Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane; Excerpt from Official Transcript; Supervising Therapist: Dr. Leslie Burnett; Patient: Graham, William; (14:26, 7/28/2017)
*Recording Start*
"How do you feel about Doctor Lecter trying to kill you to prevent being caught?"
"How do I feel? That's what you're going to start with today?"
"Given where we ended yesterday, it seems a logical place to start."
"So tell me, is 'Hannibal the Cannibal' just too kitschy? This is at least the fifth time you've used the license prefix 'Doctor', which, by now, I am fairly confident has been suspended by the Maryland Board of Medicine."
"We're not here to discuss grammar, we're here to discuss your experience and work through your trauma."
"I have a scar that runs from my lower abdomen to my ribcage, where a man who had known me intimately for over a year tried to eviscerate me. I've spent far too much time thinking about what he did and why he did it. Why he didn't kill me sooner, why he dragged it out so long, what the alternative might have been. I think, really, at the end, he was just trying to save me from what came next."
"And what was that?"
"This. All of this. The trials, the exposure, the incarceration. I think he thought killing me would save me from facing the consequences of his actions."
"Or he was simply protecting himself."
"I've entertained that thought, but no, his 'actions' came from a place of desperation. He wanted to protect me from himself. The only way to do that was to kill me."
"As a man who profiled serial killers for a living, do you see the flawed logic you've subscribed to? That a man of [Lecter's] constitution is even capable of affection?"
"You're a therapist in an asylum. Your job is to stay as emotionally distant from your patients as humanly possible. You can't even begin to understand what I was asked to do. What I still do at the behest of your supervisor."
"That's what I'm here to help you work through."
"My job was to get so deep into a murderer's psyche that I couldn't tell where I ended and the killer began. So when I said I was intimate with Lecter, I didn't mean in the physical sense. I let that man into every aspect of my life, and he was the closest thing I'd had to a friend in god knows how long. I can't tell you if he truly cared for me, but Hannibal Lecter was a good man right up until the moment he wasn't."
"Surely you've entertained the thought that he was never a good man, that it was all a facade?"
"I can tell you this, because it was my job to know this: he didn't try to kill me out of spite, or anger. He had too much respect for me, for our relationship, to do that. "
"I know you believe that, Will."
"I believe a number of things: I believe I'm sane. I believe that I was wrongfully incarcerated. I believe that when I leave this room, you'll note that I have some sort of repressed physical and emotional attraction to the man that put me in a coma and ultimately landed me in the chair before you. So please, really, tell me what I believe. Tell me what I believe, and I'll tell you where you can shove your pre-packaged psychoanalytical bullshit."
*Recording Stopped*
Hannibal Lecter kills Will Graham on a Tuesday evening, spilling blood across slick-green Connemara tile with steady hands and the same distant remorse that haunted him specter-like throughout his youth.
The act is reflexive, the wide curve of the knife cutting up through Will's abdomen with the same deft accuracy Hannibal brought to his medical career; and everything that makes Will Graham human spills to the the ground in a mess of viscera and steaming, wet meat.
Will gasps and struggles like a fish pulled from a bowl by a careless child, and Hannibal doesn't want the night to end like this.
He snarls something crude about devouring Will's heart, but the words are hollow, masking the regret that curls through him like a disease too old and too fierce to be tamed by the sugar-pill platitudes of modern medicine.
He doesn't want this. Not really.
What he wants is to pull the red currant-glazed sea bass from the oven, pour two glasses of chardonnay and sit across from Will to savor the meal he has so carefully prepared for them both.
However, plans go awry. Will asks questions Hannibal is not prepared to answer, and he strikes out reflexively like a cornered animal, lunging with deadly claws in lieu of highly evolved intellect.
Will looks up at him with devastated eyes and tries valiantly to speak words that Hannibal does not want to hear, and Hannibal can only press his face to Will's, breathing in iron and copper and cheap aftershave, to whisper vicious, biting threats interspersed with involuntary apologies and forgive me, Will, forgive me.
Hannibal is convinced the deed is done, until a tell-tale crack of gunpowder thunder forces him to his feet even as pain blossoms across his abdomen, shooting up his nerve endings with crippling precision; he looks down, watching as fresh crimson stains the front of his dress shirt. His own blood mingling with Will's.
"I...forgive you..." Will rasps from the floor, one hand holding in his small intestines, the other leveling a black service pistol at Hannibal, a look of vengeful triumph on his face.
For a brief, shining moment, the world exists only for the two of them. Blood and anger and regret and Hannibal feels oily affection coiling through him, intertwining with crippling agony.
Then Will fires again, and again, and again, forcing Hannibal back and down, to fall bodily against his desk, sliding to rest on the now ruined carpet.
He would laugh if his lungs weren't filling with fluid.
There are sirens in the distance, and Hannibal realizes that Will must have lied about coming to see him first.
"Doctor...Lecter..." Hannibal hears Will weakly over the rush of blood in his own ears. "We...need to discuss...pro-professional boundaries..."
Hannibal does laugh this time, resting his head against imported ebony and tasting blood. He presses his lavender silk pocket square hard to the most severe of his wounds and feels the fabric grow wet.
"Next week then?" Hannibal breathes thickly, black spotting his vision. He can smell the risotto burning thick and dry on the stovetop and the sirens are deafening, the sound slipping from one sense to the next until he can feel the whining pulse deep in his bones.
Hannibal will survive his wounds, excessive though they might be. Will, however, Will's death will not be an easy one. More than anything Hannibal feels regret, but this is better for the both of them. Will can be spared from the coming storm, and Hannibal is spared from Will's damning empathy.
Part of him hopes Will won't be there to accuse him. Part of him hopes Will survives his wounds. Part of him regrets inviting Will over tonight at all.
Hannibal allows the pulsing of the sirens to lull him into unconsciousness, knowing instinctively that he will awaken on the other side of this dream a public enemy.
Hannibal wakes through a morphine haze and doesn't need to move his arms to know he's restrained. The steady thrum of heart monitors and respirators and muffled voices throwing him back to the days he spent attempting to save the lives of men and women he'd just as soon have killed.
He can't speak around the tracheal apparatus and he can't free his arms to remove the tube, so he is forced to wait a full twenty-three minutes before a young residency doctor notices his condition during rounds.
Word must travel quickly, because it's not a long wait at all before Jack Crawford appears, expression thunderous and Hannibal can only assume why that might be.
The man orders a nurse with thin blonde hair into the hall to wait with another agent Hannibal can't identify from where he's strapped to the hospital bed, and Jack looms over him in what he must think is a threatening position.
"It was you." Jack hisses when the door shuts behind them. "This whole time, you were the Ripper. I let you into my home."
Hannibal doesn't really see the appeal in keeping up appearances at this point.
"You let me into your home, and I let you into my kitchen. I believe we both know what that means." Hannibal speaks as steadily as he can, his voice hoarse from disuse and the residual effects of the feeding tube, and Jack looks as if the floor has dropped from beneath his feet.
"Did you really not piece it together until now?" Hannibal questions playfully. "Because I would have expected someone in your position to be slightly more intelligent."
Hannibal allows himself a moment to savor the warring emotions on Jack's face when the man throws up a hand, index finger pointing in a manner Jack must feel will intimidate him.
"I'm going to make sure you rot, Lecter." he says, already moving away. "We're finished here." he announces loudly, and Hannibal just laughs, throat burning. Jack rips the door wide, the force slamming it against the wall with a crack.
"Oh, I assure you, Jack, that is far from the truth." Hannibal calls after him, savoring the implications and the knowledge that finally,finally, he does not have to bow to his lessors. "Don't you want to know what happened to Miriam?"
Jack reappears in the doorway, expression blank and Hannibal knows he's won.
"I know what happened. She got too close, and you killed her." Jack says, clearly intending to have the last word.
"Yes," Hannibal agrees. "I killed her. I killed her, and you ate her. It is amazing how long you can keep meat these days, don't you agree?"
Jack's face twists up and he's gone again from sight.
Hannibal lets his eyes slip shut, irritated that his body is still too weak to stay alert, but the discomfort passes.
Even now, even in defeat, Hannibal has emerged victorious.