The world didn't fall prey to those afflicted by the Crimson Plague.
A virus transmitted through blood and only blood, it conquered a surprising amount of the population before subsiding and laying in wait, dormant for hundreds of years before resurfacing in WWII.
Humans had forgotten about its existence, until the wounded American soldiers were being flown home directly from the battlefield with curious twin puncture marks on their necks, eyes wild as they screamed that the Germans were demons straight from the darkest depths of Hell.
This was curious to the United States, and they captured a group of the 'demons' straight away.
The condition was quickly identified as vampyrism, but it'd been spoken of in books as old as the Sistine Chapel, and thus its given name resurfaced, this time not to be be squashed under fear and brutality against the sick.
Some symptoms (most certainly not all) were quickly identified: elongated, sharp canines with tubes so small they almost couldn't be detected, a literal lust for blood, and a penchant for random violence.
The reservoir of knowledge of the disease was lacking, and continued to be, and since no one knew how it was transferred, the other countries lay helpless to its whims.
The disease had already spread throughout Europe, and it was too late by the time the Americans noticed, for European immigrants had brought it into the United States, and so had the soldiers.
Within a week, quarantine zones were built, and all of the airports and ports were shut down for around a month while America inspected every single mouth in the country.
Some slipped their notice. It was inevitable, really.
They shouldn't have expected to check every single last one of them.
HLWGHLWG
Will Graham needed coffee.
The scene before him was making his fingers twitch in need of a steaming mug, and he wiped his glasses furiously to occupy his hands.
A man was posed, eyes gouged out with a black nightmask covering the loss, and cotton balls in the sockets to distend the space and compensate for the sunkenness so that the effect was that he could awaken at any moment.
Strings connected him to the ceiling, and unfortunately Will had to be there when Jimmy Price cut them down to dust for prints.
Two identical wounds in his neck confirmed the artist who'd orchestrated the murder; the Chesapeake Ripper.
Yes, artist, Will knew, because that was the only way to describe what he saw.
The man was missing his jaw, and Will could surmise that he'd been rude not just from that but from the blood that chronically oozed onto the floor from a large laceration in his throat and ankles.
He had no crow's feet, just wrinkles in the brow that stated that he wasn't the most chipper of people, but whether or not he'd been a happy man, it didn't matter to the Ripper the moment he'd been rude.
"Jack, can you have someone get me a coffee? I need one. Right now, preferrably," Will croaked.
Crawford mistook his pale pallor to be fear or uneasiness and went to go grab some like a wind-up toy.
Face him in a direction and he would not be done until he saw his task through.
Will hadn't begun to whiten or sweat because of fear; he ran on fear daily, shook hands with it, slept with it, and utilized it.
What had caught his attention was the antlers that had been grafted to the man's head.
This wasn't typical at all for the Ripper.
Will was reminded of Lokrian mode; in Danse Macabre, the piece was piercing and clashing, but striking, like what he saw before him.
It could be beautiful, but only in a particular perspective.
Will happened to contain all different persepectives, and found it jarring and yet with a strange, but whimsical sort of attractiveness.
It was a poem.
But to whom?
Will mused, thinking what the message could mean, and tried his best to empathize with the recipient.
What was it? Love? Admiration? Irritation?
He brushed these thoughts away.
He was an introvert and certainly hadn't met anyone capable of this atrocity, and wasn't sure that he wanted to.
This was his first meeting, albeit unconventional, with the serial killer that Jack absolutely insisted on doggedly chasing until he'd worn his bloodhounds ragged.
With a sigh, he realized didn't know what to tell Jack, and that the damned man hadn't brought coffee yet.
"There will be no prints. There will be no evidence. This was because this man was particularly rude and the Ripper cannot stand rudeness. It was made into art, and by no means an impulse murder. One of the organs is missing."
That last piece of info was more for himself, to reaffirm that this was what he looked at.
He rubbed his temples.
All the pendulum had shown him was that he'd met his match.
HLWGHLWG
Above the delightful scent of gratuitous amounts of blood that ran down the corpse in rivulets, drying and staining the various carpets and floors, the wolf among sheep could taste something fragrant on the air.
The profiler for the FBI turned his eerily bloody gaze about the room, never resting his gaze for too long.
He prowled the rooms, weaving through the oblivious agents that went about their work, and finally his stare found a man about his height, with a scruff of beard and stormy blue eyes, rimmed with glasses that Hannibal knew with certainty he'd look better without.
He didn't dress well, which was a pity, and smelled of Old Spice and cheap cologne, but his sweat smelled exquisite from underneath the artificial musks.
Hannibal looked him up and down quickly. Ah, Crawford had mentioned the empath.
Unsure how to approach, as luck would have it, the man muttered something about an unsated coffee addiction, and the psychiatrist disappeared.
He found Jack Crawford blocking the coffeemaker with his built frame and deep in conversation with a colleague of his, and Dr. Lecter harrumphed inwardly at the boorish lout.
At least the man was tolerable, unlike how Franklin, his clingy patient, was becoming...
He infiltrated the space between, salvaging coffee before heading back out to find the source of his curiosity.
The empath seemed surprised indeed when Hannibal approached, and even more so by the fact that the coffee was offered to him.
"I... thank you," he stammered with an uncertain smile as he lifted the styrofoam cup to his cracked lips.
"I take it that you're Will Graham," Hannibal ventured.
"I am. Jack point me out to you?" Will bantered, sipping appreciatively.
"He spoke of you, flatteringly. He said he plucked you from your classroom and placed you in the field like the queen on a chessboard. You've been doing well, I've heard."
By doing well, that meant Will had caught a killer who'd stuffed many corpses into the accomodatingly large locker of an underwater welder named David 'Davy' Jones, and a different one who'd erected statues of 'see no evil and friends'.
Will had felt insulted that he had been put on such distasteful cases, but his ego could always do with a due amount of preening.
"I didn't really want to come into the field, but Jack said he needed my expertise. I beg to differ and will continue to do so on the matter until I catch a formidable enough killer to get me back into my classroom," Will mused.
"He only accepts the opinion that best suits his own, and it is his own thoughts that surmount all else unless another's end up being fruitful," Hannibal agreed.
Graham thoughtfully drained more of his coffee in the silence. "Are you knew to the field?"
Hannibal shook his head. "In a sense. I treated victims until a man died on my watch, and now I treat people who need mental stability."
"Is that why Jack brought you here?" Will asked, suddenly suspicious of the man before him. "For me?"
"Yes," Hannibal admitted. "However, I have no intention of making you uncomfortable in any way. I would like to be your friend, not your psychiatrist."
"But isn't that pretty much the only reason you're here?" Will queried.
"Not necessarily. I am to provide adequate protection to you and help you stay functional. That doesn't exactly delve into a doctor-patient relationship. We will be whatever you want us to be."
His words held more meaning than intended, but upon uttering them Hannibal decided he liked them well enough.
Will nodded at that, draining the rest of his beverage, and Hannibal snatched it eagerly to toss it into a trash can, but not before sniffing the rim gently.
"I don't mean to seem standoffish, but I didn't think I needed help," the agent said.
"Not at all. I'm actually doing this to help Jack's mental health, it seems," Hannibal spoke, amused. "To help him sleep better at night."
Will chuckled. "Sounds about right. Anyway, are you here to watch me work?"
"Not quite. I can help profile the killer as well as offer my psychiatry services."
"Welcome. Hannibal, meet the Ripper. Ripper, meet Hannibal."
Hannibal allowed himself a smile, without too much tooth.