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Demon Marcus, Sunday

"It's the most wonderful tiiime of the yeeear..."

It wasn't that Sparkle was in denial about what weekend it was or anything, really. Honest. Hell, it wasn't even that he was doing much better today than he had been in weeks. It was just that it was October now. Which meant that he had carte blanche to start pulling out the Halloween decorations. He was getting into the groove of it, here. Fake cobwebs, little glow-in-the-dark spiders to go in them... He hadn't gone so far as to replace all the mannequins with skeletons yet, but that was definitely on the docket.

Just as soon as he got some skeletons, mostly.

"There'll be trick-or-treat going, egg cartons for throwing, and hearts full of fear! It's the most wonderful tiiime of the yeeear!"

Just wait until he set up the big bowl of candy.

[OOC: IT'S HALLOWEEN. I mean, in a few weeks, but IT'S HALLOWEEN. Open, OCD-free!]

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Honestly, Sparkle, Hannibal would never use real ones! They were far too much work to get the meat off of.

"No nooses," Hannibal promised. He played with the garland a bit, letting loose a puff of glitter. "This is too stiff, anyway. It would be difficult to tie around anything."

Instead of that, he climbed onto the edge of the display to tuck one end of the garland into a corner so it wouldn't come loose. "Will this work?"

Naaah. The easiest way to get meat off of any bone was to just throw it on an anthill and let them do all the work.

Sparkle glanced over from where he was artfully arranging spiders in the cobwebs.

"... Sure," he said, after a pause. "Do you, uh, want tape or anything for that?"

He suspected that cheap glittery bat garland was not a thing Hannibal had much experience with.

He would be absolutely right about that. But the garland wasn't precisely the point here, anyway.

"Yes, please." Hannibal smiled at Sparkle. "It's staying for now, but I should hate for it to fall down later."

"I mean, not that it would be too hard to put them back up again," Sparkle noted, shrugging a little and rummaging in one of the drawers behind the counter for the tape. "But you might as well do it right the first time."

"I always prefer to do the best job possible," Hannibal said. He eyed the glittery bats sardonically. "Even for these things." Or for the reason he was actually here.

"You have a special enjoyment for Halloween," he noted.

Sparkle gave his shoulders a little shrug at that, suddenly very interested in cupping his hands together to check and see just how well these glow spiders really glowed. Because, no reason. It certainly had nothing to do with avoiding eye contact.

"Halloween's easy," he said, shrugging. "It's... you know... the one holiday that doesn't have any real big obsession with family togetherness. You don't even have to be you. It's just candy and costumes and stupid pranks and scary movies, but it's still just as big as all those other holidays that get all the attention, you know? Like, it gets the same lead-in as Easter or Christmas, or Thanksgiving without all the stupid religious shit and the big family feasts and people asking you questions that aren't any of their fucking business."

Yep, the spiders totally glowed. Good job, spiders.

"And you don't need to have a special somebody, like Valentine's day, and you don't need to have parents like either of those days and there's more to enjoy than just drinking, so it isn't even like you need a fake I.D. to do anything worthwhile the way I always had to on Saint Patrick's... Halloween has just kind of always been open for anybody."

"It's an inclusive holiday," Hannibal said, smiling gently. "What's not to like?" He fixed the bats where they were as best he could without the tape and hopped back down to the floor.

"I've thought of having a Halloween party; Jono rather likes it, as well." He paused. "I'm attempting to talk him out of trying our next wedding on Halloween."

He wasn't actually sure he was going to win that one.

"I confess that while it's not a holiday I grew up with in this way," he waved at the decorations, "I can see the appeal."

"It's got this whole, like... aesthetic to it," Sparkle said, setting his handful of spiders down and holding the tape out to Hannibal. "I dunno, it's like... scary, but it's okay to be scared sometimes. It's okay to be the little kid sometimes, too."

Which were both things he'd been reminding himself of a lot, lately.

"But if you have your next wedding on Halloween, I'm not attending. With my luck I'd end up getting turned into a werewolf or something."

Especially considering Hannibal's luck with weddings.

"I would not at all blame you," Hannibal said.

He nodded his thanks for the tape and went to tape up the garland.

"It's scary in a way that we know we can prevail," he pointed out. "Sometimes we need that."

"After the kind of year it's been, I could use a bit of prevailing," Sparkle admitted, tucking another few spiders away and then going for a rummage to see if he could find any black cat stuff.

He liked black cats. He missed his own.

Hannibal taped the garland up in a few more places (getting glitter in his hair and all over his hands in the process), then sat on the ledge.

"How have you been sleeping?" he asked.

Sparkle's reach into the supplies stuttered, and he winced faintly as it did so. Right.

"Could be better," he confessed, quietly. "I guess it takes more than some background noise. Working on it, though."

Hannibal simply nodded and held out a hand for something else to put up. Perhaps a spiderweb would be less messy?

"You know you're always welcome to visit. My office or my home."

Sparkle couldn't read minds, unfortunately, so Hannibal was being handed a few little cloth ghost lights to hang in the window, next.

They were kind of insufferably cute.

"I... Yeah, I know," he replied, the corner of his mouth twitching faintly into a tiny smile. "I guess I don't want to risk wearing out that welcome too badly."

They were ridiculously cute, yes. Hannibal shook his head and smiled at them and Sparkle both.

"You never could," he assured him. "And should it ever be an inconvenience at a particular time, I promise I would let you know."

Sparkle nodded, and got right back to fidgeting.

"I don't doubt it," he confessed. "I guess... I don't know. It feels wrong that I can't do this. Like I'm falling short at something that we do like we breathe, and I shouldn't."

It was hard to ask for help with something that he was supposed to be programmed to do with ease.

"You're having a problem that is not uncommon, particularly among those who have experienced traumatic episodes," Hannibal corrected, "and you don't have to handle it alone."

He set the ghosts aside carefully and unbuttoned a cuff to roll his sleeve up past the scar. "I don't believe I've ever showed you these before."

Sparkle blinked up at Hannibal, and then... well, then down at the scar. And then he sucked in a breath between his teeth.

"Jeeze... no," he agreed, frowning a little. "That's a new one to me..."

Though it clearly wasn't a new scar, so much.

Hannibal rolled up the opposite sleeve to show the matching scar. "A man tried to kill me. He set me on a wobbly bucket with a rope around my neck, and slit my wrists. In the end, he left me hanging." He smiled ruefully. "Jack Crawford saved my life."

"The one who crashed your last wedding," Sparkle said, his tone growing a little distant as he looked over the stars. "He didn't know yet, then."

Wasn't it great to have a timeframe for those traumas? He chewed his lip for a moment, and then looked up to Hannibal's face again, frowning faintly.

"The guy who got you... he wanted to torture you before you went."

You didn't give somebody a bucket to stand on if you didn't want them to think about what was happening to them.

"Jack suspected, but he wasn't certain," Hannibal said. "And I don't think the man who did this knew what he wanted." He waved it off. "He thought he was doing somebody a favor."

He met Sparkle's eyes. "But my point in showing you these was only to say - anybody can experience a trauma. And nightmares, trouble sleeping, as a result. I had both friends and a therapist to help me through it."

He'd still mostly done it on his own, but they had been there if he'd wanted.

"So do you, if you would like the assistance. There is no weakness in asking for help."

Sparkle chewed on his lip. And then nodded a little.

"I... yeah... I think I would. I mean, I think I need it. I'm clawing my way to functional again, but the going is slow."

Painfully slow.

"It often is," Hannibal said. "But you're definitely on the right track." He held up the (frankly adorable) ghosts, smiling over them. "Find joy in everything you can."

"Including Halloween decorating," Sparkle mused, and then smiled faintly and reached for a few rubber bats on little strings. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."

Or, at least, it was less disappointing than most other holidays ever were.

Hannibal flicked one of the bats, making it bounce. "For as long as you like."

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Demon Marcus, Sunday

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