Girl [Hannibal]
I found this awesome prompt community, which I promptly joined. It produced fic, which always makes me happy. I just hope that it's close enough to the comm standards; I'm kinda nervous.
Title: Girl
Author: angelari
Fandom: Hannibal
Character: Clarice Starling
Rating: PG
Warning: Spoilers for the series
Prompt: #01 - Beginning (for 100_women)
Disclaimer: These characters belong to Thomas Harris, and I'm just borrowing them for my own sneaky purposes. I promise to give them back when I'm finished.
In the beginning was a little girl.
Most things begin that way, really, when you come down to it, but for him it is more true than most. In the beginning was a little girl, and then there was not, and he has spent his entire life struggling with the lack. With his failure, she supposes, even though no one could really expect him to protect her, not against grown men, when he himself was just a little boy.
She wonders, sometimes, if there had never been a little girl, if he had been an only child, what he would be like today. Intelligent, sophisticated, certainly that, but … and but was an exercise in futility, one hand clapping in the middle of the woods, because if you changed the beginning of the story, there was no way to tell where the middle would be, much less the end.
She is the end of the story, she knows, and if she isn’t quite happily ever after, she is at least peace and contentment of a degree he’s never known. She sees it in how he sleeps, safe at last, deeply and curled around her, because while she has changed herself to be with him, he has changed himself because of her. With a big enough rock, even a stream can be diverted into an entirely new place.
But now, she might not be the end of the story, because the two pink stripes in her hand that confirm her suspicions suggest not only new chapters but a new volume. In the beginning was a little girl. “Or maybe,” she whispers, so only the new chapter can hear, “a little boy.”
Title: Girl
Author: angelari
Fandom: Hannibal
Character: Clarice Starling
Rating: PG
Warning: Spoilers for the series
Prompt: #01 - Beginning (for 100_women)
Disclaimer: These characters belong to Thomas Harris, and I'm just borrowing them for my own sneaky purposes. I promise to give them back when I'm finished.
In the beginning was a little girl.
Most things begin that way, really, when you come down to it, but for him it is more true than most. In the beginning was a little girl, and then there was not, and he has spent his entire life struggling with the lack. With his failure, she supposes, even though no one could really expect him to protect her, not against grown men, when he himself was just a little boy.
She wonders, sometimes, if there had never been a little girl, if he had been an only child, what he would be like today. Intelligent, sophisticated, certainly that, but … and but was an exercise in futility, one hand clapping in the middle of the woods, because if you changed the beginning of the story, there was no way to tell where the middle would be, much less the end.
She is the end of the story, she knows, and if she isn’t quite happily ever after, she is at least peace and contentment of a degree he’s never known. She sees it in how he sleeps, safe at last, deeply and curled around her, because while she has changed herself to be with him, he has changed himself because of her. With a big enough rock, even a stream can be diverted into an entirely new place.
But now, she might not be the end of the story, because the two pink stripes in her hand that confirm her suspicions suggest not only new chapters but a new volume. In the beginning was a little girl. “Or maybe,” she whispers, so only the new chapter can hear, “a little boy.”