Author's Note: As you might have noticed, I try to put a episode recap in each chapter. Here's the bit I meant to put into the previous chapter, but had yet to write. Excuse any issues, I'm half-asleep tonight. SIX MORE DAYS AAAAIIIIIHHHH!
Graham wanders into Hannibal's office like a specter dressed in ill-fitting plaid.
It takes Hannibal only a few seconds to deduce that Will is not in his right mind, or any mind of note, for that matter. The curly-haired man's eyes are half closed behind his glasses, unseeing. His body is mostly slack, save for the muscles keeping him standing and ever-so-slightly swaying in the center of Hannibal's lush carpet.
Hannibal quietly closes his book, uncrosses his ankles. "Will?" he calls softly.
There is no reply except for a faint twitch of hands at hip level.
The cannibal rises from his seat, padding towards the insensate FBI investigator. He can tell the man is soon to ascend from the state he's in, judging by the flutter of his eyelids: his baked brain can only snow him for so long. But Hannibal takes the opportunity to peer with doctor's gimlet eyes at the vulnerable Will, to take in everything of note about this occurrence. Hannibal had no doubt this would happen again. It would behoove him to understand any peculiarities about this weakness.
It might come in handy.
"Do you know what I could do to you, right now?" he whispers, ghosting a bone-dry hand around Will's glistening throat. His scruff-sprinkled Adam's apple bobs at the fleeting sensation of the doctor's warm, inquisitive, homicidal hand before it is dropped.
Oh, how it entices Hannibal to be submitted to, be it consciously or not. It's one of the aspects of killing Hannibal loves most: forcing surrender upon his victims in the most intimate of ways; the coercion of life from their grasp.
What dark, sweet surrenders will he wrench from Maryann?
When Will comes back to himself, reeling with confusion and shock at his worsening condition, Hannibal sets to work. Will attributes this sleepwalking more to mental instability than a physical condition, and Hannibal is all to happy to encourage the notion. The investigator is still having vivid, sheet-soaking dreams. His sleepwalking has escalated, in this instance, to driving and completely losing time. Together, they account for three and half hours Will cannot remember.
Hannibal theorizes that this case of lost time is Will's mind crying for help to process the gruesome murders Jack Crawford has Will seeing. In a way, it rankles the psychiatrist that Jack gets to inflict these wounds on Will, and not Hannibal himself. Jack continued to rub Will's face into disgusting things, as though the dog-lover were himself a dog to be trained out of the inherent troubles associated with his line of work.
Hannibal was loathe to let someone else discipline his dog.
Within a day, they've found the man who erected the totem pole of bodies on the beach: Lawrence Wells. If he were freer in his identity, Hannibal might have taken his hat off to the man. Not many killers find dual use in their victims. Wells sated his bloodlust and banked his proverbial 401k simultaneously.
Hannibal sated his bloodlust and filled his freezer. The symmetry of souls was heartening.
Will examined the rediscovered body of Abigail's first kill, the young Nicholas Boyle, and came to Hannibal with wild eyes and conclusiveness.
Hannibal lets him in on he and Abigail's secret, and watches the moral compass of the man spin in an altogether amusing dance. Even while he watches and speaks, Hannibal weighs his options should Will decline to go the way Hannibal encourages him. It's a dangerous game: Hannibal has no recourse planned should Will decide not to join in their coverup. He would have to kill Will to avoid prison for himself and Abigail. Although the Hannibal finds the idea distasteful, he is, at his core, self-preserving. He will do what needs to be done for himself... and the little pinion-pricked fledgling girl.
Fortunately (how much, he'll never fathom), Will's spinning compass points him to protect the girl he is a surrogate father to. And Hannibal smiles to himself as their pact is made: two fathers, watching over their daughter for decidedly different reasons.
Will seeks to free Abigail from her father's brutal legacy.
Hannibal seeks to drown her in it, to show her the intricacies, the art of real killing. In time, he will.
How delicious it is when Abigail confirms what Hannibal suspected all along. She aided her father in luring the girls he killed. Abigail contended that the Minnesota Shrike, for all his fatherly ways, was killing other girls to keep from killing her.
In drawing the Shrike's victims into her father's web, Abigail was doing what was needed to survive. Hannibal sees this, and his inner psychiatrist delights in the confirmation of his theory.
Nature, brought out by nurture.