A/N: This is just the beginning of a collection of conversations that Hannibal will have with different people and character from pop culture. All the conversations will take place in the time just before the beginning of the TV show. Hannibal has not yet met Will Graham and is just carrying on in his bubble.

Introduction To The Food Bank

Doctor Hannibal Lector was a man of habit and routine. He had a set of principles by which he lived his life and two worlds in which he moved. He was a man of taste and class. He loved good food and fine company, and he marvelled at the beauties of the civilized world. On the other hand, however, he was a man of great horrors and evil, though in his mind he saw himself as just another very dedicated civil servant.

Hannibal Lector believed that there were two kinds of people in the world - the useful and the rude. Useful people were intriguing, entertaining and just the sorts to be allowed to populate the planet earth. The rude belonged in the food bank because if one was to act like a pig then one deserved to be eaten like a pig, and even then that was unfair to the pigs. Because a pig was not rude. No, it lived its life as any animal would and served a purpose to the greater good, but rude people are less than pigs. They are a stain, a plague, a nuisance and don't deserve to hold a place in the beautiful world that Hannibal was creating.

You see, whenever possible, Hannibal Lector took it upon himself to rid the world of the ignorant and rude. And as he was brought up to appreciate the finer things in life and the thing that he had, and not to be wasteful, Hannibal used the rude to fill his freezers and nourish his body.

For it was that Doctor Hannibal Lector, criminal psychiatrist and culinary master, was a cannibal and a monster. He was very likely to make you into dinner if you proved to be useless or repulsive.

Doctor Lector, therefore, surrounded himself with beautiful things, expensive and delicious foods, fine clothing, great performers and well educated minds. And for those people whom he liked he was hospitable, loyal and giving. He was one of the top professionals in his field with a large clientele and occasionally a friend or two within the law enforcement community.

He was highly respected and little suspected of the things that he ultimately did in the secret spaces he kept for himself. If you needed to find the good doctor you need only make and appointment or call ahead before dropping by his home. He would welcome you with opened arms and a healthy appetite.

As mentioned, Hannibal was a creature of habit and ran his practice as tightly as a ship commander. Hannibal was always punctual, silent in his listening and gracious with his advice.

He was very good at his job, had many success stories to boast of, if he were a boastful man. He kept hours as regular as the tides. He was in his office by eight in the morning, with his first clients always booked for nine sharp, and he took great pleasure in keeping the first appointment for possible new clients.

First impressions were always the most important part of any meeting for Hannibal. So he always wore a stunning suit to work in, kept his office immaculately clean and greeted his new patients at the door. It was in those first moments when Hannibal usually decided how to classify his patients, even before they took a seat in one of his chairs.

Many questions were answered in those first moments. Friends or Foe? Proper or Scruffy? In desperate need of a guiding hand and a sympathetic ear or are they deceptive, deceiving and manipulative? But most of all, Hannibal would ask himself if the new being before him was worthy of a conversation or whether they belonged in a cooker.

Usually, in those first moments, Hannibal Lector had already made up his mind but that never stopped him from playing with his food. It gave him a lot of time to think about what to make, how to prepared it and present it, and ultimately how to symbolically dispose of the remains. Because Hannibal always left his trash better than when he found it.

Occasionally a potential meal would intrigue him enough for a second or third meeting. Some rare case made fit into a filing system for a rainy day or when he would be cooking for guests. But most of the time, Hannibal liked to cook and kill on a whim. Whenever he was truly hungry.

Sometimes he took pieces of a person, leaving them to learn a lesson before they died. Because Hannibal like the idea of a human consciousness being more than just a body, and he hoped that he could at least make a difference in this life so as to change a person for the next. Death was inevitable and delicious in Hannibal's world but it was also a learning opportunity.

And so it was that Hannibal had established himself, made a name or rather several to carry him through any possible suspicions and carved out his place in the world he was determined to put beauty into and take ugliness out of. For Hannibal, his life was meant for a greater good and he would see and hear and taste it all first hand. And when his time in this place, with these people, was over, by choice or by necessity, he would move on to bring sophistication, beauty and polite society to another dark and dreary part of the world.

For now he was content, well fed and looking forward to those he may mould into better people. As for the others, he deemed them lucky to wind up in a place like his belly. Because what else were they good for but to stock his food bank?