The Bone Arena • Hannibal/Will

[igrab]

Hannibal • 1726 words • character study


The secret to Will Graham, or one of them, anyway, is that he doesn't compartmentalize. He can't.

Jack Crawford speaks with his actions and what they say is, gambling with your sanity is worth the results you give me. But the truth is that it's not a gamble when the only option is to lose. Will knew, from the second he agreed to step into a scene and take a killer's conscience into his own, that it was over. Not the beginning of the end; no, not even that. The first time the silver pendulum became gold and he used it to sweep away history like layers, he had already gone too far. He was already a man with a gun in his hand, blood on his face, caked into his nails, he was already a wearer of skin suits and a carver of flesh. Jack Crawford had no way of knowing that, but Will still feels as if he should have known, should have understood. He is a victim of circumstance and hollow people and the inside of his own skull. He is a victim with no one to blame.

When he falls in love, this, too, happens all at once.

He's done it before. More times than he'd like to admit, if he's being honest with himself, which he has to be. When he falls there's no escaping it, nowhere to hide, no corner of his head free of the saccharine taint of this most powerful of emotions, thick as blood and harder to get rid of. It has never ended in anything but full bodily removal, of one party or another, until other things crowd out the unpleasantness and the memories don't hurt quite as keenly.

When he meets Hannibal Lecter he knows, the same way he knows why a man takes a knife instead of a gun or what it means when he kills the children first, that this path will end in blood enough for two. He knows these things - that Hannibal Lecter is the most brilliant psychopath in the world, that he's going to fall in love with him, and that the second fact is too intimately tied to the first to stop any of what will come.

He knows this, too: that Hannibal's mind isn't kin to his, but rather, the diametric opposite. Where Will's head is an open battleground, Hannibal's is a many-chambered nautilus, with lies upon lies upon secrets upon projections, with all his memories and realities tucked away into such perfect containers that he will never seem to be anything other than what he appears to be, which is exactly what he wishes to appear. It's exhausting and it makes Will's head hurt, but he also knows (because things don't happen subconsciously in Will's bone arena, they don't happen 'on some level', they just happen) that Hannibal is, in a curious way, safe.

Safe is a word that Will hoards. If he could protect any part of what lives inside him, if he could have memories that didn't fall whole into blood and darkness whenever Will slid his glasses off his face and truly opened his eyes, the word safe would be a bastion at the heart of his soul. He would cling to it like an anchor, build everything else around this one truth, this one concept, this one thought that would be with him always.

As it is, safe is a state of mind he cannot claim unless it is true, unless he is safe in every way possible, from end to end, he cannot be safe unless it fills him up. There is no relativity, in this the shifting ocean of Will's inner world.

But Hannibal is safe.

These are the things that he can trust - that Hannibal does not make mistakes. That he is too good a criminal, too careful, too particular, because the endless chambers of his heart do not ever let him forget the rigid order of his existence. There is nothing liquid in Hannibal Lecter, no emotion out of his control, nothing that affects him more than he lets it.

Hannibal is safe because Will can trust in his diligence, and in his rigidity. So maybe, Will thinks, maybe this love will consume me, but it will slide off of Hannibal like water off a stone. He won't need to leave because no one will break but Will, and Will is already broken.

He does not expect Hannibal to let himself feel love.

At first, he knows, it's one chamber. Hannibal is the Titanic, built of watertight compartments. This chamber holds the gentle psychiatrist that interacts with Jack Crawford, with Alana Bloom, the one who was asked to make a profile of a broken thing. Will isn't surprised when Hannibal appears to feel affection in return, because Will's heart is spilling over, and Hannibal uses mirroring to manage this chamber, so that he appears to be exactly what one expects. Will doesn't show it but of course Hannibal soaks up the overflow, of course he doesn't need things like outward signals.

But when he sees a body laid out in exactly the wrong way, when he speaks about it and Hannibal likes what he hears, he knows then that another chamber has been infected. The killer, too, has come to love him.

He's at a dinner party when another of Hannibal's nested cells reveals itself. This, Will knows, is not pork. He knows how pork tastes; he knows how a lesser creature could easily swallow the lie, but this is not pork. He worries, then, that Hannibal thought he would be so mundane as to believe it - because he does love him, he wants every scrap of his attention like a pathetic dog - but then he realizes. This is the way the cannibal writes his love letter.

(And in his bone arena all of Hannibal's jokes are suddenly hilarious, and he falls in love a little more. It rhymes, too, he thinks, and just barely manages not to laugh out loud.)

The stag, too, is Hannibal's, though Will is certain it's just a figment of his own imagination. A way to sort out the shadow he feels, as antlers grow like coral to form an underwater forest in his mind. This is the hand on his shoulder, the quiet words of comfort and destruction, this is the sum total of Hannibal's manipulations, given physical form.

It isn't that he necessarily wants it, because he knows how this is going to end. He just also knows, though, that there can be no other way. So he lets the stag have his roaming grounds, and he loves feeling as if Hannibal is always watching.

He knows now that a number of Hannibal's façades have his name on them, but what he doesn't know if how many more there are. He still assumes, naïvely, that Hannibal could drop the tainted areas of himself, excise them like pruning off bad branches, and move on. He doesn't understand that he is a cancer, not just one tumor but a disease that can't be stopped. He doesn't understand that if Hannibal is the Titanic, there will come a time when too many chambers will flood and the whole ship will be doomed.

He doesn't understand that he is the iceberg, and Hannibal has already crashed.

Doubt, too, is something that cannot be sectioned off.

It only takes one drop of poison to affect the whole ocean, until Will cannot be sure of anything except that Hannibal is inside him, everywhere. Will is running from the stag; he is the stag. He has lost all parts of himself in a sea made red by blood and ataraxic whispers. There is nothing to cling to; no anchor, no bastion, and it is only when he wakes up in the hospital that it occurs to him just how thoroughly he has been appropriated.

It isn't that he hadn't known that Hannibal was a killer, that he was a master conductor of life's orchestra, using death as one instrument among many to construct his symphony. But he had thought, so innocently, that love would not mean anything to a psychopath. That he would be an object, too; the oboe, perhaps, unique in context but not irreplaceable.

He was wrong. So wrong. He is no longer a thing but a work of art, he is priceless, without equal, he is the virtuoso with hands belonging to God.

It terrifies him, to be so wanted by someone who holds Will's beating heart neatly in the palm of his hand.

He knows this - that if he doesn't fight back, Hannibal will be disappointed. That Dr. Du Maurier, when she comes to him and gives him the gift of words that drive the doubt from his system full-force, says I do believe he was doing what he thought was best for you, that this, too, is true.

Hannibal is no longer safe, because love has compromised him. He is no longer immune to mistakes. The walls that hold his parts have hairline fractures, and the water is seeping in.

But Will no longer needs Hannibal's safety. He has been in that wet warmth, he knows how it feels to be swallowed, for his arms and legs and ears and heart to not be his own. What he has, now, is a word that needs no bastions, no anchors, and will not be chased away so easily, for it is not something that can be easily defined, and therefore shies away from denial.

Will has, and has always had, love. But now it will be the weapon that sinks the unsinkable ship, that brings Hannibal to justice - because Will loves him but he loves justice, too, and the things that Hannibal has done are illegal. He will still love him in prison. He will love him until the end of time. But love is not always blind, and Will, too, is doing what is best for the one he cares about. He can't let Hannibal hurt anyone else. He can't let anyone else hurt Hannibal.

He drops these words into his ocean, staining the bone-white spurs of the antlers of dead dreams. He loves me, he thinks, smiling in a way that must seem so cruel. And it will make him let me win.