into the universal flow like stepping through a thin curtain."

Maryann rubbed her face, blinking back tears.

"Why are you crying, dear heart?" Kathy asked. "If you asked anyone, they couldn't picture a lovelier way to die."

Maryann doubled over and fought to control her emotions, her breathing. "Kathy, this isn't right."

"Says who?" Kathy challenged.

"If you had to paralyze him, then he didn't want to die," Maryann hiccupped. She was starting to feel lightheaded and argued with her breath.

"Fear of dying, fear of ultimate peace, isn't a reason to avoid it," Kathy asserted. "I helped him, that's all." She stepped to her mentee's side and rested a balm-soft hand on her back. "He had rheumatoid arthritis. His joints were starting to deform. He admitted himself that he couldn't take much more."

Maryann's breath shuddered, tears blearing the forest floor.

"You know, when I put the queen in his head, he smiled," Kathy said. "He felt her vibrating where his thoughts used to be."

The gardener forced her lungs to work normally, shoved it all down as best she could. "Kathy, I need to process all this. Please take me back."

Kathy's soothing, matronly circles on her back accompanied Maryann's every step back to the car.

As they rode in silence, Maryann tried her best to ignore the whispering, nagging voice in her heart of hearts, to no avail.

Maybe she isn't totally wrong.

Maybe living is sometimes worse than the release of death.

She was shocked and disturbed to find that, deep down, it was the reality of death that shook her most, of everything wrong with the situation.

It wasn't that Kathy had killed him.

It wasn't the manner in which she did it.

It wasn't even the necessity, or lack thereof (and she dared not poke that moral conundrum with a stick).

It was simply the fact she hadn't seen a corpse since identifying her parents' bodies.

What kind of monster was she, if it was merely a matter of acclimatizing to the surprise? Perhaps Hannibal and she weren't so mismatched, after all.

"Kathy, I'm not going to tell anyone about this."

"So you agree what I did was needed?"

Maryann hesitated. "I haven't come to that conclusion yet, but there's a chance I will. In the meantime..."

Kathy patted the gardener's knee. "I understand. It took me a long time, too. I don't expect anything. Even if you told the police, I'd still love you, dear."

Maryann's sob nearly escaped, but she squeezed Kathy's hand and held it back.

Hannibal would help her figure this out. Having a psychiatrist for a boyfriend had to come in handy, sometime. And truth be told, Maryann had the sneaking suspicion that Hannibal had more experience with death and the macabre than their fledgling relationship had revealed. She didn't feel right in the head (but maybe that was just her perspective changing). She felt a little ill (maybe because she was already internalizing).

Fuck, if this fails to upset me meaningfully, what does that make me? she wondered.

But she was already barreling down the road to acceptance. From a place of acceptance of what she saw, and how she truly felt about it, she could move forward.

So at the risk of her moral compass, she pressed on.