Disclaimer; I do not own the rights to Hannibal or anything affiliated thereof. I mean no copyright infringement by publishing this work of fanfiction.

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He hates it.

Sinking into the depths of his mind, he knows every strain and connection by long-term memory. He knows the feeling of imagination flooding his entire body, creating a world within his own human brain in which to discover the means of execution. Tracing steps backwards in time and space, reaching the inevitable end that will become the perpetrator's complete unraveling.

He lives in his mind, speaking on a regular basis only to his dogs and his students, and to both as sparingly as possible. This man lives in as much solitude as he is allowed by the constraining standards of society and the basic necessity of a paycheck. Of course, somewhere deep inside his walled-off heart, he yearns to let people see how he sees, think how he thinks. He wants to show people how he delves into the mind of anyone and everyone.

And he hates it.

Pure empathy, one once called it; his alleged "gift". More a curse than something to be desired of. The ability to see into a criminal's mind and understand it better than one understands oneself is extremely beneficial to one in the behavioral profiling field. Many had expressed some form of envy at the revelation, but the feeling soon gave way to pity in the hearts of every individual who once gazed upon his work with ravenous eyes.

Because they know he hates it. And he knows better than anyone that he must continue.

Some stifled form of zealous justice fueled him as gasoline does a combustion engine, but not in the way the comics and cartoons intended. Certainly not how they depicted the work of a superhero. He was born with this mind, and thus, an obligation, a duty to humanity, to pick the homosapien mind apart and put it on display. To explain the inner workings by dissecting and dividing, with no regard to the cataclysmal effect upon his own mind. Every case he steps into leaves a little bit of itself behind, taking a piece of his own sanity to compensate the loss.

He doesn't know why he trusts Hannibal Lector. It could be his calm demeanor and unreadable eyes, his ironic sense of humor, or his ease and mastery of his profession. But it was probably how Doctor Lector could see right through him; challenging him and being blunt with every inference.

It's strange to trust someone.

He only hopes that he's not mistaken in his trust.