Finále • Hannibal/Will

[igrab]

Hannibal • 940 words • character study


When he first met Will, when he started all of this, he hadn't known what the end would be like, only that it would be beautiful. He had seen in Will a spark that no other human had ever had, and - through entirely unethical and nonconsensual methods, perhaps - stripped off the layers of detritus and laid bare what was hidden inside. The seeds he'd sown, the parts of Will that were cultivated, sculpted, were only the window dressing, the stage set, the background and support structure. What Will had when he came alive out of that prison was entirely his own.

What he had known was that Will would be the end of him. Not the death, though that certainly was an option, but truly the end - of the Chesapeake Ripper, of Hannibal himself, of the long journey he'd undertaken to create beauty from ugliness. For the first time in a long time, he thinks of his sister and not of her death, or of how her heart tasted on his tongue and the things it told him in red, wet secrets.

He remembers her alive. He remembers loving her, and how he had known, from the day of her birth, that he belonged to her alone. He has not loved since then, until now. Until now.

He doesn't want to possess Will, he wants to be broken by him.

He does not know if, in the end, he will struggle. Probably, he will. Probably, his self-preservation will kick in and he will do things he would otherwise regret, act in a manner not in keeping with the true wish of his heart, which is for Will to flay him alive and eat him raw and swallow him, smiling, to carry him inside always. There is such a rush that comes from doing bad things to bad people, and he is, of course, a bad person. For Will, perhaps the worst, though he has also in his way tried to be the best. He is both; he is the ends of the spectrum, he is anything but a non-entity to Will Graham and that's all Hannibal needs. He does not want to be loved, he wants to be important. Important enough to kill.

After their session, he lets his eyes slip shut and carefully, delicately, replays the memory in perfect detail. With my bare hands.

He can feel it, Will's hands on him, there are tools and implements all around and Will has killed so many in his head - but they were none so personal as this, there is no other way than face to face with those slim hands around his neck and Hannibal's heart rate finally rising, rising. Not with fear - not entirely with fear, he is not immune to it, but dying does not frighten him if Will is the one to do it - but with love, arousal, and the kind of brutal want that makes him all the more cautious these days in Will's presence. It wouldn't do to give up the game so early, not when there's so much more to do, to see. So much more of Will to unfurl, peeling open like petals of a lily and baring their true colors.

His heart would be pounding if Will strangles him, he thinks, and he thinks also that this is why Will won't do it. There is every chance that he will be arrested instead, because that is what Will does. He is not, in actuality, a killer. He may love Hannibal enough to put his hands on him and slowly choke him to death (he wishes it were so; he wishes for Will's intimate murder like Juliet must have wished for Romeo) but he may also hate Hannibal enough to deny him this most beautiful of deaths, to deny it every day. To suffer a life alone and in chains, to give of himself so sparingly that Hannibal is a starved, desperate man. It would be terrible, but it would be Will's right to do so, and Hannibal would see either outcome as being equally expressive of the depth of Will's feelings.

(He does not think, though, that Will may love him enough to want to keep him alive, simply for the pleasure of his continued existence. He does not know Will Graham as well as he thinks he does, which has always been his downfall.)

Hannibal has fed the caterpillar and guarded the cocoon and what emerges, now, is the culmination of his entire life's work. He is the muralist sewing himself into his masterpiece. He has killed so many men (several women, not as many, they have on the whole been less rude) and transformed them, utilized them, built an impossible structure of murder and deceit and necessity and they are wrong, when they say his kills have no motive, or that the copycat victims were for a different purpose than the deaths at the hand of the Ripper. They are all perfectly, meticulously, his. His design is bigger, grander, with more pieces than anyone has ever cared to contemplate, before Will Graham. But this has always been for an audience of one. Will has hatched into himself, becoming the only creature fit to lay the final brushstroke, to be as Hannibal was for the muralist when he sewed him in with grace and care.

Hannibal has set up his own death, figurative or literal, and placed it delicately into Will's hands. Now all he has to do is wait, and keep playing along.

I know you are watching, sister heart, he thinks. I will finally be ready to join you.