Hannigram fic: YUZU
Alternate Universe - College/University, Canon Divergence, Aged-down Will and Hannibal, Meet-cute.
“Surprising?” Hannibal asks.
“Being surprised would require expectations.”
“And what were your expectations of me?”
Will scoffs. He looks outside. It’s started to snow. “Intimate question, don’t you think?”
“You feel sensitive over your thoughts.” Hannibal observes. Will meets his gaze. Hannibal then says, “You’re hyper aware of me the same way you were hyper aware of your date.” Then, “Hyper aware of yourself.”
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Archive of Our Own
The contrast of high-society, European accented, posh gourmet dinner-party hosting, fine art and classical music connoisseur, sinister sense of humor having DOCTOR Hannibal Lecter falling for soft nature boy Will Graham whose mind is a beautiful universe filled with water streams and mangroves and artsy dead bodies and haunted victims and self-satisfied murderers, who tinkers with fishing boat mortors on his living room floor with sweater sleeves pushed back and dark grease framing his fingernails is so 🤌🤌🤌 no, it’s SO ✨ 🤌🤌🤌 ✨
Hannibal “changing” Will into something he intrinsically isn’t feels like a misunderstanding. Will is always Will and he will always be Will. The Will Hannibal sees and the Will that Will himself sees are the same, the difference lying in perception. Hannibal thinks Will’s mind is that of an artist’s; like himself. Will thinks of his own mind as something dangerous; not to others, but to himself. If everything he sees touches everything he is, then how does he stay “himself” when he’s stained by every colour he touches?
Hannibal abuses this greatest fear at first from fascination. Will is convinced that he has acted out of control. He is no longer himself. He figures out the culprit. This is the greatest betrayal.
Will has purpose, now. There will be a reckoning. The stag that has imprinted on his mind after seeing Hannibal’s brutalisation of Cassie Boyle is a muse that stomps across his psyche. He sees the stag leading him out of the prison cell which Hannibal ushers him back into: To be rid of Hannibal, he must let his muse guide him. He must be inspired by his urges and cruelty.
His fear has always been change. But all of Will Graham is Will Graham, Hannibal knows this. In his wrath for Hannibal, he is no longer afraid of losing himself. He sends Matthew Brown as his assassin.
What Hannibal hoped for Will, was that Will be no longer afraid of his chair of antlers, no longer scorn it when it’s so valuable even beyond its usefulness. While everyone, especially Alana Bloom was professionally curious, Hannibal was enamored with Will by virtue of who he is.
I LOVE the re-contextualisation of Bedelia going AWOL in season 2 when Hannibal first starts using her as a shield so that he may prove his “transparency” to Jack. Bedelia didn’t leave because she couldn’t abide by Hannibal’s suddenly sinister actions; she left because she didn’t want the FBI’s scrutiny on her. When she went to Will to tell him she believed him, this was her “I want to crush the wounded bird” moment. She wanted to give him hope, watch him flutter in his cage. See what it’d compel him to do against Hannibal. She was curious! She is sooooo self-serving. Another devil, albeit not as potent as Hannibal but just as anti-social. Her character really is so intriguing.
There are so many extraordinary visuals in Hannibal. So many extraordinary personalities. I can’t help but admire, then, how they still managed to make the visual of Hannibal wearing his murder suit come out so utterly ridiculous.
It’s his personality you know. Straight proud shoulders and chin held high, Hannibal wears a waistcoat at home to upkeep his own standards of what is proper, but then, but then – he’s wearing a plastic suit over his 3 piece under the burning sun and he’s doing this because well, partly, he doesn’t want to be leaving evidence of himself behind, but also, certainly, he doesn’t want to get his clothes dirty.
It’s ridiculous. There are peeling bodies trapped in silicone being driven away by the currents, there is a mural of people having been sewn together to resemble an eye trying to test the affections of god, and then there is Hannibal walking around a corn field in his vinyl suit. Where’s your hair cap bro??? This is a health code violation (ha ha).
Here is Chilton whose entire life just slipped down the garbage shute, sorry, stuffed down the garbage shute, and then there is Hannibal, in his ridiculous, vinyl, murder suit. Is murder funny to you Hannibal?? Is it??? It is, and I think the fact that he finds murder funny is portrayed so well visually. That is why it stands out, because the horror of it isn’t in death, rather it is in its humor.
“I will make a murderer out of him.” Hannibal probably declared in his mind at one point, his reflection in the mirror smirking at his own self-judged brilliance, and then there he is, a few months later, carving a broken heart out of Anthony Dimmond and placing it in front of god, then smiling secretively to his inwardly shivering (and high) psychiatrist about how capricious love is while playing a whimsical tune on the piano in his nice Florentine house.
In Naka-choko he tells Margot that she failed to murder Mason because she still loves him, that love makes a person senseless, that hatred makes one be present and calculating. That she must allow herself to hate Mason. And I really think all of this was very ironic in hindsight.
I just want a short Hannibal side episode where Winston is missing (he’s ok, he’s just on an adventure) and Will (frantic) and Hannibal (“why not?”) go searching for him. The entire episode is just Will and Hannibal using their brain superpowers to find Winston, arguing here and there (it is, of course, poetic; contemplative of life and dogs and all that), maybe separating somewhere in the middle because suddenly it’s a challenge of who can find him first, before eventually getting back together. But it’s really just Will being super frazzled and Hannibal for once in his life actually helping him out.
One of the MOST frustrating and audacious things Hannibal has done, for me, is when Will waits in his kitchen to confront him after he visits the place he put Miriam Lass in for Jack to find, where there were containers of Beverly’s blood and the extra glass slides he used for her tableu, and then Hannibal detects him by the smell of “the same unfortunate aftershave you wore in court” and then he looks at Will, says, “too long in the bottle” and he SMILES at their little inside joke. and it’s his natural smile, he’s not being placating or putting up a front. He genuinely finds this amusing. And I’m sitting there, hand over my mouth, because he’s not confessing to ANYTHING yet he’s not hiding anything at all, and it’s so obnoxious. That’s why he’s the devil
know-me-see-me:
no wonder why Hannibal loves him
Will Graham and David of Michelangelo
I love Antipasto!!!! The whole episode is just people throwing themselves at Hannibal and he’s all sad because they’re not Will Graham. And I’m not even making fun of him, I do feel for him. This is a serious post!! I mean look at him enjoying life yet tearing himself away from it to make Will a valentine. He misses him. He yearns for him. He loves Will.
Hannibal’s writing and acting is so powerful because you fall in love with Hannibal through Will, and you fall in love with Will through Hannibal, but you wouldn’t really love them as they love each other. You may think, “This is fucked up, they shouldn’t meet” and then they meet, and you look at how they smile and you understand. You think “They shouldn’t separate, how can they ever separate? They love each other”
Actually my favourite Hannibal episode is “Su-zakana.” The horse episode?? The horse episode! We leave off previously on Will sending Matthew to murder Hannibal. Hannibal survives the attempt and now Will has to live with himself as this person who chose “killing” as an option while completely sober. Then he is in Hannibal’s office, planning to trap him, and to trap Hannibal he has to be somewhat honest so in-between his lies he’s forced to slip in confessions – like fantasizing about killing Hannibal with his bare hands and enjoying doing it. But not even that, my favourite ever moment is when Will tells Hannibal not to lie to him. It’s not a request– it’s a demand. He says “Don’t lie to me” to Hannibal as though Hannibal owes him this. (He doesn’t. Hannibal doesn’t owe anybody anything.) But Hannibal is so charmed and taken by Will, taken by Will demanding something from him because it indicates intimacy. I mean, you won’t make demands from strangers like it’s your birth right. You make demands from your parents, your best friends, your lover. You make demands from a god who betrayed you, wanting to forgive him. So Hannibal acquiesces. He asks, “Will you return the favour?” And Will doesn’t confirm, even so, Hannibal gives it to him, he gifts Will his honesty and stops lying to him from then on – even when Will betrays him. Hannibal doesn’t break his promises. It’s all so, it’s so erotic. For someone like Hannibal to give anyone anything when it’s demanded from him. It was the first interaction between them that left me breathless.
justfandomthing:
Sometimes, don’t you just get the feeling that Hannibal is immortal? That he just won’t grow old?
I can just never imagine him having a frail body and saggy skin and won’t be able to do murder-y things just because of physical limitations
Yes. He’ll be 80 and tending to his rose gardens in some surburbia. His neighbours love him. They say “Dr. Lecter? Oh he’s so kind. Brought Lemon meringue pie to the last community meeting.”
And then, “Ah, the recent murder sprees? We don’t know… we sure hope Dr. Lecter and his partner are safe in their house when it gets dark. This monster won’t get away!”
thedarkmongoose:
Apéritif
Will finally visiting Dr. Lecter in prison after he waddles around the entire episode of “Red Dragon” reminding himself that he’s trying to be a different man and then he sees Hannibal and just stares at him unblinkingly like a lovesick fool… yeah… I suppose it is akin to the difference in eating to live versus living to eat
Hannibal tells Jack he’s overworking Will, making him doubt his judgement, and tells Will that Jack’s overworking him, making him doubt Jack. Will asks Hannibal if he’s alienating him from Jack and he was right. Hannibal does the devil’s work in slowly and nauseatingly removing them from each other throughout season 1, and so when Jack tells Will that he is not sand for Will’s moorings, rather he is his bedrock, it is heartbreaking to see where they end up in s1e13. Jack tells Hannibal that he believes that Will would always come back to himself, and that was true. Hannibal was only able to break Will from psychic driving and encephalitis and EVEN THEN Will managed to reclaim himself, just like Jack prophecised, unlike Miriam Lass. And Jack knows what Hannibal offers to Will intellectually, so when Will tells him he wanted to run away with Hannibal, there is shock, but when Will later tells him “A part of me will always want to run away with him” in Florence, there’s understanding. He has to tell Will to cut that part out of himself though, because even though Will yearns for Hannibal, Hannibal is the Chesapeake ripper. He is a monster. And Jack needs Will to put a full stop to this thing Jack started. Jack dragged Will into this, and when Will asks why he didn’t kill Hannibal, he says “I needed you to do it.” And there is so much regret and heartbreak in his words. The relationship between Will and Jack is so tender to me as it grows and evolves throughout the show. I would have loved to see what he’d have done after Will and Hannibal eloped in season 4 💔
I used to think Hannibal didn’t care about Abigail, but between Will and Hannibal, I think Hannibal was the one who looked at Abagail for who she was and loved that broken creature, as Hannibal is prone to admire and give himself to horrible things.
In s3e9, when she asks how he would have killed her, he tells her that he would have slit her throat just like her father had. Abigail feels a bit of possession and incredulity and tells him “You aren’t my father.” And he asks her, “You accepted your father, would it be so difficult to accept me?” I think this is how Abigail fits into the world as Hannibal perceives it; a girl obsessed over by her own father who slits her throat in their own kitchen. Her father felt that no one can have her besides him, not even herself. Abigail is gifted this perverse thing by her father. Hannibal will gift her the same. But this doesn’t paint the whole picture. The beauty of it comes from Abigail’s own suffering and her trials for survival. There is something fatalistic about her doom; and I think Hannibal loves things fixed in fate. When Hannibal himself is responsible for such beautiful tragedies, it just establishes his power. Nothing happened, after all; Hannibal happened. He treasured her the way he believed she was meant to be treasured.
Nah I can’t believe Will Graham went to Lithuania dressed all grim in a high-collared coat like a victorian era vampire adjusting to the modern times as if wanting to avenge himself against his ex-lover, manipulated Chiyo into killing, desicrated the corpse of said kill and made art out of it, got thrown off a train at midnight in the extremeties of europe, AND then he got married??????? To Molly?????????? The same man????? He has a cabin now and he’s laughing all shy and flirty like he isn’t the one that made an ode to mothman in his ex’s childhood home.
It really wasn’t just Hannibal admiring Will’s intellect, from Will’s perspective, Hannibal is also the only person who can keep up with him. Each time Will goes to Hannibal to discuss cases, bouncing ideas off of him instead of anyone else from the BAU who are literally trained and paid to dissect crime scenes. I love it when Will is able to figure out Hannibal put the killer in the middle of the eye mural from looking at the picture and creating the scene within his mind with such brilliant clarity; and so it feels like he is uniquely intelligent, which makes him seem both incredible and one of a kind. But Will himself must feel alone in his ability. The icing on the cake for me is when Will and Hannibal work on the Dolarhyde case, and in this instance they’re BOTH doing what Will did in prison. And Hannibal is perfectly able to keep up with him. They’re, in this circumstance, terrifically equal and no one else can follow them into this mind space. They are unique alone and they’re unique together. It’s so!!
!!!
It’s incredible how familiar the sets in Hannibal become to you. Dolarhyde pulls off the sheet from Hannibal’s desk and it sits there, molten, mellow colouring, light sharply sliced along wood and clinging to glowing leather and you realise you missed it. And what is Dolarhyde doing there, intruding on a space so meaningful? It has so much character, soaked in Hannibal’s power and authority. Where is Will’s farm house? We see the last of it as it sees the last of Will and Hannibal, as Will tells Hannibal goodbye. The BAU’s forensics lab. The busybodies there, white lab coats and silver metallic tables. Price and Zeller arguing, Will standing a little away, the empty clicking of Beverly’s lost heels. Hannibal’s kitchen. Besides the tragedy, even Will, unable to reconcile with everything that has happened since he met Hannibal, marinates there after Mizumono.
The only thing I don’t miss is Hannibal’s dining room. I think, the heart of the room was always Hannibal; rather, the dining room is Hannibal’s stomach. As long as Hannibal’s hungry, any table can be laid at any moment. Wherever he goes, the feast follows.
Will Graham gets pathetically lifted up and thrown bodily against the back of the elevator and he makes a comeback by carving out Dolarhyde’s guts ok ok
Hannibal Lecter zooming through the streets of Paris on a motorcycle in a leather jacket like the epitome of freedom and then getting himself locked up just because his beau ideal rejected him. Pathetic man you are unbelievably bull-headed!!
