Archive of Our Own

Imagine Freddie.

Fredricka Lounds, after. After the Tooth Fairy is dead and the Red Dragon is dead (poseur) and Francis Dolarhyde's corpse has been taken to pieces and then sewn back up and ignominiously squabbled over by people with medical degrees who want to shred it apart again to see how he ticked, Freddie stares at a blinking cursor and, for the first time since she was an undergraduate journalism student with pretensions, second-guesses her words.

Safe in the cocoon of her house, wearing sweatpants and a tank top, bra hanging from the closet door knob, she hesitates.

(Her mother calls her sanctuary a cave and still thinks there's something wrong with her, that she eschews all windows. But Freddie, what if there's a fire, she frets, and Freddie neither giggles hysterically nor pops one of the pills the doctor gave her. She's the Pythia in her cave, not Cassandra bared before the Greeks, and she will have her respect and her walls.)

She pulls on her wrist-braces and starts an article about Dolarhyde's grandmother, stitched together from dentures and hospital records and whispers from the neighborhood gossips.

(For 10 bucks an hour, grad students are more than happy to wade through the old microfilm of the tiny local newspapers, full of innuendo and local crimes; the papers are all dead now, but they're still popping up with delightful morsels for her after all these years. If she were poetically inclined — or Hannibal Lector, damn him — she might liken them to the bones that scaffold her empire. Or mushrooms sprouting from decomposing corpses. But she's not: they're useful, if tedious, that's all.)

Next week she'll roll out the triptych she has of Chilton and Lang framing Dolarhyde's corpse; she'll play in photoshop until Chilton and Lang are burnt black wings spanning out from Dolarhyde's exsanguinated body. The newsstands that carry Tattlecrime in pulp will black band it; it will become her best selling issue to date, and her servers will crash twice.

Next month she'll find herself playing with Jack again, following poor broken Miriam Lass until she gives Freddie details on the latest serial killer to give Jack a hard on. (Miriam Lass is broken like Freddie is broken, like Alana Bloom is broken, which is to say she isn't. She'll give Freddie better orgasms with one hand than any man has managed with two, and she will oh-so-accidentally leave casefiles under a lock more rudimentary than Freddie's junior high diary's. Jack will bluster, but he never will find out how the Deadly Nightshade murders end up on Tattlecrime. Freddie will even get to make her header pretty, for that one.)

When the Deadly Nightshade murderer — Percy Penshydde, you have got to be kidding — ends up posed like Atropos in a Rubens, Freddie will publish every picture she can get her hands on, will have angry lawyers from the Louvre giving her copyright infringement notices when she posts images of the original painting, and will contemplate her exit strategy again. Except she has no exit strategy; she's already died once, so she might as well make the second time, if it happens, count.

Next year she'll open up a holiday card in the mail. Thanks for all the memories, it will say, and it will have five locks of hair in it; one of them will be hers. After some time, testing will confirm the sources of the others. Percy Penshydde. Bradley Forsythe-Huntingdon: the Appalachian Vampire; found flayed, the hollowed out cavity of his chest holding cheap copies of Dracula rebound in his skin; Tattlecrime's series of articles on book bindings in human skin, anthropodermic bibliopegy, will bring her joy and pageviews. James Smith: the Alabama Arsonist (she has to call them something, people aren't going to buy a headline about a generic arsonist, and she likes alliteration, sue her); found bound to a rock underneath the eagle nest in the Birmingham Zoo, his liver shredded. Sophronia Hobbs (no relation to Garret Jacob, unfortunately): the Werewolf of Chestertown; all her kills — brutal dismemberments — happened on the full moon, and she was found on the new, a silver centerpiece at the restaurant she owned (although, also unfortunately, without cannibalistic tendencies).

Freddie will get very, very drunk that night and publish her expose of Jack Crawford the next day. (Despicable man. She knows exactly what she is, and she doesn't care if you call her a carrion eater or a truth seeker, she's going to do her job. Jack's lied to himself so often that he can't see the truth for the bullshit. Prurnell's files are enlightening; Lass' stories more so. Freddie hates Will Graham, but at least he didn't know he was lying; Jack did, until he started believing the shit he was shoveling and eating people up from the inside.) It's a slow news day; she might as well.

In the meantime, she pulls on her wrist braces and types. She has an article on Dolarhyde's grandmother; if she adds a few choice quotations from Chilton-and-Will, massages a few of her transitions, it'll be sensational. She's thinking of how to get a picture of Chilton, or, better yet, a copy of the video; she already has a picture of Lang.

She opens a new document and stares at the cursor again. Fuck it, she thinks.

MURDER HUSBANDS REUNITED AT LAST! HONEYMOON STARTS WITH A MENAGE A TROIS, ENDS WITH A MURDER.

Imagine the littlest Verger.

George Bloom Verger. Named for Margot's poor godfather, embraced by God too soon. Not traditional, perhaps, it really would have been more appropriate to name him after poor Mason, bless his soul, but understandable. Margot and her godfather were so close, remember? He and Susannah had even talked about adopting her, and she'd seemed so excited. Her daddy wasn't sure, but he did have Mason to carry on the family line, and George and Susannah hadn't been able to have their own kids, poor dears. Such a shame he died in that terrible accident. Mason never did get over the shock of seeing it, and thank goodness Margot wasn't there.

George thinks the helicopter is a great adventure. He's been on one before, but he loves it every time. His mothers always smile when he makes whoomp whoomp sounds. Mom's hair blows everywhere because it's not long enough yet to really pull back, and Mama always asks him to talk her through her motion sickness because he's her brave little man. Their new home doesn't have as many places to play hide and seek, but that's okay. It also doesn't have constant renovations or have the smell of bleach and wet paint marching inexorably through every square inch, room by room.

In a week, his mothers will stop hovering so tightly, and they'll banish him back to his own room at night. It's right next door to theirs, and they welcome him when he has nightmares and keep him company when he's ill — Mom never does master the soothing lullaby, but she tries, and Mama's cool hands feel good on his forehead — but it's made very clear that they have their room and he has his.

In a month, they'll tell him that he's going to be a big brother soon. Mom's not going to have the baby this time, neither is Mama, but it will be Mama's baby and will belong with all of them, just as they belong with each other. Their eyes will be red when they tell him, and their smiles will be thin. They will have argued themselves hoarse before coming to the decision that they can't hide from the monster under the bed forever and that they still want this child, no matter the complications and the miles between them and their pampered surrogate. However, George won't notice this. He'll just know that he's excited and can't wait until his little sister comes.

In a year, he'll unwrap a package, shiny gold paper covering a plain cardboard box. Congratulations on being a big brother, the card will say, (sorry we're late!), and in that box will be a set of scales and weights that he plays with, making them teeter back and forth. (Roman, 2nd century B.C., the dealer will confirm, carefully not asking where they found such a treasure.) His mothers will pale, but they won't let him see their panic, their desire to wrap their children up and run again.

Eventually, Mom will go away on a business trip. He won't know that if she doesn't return Mama will tell him that she was lost in a terrible storm over the ocean. He won't know how long they fought, well out of sight, only when he and his sister were asleep, about running or staying or meeting the monster behind the door face to face. He won't know that Mom will decide to go to Rome, to put an end to the dagger that's been aimed at her throat (but not Mama's or George's or his sister's). He won't know about a slate wiped clean by salt of the Atlantic.

What he will know is that when Mom comes back, she and Mama will kiss and hug him so hard that all of his squirming and protests that he's a big boy now and that they should stop getting lipstick on his face will do no good. George won't know what happened — he'll never know what happened, and to him the monster up in the rafters will always be imaginary — but sometimes they'll tell him about the times Mom took care of a pack of dogs and got lost in the fields; they'll make it a funny story about the city mouse out of place in the country, the orderly parent beset by chaos. George will howl at the moon for a solid month, after, pretending to run with a bunch of dogs that understand his every thought.

In the meantime, he's on a helicopter, and he needs to tell Mama all about what happened that day — he and the cook made cookies!

(Did they pack any?)

Imagine Molly.

Molly Graham, mother of Walter, wife of Will, and survivor of the Red Dragon.

Forget all of those labels.

She's Molly, and she's alive. Her son's alive. Her dogs are alive, and she hopes Francis Dolarhyde rots in hell for what he's done to them. (She refuses to let Tattlecrime into her house, but for just a moment she enjoys the picture of him, dead as a doornail, when she peeks underneath the wrapper at the Stop and Save. She thinks she should feel guilty, but she doesn't, not really. However, she does refuse when Beau offers to give her a copy for free.)

She and her son survived something terrible, and they're both going to be in therapy for the next thirty years, but they're still breathing.

After a week, she will take them both home, and, no matter what her parents say, she will know that she's not going to sell. The cabin is in her name, and it's their home; there's no where else she would rather be. This is the building where Walter's growth is marked in pencil ticks along the pantry doorframe. (This is the building where she can escape in the dark without giving herself away on a creaky floorboard.) This is the building where she welcomed Will Graham into her life, and this is the building where she will say goodbye to him, because her life will continue on.

After a month, she will tell her mom that she takes back every terrible thing she ever said about her town and the people in it. They will be rocks for her and Walter: there will be a fund set up to pay the vet bills from Dolarhyde's incursion; everyone will remember how much Molly hates condolence casseroles and will bring her vegetables and ice cream instead; girls' nights outs will continue unabated, and her friends will let her rant or vent or cry or pretend everything's normal, whatever she needs.

After a year, she will start writing a novel. It'll never sell, but that won't be the point; the point will be to try something new. It's a terrible novel, but she has fun discussing it on girls' nights — they come up with ever more torrid descriptions for the characters, and she's not sure why they ever thought Jessamyn Moonlyte was a good name — and June even decides to start writing a sequel.

Contemplating the adventures of Jessamyn Moonlyte will also distract her when she's fighting through the paperwork of having a husband who disappeared with a serial killing cannibal after the murder of yet another serial killer — whom she had told Will to chase. She will unashamedly take advantage of Jack Crawford's guilt and fraying connections to keep their health insurance sorted out. She and Walter had been on Will's, which was still FBI coverage through some bureaucratic trail she didn't understand but will replicate because they will need every bit of that coverage, no matter how much the doctors and therapists are willing to let things slide (to a point, always and only to a point) and work with them. She won't fight for survivors benefits, the retirement accounts and social security payments, although she won't say no when they're given to her. However, she will donate Will's savings to an animal shelter. She will think that he would like that.

In the meantime, Molly breathes. She ignores Tattlecrime's lurid headlines and also, in no particular order: the internet; CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, everything on television, really; Freddie Lounds' phone calls; Jack Crawford's phone calls; and her parents' cat Dinah.

She's alive, her son's alive, and her dogs are alive.

She breathes.