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There was once a woman, thousands of years ago, who lived a good life with two men who loved her, and each other in turn. We know this, because when she died, one of them immortalised her virtues in an epitaph that endured through the archaeological record.
She was golden haired, pale, desired and loved for her beauty and accomplishments.
Her last name, Potestas meant power, but she was likely a freed slave woman who lived in Perugia, Italy. This is all we know of her. The small details of the women of history are rarely known even in this detail.
Bedelia wore the ring Hannibal gave her, and lived in Florence, not far from Perugia, and lived a fiction of being a good woman, with a good marriage to a man who loved her. Most things in Bedelia’s life were tinged with fiction, and so it was no real bother to her that she lived in a castle of lies, playing chicken every day with the tidal wave that might consume her. A bag, half packed, always sat in her closet.
There was a time when she was less than this. She was a woman who left something in her wake wherever she went. The sillage of her perfume, the impression of a lipstick on a wine glass, a fleeting impression of beauty and grace.
Hannibal had only just solidified his place in Florence when the glass was upset by the arrival of Will Graham.
They both expected that this was the overture to a war. That soon the Polizia would come knocking on their door, Jack Crawford himself would come calling to break up their tiny oasis of tranquility. Instead though, Will stalked Hannibal silently through the streets of Florence, lurking in shadows, saying nothing, but always appearing to be on the verge of upsetting the apple cart.
There was a storm, and Will ended up on their doorstep, drenched to the bone, looking forlorn. She let him in. He was shaking, and smaller than she remembered. She helped him out of his clothes, and saw the marks that Hannibal had put upon his skin, still angry and red and barely healed. Her doctor’s training told her that he should barely be out of bed, let alone be half way across the world lurking in doorways and dashing himself against the rocks of Hannibal Lecter’s favour. Nothing was bleeding, and so she did what always made her feel better, and drew him a bath.
He was too distracted to be self conscious about nudity - she had already seen the most vulnerable part of him when she removed his shirt. Her bathtub is deep, lovingly maintained and designed to be reassuringly womblike. He climbs into its lavender scented depths, and she pulls up a chair, her hand resting under the swell of his skull to stop him from drowning.
Hannibal comes home as she is washing Will’s hair. Will is mostly asleep, and she had been admiring the way that her wedding ring catches in the candlelight as it drags through the remains of his curls, shorn short in a hospital cut.
She hears his feet on the carpet and turns to see him leaning against the doorframe, undoing his cuffs and watching her with interest.
“Will you be cleaning his feet with your hair next?” he snarks.
Bedelia takes the moment to lift the jug she uses for rinsing her hair and begins rinsing the suds from Will’s hair.
“Will Graham is no more Jesus than you are the Devil, Hannibal. Neither of you are well defined enough to be worthy of parables, let alone archetypes.”
“And you are?”
“The point of the good samaritan was that it was the last person you would expect” she says.
Will is rousing, and sits up in the tub. Hannibal holds his breath, and Bedelia holds out one of the huge towels. If she were a crueller woman she would have chosen a smaller one, but Will has been through a lot, and deserves a modicum of dignity for what comes next.
He doesn’t drop the towel when he sees Hannibal, but it is a close thing.
“Hello Will.” Hannibal smiles. “Welcome to our home.”
Hannibal makes dinner. Bedelia opens wine. Will sits there in one of Bedelia’s robes, lacquered in her colour and scent, and drinks a glass of wine as soon as it’s offered to him. Bedelia longs to do the same, but she is busy watching Hannibal.
The three of them eat oysters and marsala as Will Graham prostrates his emotional guts the way his entrails spilled onto Hannibal’s kitchen floor a world away.
“I forgive you, Hannibal”, Will says, between bites.
Hannibal smiles.
Later, Bedelia is on her bed, and watches Will, still clad in her robe, fall to his knees and press his face into Hannibal’s legs, declaring his forgiveness over and over again.
Hannibal looks at her, confusion painted across his face. She shrugs. She knows he suspects she drugged him, but he came here like that.
Hannibal drops down onto his haunches, which takes him below the line of the end of the bed. She crawls forward, and watches as Hannibal murmurs his own forgiveness against Will’s lips, their foreheads pressed together. It is almost a kiss, but not quite.
Will tries to instigate a kiss; a needy, reedy moan escapes when Hannibal springs to his feet and leaves the room. He looks at Bedelia with an identical look to the one Hannibal had just held - adorable confusion. He reluctantly stands, and sits on the end of the bed, tugging her robe back around him where it was dislodged during his prostration. He puts his hand on hers, and it is warm and she feels a twinge. He is a so nearly a normal man, and it has been a long time since she had anything approaching normal.
Hannibal returns. He holds a box in his hand that Bedelia has seen before only once, in a quiet corner of the first class lounge of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Its where they took their version of vows.
She had always wondered why there was a third ring in the box. She had assumed it was because he had guessed at her ring size and bought a spare in case it didn’t fit. She hadn’t considered that they might be a set.
Hannibal drops to his knees in front of Will. “I take my vows seriously. Will you consent to join us?” he holds the ring between his thumb and forefinger; his own just visible in the shadows.
Will looks at Bedelia, and then at Hannibal, and then takes the ring from him with a small nod.
It fits perfectly.
They leave at first light. There is a note left for Jack Crawford to find. Bedelia is sure it is unerringly polite, but that Jack will chase them to the ends of the earth no matter what they write.
She leaves the stash of drugs she had carefully collected to form her alibi in the apartment. She has no need for it now.
Jack would expect them to run as far away as possible, and so they stay in Italy. Umbria is beautiful in the spring. They change their appearance dramatically, but she keeps her gold curls for history’s sake.
They have come a long way from the first night, where they just slept together. Will lay between them, dead to the world, while Bedelia and Hannibal watched over him, hands linked over the vulnerability of his body. That night was a night of many kinds of vows.
Now, in the quiet of their Umbrian farmhouse, they are much more profane.
Will blossoms under the influence of good food and regular sex. He is much more creative and sensual than she ever would have given him credit for. She would have pegged Hannibal as the one with the unorthodox sexual habits, but it is Will who begs prettily for things she had only ever read about, including non-metaphorical pegging.
Hannibal loves the physicality of sex, but he is a predator. His muscles are best for sprinting, for hunting and taking, while she and Will are stalkers, they are built for endurance, for the slow build of infinite pleasure, of foreplay that is designed to tease and open.
Will loves to eat her, and she loves his strong tongue, the rasp of his beard against her thighs, the way he isn’t scared of her and the power she holds inside her. She likes to touch every inch of his skin until he is almost vibrating out of his skin, then do it all again with teeth and tongue until he is blushing pink and hypersensitive - streaked with red welts from her nails and incisors, and then she puts her closely manicured fingers inside him and likes to make him scream.
Hannibal likes to watch them until they are both ready for it, primed and nearly ready to climax without him and then he joins them, launching himself out of wherever he was watching them and between them.
They both then inevitably get fucked slow and strong and deep. Hannibal is honest with his desire for both of them, and for them to have each other. The first time Bedelia slid into Will’s grasping, needy ass she ended up in the middle between them, Hannibal unable to help himself. Mostly, though, she ends up underneath Will as he gets thoroughly fucked above her, the angle of his dick perfect for her, shallow and rapid, like a heartbeat. Hannibal holds her hands above her head, Will’s head bowed and attached to her nipple, and Hannibal controls the rhythm, driving them towards orgasm. Will always comes first, the double stimulation always too much, and that nearly always sets her off, her orgasm like an earthquake that shakes their foundations and brings them all down. Hannibal always shouts his orgasm last, and always, always is the first one up, clearing their twitching, insensate bodies up before lying back down among them in the low afternoon sun.
There is a blonde woman, loved by two men, who also loved each other in turn, and the three of them lived in sun dappled Perugia thousands of years after another women did the same. She was a woman of great skill, respected by those who knew her and admired by those who didn’t. Not much more was known about her other than that she was loved, but maybe it is enough for that to be how you resonate through history, as an immortal love poetry indelibly cast on stone.