The Turkey Baster Method

“God, do you know how lucky we are?” Alana asks. She’s lying back against the satin pillows, another one under her hips and her knees splayed open. In any other circumstance she’d be irritated at a sexual partner so blatantly distracted from the display she’s making of herself, but. Well. Margot has a good excuse.

Still, Margot’s gaze flicks minutely towards the positive ovulation test on the dresser. “To be honest, I would have said that the odds of you being fertile on the day we happened to kill my brother were better than the odds of Hannibal Lecter milking him with a cattle prod.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “But then, I guess you know Dr. Lecter better than I do.”

Alana closes her legs, rolling over onto her side and propping her head on her hand. She’d never figured Margot to be the jealous type, but then, it’s not like they’ve really gotten all that many chances to get to know each other without Mason’s interference. And anyway, Alana had never figured herself as the U-Haul type, but here she is skipping straight over the U-Haul step and going straight to the turkey baster. So perhaps her psychological profiles were never all that good in the first place.

Margot glares at her now, perfectly mascara-framed eyes wide and amused. “Seriously?” she says. “You’re worried I might be jealous that you let the cannibal put his meat in you?”

Alana snorts, lies back on the pillows again. It feels good to laugh about Hannibal; if a little dangerous, since he’s probably barely even off the property by now, unconscious prize in his arms. She’s not sure whether Margot would take kindly to any joking about the meat she’d put into herself in pursuit of their current goal. Maybe once the Verger baby is alive and squalling, they can stop pretending that Will Graham is merely Hannibal’s irrelevant collateral damage.

“Kinda disappointing,” says Margot, holding the oral medicine syringe and a the vial of semen in front of her eyes and pulling the plunger out slowly, “That it turns out you don’t actually use a turkey baster for this.”

“Yeah, well, that’s medicine for you,” says Alana. “Romance gives way to reality.”

“Most medicine,” says Margot, and Alana stares up at the ceiling and thinks about the dead body in the eel pool. Margot is right, of course: Hannibal’s medicine is the only kind where romance is the cure for reality. And she has to admit that the man who’s promised to kill her was entirely right in his prescription to Margot. Killing Mason was– right. It was the most right-feeling thing she’s ever done.

“Okay.” Margot holds the syringe up to the light and flicks a finger against it dramatically. “Spread ‘em.”

It doesn’t feel like much, besides the warmth of Margot’s fingers and an anomalous twinge of pain as she accidentally stabs Alana’s cervix with the blunt syringe. “Sorry,” she mutters.

“S’alright,” says Alana.“You just want to kind of… coat the cervix with it.” She reaches a hand into Margot’s hair, her once-perfect curls frizzy from the day’s activities. “And then,” she adds, “You’re supposed to have an orgasm. Helps to– you know. Suck it all up.”

“I do know,” says Margot slowly, concentrating on her work. “Been researching this for a long time, actually.”

Alana swallows. She wants to ask how long. Imagines Margot as a child or perhaps a teenager, realizing that the only way out of her own personal hell was to create a new life at the same time as she ends one. Alana can see how Margot has grown around the concept like a tree growing around a fence, until it sits at the very heart of her, both self and not-self.

Margot pulls it out of her and then the syringe is empty save for a slimy string trailing off the end. She wrinkles her nose, wraps it in a tissue and throws it in the garbage.

Alana reaches over and trails a hand down her arm. “Hey,” she says. “I was only joking about the orgasm. I mean, I wasn’t, but I understand if you’re… not really interested in me sexually while I’ve got your brother’s semen inside of me. I can just–”

Margot plants her hand on the other side of Alana’s face, and leans down to kiss her hard enough to cut the sentence off. Her hair pools on the pillows, smelling of sweat and fear and triumph, and Alana strains to hear the words when Margot whispers into the canopy of darkness around their faces, “If you think a little bit of Mason’s spunk is going to put me off, you’ve underestimated either how hot you are, or how fucked-up I am.”

And Alana laughs into her mouth, because– well, they’ve only just begun to excavate all of the ways in which they’re both fucked-up, but at least this one feels good. Margot straddles her hips and kisses her like it’s the end of the world, her fingers rubbing over Alana’s clit with some of the slick leaking out of her from– well, best not to think about that particular substance too much. It’s momentarily blissful, is the point, something otherworldly about the idea that they’re here, skin-to-skin, and they have everything they want.

Everything they want– plus a death sentence for Alana. She forces the thought down and buries her face in Margot’s neck as she comes, trying to retain the presence of mind to keep her hips tilted up as she spasms and whimpers and eventually comes to rest, Margot’s sticky fingers resting on the soft inside of her thigh.

She breathes out, slowly, marvelling at how still everything is, all of a sudden. She should spend some more time still, waiting for Mason’s sperm to find their way around inside of her, and the the fact that she’s required to relax makes it possible, somehow, to do.

Margot rolls onto her side, and they stare up into space together. Alana snakes out a hand and grasps Margot’s fingers in hers, still slick with semen.

“Thank you,” Margot whispers, and Alana just tightens her grip. It’s too huge and too delicate a statement to be met with a response.

Eventually, Margot sits up. She’s naked– Alana had insisted that she wasn’t going to be the only person starkers for this– and she looks tired. Well, she has a right to be, Alana supposes. It’s been a very long day.

“God, I’m starving,” Margot says, rubbing at her eyes with the heels of her hands.

Alana licks her lips. “I’m getting hungry too,” she admits. “Is there…”

“Anything to eat in this godforsaken house not prepared by Cordell?” Margot grimaces. “Well, there’s a stack of hotdogs that was going to be lunch for Mason’s creepy orphan camp.”

“Huh.” Alana considers that. It makes sense that there are hotdogs; the inevitable end of the life-cycle of a commercial meat production operation. Dribs and drabs, parts you can’t sell any other way, nitrates and nitrites. Some of the meat in those hotdogs probably came from pigs that had eaten human flesh, but as far as eating human flesh goes, that at least is a level of distance she’s willing to accept the odds on. “That actually sounds pretty good,” she says cautiously.

Margot washes up in the ensuite bathroom, then disappears for a few minutes. Alana closes her eyes and drifts, feeling more peaceful than she has in– god, years. Since Jack Crawford asked her advice on sending Will back into the field.

When Margot comes back, she’s wearing a silk robe and carrying an enormous platter of hotdogs and condiments. She deposits the platter on the bed and then shucks the robe back off, climbing back in beside Alana naked and reaching for a bun.

Alana watches her pour a generous line of ketchup over the cheap meat. A drop falls off and lands on the sheet and for a moment Alana stares at it, wondering if it looks like blood. If this is some sort of omen– and if so, if blood on the sheets would be an ill portent or merely a salacious metaphor.

She rubs it into the hideously expensive satin with her thumb, and then it looks nothing like blood. She grabs a hotdog of her own, suddenly ravenous. Maybe that’s a good sign– eating for two, as they say.

Alana is a doctor; she knows there’s no way to tell if an egg has been fertilized directly after insemination. Still, some part of her is convinced that of course she must know; how could something so monumental be happening inside of her this very moment, and her still be completely unaware?

“I would’ve thought you’d have an aversion to eating Verger hotdogs,” she says lightly, as Margot shoves the thing into her mouth in large enough bites to be nearly comical.

“I did, when Verger hotdogs belonged to my brother,” says Margot, her mouth full of half-chewed meat and bread. Rude. Alana smiles, takes a big bite, and she speaks with her mouth full, too. “They’re our hotdogs now.”