By blood and by me, I’ll follow your lead.

Will Graham aches for Hannibal Lecter. His hunger for him is undeniable, a marrow-deep craving that eclipses reason. But can he love him?

We know little of his past. He is motherless, raised in poverty. These sparse details serve as the only signposts of his history; beyond them, he remains a mystery. If Hannibal’s heart is a frozen well, sealed until a vast enough void summons its waters, then Will’s is a black hole. It does not overflow; it only takes in, swallowing light, swallowing feeling, endlessly consuming. If Hannibal has an excess of nectar, awaiting the perfect chalice to hold it, then Will is the abyss that ensures it will never stop flowing. He is not the receiver of love…he is its devourer.

Unlike Hannibal, whose affections extend to art, cuisine, philosophy, and the aesthetics of violence, Will is curiously bereft of passion. He does not love people; he does not even try. He cares for his dogs, but he belongs to them as much as they belong to him. He is drawn to Alana yet does not pursue her beyond what serves his own narrative. His colleagues orbit him, but he keeps them at arm’s length. Beverly sees him as a tool. Jack values his utility. And Alana pities him, plays at saving him. But no one, not a single soul, is truly his.

Hannibal, by contrast, cultivates a social life, a network of admirers, colleagues, and so-called friends. He is an artist of experience, capable of relishing beauty despite his wounds. But Will? Will does not live. He seemingly rots in his home, fishes, works, and in the spaces in between, just exists as if waiting for something. And then there is his fascination with murder. Not justice. Not retribution. His empathy stretches only toward the grotesque, to killers and the bloody fingerprints they leave on the world. He has no patience for the dullness of normal minds, but he delights in the labyrinthine corridors of the violent ones. They alone are worthy of his attention, his passion.

Abigail Hobbs was never truly seen by him. He fashioned an idea of her, an innocent he could redeem, an emblem rather than a person. He sought to mold her into something that suited his own reflection, never once stopping to ask what she desired. In this, he was not unlike Hannibal, but he was less honest about his intentions. He did not love her, not in the way Hannibal did, with full recognition of who and what she was. No wonder she preferred Hannibal.

Will sees himself as a stray, one of his dogs. Not their owner, not their friend, not their father, but one of them. This view of himself bleeds into his understanding of others. He sees Hannibal as a stray too, something wild and wounded, something that calls to him. He is drawn to beasts because taming them is the only way he knows to grapple with his own monstrosity. To control the external is to impose order upon the internal. And yet, he fails. He fails because he is not, at heart, a tamer.

He is hunger.

Others on the periphery recognize Hannibal’s danger and step away. But not Will. He follows, chases, again and again. Every decision, no matter how self-destructive, leads him back to Hannibal.

He cloaks himself in morality, in duty, in obligation, but it is a flimsy disguise. He does not pursue justice. There are many ways to save lives, many avenues to do good in the world, and yet Will chooses only the path soaked in blood. He merges with brutality because it is the only thing that stirs his soul. His supposed righteousness is a mask, and his masks are legion.

So can Will Graham love? He sees through people, sees their fears, their desires, their wounds…and he is bored by most of them. But Hannibal is different. Hannibal elevates violence into beauty, makes death into art. Will fears his own love for darkness, while Hannibal worships his without shame. That, more than anything, is what ensnares him. Not the mystery of Hannibal’s mind, but the freedom in it. The freedom to love the grotesque without fear or shame.

Will was always attuned to the Ripper. He spoke of him not with detachment, not as a scholar, but as a lover speaks of a distant beloved: admiring, mesmerized. When he discovered the Ripper was Hannibal, he recoiled, not out of moral horror, but out of personal shame. He had already loved him. He had already desired him. But to admit that desire, to acknowledge that the only man he ever trusted was the monster in the shadows, was too much. It was, as he would say, “too ugly a thought.”

He ran to Alana, to normalcy, to tradition, in a desperate attempt to convince himself he could belong in a world that did not smell of blood. But he could not. He never could. Because Hannibal was the only one who had ever made him feel anything at all. And when he finally understood that, he surrendered.

So what is Will’s heart? It is not like Hannibal’s. It does not overflow. It does not yearn to give. It is a void, an absence, a hunger. Will is the abyss waiting to consume love. As Hannibal connected in Dante’s poem, mentioned in my previous essay. He does not love in the way others do, he reflects, he absorbs, he mirrors. He is nothing until he is filled. Like Maha Maya, the Grand Ilusion.

And Hannibal, with his boundless, inexhaustible love, is the only thing that can fill him. The only thing he will ever crave.

Is Will Graham capable of love? If love is something that binds, that consumes, that reshapes the self in the image of another, then he has never done anything but love Hannibal Lecter.