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Will is an innocent. Jack was right. This is what Hannibal can’t stand about him; this is what fascinates and repels, what draws him in even as it draws out tendrils of resentment from what should have been his heart: Will can go to the end of the dark path in the woods, Will can walk into hell, Will can pick up a knife and spill blood and walk out again, untouched, into the light. This should not be possible. The clinical part of Hannibal thinks Interesting; something in him that he thought was dead protests not fair.
Is Will untouched? Not completely; he is wounded by what he sees, but it does not mark him. He is not changed; there is that essential core of rough goodness, a frontier Protestant assertion of the importance of sacrifice and justice, that remains intact no matter what dark forces Will allows inside his heart (later, much later, Clarice will have this too; why, eventually, she will turn and Will never, ever could is that Will knows the darkness, lives in the darkness, and thinks he is it, thinks he deserves it, thinks that all his atonement for a sin yet uncommitted can never be enough; Clarice touches the darkness, studies the darkness; would sacrifice herself to save another, but never thinks she might have the darkness in her; she has nothing for which to atone, until she does. But all that is so much later). All Will’s brusqueness is fear; he cuts himself off from feeling anything but the justifications of murderers, the siren song of bloodletting. The need.
Hannibal knows the itch, the need. He pretends he is better than that; he can rise above it for a time, but always, finally, he succumbs. To himself he never says succumbs, he never feels it that way; to him his kills are choices, cleanly made decisions, shopping. Hunting for sport. A gentlemanly pursuit, dignified. He is not like the others, who need it, who pursue their elusive, time-worn, dog-eared, semen-stained, grubby little fantasies that can never be realized to perfect satisfaction. Murder is like any other drug; you can never recapture the perfect, ideal, high of the first time. But you can never stop trying, either. The cooling-off period shortens, the risk increases, driven by hope for a greater thrill as much as rising desperation for a kill.
Hannibal prides himself on his control. He is not like that, except on the essential way that he is. The need.
He despises Will because he knows Will knows this. Will doesn’t know the Chesapeake Ripper’s name, but Will knows him nonetheless.
He likes Will, is fascinated by Will, for the same reason, and for another: he sees on Will’s face when he goes into his trances that Will appreciates his art.
…
It disgusts him. It sets him on fire and shaking when he opens his eyes. He blurts it all out to get it away, to cleanse himself, so that he can take a moment to remember that he is disgusted and not admiring, not aroused, not whatever the killer was by the blood and the torture and the terror, by the staging and the arrangements and the look-at-me-see-what-I-can-do that echoes in the placement of bodies, the art of it. He looks at a totem pole made of severed limbs and thinks masterpiece.
Dogs are good judges of character, unless you have blood on your hands. He tries to take comfort in this. They ask no questions of him; have no concept of what is in his head; love him regardless of whether or not the blood is staining him. Blood can be redemptive; the blood of Christ. Will thinks perhaps if he steeps himself in enough blood he will eventually be clean; the taint that opens him up to the minds of monsters will be erased along with all the other effluvia.
Now he does not think so; he thinks it has become essential to him, seeped in to every part of him. He is hiding things from himself; sleepwalking, losing time, erasing the line between dreams and reality and delusions. He can’t understand how everyone can’t see what he is becoming; that he is sprouting fangs and claws and fur, becoming a monster, clearly no longer human. As long as he can keep catching the monsters, though, he has to; he has to catch as many as he can before he becomes one and starts killing himself.
You can’t atone in advance, Will.
He’s no longer certain it is in advance.
Every time he closes his eyes he feels himself cutting into someone, their blood covering him in wet warmth. He feels a rush like nothing else; he feels whole for the first time in weeks.
Then he opens his eyes. Sometimes his hands are still covered in blood.
He opens his eyes again. Usually, usually, he finds himself clean, in the place he last remembers being, at a time that makes sense, knowing who he is. Usually.
He stopped praying long ago, but he finds himself thinking, Please, please, please, don’t let me hurt anyone. If I hurt someone please let it be me. Please let them catch me. Please.
…
Will is in his office, saying “My brain is on fire.” Hannibal is thinking, If only you knew.
If he had a heart, he knows, he would be racked at the sight of Will, so clearly falling apart, so desperate, so open. He could heal him, easily. Take him to another neurologist, let them fix the inflammation. As it is, he almost feels sorry for him; not enough to stop, though. Because, you see, he’s so curious. Can Will, really, be what he is, and just what he is? Or isn’t understanding somehow deeply linked with being? Isn’t Will too connected, mustn’t he really be what Hannibal is? Humans can’t, Hannibal knows, truly understand other animals— say, dogs— anymore than dogs can them. Certainly, one can learn how to interact with them— manipulate them to create the desired response— just as Hannibal can people. But only creatures on the same level can possibly understand one another.
So Will must have the wiring of a killer, the make-up. His environment ought to have pushed him in that direction, too, but something was lacking; these things are so delicate. All he needs, perhaps, is a little push.
Which is not to say that what Hannibal is worried that, if Will can withstand the pushing, if Will really is somehow immutably good, that Hannibal himself might be immutably something else. Or that he might have been, instead, what Will is—no.
…
Perhaps the denouement is inevitable. No, not that denouement; Will is not yet fully recovered, still too clouded, still too faithful, to have realized just yet that Hannibal is the Chesapeake Ripper. He accepts, at least outwardly, the explanation that the initial tests must have been wrong, somehow. But his eyes narrow when he looks at Hannibal; his face sets. His whole body tenses, like he’s contemplating whether to strike or flee. His imagination has been sparked, and Hannibal knows there’s no turning back from that.
He also knows that Will will fight, not run. That is who Will is, fundamentally. He would rather run, from who he is as well as all that brings down on him, but he can’t do that any more than he can stop seeing what he sees, feeling what he feels, being what he is. Hannibal knows— this is part instinct, part what he has learned from his experiment— that even if Will had murdered someone, he would not have tried to hide it, not have tried to escape. He would have gone straight to Jack’s office and turned himself in, or called the police and waited beside the body, grieving. It is not in Will’s nature to run. It is also not in Will’s nature to deceive; he agreed to hide what Abigail did partly because his mind was clouded by guilt and inflammation; partly because he has categorized Abigail as Innocent, and will do everything in his power to protect her as he wishes someone might have protected him. He will not disclose Abigail’s crime or Hannibal’s involvement now, because he has given his word, and it is also not in Will’s nature to break promises.
But— Hannibal knows this— if Will finds out what he, Lecter, is, he will tell. He will have to. That is in his nature, too. But first he will try to confront Hannibal himself; he will want to know, to understand. Not the murders— he will understand those; in large part, he already does. But the betrayal. That, he will want answered, and those answers he will not want to understand. For they are different; this is what Hannibal has learned. Killing might lie somewhere in Will’s nature, but he could never hide it. In all Will’s fear— and he has so much fear— there is no fear for himself, not really; when Will fears killing someone innocent in a blackout, in his sleep, in his lost time, or even consciously, he does not fear going to prison, he does not fear the loss of his own life; he never even thinks of it. He fears only what he might do to another person, the weight of the loss he might incur. It is…remarkable. It means that Will will always, always, turn him in. And Hannibal knows that one day, not too far in the future, Will will find him out.
And then one of them will have to die. Hannibal looks forward to the fight.