danzanelfuoco | Spoils left behind

HANNIBAL

Cow-T, w6, m1 - sacrificio
602 parole

If he wants to catch the Cheesapeak's Ripper - if he wants to catch Hannibal - he has to sacrifice something to him, Will knows.

He doesn't tell Jack - it's enough to have been considered crazy, it's enough to have been considered a murderer, a serial killer. So maybe he didn't kill all those people, knowingly or not, and maybe he really was framed, but the idea that Jack would believe the evidence without even questioning it... Will is not stupid, he knows he has been framed very well, he knows he would have believed that lie too if he were to see it from an external viewpoint - damn, he had believed it, would still be believing it, if his encephalitis hadn't been treated, if his mind hadn't become clear enough to realize Hannibal's machinations.

Still.

Beverly gave him the benefit of the doubt - though she thought him guilty too.

(Beverly's dead - another one of your sins.)

Maybe putting together Beverly's death and the fact that Will had asked her to investigate Lecter should be enough to convince Jack. But Will doesn't want to convince him - Will wants Hannibal, wants the truth, wants the Cheesapeak's Ripper, the Copycat Killer, the monster hidden behind the suits and the politeness and the refinement. What Will doesn't want is another round of fighting to be believed. He already went throught that.

So his plan has to be his and his alone.

He already took the right step - he's been released from the psychiatric ward simply because he sent Matthew Brown to kill Lecter, he's been cleared from all accuses, he's been found innocent, because he has proved Lecter that he's capable of Becoming whatever Lecter wants him to become. He made a pledge to renounce his soul, now he just has to go on with it.

He wonders - briefly - if killing to capture Hannibal and if, eventually, killing Hannibal won't make him a worse monster than the one he's hunting.

Becoming a killer in the intention to stop one.

But this part of himself Will has already lost - he doesn't care. The line in the sand, oh, he's following it, but he has already crossed it.

He will kill Hannibal, and he won't do it for justice - he won't do it for his victims, he won't do it for the people he had killed, manipulated and ruined. He will do it just for himself.

Maybe he will also do it for Hannibal - after all, he was the one who wanted to see what would happen, that wanted to see him changed.

Innocence, his clean hands, the rest of his mental sanity - the small hold he has on being a good person even while thinking like a killer - well, these are small sacrifices to make on the altar of revenge.

(Later, when he has a gun to Hannibal's head and he doesn't shoot, he'll wonder, why he didn't pull the trigger - he'll tell himself it's because he didn't want to use a gun, too impersonal, too clinic. He'll want to use his hands, he'll want to feel the blood and later to dispose of the body. He won't admitt even to himself that, painful as it was the sacrifice Hannibal forced him to make, now that he has left behind unsteady, mentally ill, shaky, Will Graham - now that he has Become something fiercer and prouder and unhinged, now he wants - he needs - a partner.)