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sweetbreadsP L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Reg
OOC Journal: regasssa
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope
Email + IM: regasssa at hotmail dot com
Characters Played at Ataraxion: John Casey, Chad Warwick, Dexter Morgan, Nathan Petrelli
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Dr. Hannibal Lecter
Canon: Thomas Harris' Hannibal (novels). For argument's sake I'll be deferring to the book canon, while maintaining Hopkins as the face of Lecter.
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Mason Verger's estate in Hannibal; Dr. Lecter carries an unconscious Clarice Starling through a sea of man-eating pigs, his hair is cropped military fashion, and he carries himself with almost unnatural strength. The ravenous pigs ignore him.
Number: 138
Setting: The date: 1991, an equivalent modern world in which among the world's other most wanted criminals is one Hannibal Lecter M.D. otherwise known to the press as Hannibal the Cannibal, up to his capture known to the FBI under the title of "The Chesapeake Ripper".
History: A.N. I want to apologise for the length of the history. In play it'll act as as reference material for playing Hannibal from the book canon, and as a result is somewhat excessive.
Hannibal Rising:
Born to Count Lecter, and inheriting the name of one of his forefathers, the warlord Hannibal the Grim, Lecter was already at six a loving boy, artistic and genuine, living at Rabenstein (Ravenstone) with his beloved sister Mischa, who had been born on the eve of war. Two years into the conlict the family uprooted from their generational home and head into the forest, fleeing the German occupation of Lithuania, which they would call Ostland, along with the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia.
Hidden in the dense forest, the family waited for the war to pass them by, certain that it would all be over soon. They lived out the cold winters and long summers for three more years, taking advantage of their surroundings and protected by the thick marsh and forest that hid their home from the roads. Toward the end of the war a Soviet tank blundered out of nowhere into their idylic safety, pursued by a German bomber. The adults, including Hannibal's parents, his tutor and their servants died that day, leaving Mischa and Hannibal to look after themselves.
Hitler's retreat would change Hannibal's life forever. A small group of turncoats, men fighting for themselves rather than die in slave batallions, found the two children in the dead of winter. The retreat had stripped all the food from the land, and so they took the children prisoner, chaining them by their necks to the bannister. Hannibal would bear a scar from the chain years later. They starved, and the men starved too, and Mischa - cold and feverous from the sickness the men brought with them - grew worse still. An Albanian boy found in the woods would be killed and eaten first, following after a little deer, which the men led back with an arrow in it.
And then one day they came for Mischa.
What happened after that struck Hannibal dumb, and caused a mental block where the memories of Mischa's death were concerned. He stumbled out into the path of a Soviet tank, bedraggled and wearing a collar with a chain, and behind it an empty loop where his sister's neck had once been. He was taken back to his family home, transformed into an orphanage after its rescue from gunpowder. Here, Hannibal fought against the bullies despite his muteness, protecting those younger and smaller than himself the way he had once failed to protect Mischa. He used his smarts to defeat the monitors; boys much bigger than himself, such as by blowing out a candle when they came to try and beat him in the dark. At night, he'd have terrible dreams and night sweats, which would wake him screaming in the dark and disturb the other children.
Hannibal would leave with a relative for France - Count Robert Lecter - a prestigious French painter, who would rescue him from the orphanage, taking him back to France and his Japanese bride, Lady Murasaki, and their French chateau. They had survived the war, but were poor as a result of the Germans stealing away his uncle's paintings. Hannibal would learn to take his voice back with the lady's help, would learn a variety of Japanese arts rather than attending school, where he only got into trouble fighting with the other children. Attending the market one day, Hannibal spoke at last, but only when the butcher insulted Lady Murasaki; he struck the man with a leg of lamb, and would have stabbed him had he been able to reach a knife. His first word was "Beast." Hannibal was taken to the police station and shown a police cell for the first time; the policeman warned him to be prudent: "Use judgement and you will never occupy a cell like this." He gave Hannibal a pass. Later that week, pursuing the butcher for his insult, the Count would be killed, leaving Murasaki a widow, with death taxes that would then force her to sell the chateau.
A mere teenager, thirteen, Hannibal kills the butcher savagely at the edge of the lake. The news spreads like wildfire, and Hannibal brings the butcher's head back, placing it on the shrine to Murasaki's ancestor, missing his cheeks, and labeled like a piece of meat. The Inspector - Popil, who Hannibal decides has a smudge of intelligence - takes Hannibal to the morgue and challenges him that the butcher is his first kill outright. He gives Hannibal an early polygraph test, which he passes, but Popil is certain that he's done it; he recognises the timbre in the boys voice, the disdain. The head, meanwhile, is discovered elsewhere while Hannibal is in custody, placed there by Lady Murasaki.
Moving to Paris with her, Hannibal begins attending boarding schools on a tight budget, painting ink washes of birds and sailboats in the Japanese style to make a little money for luxuries. Graduating early, he was admitted with a scholarship to medical school, where he used his art skills and talent with a knife and power tools for dissections and illustrations, and performed such tasks as securing the appropriation of legal cadavers for the university. Under the influence of a self administered cocktail of opiates, Hannibal tries again to recover his memory of the night his sister died; he finds enough there, the memory of the men stuffing their dog tags away into a bag; it's something, and Hannibal arranges to visit Lithuania for his revenge, though word of his coming reaches the men too--those that had survived the war, at least.
Lecter finds the tags at the broken house, and then Dortlich finds him. Unable to surprise Lecter, the young Hannibal takes out Dortlich's legs and secures him, and then Lecter drags out the bathtub that still contains his sister's skeleton, dragging it away so that he can bury her. Standing above her grave he declares: "Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day." Hannibal eats Dortlich's cheeks as brochettes with some wild mushrooms, takes his car, and makes his way back to France.
After visiting the next man and his family - Kolnas' daughter wears Mischa's bracelet - Hannibal heads back to school to work during the night. Milko is sent to kill him, but Hannibal is quicker, and feeds Milko into the embalming tank as he extorts information from him. While Milko drowns Popil visits him, accusing him of Dortlich's murder and warning him not to kill in France. He wants the ringleader Grutas himself, for warcrimes, including such feats as silencing a witness at the Nuremberg trials by pouring acid down her throat.
Following a failed attack on Grutas that ends in Hannibal detonating an explosion in his house, Hannibal is arrested and escapes from jail, only to learn that Lady Murasaki has been kidnapped. Popil meanwhile wants Hannibal arrested and tried for the murder of the butcher years ago; he says it's because Hannibal was a minor when he commited that crime, he would be put into an institute where he could be studied. His wish would come true, but it would be years yet.
Hannibal goes to Kolnas prepared to strike a deal for Lady Murasaki's sake. He has stolen Kolnas' daughter's bracelet, but presents it as though he's kidnapped his children, and tells him that he'll have them back safe and sound and spare his life if Lady Murasaki is returned to him. He calls the house, but as Kolnas realises he's been tricked into revealing Grutas' canalboat, he swings his gun around toward Lecter, who drives a knife up into his head, killing him instantly. Hannibal takes no trophy from this kill, he goes straight to the canal, killing the last two men bar Grutas, who shoots him in the back, striking the hidden dagger that Hannibal has folded into his collar but thinking instead that he's paralysed him. He threatens Lady Murasaki, crows over him, and Hannibal fights him away from the gun. After he kills Grutas - who tells him the truth that Hannibal has banished, that Hannibal was forced to eat his sister too - Lady Murasaki, cut free, saves Hannibal from the captain of the boat, who's snuck up on him. Hannibal, covered in Grutas' blood, declares his love for her, but Lady Murasaki flees, throws herself over the edge of the boat and disappears.
Hannibal blows up the boat, and the police arrest him. They want to try him for the killing of the war criminals, or for the murder of the butcher, but the prosecutor advises against both. Hannibal is smarter than that, petitioning through the periodical L'Humanite in such a way as to engender support from the Communist movement, who in turn put pressure on the police to treat him less gravely. In the meantime Hannibal, by helping out the new forensics division and petitioning his previous teacher, secures an internship at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, and shortly thereafter Hannibal leaves.
In Quebec, having begun his internship, Hannibal finds the final man and kills him. Thus ends the childhood of the serial killer, but it's only one part of the story.
Interlude - Medical career, capture, and incarceration:
Finishing his degree and beginning a career in medicine, Hannibal moves swiftly into being his own boss, founding his own psychiatric practice some time after leaving practicing medicine in 1972. He had little time for psychiatry himself, and even less time for those who shared his field, but he shared his experience and insight with periodicals and magazines across a variety of subjects, growing propserous meanwhile on the large sums bequeathed to him by some of his patients. Throughout the seventies Lecter would kill again. Though not all were patients, many were; in general though, he killed people he considered to be interminably rude, though his victims would include a variety: a bowhunter, a census taker, a Princeton student, and a flautist, for example. Only three would survive. A woman confined to mental institute, Mason Verger whom Hannibal had cut off his own skin and feed it to the dogs, and FBI profiler Will Graham, who came upon him quite by accident.
In 1975, Graham, acting as a Special Investigator in the murders of the so called Chesapeake Ripper, came to speak to Lecter about the sixth victim, a bow hunter that Hannibal had laced to a pegboard, decorating him like the Wound Man. An old scar in his thigh from an arrow leads Graham to Hannibal, who had been working in the emergency ward the day the hunter was brought in. The first visit only raises Graham's hackles. On the second, he stood in Hannibal's study looking at his medical books and piece by piece put it together. Though he was still uncertain, Hannibal saw the suspicion in his eyes. Even so, for years Graham couldn't wholly explain how he caught him. Hannibal caught Graham by surprise as he tried to call the police switchboard for backup, stabbing him with a knife; Graham in turn shot Lecter, and the two were found dying together when the cops arrived.
Hannibal, found insane, was sent to Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane amidst a massive press frenzy. Dr. Chilton ran the hospital at the time, and reveled in the publicity, though in the years that followed Hannibal's notoriety would infuriate him, Chilton having achieved very little in terms of status compared to Hannibal, who was published and much endeared to by people in all kinds of fields. Hannibal still sent papers to magazines to have them published, and Chilton would resort to pitiful attempts to displease Hannibal in shows of his power, such as by taking away his books or his toilet seat.
Throughout his incarceration, Hannibal would resist psychiatric testing; he knew every trick of the trade, and knew how to read as a perfectly sane person. He would fold their tests into origami, resist hypnosis, ace lie detector tests and overpower drug induced testing, but he was also violent, assaulting a nurse and swallowing her tongue without so much as a blip in his heartbeat. Chilton's response to the attack was extreme but sensible; Hannibal would never leave his cage without being confined, strapped to a chair and wearing a muzzle, but confinement hardly stopped him if he wanted to kill someone; Hannibal could, by simply talking, convince a man to kill himself, providing they were unstable to begin with. He would later escape with only the use of a paperclip and a biro, things that Chilton insisted weren't given to him.
While incarcerated, Hannibal would deviate between being extremely helpful and incredibly dangerous, depending on his mood. He would have numerous visitors, all wanting to get something out of him, such as other budding psychiatrists who thought they might classify him; he sent most of them away in tears. Few visitors would meet Hannibal's high standards; Will Graham and Clarice Starling would stand out to him.
Red Dragon:
Graham came first. Having been responsible for Hannibal's incarceration, Lecter welcomed him like an old friend, though more sinister intentions were at the core of his interests. Graham was in retirement; he was a fascinating subject, described as an eideteker, with an incredible visual memory. His gift of memory and his ability to put himself into the shoes of the men he was chasing gave him an edge against the criminal element, but particularly those that were most difficult to catch.
For this reason, Jack Crawford at the FBI had taken him out of retirement to work on the case of the Tooth Fairy, a killer who was choosing supposedly random families and killing in unpredictable ways--the only thing linking the crimes was saliva, hairs, semen, broken mirrors and the imprint of a bizarre set of teeth, left behind at every crime scene. Enough DNA evidence, if they could only find the source. As Jack convinces Graham, he insists to his wife Molly that she and her son will be safe, that this time he won't let Graham get too close; while investigating the Minnesota Shrike, Graham had been shot; while taking on the Chesapeake Ripper, Graham had been opened up by Hannibal with a linoleum knife
Graham sought help from Hannibal, hoping to discover some insight into what links the families together; they have a limited timeframe, the killer prefering to kill by the light of the full moon, and Graham finds himself under pressure from Lecter in more ways than one. Hannibal pushes him emotionally, baits him regarding his cologne - a gift from Molly's son, which he gets given every year (it has a boat on the bottle) - and grows short with Graham when he thinks that Hannibal isn't giving him anything. Graham walks away, but Hannibal calls him back and takes the case file.
Guided by Hannibal's insight, although Hannibal rarely directly gives Graham an answer he doesn't already know, but encourages him toward realisation instead, Graham begins his pursuit of the Tooth Fairy, hounded by the reporter from the National Tattler who had once been responsible for sneaking into the hospital ward where Graham was recovering from Lecter's attack to photograph his injuries. Lounds photographs Graham leaving the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane--in the crop for the front page story, the photograph is trimmed down to a picture of Graham with the two words Criminally Insane written in stone beside him.
The Tooth Fairy writes to Hannibal on sheets of toilet paper, and they discuss a book code so that they might communicate through the National Tattler. He tells Lecter of his respect for him. Lecter preserves the first and last parts of the note, full of compliments, hiding it inside his roll of toilet paper, but he eats the middle part that discusses their code. Secretly, the FBI and Chilton sneak away the note, staging a problem with the hospital's utilities while they fly the note to and from their crime labs to study it, returning it after hair and fibre, spectral, reconstructive and handwriting analysis tests. Hannibal is returned to his cell, and Hannibal places his reply to the Tattler small ads. The FBI team can't crack the code fast enough, and the note goes into the paper, with them running out of time to catch the Tooth Fairy before his next kill. The note, when they crack it, turns out to be Graham's home address, and Molly and Willy are uprooted for their own safety, beginning the fracturing of the family that will eventually leave Graham alone. Willy's Grandfather buys him a pony, a puppy and an expensive fishing rod.
After Lounds gets arrested pretending to be the Tooth Fairy to get insider information, Graham uses the him and the Tattler, since he now knows the Tooth Fairy reads it. A news story is leaked that makes insinuations about the killer's sexuality, as well as his intelligence, his impotence and various other things. It's a staging intended to draw the killer to try and attack Graham in an FBI sting, a studio in a very obvious place, with landmarks visible through the windows. Instead of predictability, the Tooth Fairy goes after Lounds instead. He shows him photographs of his work, has him recite a prepared passage talking about the Red Dragon, and that what he's going to do to Lounds is only a fraction of his plans for Graham. He then bites off Lound's lips on the audio tape and mails them to the FBI. Lounds is upended out of a van outside the National Tattler headquarters, superglued to a wheelchair and set on fire. He rolls screaming down the street, and dies swiftly from his wounds.
For this, Lecter writes a letter to Graham congratulating him for ridding the world of Freddy Lounds, although he does owe something to the reporter, he says, for enlightening Hannibal to Will Graham's stay in a mental institution.
At last finding evidence of the Tooth Fairy's background in film development, Graham closes in on the killer, just as the Tooth Fairy returns from eating the watercolor painting of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. Sensing his impending capture, the killer kidnaps his then girlfriend, the blind Reba McClane, and takes her to his home. He stages his own death, instead shooting off the face of another man and leaving behind his grandmother's original false teeth, the ones that his own false teeth are a copy of, and such that he has used at the crime scenes to leave his signature behind. Reba, believing he is dead, corroborates the story after fleeing the burning house into the arms of Graham. After comforting her in the hospital, Graham goes back home to his family.
The Tooth Fairy comes across them while the family is fishing. Crawford phones too late to warn them. As Graham goes back to the house to call him back, the Tooth Fairy is setting his gun sight on Graham. He gets off one round as Graham tackles him, then leaps on the retired investigator with a knife. As they fight, Graham is grievously wounded, taking the knife to the face. The Tooth Fairy gets a big, four bladed fishing hook in his face - sent by Molly - he hooks his hand to it, too, pursuing her and Willy across the beach. Graham gives chase, but collapses, while Molly and Willy reach the house. After finding Graham's big .45 in the closet, Molly shoots the Tooth Fairy repeatedly to put him down. Graham, taken to hospital and undergoing reconstructive surgery, none the less is never the same again; he loses his family and drinks to cope with his experiences. Hannibal writes to him, apologising for his face.
Silence of the Lambs
Not long after, the FBI send another agent to speak to Hannibal. Crawford is behind the push, though he doesn't reveal to the young Clarice Starling what his intentions are at the time. Hannibal takes a liking to her almost at once--she doesn't leave crying, at least, and the other inmates seem to shake her more than Hannibal does. She doesn't convince him to take her tests, only look at them, but Lecter brings up the Buffalo Bill investigation as they talk, and they speak at length about Europe and Clarice's expensive bag and Valentine's Day. After Clarice experiences an insult at the hands of the schizophrenic in the cell down from Hannibal (three doors down on the opposite side of the corridor, in the book) he takes pity on her. He sends her to look for Benjamin Raspail's car, and after a blunder with the wrong vehicle, Clarice finds a severed head. Clarice returns to Lecter, who she suspects knows the identity of the victim; he expresses his doubts and reflects briefly on his dislike of Raspail--the flautist he killed supposedly to improve the sound of the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra. He also tells her that Buffalo Bill will start scalping his victims.
Together they play a game of quid pro quo; Hannibal gets to ask Clarice a question, and in turn Clarice is able to ask one of her own. Gradually Hannibal schools her into asking better questions, but he is a firm and insistant teacher, forcing her to stretch to accomodate him, mentally. After causing trouble with the press, Clarice is taken along with Crawford to investigate a new victim found in the Elk River. She discovers a moth pupae in the victim's mouth, and delivers it to the Smithsonian for study. After that, the team takes a look in the mouth of the head that Clarice found, discovering another moth there, and realise that Hannibal really did know something, perhaps even who the killer is.
The situation spirals. Clarice comes with an offer from Crawford--the latest victim is a Senator's daughter, and it becomes a race against time to rescue her. Lecter snubs her offer, believing it to be false. Chilton, having recorded the meeting, makes an offer of his own; he craves recognition and success, and hardly puts up a fight when Lecter insists that while he knows the killer's name, he will only tell the Senator herself in Tennassee, setting the stage for his own escape. In the meantime, Hannibal tells Clarice to look at hospitals that offer sex changes, and gives Clarice some ideas of what to look for in the application tests.
Clarice and Hannibal go their separate ways to Memphis; Lecter under the guard of the Tennessee state police, Clarice to investigate the Senator's daughter's friends. He feeds the wrong name to the Senator - Billy Rubin, as in bilirubin, the chief chemical colorant in shit - and Clarice does a search of the missing girl's room for information, finding herself at the mercy of Krendler and the Senator, and hardly endearing herself to the later by her discovery of sex snaps in the girl's jewelery box. Sent home by Krendler, Clarice none the less resists, forcing her way into the holding pen to speak to Hannibal one last time. They talk about the screaming lambs, and Hannibal returns her her file as she is pulled out of the room by the authorities.
Hannibal waits for the policemen to feed him. They don't know him, aren't as experienced with men like Hannibal as the careful men at the institute; using a piece of biro as a handcuff key and a metal wire as a weapon, Lecter frees himself, kills the two policemen, and cuts off the face of one of them, using it to mask himself, and throwing the body into the lift shaft. After assaulting the room and finding him, the policemen whisk him away believing him to be their colleague; shortly thereafter, they find the body of the real policeman, but by then Hannibal has already escaped with the ambulance, killing the medics and driving straight to the airport. Clarice is told to go back to school. Hannibal, however, doesn't fly away--he kills a man in the long term parking at the airport, stuffs him into the trunk of his car and drives to St Louis.
Lecter has left one last clue for Clarice; it urges her to consider how desperately random the dumping and pickup sites are, as though the killer is covering for something--in this case the first victim, the one he coveted. Clarice pursues Lecter's clues, finds Jame Gumb - Buffalo Bill - and rescues his most recent victim. Lecter, having begun his plastic surgery, writes to Clarice, Barney and to Dr. Chilton, offering a variety of greetings, tips and threats. He flies to Brazil to complete his transformation, losing his distinctive eleventh finger and changing everything but his nose, which he refuses to have altered in case it affects his olfactory senses--while in Brazil, an X-ray is taken of his arm which later finds its way into the clutches of Mason Verger, and subsequently those of the FBI.
Hannibal:
Seven years pass; now Hannibal Lecter is situated in Florence under the pseudonym Dr. Fell, a literary reference. Clarice, meanwhile, is disgraced; Lecter writes to her with words of odd comfort. He tells her that the most stable elements on the periodic table lie between iron and silver, which he finds appropriate for her. After killing the previous curator of the Palazzo Capponi and taking temporary guardianship of the library, he waits for the museum's appointing committee to decide on his future. The visiting police officer, Pazzi, notices the scar on Lecter's hand, which he claims is the result of having had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Pazzi meets Fell again at an extended exhibition of Atrocious Torture Implements, and Hannibal reflects that all the possibilities for inciting an epiphany are present. Pazzi, sure enough, begins his investigation--and Hannibal begins his own preparations.
First Pazzi needs to get a fingerprint--having been encouraged by the reward money to sell Hannibal to Mason Verger, rather than report his discovery to the police. He organises for a pickpocket he knows to fail the act, a Gypsy woman who has been in trouble with the police before. She fails twice - the second time because she sees the redness in Hannibal's eyes and calls him Shaitan. Her boyfriend and spotter takes over the job, and Hannibal stabs him in the abdomen, though Pazzi does get his fingerprint for the effort. He sends it straight to Verger.
The next time Pazzi met Hannibal would be after he was paid, taking his wife to see the Florence Chamber Orchestra at the Teatro Piccolomini. Hannibal was in his box, Pazzi and his wife in the seats below. Hannibal puts himself into such a position that Pazzi must introduce him to his wife, and endears himself to her.
Verger's men go to Florence to meet with Pazzi, and arrange Hannibal's kidnap. Hannibal wakes up on that Friday morning with a warning dream--then goes about his day as usual, the memory of Mischa haunting him from decades before. Hannibal clips Clarice's face from the newspaper and draws a great griffon from her body. Writing a note in his scrawl and signing it for her, he takes it to the market and finds soaps and lotions to send with it - he dispatches a number of packages - then goes back to the palazzo to prepare to address his peers, the professors of the Studiolo that he is trying to impress. When Pazzi enters, Lecter introduces him by saying that there are two Pazzis already in Dante's Inferno--he goes on to discuss the hanging of Judas.
Did you ever think, Clarice, why the philistines don't understand you? It's because you're the answer to Samson's riddle: You are the honey in the lion.
After the talk, Pazzi ingratiates himself into accompanying Hannibal back to his home in order to mark him to Verger's men. Hannibal calls him back in to show him some of the other slides, ones he didn't show the crowd. Among them is an image of Pazzi's ancestor hanging from the windows of the Ponte Vecchio in which they presently stand. As the light from the machine dazzles him, Hannibal says "On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife." He drops a heavy cloth from the ceiling down onto Pazzi's head, then holds him as he applies an ether to knock him unconscious; as he struggles, Pazzi (symbolically) shoots himself in the thigh.
When he awakes, the policeman is bound, and Hannibal puts a noose made out of the electrical cord of a floor polisher around his neck. He quizzes Pazzi on his identification code for Quantico's VICAP system, then slices him lengthwise and sets him free over the balcony--as the jerk of the heavy polisher breaks his neck, his innards spill out into the plaza below, and Hannibal waves toward the cameras from the darkness, knowing that the world will see them later. 'Bye-bye' he seems to say. Hannibal escapes, but word begins to spread of his reappearance, and of his new face. He slips in with a tour, which is his prefered way of traveling as it gets him rushed through customs, but it also means flying in the cheap seats--the plane heads back toward Canada.
Krendler, who gave Clarice so much trouble before, is in cahoots with Verger. He has ambitions to be a congressman, and makes deals that ensure that, should the FBI come down on Hannibal he will end up in Verger's hands. Verger has his eyes on Clarice; he knows that she would be perfect bait, but he has to wait until Krendler takes his pay-off, putting him under Verger's thumb, before springing the idea to him.
Lecter, meanwhile, goes on a shopping spree, making himself comfortable with a new harpsicord, a theremin, expensive silver cutlery, porcelain plates, a new Jaguar. He goes on to an arms show, too, purchasing a variety of blades as well as a crossbow and bolts. He watches a video where a man named Donnie Barber shoots a musk deer with a crossbow, failing to kill it on the first blow and reveling in the creature's suffering. It's an image burned in Hannibal's mind from his childhood, and so he takes extra offense at it, and uses slight of hand to steal the man's address. He kills him after Barber kills a deer the day before hunting season opens, taking the same organs from both and leaving them to be found, Barber with his lungs pulled out behind him like wings.
Confirming Hannibal's presence in Chesapeake, Mason orders his man eating pigs brought from Sardinia - he has been planning his revenge meticulously for years - and arranges for Clarice to be ruined by Krendler and then kidnapped. Hannibal, meanwhile, exhumes her father's skeleton in Texas, and flies back home with it in a viola case, then he heads to a Maryland hospital to steal a number of drugs. His plan for Clarice's birthday coming together is a shopping list of ingredients, which include both food and tools. Lecter buys a bottle of Chateau d'Yquem, but as he comes to hide it in Clarice's car, the men who have come to kidnap her take Hannibal instead, accidentally leaving behind the gift.
He wakes strapped to a pony cart and awaiting Verger and the pigs. Carlo - whose brother Lecter killed in Florence - is enraged by a comment from Hannibal, and drives an electric caddle prod into one of his eyes. In private shortly after, Hannibal talks to Margot - Mason's sister - about her predicament. She had been one of his patients, and he gives her an idea as to how to make her brother donate for her in vitrio treatment with her lover Judy, therefore securing Mason's estate. He encourages her to tear out a piece of his hair, so that she can place it on Mason--that way when she kills him, she can claim he was the killer. He has to goad her to convince her of the idea. When Mason's assistant Cordell then offers him pain relief in exchange for Hannibal's hidden money, he bites the man's eyebrow off.
A half hour later the procession takes Hannibal toward the pen in the barn where the pigs are kept, raised up on a forklift truck. As things are set to begin, Clarice comes to the rescue. She shoots three of the men to get to Lecter, and cuts his arm free, giving him the knife so he can finish the job while she covers him, and then gives handcuffs for him to secure both himself and the men laid out behind him. Hannibal doesn't have the opportunity to do that--Starling is hit with a tranquiliser dart, leaving it up to Hannibal to escape, just as the pigs surge into the arena and begin to devour the other men. She takes a second dart in the leg. Hannibal, carrying Clarice, walks through the animals, practically undisturbed and barefooted.
Personality:
The problem with using any of Hannibal's conversations in the asylum with either Will Graham or Clarice Starling as any kind of evidence regarding his personality is that Lecter is projecting another personality throughout. It's an act, because of the power games he plays with them, but he would have it appear that he has nothing to hide at all, that this is him with everything else stripped away. After all he's incarcerated! What has he got to hide? The honest Lecter rarely comes out, though he is usually cuttingly truthful with and without the mask. The difference between the two - honesty and truthfulness - is crucial.
For example Hannibal is clearly not at his happiest being confined, though he is incredibly patient, playing his waiting game and collecting whatever tools he can over the years in preparation for his eventual escape attempt. However when Graham asks him why he cares so much about how he was caught, Hannibal says 'Not me, Will.' It's genuine and it's not; truthful, but not honest. It could be used to say that Hannibal is uninterested in the answer, or that he doesn't care particularly about his incarceration--but it's not actually about either, it's part of the act, and in turn it's a part of the long game he's playing with Will Graham, where the only thing he intends to get out of it is the upper hand in his relationship with the other man; the position of cat rather than mouse.
It would be inaccurate to say that he doesn't like anyone, and that their only purpose is to entertain him; it's implied by the mask, the projected version of Lecter, and it seems even that he would like for it to be true, perhaps to protect himself. He is capable of being petty. In Graham's case, it could be said that Hannibal craves revenge; at one point he considers having used colostomy bags delivered to Graham's home address--he eventually decides instead to send the Red Dragon after him instead. That said, it's more likely he does it because he wants to see who wins. He wants one of them to kill the other, as though he could use it to prove that Graham's catching killers is not a fluke; and therefore Graham's capture of him wasn't a fluke. And why is he so determined for that to be true? Perhaps because of the tricky application of respect. It's unclear whether or not Graham actually has it, or whether he's earned it only by circumstance.
What is certain is that Hannibal's actions toward Will and to his own victims comes off as a kind of childish petulance, as though Hannibal is still thirteen years old. For a man with such extraordinary tastes and talents, it's shocking to boil his actions down to childishness, but when you look at his point of view in Hannibal Rising, his actions with Will and his behavior in regard to Clarice at the end of Hannibal, there is an unmistakable innocence there, a childish willfulness. Look at his desire that Stephen Hawking's early theory - that at a certain point the universe will stop expanding, and time will reverse, unbreaking fallen teacups - is true, even at 58, because of his desire to see his sister Mischa rise from the dead. It's desperation, too, an impotence in the face of things he can't control. No amount of patience will bring his sister back.
The only truth that can be gleamed from the conversations shown in the novels, is that he is proud, egotistical, and passionate. He's forthright, too. When both Clarice and Will visit him for the first time, they speak at length where the two tussle for the upper hand in the conversation; the questions lend themselves toward the personal. Lecter likes to watch strong, no nonsense people - people he respects - squirm, the ones who masquerade intelligence and pretend to be bigger fish than they are - people he thinks are rude and bullies - he crushes. Will and Clarice both use the same phrase "You'll either do it or you won't". Clarice challenges him to point his high powered regard at himself; Will tells him that Dr. Bloom will do a better job with the Tooth Fairy case file--they both walk away, and Lecter calls them both back. There's a simple reason for that. After glancing off each other, the control falls to the person walking away, as Hannibal is confined and cannot follow. The only way to wrest control, then, is to offer assistance, to become the person who has the information to whom the other must lend themselves.
Suffice is to say that there's a reason why attempts to psychoanalyze Lecter canonically fail, and it makes him just as much of a pain in the ass to write a personality section about. Hannibal Rising offers the best evidence for his personality based on what actually happens to him; evidence which is in general denied to those minds that try to pick Hannibal apart in the books. He is protective of his past - he never shares it, never speaks a single word of it, except eventually when he shares it with Clarice, after she falls under his thrall at the end of Hannibal. Hannibal is charismatic. He would also never attempt to engender sympathy or pity; that would imply he is weak. If anyone implies it to him about themselves in anything but modesty, Hannibal writes them off instantly. People who boastfully overestimate their intelligence or capabilities earn the same disregard. When Clarice and Graham do show their weaknesses, Hannibal doesn't show pity, nor really go on the attack, though he could. It would be cruelty, the equivalent of bullying, and Lecter's rules on bullies are quite firm.
When it comes to liking and love, such things as seem unlikely, Clarice Starling is a unique case, though she does share the position with other women. Hannibal has felt love before. He loved Mischa, and Lady Murasaki, but lost the first, and the second eventually could not stand to look at him, and threw herself into a river. He has the burden of intelligence and taste that makes him crave his own company above everyone else's, but he is a man, too. Yes, he prioritizes learning and his own comfort throughout his life, but when it comes to Starling, he does begin to love her, though it comes hard to both of them, and neither of them ever really identify it.
Lecter idealises Clarice Starling as a warrior woman, as a great lioness with sweet honey at her core. Her defiance of him, his respect for her idealism is so powerful that in the end he tries to replace her personality with Mischa's - what better place in the world for her than Starling's? She earns his respect, yes, but he also finds himself craving to protect her - for example from Krendler - and teach her, the way he seems to wish he could have taught Mischa, introducing her to new tastes and new experiences, something that Starling begins to appreciate when she tries to catch him. The betrayal that he felt at the hands of Lady Murasaki clearly makes Hannibal defensive, and he consequently applies a stigma to love that without a doubt makes him yearn for a brother-sister relationship with Clarice when he becomes drawn to her.
Hannibal rarely kills for other people; he is triggered by images from his delicate past for the most part; the example of the injured deer is one of them, the insult to Lady Murasaki is another. Hannibal kills Miggs for Clarice - though everyone accuses him of simply not being able to stand him. With reflection on the marketplace incidence, his fierce protectiveness in the face of an insulted woman, someone he respects, means something very different. Both women keep their heads up, they appear stronger in their defiance of the insult, and there's no doubt a similarity in the grace of both that Hannibal aspires to. Hannibal kills Krendler for Clarice eventually too, and there's a lot more symbolism to that. They eat his brain together. It's a bonding exercise, a shucking off of Clarice's FBI past, of the insults she's suffered in her male driven world, and it's an introduction to Hannibal's world in many ways, but it's also a punishment for Krendler. What more fitting punishment for a rude, unintelligent oaf of a man? Hannibal believes in punishments that fit the perceived crimes.
His relationship with Clarice is complex, and without a doubt related to his relationship with the previous women in his life. Yes, Lady Murasaki is one, but so is his dead sister, whom he relates to even fifty years after her death, and occasionally talks to in his thoughts. He attempts to combine the two, through hypnosis and drugs and conditioning, but Clarice's personality is too strong, and they enter into a sexual relationship, eventually, instead. I reiterate this because I want to highlight the lengths that Hannibal will go to. This shows enormous commitment on Hannibal's behalf.
More evidence of Hannibal's sister complex - as though the above isn't enough? - is how he responds to Margot, whom he claims he found the more interesting of the Vergers, and the strongest. Her brother had been a bully who assaulted her as a child, and went on to use his money to molest others. When Lecter follows Mason to his home, he is keeping two dogs from a shelter in a cage and starving them, so that he can find out what happens. Lecter drugs him, sets the dogs free and had Mason feed his face to the hungry animals. He makes him eat his own nose. Years later, Margot still has a strong loyalty to him as her psychiatrist, and Hannibal demonstrates a fondness for her, offering her a solution to her problems, so that her brother can't abuse her any longer. It's clear that the brother/sister relationship she has with Mason offends him, not because of its incestuous origins, but because of the mistreatment that Margot suffers in general, at the hands of someone who should love her, not show contempt for her. There's another hint to his true self in how Hannibal arranges Margot's dispatch of Mason--Hannibal doesn't have any problem with people killing. It isn't about morals, and if people die then they die; he instructs Margot to kill her brother, but it's her decision in the end, and he certainly doesn't believe in judging her for it.
Hannibal has his own sense of morality, if it could be called that, borne out of his experience at the the orphanage, and it underlines most of Hannibal's drive. There are three kinds of people; those who are unnecessarily cruel or rude are on one side of the scale, those who need the explicit protection of others lay on the opposite side, and in between there is everyone else. It's obvious that Hannibal tries and struggles to classify Clarice as one, while being well aware that she is no fragile flower who needs his protection--it's the role he tries to force her to play, eventually, through brainwashing. As I said, this comes from his experience at the orphanage, where Hannibal was protective of the smaller children, as he had been with Mischa, and spitefully vicious toward the bullies. These extremes are the people that he's more likely to respond to. Even in the asylum Hannibal expresses compassion for struggling fellow inmate Sammie (whom the authorities have given up on), which startles Clarice, and helps the nurse Barney with his correspondance courses, finding a certain pleasure in a responsive, respectful student. Hannibal thrives in a position of respect and power, such is obvious when he takes the position in Florence, but he is more than content being in that position over only one person.
Hannibal Lecter eats his trophies from his victims, though he doesn't think of them like that. He also claims that he didn't go out of his way to feed human remains to his guests. He explains that it's like realising you have guests coming over for dinner and no time to rush out to the supermarket, that you use whatever it is you have in the back of the fridge. Whether or not that's true, or just a jest--again, it's debatable. Hannibal's words always walk a fine line of truths. He has an incredibly dark sense of humor, which makes it difficult to reconcile against the reality of his life, and in fact is a strong motivator in his actions. He expresses them in his tableaux. His murder of Pazzi is an example, as is his decision to string up the bow hunter and decorate him like the Wound Man, and Starling has to stymy a laugh when she's shown the bodies of the hunter and the deer, both stuck through with arrows and butchered the same way, no matter how grizzly it is.
There's one other strong theme to Hannibal's murders: justice. The justice he has is a stilted thing, or perhaps to be more accurate an eight year old's version of it - and must be from Hannibal's hand, when it comes to the hurts done to him. It powers him all the way through Hannibal Rising, in his hunt for the men who killed Mischa. As a result of that experience, Hannibal also lost his love for God. He finds himself drawn toward irony there, too, such as the oft repeated quote about God dropping a church roof on his worshippers as they grovelled through a hymn. In the novels, it's made clear that Hannibal collects clippings about church collapses, finding a bitter pleasure in it. It's his hobby.
Hannibal respects learned men in a variety of fields, and keeps up with modern science; he takes a particular liking to Stephen Hawking, for example, who he believes to have an understanding of science and mathematics far beyond even his own. It's a fascinating and rare moment of modesty from Dr. Lecter.
Physically, Hannibal is a man who expresses himself with the minimum amount of movement and emotion. He empowers every inch of his slight frame with presence, moves with barely a sound, and surprising grace. I wanted to mention it because the way Hannibal comports himself is as much an expression of his personality as anything else. He has the frame of a dancer, Clarice describes it, although at one moment in the cell, he's described as having a sinister spider-like quality, comporting himself with menace. Both are Lecter.
Hannibal's taste is the one enduring and certain thing about him. It's what helps Clarice track him in Hannibal, as she looks back over years of receipts and puts alerts on certain items of food, clothing, furniture etc. that Hannibal is likely to purchase. These are usually expensive and rare items, although not always. Some Hannibal laments he can't purchase in America. He likes the feel of a turbocharged V-8 engine--it's one of the first things Clarice surmises, since she herself understood cars; one of the few things they had in common. Hannibal even has a favored seat in the theatre.
His interests are massively varied, including language, cookery, science, medicine, mathematics, art, music, oprah, history, geneology, mythology. The list barely touches the surface; Hannibal's expertise expands out into more specialised things, too, such as martial arts, flower arranging, fishing, pigeon racing, butchery, horse riding. He has a scholarly opinion about most things, and locks all the information away in rooms in his memory palace.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
At the present time, Hannibal is still suffering from night terrors and flashbacks of Mischa that wake him from his dreams. In time, settled with Clarice, these nightmares would subside.
Already at the age of two, Hannibal had taught himself to read, simply by following his nanny's voice and the words in his copy of The Brothers Grimm. He read out loud and in her accent. By six, he could use advanced mathematics to measure the height of the towers at Rabenstein, and could already appreciate such complex books as The Treatise on Light and Euclid's Elements. His father, nurturing his talents, brought him dictionaries in English, German and Lithuanian, and then later a Jewish tutor, who would share with him his education and his memory palace. This intelligence and wide variety of smarts is the sharpest tool in Hannibal's box. He is a polyglut, speaking a number of different European languages completely fluently,
Hannibal uses his intelligence incredibly ruthlessly. He employs it in his wit, his conversation tactics, his incredible resourcefulness and commanding ability to plan. Hannibal can make these plans far in advance, but it could be called a weakness that once he commits himself to it, he loses some of his perspective for the bigger picture, which is why he ends up being caught by Verger's men in Hannibal. Otherwise, when Hannibal's perception is completely focused on someone or something, what he intuits from this "high powered perception" is usually accurate.
Hannibal uses every inch of his own experience, and every hint of information revealed by the other person to pick them apart, from their shoes to the scent of their hand cream. His history in psychiatric medicine gives him the edge. It's not intuition; Lecter applies what he sees and hears and tastes and smells, draws his conclusions, then picks his way through to the bottom line. It's close to what Patrick Jane does on the Mentalist, in that it has the appearance of being superhuman, or magic, and yet is based entirely on simple observations. It also means that he misses very little, so when Pazzi's behavior changes in Hannibal, he is immediately suspicious. It isn't by luck that Hannibal kills the pickpocket in the market--he knows what he's doing.
Hannibal escapes the very first time that he isn't held by someone with direct previous experience. He takes small advantages where he can, he lays red herrings, approaches everything with a remarkable calm. In the ambulance after his escape, not knowing how to drive it, Hannibal calmly climbs into the driver's seat, presses all the buttons, makes sure he knows where everything is, then drives away, uncaring of the fact that the vehicle has come to a stop on the freeway and is holding up traffic behind it. Attacking a nurse, his heartbeat doesn't rise above a resting speed. He's a good actor. He plays with accents, and is incredibly convincing, especially on the phone.
Hannibal is incredibly strong, physically, even despite his present age. He can pick up a man single handed and bundle them into a vehicle. Hannibal demonstrates this again when he saves Clarice's life, but he also demonstrates another ability, his presence around animals is such that even the most aggressive of them will respect him. A sow challenges him in the novel, then reconsiders after Lecter squares off to it, heading off to find easier prey. Hannibal displays this same presence around dogs, deer, swans and horses, too. Lecter is also capable of manipulating the people around him. He directs Miggs to swallow his own foul tongue from another prison cell, without even direct eye contact. During his time as a psychiatrist, Hannibal also hypnotised a number of his patients - he uses the same method on Clarice - sometimes with the aid of narcotics.
Possessing a good nose, Lecter is able to appreciate many of the finer things in life, but there's no doubt that it's the closest thing to a superhuman ability that he has. Lecter can identify unique smells, unique blends of smells, even from a distance. It's likely he can also smell fear, for instance through perspiration, though he never mentions it. He has a medical degree, and can perform precise or emergency surgery; his knowledge of the human body is next to none, as he spent most of his childhood dissecting, drawing and reconstructing the human form. At home, even in his prison cell, Hannibal owns a collection of rare and expensive books, usually first editions. He has a good eye for the finer things, is an artist and a musician in his own right, and a remarkable chef and host. Hannibal flourishes at most things he puts his mind to.
Hannibal has an incredible memory. He has a memory palace, where he keeps everything from textures to smells. He uses rooms where he's been, images and smells to mean people, locks into them addresses and numbers and personal memories, even recipes. His palace needs to be well lit, Hannibal concedes, as he once stored some information in a dark place, and couldn't draw on it when he wanted to.
In terms of weaknesses, Hannibal is only human. He can die, though one supposes that were he not shot enough times the first time, he'd rise back up horror movie style and have a second go. The villains in Harris' novels do like to do that. He shows no aggression toward children at any point, and shows a clear weakness for women. Not all women, but certainly those that he can project Mischa or Lady Murasaki onto, in which case they need to possess certain traits. As mentioned before he can be caught off guard, should he have one singleminded goal in mind, and fail to account for all the variables. Hannibal isn't psychic, he does make mistakes, and he is most susceptable to abberations in human behavior. If someone does anything he thinks beyond their skill level, or outside of their normal routine, it can unsettle his plans. He is also weakened by his own contempt for other people.
Hannibal's greatest weakness, at least in regard to Ataraxion, will concern the fourth wall.
Inventory:
Lecter's mask
His box of art supplies; charcoal, erasers, pen and ink, sealing wax, pencils in various grades and a thick roll of expensive, European made linen paper.
His copy of Alexandre Dumas' Le Grande Dictionnaire de Cuisine
A case of wine; three bottles of Batard-Montrachet, an expensive white wine from France, three of Chateau Petrus from Bordeaux; a red.
Two outfits, with accompanying scalloped hankerchiefs and driving gloves, and a good pair of leather shoes.
Appearance: Lecter appears younger than his almost sixty years; he is spry and fit, sleek, although not a particularly imposing figure, as it's his routine to blend into the crowd. Thinning and graying dark hair, and blue eyes, which appear to contain in them flecks of red in certain light. As in the movie version, I'll be using Sir Anthony Hopkins as a PB.
Age: 58 (assuming date of birth in 1933)
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample: Hannibal's lungs filled, chest swelling with the thick, exotic scents in the garden. His eyes were closed. There was no point in trying to work out what earthbound variety any of the plants smelled like. They were as foreign and alien - as individual - as they all needed to be. Alien plants, millions of species, many of them edible, some with medicinal qualities, others that simply smelled pleasant--they had all been put on this ship for a purpose, to provide oxygen, maintainable supplies and of course recreation.
After sating his curiosity about the ship, its technology - so far in advance of anything that Hannibal had ever seen - its library, its culture; Hannibal had settled on the gardens as his favorite place on board. There were lifetimes of discovery here, and Hannibal was still learning things about his own world! Where did it stop? With alien worlds, cultures, and planets there could be no end to the wealth of information available. It was simply beyond him, though Hannibal didn't enjoy the declaration. He prefered to think that he was capable of anything, but even he had his limits.
He would start with the garden. He would start here, and one plant at a time make himself familiar. The new scents had drawn him in, and Hannibal had opened a new wing of his memory palace for them. The wing was constructed of the same stunning gothic architecture that the Tranquility was built from, though it hardly differentiated it from the romantic structures that made up the rest of the palace. They were not dissimilar, for example, to the great walls and towers of Colonne's magnificent cathedral. The hallways were too dark, so Hannibal lit them with gas lamps, their strange flickering glow through the glass like a study of sunlight through water. Some of the species of moths he'd observed in the garden flickered against them, their wings blurring as they swirled around the light.
Off the corridor were doors, and beyond those doors were rooms waiting to be filled; rooms with vast ceilings like the gardens, rooms full of lockers, and inside of them so many wonderful secrets. He'd fill them all, in time.
Hannibal retreated from it all for now; there was a face he wanted to visit, back in one of the rooms he had taken from the Smithsonian so many years ago. Clarice waited there for him. Following one of the moths, Hannibal found his way back. The paths had become more complex as of late, but he found the painting there, the Madonna and Child, only the Madonna was Clarice, her breast bared to the infant, and she wore a reckless defiance in her gaze. The halo that framed her hair made her look radiant. Mischa was the child she held. Fat little Mischa, a baby again, with her dark downy hair and her plump, grabbing hands.
Eyes opening, Hannibal looked up at the glittering water as it tumbled down through tiers of forest canopy, sending up a magnificent spray. He'd find a spot on the grass - somewhere where the water couldn't reach him - and begin his catalogue. Perhaps, he thought, he would find the time to draw another picture of Clarice, for fear that the image might somehow fade from his mind.
Comms Sample:
[ It's exceptional that Hannibal feels recording a message necessary. He had never privately recorded video of himself, though there had once been thousands of audio recordings of his voice in his patients records, all of them destroyed by request of the victims families.
An audio recording is all the network gets for now. Hannibal's voice is clear, his accent indefinable. There's something Eastern European, transformed by Japanese, French, Italian, American. It's crisp, each syllable pronounced, and no louder than it needs to be. ]
Many cultures believe that when their photograph is taken, the image steals away their spirit. But what is a spirit? A soul? The desire to protect something entirely without basis in reality is unique to humans. A curr will fight for its life, even spar for a mate that it can only smell, but it has no use for a soul. For those with faith, a soul represents something greater even than themselves. To others, it is a part of them that lies beyond physical harm, beyond the confines and dangers of life.
Soul is something quite impossible to miss in the grand gestures inherent to Leonardo da Vinci, or the moving gravity of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Art exists in the moment, a manifestation brought into existence by the painter, the musician, the mathematician. Our souls grow richer through our experiences, but they serve us only here. There is no heaven, no great white stairway disappearing into the clouds, no pearly gate. We must be inspired in this life, share the wealth of our experiences, allow them to inform further generations. [ A pause. ] Someone built this ship. I can only wonder at where they found their own inspiration.
Your Name: Reg
OOC Journal: regasssa
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope
Email + IM: regasssa at hotmail dot com
Characters Played at Ataraxion: John Casey, Chad Warwick, Dexter Morgan, Nathan Petrelli
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Dr. Hannibal Lecter
Canon: Thomas Harris' Hannibal (novels). For argument's sake I'll be deferring to the book canon, while maintaining Hopkins as the face of Lecter.
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Mason Verger's estate in Hannibal; Dr. Lecter carries an unconscious Clarice Starling through a sea of man-eating pigs, his hair is cropped military fashion, and he carries himself with almost unnatural strength. The ravenous pigs ignore him.
Number: 138
Setting: The date: 1991, an equivalent modern world in which among the world's other most wanted criminals is one Hannibal Lecter M.D. otherwise known to the press as Hannibal the Cannibal, up to his capture known to the FBI under the title of "The Chesapeake Ripper".
History: A.N. I want to apologise for the length of the history. In play it'll act as as reference material for playing Hannibal from the book canon, and as a result is somewhat excessive.
Hannibal Rising:
Born to Count Lecter, and inheriting the name of one of his forefathers, the warlord Hannibal the Grim, Lecter was already at six a loving boy, artistic and genuine, living at Rabenstein (Ravenstone) with his beloved sister Mischa, who had been born on the eve of war. Two years into the conlict the family uprooted from their generational home and head into the forest, fleeing the German occupation of Lithuania, which they would call Ostland, along with the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia.
Hidden in the dense forest, the family waited for the war to pass them by, certain that it would all be over soon. They lived out the cold winters and long summers for three more years, taking advantage of their surroundings and protected by the thick marsh and forest that hid their home from the roads. Toward the end of the war a Soviet tank blundered out of nowhere into their idylic safety, pursued by a German bomber. The adults, including Hannibal's parents, his tutor and their servants died that day, leaving Mischa and Hannibal to look after themselves.
Hitler's retreat would change Hannibal's life forever. A small group of turncoats, men fighting for themselves rather than die in slave batallions, found the two children in the dead of winter. The retreat had stripped all the food from the land, and so they took the children prisoner, chaining them by their necks to the bannister. Hannibal would bear a scar from the chain years later. They starved, and the men starved too, and Mischa - cold and feverous from the sickness the men brought with them - grew worse still. An Albanian boy found in the woods would be killed and eaten first, following after a little deer, which the men led back with an arrow in it.
And then one day they came for Mischa.
What happened after that struck Hannibal dumb, and caused a mental block where the memories of Mischa's death were concerned. He stumbled out into the path of a Soviet tank, bedraggled and wearing a collar with a chain, and behind it an empty loop where his sister's neck had once been. He was taken back to his family home, transformed into an orphanage after its rescue from gunpowder. Here, Hannibal fought against the bullies despite his muteness, protecting those younger and smaller than himself the way he had once failed to protect Mischa. He used his smarts to defeat the monitors; boys much bigger than himself, such as by blowing out a candle when they came to try and beat him in the dark. At night, he'd have terrible dreams and night sweats, which would wake him screaming in the dark and disturb the other children.
Hannibal would leave with a relative for France - Count Robert Lecter - a prestigious French painter, who would rescue him from the orphanage, taking him back to France and his Japanese bride, Lady Murasaki, and their French chateau. They had survived the war, but were poor as a result of the Germans stealing away his uncle's paintings. Hannibal would learn to take his voice back with the lady's help, would learn a variety of Japanese arts rather than attending school, where he only got into trouble fighting with the other children. Attending the market one day, Hannibal spoke at last, but only when the butcher insulted Lady Murasaki; he struck the man with a leg of lamb, and would have stabbed him had he been able to reach a knife. His first word was "Beast." Hannibal was taken to the police station and shown a police cell for the first time; the policeman warned him to be prudent: "Use judgement and you will never occupy a cell like this." He gave Hannibal a pass. Later that week, pursuing the butcher for his insult, the Count would be killed, leaving Murasaki a widow, with death taxes that would then force her to sell the chateau.
A mere teenager, thirteen, Hannibal kills the butcher savagely at the edge of the lake. The news spreads like wildfire, and Hannibal brings the butcher's head back, placing it on the shrine to Murasaki's ancestor, missing his cheeks, and labeled like a piece of meat. The Inspector - Popil, who Hannibal decides has a smudge of intelligence - takes Hannibal to the morgue and challenges him that the butcher is his first kill outright. He gives Hannibal an early polygraph test, which he passes, but Popil is certain that he's done it; he recognises the timbre in the boys voice, the disdain. The head, meanwhile, is discovered elsewhere while Hannibal is in custody, placed there by Lady Murasaki.
Moving to Paris with her, Hannibal begins attending boarding schools on a tight budget, painting ink washes of birds and sailboats in the Japanese style to make a little money for luxuries. Graduating early, he was admitted with a scholarship to medical school, where he used his art skills and talent with a knife and power tools for dissections and illustrations, and performed such tasks as securing the appropriation of legal cadavers for the university. Under the influence of a self administered cocktail of opiates, Hannibal tries again to recover his memory of the night his sister died; he finds enough there, the memory of the men stuffing their dog tags away into a bag; it's something, and Hannibal arranges to visit Lithuania for his revenge, though word of his coming reaches the men too--those that had survived the war, at least.
Lecter finds the tags at the broken house, and then Dortlich finds him. Unable to surprise Lecter, the young Hannibal takes out Dortlich's legs and secures him, and then Lecter drags out the bathtub that still contains his sister's skeleton, dragging it away so that he can bury her. Standing above her grave he declares: "Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day." Hannibal eats Dortlich's cheeks as brochettes with some wild mushrooms, takes his car, and makes his way back to France.
After visiting the next man and his family - Kolnas' daughter wears Mischa's bracelet - Hannibal heads back to school to work during the night. Milko is sent to kill him, but Hannibal is quicker, and feeds Milko into the embalming tank as he extorts information from him. While Milko drowns Popil visits him, accusing him of Dortlich's murder and warning him not to kill in France. He wants the ringleader Grutas himself, for warcrimes, including such feats as silencing a witness at the Nuremberg trials by pouring acid down her throat.
Following a failed attack on Grutas that ends in Hannibal detonating an explosion in his house, Hannibal is arrested and escapes from jail, only to learn that Lady Murasaki has been kidnapped. Popil meanwhile wants Hannibal arrested and tried for the murder of the butcher years ago; he says it's because Hannibal was a minor when he commited that crime, he would be put into an institute where he could be studied. His wish would come true, but it would be years yet.
Hannibal goes to Kolnas prepared to strike a deal for Lady Murasaki's sake. He has stolen Kolnas' daughter's bracelet, but presents it as though he's kidnapped his children, and tells him that he'll have them back safe and sound and spare his life if Lady Murasaki is returned to him. He calls the house, but as Kolnas realises he's been tricked into revealing Grutas' canalboat, he swings his gun around toward Lecter, who drives a knife up into his head, killing him instantly. Hannibal takes no trophy from this kill, he goes straight to the canal, killing the last two men bar Grutas, who shoots him in the back, striking the hidden dagger that Hannibal has folded into his collar but thinking instead that he's paralysed him. He threatens Lady Murasaki, crows over him, and Hannibal fights him away from the gun. After he kills Grutas - who tells him the truth that Hannibal has banished, that Hannibal was forced to eat his sister too - Lady Murasaki, cut free, saves Hannibal from the captain of the boat, who's snuck up on him. Hannibal, covered in Grutas' blood, declares his love for her, but Lady Murasaki flees, throws herself over the edge of the boat and disappears.
Hannibal blows up the boat, and the police arrest him. They want to try him for the killing of the war criminals, or for the murder of the butcher, but the prosecutor advises against both. Hannibal is smarter than that, petitioning through the periodical L'Humanite in such a way as to engender support from the Communist movement, who in turn put pressure on the police to treat him less gravely. In the meantime Hannibal, by helping out the new forensics division and petitioning his previous teacher, secures an internship at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, and shortly thereafter Hannibal leaves.
In Quebec, having begun his internship, Hannibal finds the final man and kills him. Thus ends the childhood of the serial killer, but it's only one part of the story.
Interlude - Medical career, capture, and incarceration:
Finishing his degree and beginning a career in medicine, Hannibal moves swiftly into being his own boss, founding his own psychiatric practice some time after leaving practicing medicine in 1972. He had little time for psychiatry himself, and even less time for those who shared his field, but he shared his experience and insight with periodicals and magazines across a variety of subjects, growing propserous meanwhile on the large sums bequeathed to him by some of his patients. Throughout the seventies Lecter would kill again. Though not all were patients, many were; in general though, he killed people he considered to be interminably rude, though his victims would include a variety: a bowhunter, a census taker, a Princeton student, and a flautist, for example. Only three would survive. A woman confined to mental institute, Mason Verger whom Hannibal had cut off his own skin and feed it to the dogs, and FBI profiler Will Graham, who came upon him quite by accident.
In 1975, Graham, acting as a Special Investigator in the murders of the so called Chesapeake Ripper, came to speak to Lecter about the sixth victim, a bow hunter that Hannibal had laced to a pegboard, decorating him like the Wound Man. An old scar in his thigh from an arrow leads Graham to Hannibal, who had been working in the emergency ward the day the hunter was brought in. The first visit only raises Graham's hackles. On the second, he stood in Hannibal's study looking at his medical books and piece by piece put it together. Though he was still uncertain, Hannibal saw the suspicion in his eyes. Even so, for years Graham couldn't wholly explain how he caught him. Hannibal caught Graham by surprise as he tried to call the police switchboard for backup, stabbing him with a knife; Graham in turn shot Lecter, and the two were found dying together when the cops arrived.
Hannibal, found insane, was sent to Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane amidst a massive press frenzy. Dr. Chilton ran the hospital at the time, and reveled in the publicity, though in the years that followed Hannibal's notoriety would infuriate him, Chilton having achieved very little in terms of status compared to Hannibal, who was published and much endeared to by people in all kinds of fields. Hannibal still sent papers to magazines to have them published, and Chilton would resort to pitiful attempts to displease Hannibal in shows of his power, such as by taking away his books or his toilet seat.
Throughout his incarceration, Hannibal would resist psychiatric testing; he knew every trick of the trade, and knew how to read as a perfectly sane person. He would fold their tests into origami, resist hypnosis, ace lie detector tests and overpower drug induced testing, but he was also violent, assaulting a nurse and swallowing her tongue without so much as a blip in his heartbeat. Chilton's response to the attack was extreme but sensible; Hannibal would never leave his cage without being confined, strapped to a chair and wearing a muzzle, but confinement hardly stopped him if he wanted to kill someone; Hannibal could, by simply talking, convince a man to kill himself, providing they were unstable to begin with. He would later escape with only the use of a paperclip and a biro, things that Chilton insisted weren't given to him.
While incarcerated, Hannibal would deviate between being extremely helpful and incredibly dangerous, depending on his mood. He would have numerous visitors, all wanting to get something out of him, such as other budding psychiatrists who thought they might classify him; he sent most of them away in tears. Few visitors would meet Hannibal's high standards; Will Graham and Clarice Starling would stand out to him.
Red Dragon:
Graham came first. Having been responsible for Hannibal's incarceration, Lecter welcomed him like an old friend, though more sinister intentions were at the core of his interests. Graham was in retirement; he was a fascinating subject, described as an eideteker, with an incredible visual memory. His gift of memory and his ability to put himself into the shoes of the men he was chasing gave him an edge against the criminal element, but particularly those that were most difficult to catch.
For this reason, Jack Crawford at the FBI had taken him out of retirement to work on the case of the Tooth Fairy, a killer who was choosing supposedly random families and killing in unpredictable ways--the only thing linking the crimes was saliva, hairs, semen, broken mirrors and the imprint of a bizarre set of teeth, left behind at every crime scene. Enough DNA evidence, if they could only find the source. As Jack convinces Graham, he insists to his wife Molly that she and her son will be safe, that this time he won't let Graham get too close; while investigating the Minnesota Shrike, Graham had been shot; while taking on the Chesapeake Ripper, Graham had been opened up by Hannibal with a linoleum knife
Graham sought help from Hannibal, hoping to discover some insight into what links the families together; they have a limited timeframe, the killer prefering to kill by the light of the full moon, and Graham finds himself under pressure from Lecter in more ways than one. Hannibal pushes him emotionally, baits him regarding his cologne - a gift from Molly's son, which he gets given every year (it has a boat on the bottle) - and grows short with Graham when he thinks that Hannibal isn't giving him anything. Graham walks away, but Hannibal calls him back and takes the case file.
Guided by Hannibal's insight, although Hannibal rarely directly gives Graham an answer he doesn't already know, but encourages him toward realisation instead, Graham begins his pursuit of the Tooth Fairy, hounded by the reporter from the National Tattler who had once been responsible for sneaking into the hospital ward where Graham was recovering from Lecter's attack to photograph his injuries. Lounds photographs Graham leaving the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane--in the crop for the front page story, the photograph is trimmed down to a picture of Graham with the two words Criminally Insane written in stone beside him.
The Tooth Fairy writes to Hannibal on sheets of toilet paper, and they discuss a book code so that they might communicate through the National Tattler. He tells Lecter of his respect for him. Lecter preserves the first and last parts of the note, full of compliments, hiding it inside his roll of toilet paper, but he eats the middle part that discusses their code. Secretly, the FBI and Chilton sneak away the note, staging a problem with the hospital's utilities while they fly the note to and from their crime labs to study it, returning it after hair and fibre, spectral, reconstructive and handwriting analysis tests. Hannibal is returned to his cell, and Hannibal places his reply to the Tattler small ads. The FBI team can't crack the code fast enough, and the note goes into the paper, with them running out of time to catch the Tooth Fairy before his next kill. The note, when they crack it, turns out to be Graham's home address, and Molly and Willy are uprooted for their own safety, beginning the fracturing of the family that will eventually leave Graham alone. Willy's Grandfather buys him a pony, a puppy and an expensive fishing rod.
After Lounds gets arrested pretending to be the Tooth Fairy to get insider information, Graham uses the him and the Tattler, since he now knows the Tooth Fairy reads it. A news story is leaked that makes insinuations about the killer's sexuality, as well as his intelligence, his impotence and various other things. It's a staging intended to draw the killer to try and attack Graham in an FBI sting, a studio in a very obvious place, with landmarks visible through the windows. Instead of predictability, the Tooth Fairy goes after Lounds instead. He shows him photographs of his work, has him recite a prepared passage talking about the Red Dragon, and that what he's going to do to Lounds is only a fraction of his plans for Graham. He then bites off Lound's lips on the audio tape and mails them to the FBI. Lounds is upended out of a van outside the National Tattler headquarters, superglued to a wheelchair and set on fire. He rolls screaming down the street, and dies swiftly from his wounds.
For this, Lecter writes a letter to Graham congratulating him for ridding the world of Freddy Lounds, although he does owe something to the reporter, he says, for enlightening Hannibal to Will Graham's stay in a mental institution.
At last finding evidence of the Tooth Fairy's background in film development, Graham closes in on the killer, just as the Tooth Fairy returns from eating the watercolor painting of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. Sensing his impending capture, the killer kidnaps his then girlfriend, the blind Reba McClane, and takes her to his home. He stages his own death, instead shooting off the face of another man and leaving behind his grandmother's original false teeth, the ones that his own false teeth are a copy of, and such that he has used at the crime scenes to leave his signature behind. Reba, believing he is dead, corroborates the story after fleeing the burning house into the arms of Graham. After comforting her in the hospital, Graham goes back home to his family.
The Tooth Fairy comes across them while the family is fishing. Crawford phones too late to warn them. As Graham goes back to the house to call him back, the Tooth Fairy is setting his gun sight on Graham. He gets off one round as Graham tackles him, then leaps on the retired investigator with a knife. As they fight, Graham is grievously wounded, taking the knife to the face. The Tooth Fairy gets a big, four bladed fishing hook in his face - sent by Molly - he hooks his hand to it, too, pursuing her and Willy across the beach. Graham gives chase, but collapses, while Molly and Willy reach the house. After finding Graham's big .45 in the closet, Molly shoots the Tooth Fairy repeatedly to put him down. Graham, taken to hospital and undergoing reconstructive surgery, none the less is never the same again; he loses his family and drinks to cope with his experiences. Hannibal writes to him, apologising for his face.
Silence of the Lambs
Not long after, the FBI send another agent to speak to Hannibal. Crawford is behind the push, though he doesn't reveal to the young Clarice Starling what his intentions are at the time. Hannibal takes a liking to her almost at once--she doesn't leave crying, at least, and the other inmates seem to shake her more than Hannibal does. She doesn't convince him to take her tests, only look at them, but Lecter brings up the Buffalo Bill investigation as they talk, and they speak at length about Europe and Clarice's expensive bag and Valentine's Day. After Clarice experiences an insult at the hands of the schizophrenic in the cell down from Hannibal (three doors down on the opposite side of the corridor, in the book) he takes pity on her. He sends her to look for Benjamin Raspail's car, and after a blunder with the wrong vehicle, Clarice finds a severed head. Clarice returns to Lecter, who she suspects knows the identity of the victim; he expresses his doubts and reflects briefly on his dislike of Raspail--the flautist he killed supposedly to improve the sound of the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra. He also tells her that Buffalo Bill will start scalping his victims.
Together they play a game of quid pro quo; Hannibal gets to ask Clarice a question, and in turn Clarice is able to ask one of her own. Gradually Hannibal schools her into asking better questions, but he is a firm and insistant teacher, forcing her to stretch to accomodate him, mentally. After causing trouble with the press, Clarice is taken along with Crawford to investigate a new victim found in the Elk River. She discovers a moth pupae in the victim's mouth, and delivers it to the Smithsonian for study. After that, the team takes a look in the mouth of the head that Clarice found, discovering another moth there, and realise that Hannibal really did know something, perhaps even who the killer is.
The situation spirals. Clarice comes with an offer from Crawford--the latest victim is a Senator's daughter, and it becomes a race against time to rescue her. Lecter snubs her offer, believing it to be false. Chilton, having recorded the meeting, makes an offer of his own; he craves recognition and success, and hardly puts up a fight when Lecter insists that while he knows the killer's name, he will only tell the Senator herself in Tennassee, setting the stage for his own escape. In the meantime, Hannibal tells Clarice to look at hospitals that offer sex changes, and gives Clarice some ideas of what to look for in the application tests.
Clarice and Hannibal go their separate ways to Memphis; Lecter under the guard of the Tennessee state police, Clarice to investigate the Senator's daughter's friends. He feeds the wrong name to the Senator - Billy Rubin, as in bilirubin, the chief chemical colorant in shit - and Clarice does a search of the missing girl's room for information, finding herself at the mercy of Krendler and the Senator, and hardly endearing herself to the later by her discovery of sex snaps in the girl's jewelery box. Sent home by Krendler, Clarice none the less resists, forcing her way into the holding pen to speak to Hannibal one last time. They talk about the screaming lambs, and Hannibal returns her her file as she is pulled out of the room by the authorities.
Hannibal waits for the policemen to feed him. They don't know him, aren't as experienced with men like Hannibal as the careful men at the institute; using a piece of biro as a handcuff key and a metal wire as a weapon, Lecter frees himself, kills the two policemen, and cuts off the face of one of them, using it to mask himself, and throwing the body into the lift shaft. After assaulting the room and finding him, the policemen whisk him away believing him to be their colleague; shortly thereafter, they find the body of the real policeman, but by then Hannibal has already escaped with the ambulance, killing the medics and driving straight to the airport. Clarice is told to go back to school. Hannibal, however, doesn't fly away--he kills a man in the long term parking at the airport, stuffs him into the trunk of his car and drives to St Louis.
Lecter has left one last clue for Clarice; it urges her to consider how desperately random the dumping and pickup sites are, as though the killer is covering for something--in this case the first victim, the one he coveted. Clarice pursues Lecter's clues, finds Jame Gumb - Buffalo Bill - and rescues his most recent victim. Lecter, having begun his plastic surgery, writes to Clarice, Barney and to Dr. Chilton, offering a variety of greetings, tips and threats. He flies to Brazil to complete his transformation, losing his distinctive eleventh finger and changing everything but his nose, which he refuses to have altered in case it affects his olfactory senses--while in Brazil, an X-ray is taken of his arm which later finds its way into the clutches of Mason Verger, and subsequently those of the FBI.
Hannibal:
Seven years pass; now Hannibal Lecter is situated in Florence under the pseudonym Dr. Fell, a literary reference. Clarice, meanwhile, is disgraced; Lecter writes to her with words of odd comfort. He tells her that the most stable elements on the periodic table lie between iron and silver, which he finds appropriate for her. After killing the previous curator of the Palazzo Capponi and taking temporary guardianship of the library, he waits for the museum's appointing committee to decide on his future. The visiting police officer, Pazzi, notices the scar on Lecter's hand, which he claims is the result of having had Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Pazzi meets Fell again at an extended exhibition of Atrocious Torture Implements, and Hannibal reflects that all the possibilities for inciting an epiphany are present. Pazzi, sure enough, begins his investigation--and Hannibal begins his own preparations.
First Pazzi needs to get a fingerprint--having been encouraged by the reward money to sell Hannibal to Mason Verger, rather than report his discovery to the police. He organises for a pickpocket he knows to fail the act, a Gypsy woman who has been in trouble with the police before. She fails twice - the second time because she sees the redness in Hannibal's eyes and calls him Shaitan. Her boyfriend and spotter takes over the job, and Hannibal stabs him in the abdomen, though Pazzi does get his fingerprint for the effort. He sends it straight to Verger.
The next time Pazzi met Hannibal would be after he was paid, taking his wife to see the Florence Chamber Orchestra at the Teatro Piccolomini. Hannibal was in his box, Pazzi and his wife in the seats below. Hannibal puts himself into such a position that Pazzi must introduce him to his wife, and endears himself to her.
Verger's men go to Florence to meet with Pazzi, and arrange Hannibal's kidnap. Hannibal wakes up on that Friday morning with a warning dream--then goes about his day as usual, the memory of Mischa haunting him from decades before. Hannibal clips Clarice's face from the newspaper and draws a great griffon from her body. Writing a note in his scrawl and signing it for her, he takes it to the market and finds soaps and lotions to send with it - he dispatches a number of packages - then goes back to the palazzo to prepare to address his peers, the professors of the Studiolo that he is trying to impress. When Pazzi enters, Lecter introduces him by saying that there are two Pazzis already in Dante's Inferno--he goes on to discuss the hanging of Judas.
Did you ever think, Clarice, why the philistines don't understand you? It's because you're the answer to Samson's riddle: You are the honey in the lion.
After the talk, Pazzi ingratiates himself into accompanying Hannibal back to his home in order to mark him to Verger's men. Hannibal calls him back in to show him some of the other slides, ones he didn't show the crowd. Among them is an image of Pazzi's ancestor hanging from the windows of the Ponte Vecchio in which they presently stand. As the light from the machine dazzles him, Hannibal says "On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife." He drops a heavy cloth from the ceiling down onto Pazzi's head, then holds him as he applies an ether to knock him unconscious; as he struggles, Pazzi (symbolically) shoots himself in the thigh.
When he awakes, the policeman is bound, and Hannibal puts a noose made out of the electrical cord of a floor polisher around his neck. He quizzes Pazzi on his identification code for Quantico's VICAP system, then slices him lengthwise and sets him free over the balcony--as the jerk of the heavy polisher breaks his neck, his innards spill out into the plaza below, and Hannibal waves toward the cameras from the darkness, knowing that the world will see them later. 'Bye-bye' he seems to say. Hannibal escapes, but word begins to spread of his reappearance, and of his new face. He slips in with a tour, which is his prefered way of traveling as it gets him rushed through customs, but it also means flying in the cheap seats--the plane heads back toward Canada.
Krendler, who gave Clarice so much trouble before, is in cahoots with Verger. He has ambitions to be a congressman, and makes deals that ensure that, should the FBI come down on Hannibal he will end up in Verger's hands. Verger has his eyes on Clarice; he knows that she would be perfect bait, but he has to wait until Krendler takes his pay-off, putting him under Verger's thumb, before springing the idea to him.
Lecter, meanwhile, goes on a shopping spree, making himself comfortable with a new harpsicord, a theremin, expensive silver cutlery, porcelain plates, a new Jaguar. He goes on to an arms show, too, purchasing a variety of blades as well as a crossbow and bolts. He watches a video where a man named Donnie Barber shoots a musk deer with a crossbow, failing to kill it on the first blow and reveling in the creature's suffering. It's an image burned in Hannibal's mind from his childhood, and so he takes extra offense at it, and uses slight of hand to steal the man's address. He kills him after Barber kills a deer the day before hunting season opens, taking the same organs from both and leaving them to be found, Barber with his lungs pulled out behind him like wings.
Confirming Hannibal's presence in Chesapeake, Mason orders his man eating pigs brought from Sardinia - he has been planning his revenge meticulously for years - and arranges for Clarice to be ruined by Krendler and then kidnapped. Hannibal, meanwhile, exhumes her father's skeleton in Texas, and flies back home with it in a viola case, then he heads to a Maryland hospital to steal a number of drugs. His plan for Clarice's birthday coming together is a shopping list of ingredients, which include both food and tools. Lecter buys a bottle of Chateau d'Yquem, but as he comes to hide it in Clarice's car, the men who have come to kidnap her take Hannibal instead, accidentally leaving behind the gift.
He wakes strapped to a pony cart and awaiting Verger and the pigs. Carlo - whose brother Lecter killed in Florence - is enraged by a comment from Hannibal, and drives an electric caddle prod into one of his eyes. In private shortly after, Hannibal talks to Margot - Mason's sister - about her predicament. She had been one of his patients, and he gives her an idea as to how to make her brother donate for her in vitrio treatment with her lover Judy, therefore securing Mason's estate. He encourages her to tear out a piece of his hair, so that she can place it on Mason--that way when she kills him, she can claim he was the killer. He has to goad her to convince her of the idea. When Mason's assistant Cordell then offers him pain relief in exchange for Hannibal's hidden money, he bites the man's eyebrow off.
A half hour later the procession takes Hannibal toward the pen in the barn where the pigs are kept, raised up on a forklift truck. As things are set to begin, Clarice comes to the rescue. She shoots three of the men to get to Lecter, and cuts his arm free, giving him the knife so he can finish the job while she covers him, and then gives handcuffs for him to secure both himself and the men laid out behind him. Hannibal doesn't have the opportunity to do that--Starling is hit with a tranquiliser dart, leaving it up to Hannibal to escape, just as the pigs surge into the arena and begin to devour the other men. She takes a second dart in the leg. Hannibal, carrying Clarice, walks through the animals, practically undisturbed and barefooted.
Personality:
The problem with using any of Hannibal's conversations in the asylum with either Will Graham or Clarice Starling as any kind of evidence regarding his personality is that Lecter is projecting another personality throughout. It's an act, because of the power games he plays with them, but he would have it appear that he has nothing to hide at all, that this is him with everything else stripped away. After all he's incarcerated! What has he got to hide? The honest Lecter rarely comes out, though he is usually cuttingly truthful with and without the mask. The difference between the two - honesty and truthfulness - is crucial.
For example Hannibal is clearly not at his happiest being confined, though he is incredibly patient, playing his waiting game and collecting whatever tools he can over the years in preparation for his eventual escape attempt. However when Graham asks him why he cares so much about how he was caught, Hannibal says 'Not me, Will.' It's genuine and it's not; truthful, but not honest. It could be used to say that Hannibal is uninterested in the answer, or that he doesn't care particularly about his incarceration--but it's not actually about either, it's part of the act, and in turn it's a part of the long game he's playing with Will Graham, where the only thing he intends to get out of it is the upper hand in his relationship with the other man; the position of cat rather than mouse.
It would be inaccurate to say that he doesn't like anyone, and that their only purpose is to entertain him; it's implied by the mask, the projected version of Lecter, and it seems even that he would like for it to be true, perhaps to protect himself. He is capable of being petty. In Graham's case, it could be said that Hannibal craves revenge; at one point he considers having used colostomy bags delivered to Graham's home address--he eventually decides instead to send the Red Dragon after him instead. That said, it's more likely he does it because he wants to see who wins. He wants one of them to kill the other, as though he could use it to prove that Graham's catching killers is not a fluke; and therefore Graham's capture of him wasn't a fluke. And why is he so determined for that to be true? Perhaps because of the tricky application of respect. It's unclear whether or not Graham actually has it, or whether he's earned it only by circumstance.
What is certain is that Hannibal's actions toward Will and to his own victims comes off as a kind of childish petulance, as though Hannibal is still thirteen years old. For a man with such extraordinary tastes and talents, it's shocking to boil his actions down to childishness, but when you look at his point of view in Hannibal Rising, his actions with Will and his behavior in regard to Clarice at the end of Hannibal, there is an unmistakable innocence there, a childish willfulness. Look at his desire that Stephen Hawking's early theory - that at a certain point the universe will stop expanding, and time will reverse, unbreaking fallen teacups - is true, even at 58, because of his desire to see his sister Mischa rise from the dead. It's desperation, too, an impotence in the face of things he can't control. No amount of patience will bring his sister back.
The only truth that can be gleamed from the conversations shown in the novels, is that he is proud, egotistical, and passionate. He's forthright, too. When both Clarice and Will visit him for the first time, they speak at length where the two tussle for the upper hand in the conversation; the questions lend themselves toward the personal. Lecter likes to watch strong, no nonsense people - people he respects - squirm, the ones who masquerade intelligence and pretend to be bigger fish than they are - people he thinks are rude and bullies - he crushes. Will and Clarice both use the same phrase "You'll either do it or you won't". Clarice challenges him to point his high powered regard at himself; Will tells him that Dr. Bloom will do a better job with the Tooth Fairy case file--they both walk away, and Lecter calls them both back. There's a simple reason for that. After glancing off each other, the control falls to the person walking away, as Hannibal is confined and cannot follow. The only way to wrest control, then, is to offer assistance, to become the person who has the information to whom the other must lend themselves.
Suffice is to say that there's a reason why attempts to psychoanalyze Lecter canonically fail, and it makes him just as much of a pain in the ass to write a personality section about. Hannibal Rising offers the best evidence for his personality based on what actually happens to him; evidence which is in general denied to those minds that try to pick Hannibal apart in the books. He is protective of his past - he never shares it, never speaks a single word of it, except eventually when he shares it with Clarice, after she falls under his thrall at the end of Hannibal. Hannibal is charismatic. He would also never attempt to engender sympathy or pity; that would imply he is weak. If anyone implies it to him about themselves in anything but modesty, Hannibal writes them off instantly. People who boastfully overestimate their intelligence or capabilities earn the same disregard. When Clarice and Graham do show their weaknesses, Hannibal doesn't show pity, nor really go on the attack, though he could. It would be cruelty, the equivalent of bullying, and Lecter's rules on bullies are quite firm.
When it comes to liking and love, such things as seem unlikely, Clarice Starling is a unique case, though she does share the position with other women. Hannibal has felt love before. He loved Mischa, and Lady Murasaki, but lost the first, and the second eventually could not stand to look at him, and threw herself into a river. He has the burden of intelligence and taste that makes him crave his own company above everyone else's, but he is a man, too. Yes, he prioritizes learning and his own comfort throughout his life, but when it comes to Starling, he does begin to love her, though it comes hard to both of them, and neither of them ever really identify it.
Lecter idealises Clarice Starling as a warrior woman, as a great lioness with sweet honey at her core. Her defiance of him, his respect for her idealism is so powerful that in the end he tries to replace her personality with Mischa's - what better place in the world for her than Starling's? She earns his respect, yes, but he also finds himself craving to protect her - for example from Krendler - and teach her, the way he seems to wish he could have taught Mischa, introducing her to new tastes and new experiences, something that Starling begins to appreciate when she tries to catch him. The betrayal that he felt at the hands of Lady Murasaki clearly makes Hannibal defensive, and he consequently applies a stigma to love that without a doubt makes him yearn for a brother-sister relationship with Clarice when he becomes drawn to her.
Hannibal rarely kills for other people; he is triggered by images from his delicate past for the most part; the example of the injured deer is one of them, the insult to Lady Murasaki is another. Hannibal kills Miggs for Clarice - though everyone accuses him of simply not being able to stand him. With reflection on the marketplace incidence, his fierce protectiveness in the face of an insulted woman, someone he respects, means something very different. Both women keep their heads up, they appear stronger in their defiance of the insult, and there's no doubt a similarity in the grace of both that Hannibal aspires to. Hannibal kills Krendler for Clarice eventually too, and there's a lot more symbolism to that. They eat his brain together. It's a bonding exercise, a shucking off of Clarice's FBI past, of the insults she's suffered in her male driven world, and it's an introduction to Hannibal's world in many ways, but it's also a punishment for Krendler. What more fitting punishment for a rude, unintelligent oaf of a man? Hannibal believes in punishments that fit the perceived crimes.
His relationship with Clarice is complex, and without a doubt related to his relationship with the previous women in his life. Yes, Lady Murasaki is one, but so is his dead sister, whom he relates to even fifty years after her death, and occasionally talks to in his thoughts. He attempts to combine the two, through hypnosis and drugs and conditioning, but Clarice's personality is too strong, and they enter into a sexual relationship, eventually, instead. I reiterate this because I want to highlight the lengths that Hannibal will go to. This shows enormous commitment on Hannibal's behalf.
More evidence of Hannibal's sister complex - as though the above isn't enough? - is how he responds to Margot, whom he claims he found the more interesting of the Vergers, and the strongest. Her brother had been a bully who assaulted her as a child, and went on to use his money to molest others. When Lecter follows Mason to his home, he is keeping two dogs from a shelter in a cage and starving them, so that he can find out what happens. Lecter drugs him, sets the dogs free and had Mason feed his face to the hungry animals. He makes him eat his own nose. Years later, Margot still has a strong loyalty to him as her psychiatrist, and Hannibal demonstrates a fondness for her, offering her a solution to her problems, so that her brother can't abuse her any longer. It's clear that the brother/sister relationship she has with Mason offends him, not because of its incestuous origins, but because of the mistreatment that Margot suffers in general, at the hands of someone who should love her, not show contempt for her. There's another hint to his true self in how Hannibal arranges Margot's dispatch of Mason--Hannibal doesn't have any problem with people killing. It isn't about morals, and if people die then they die; he instructs Margot to kill her brother, but it's her decision in the end, and he certainly doesn't believe in judging her for it.
Hannibal has his own sense of morality, if it could be called that, borne out of his experience at the the orphanage, and it underlines most of Hannibal's drive. There are three kinds of people; those who are unnecessarily cruel or rude are on one side of the scale, those who need the explicit protection of others lay on the opposite side, and in between there is everyone else. It's obvious that Hannibal tries and struggles to classify Clarice as one, while being well aware that she is no fragile flower who needs his protection--it's the role he tries to force her to play, eventually, through brainwashing. As I said, this comes from his experience at the orphanage, where Hannibal was protective of the smaller children, as he had been with Mischa, and spitefully vicious toward the bullies. These extremes are the people that he's more likely to respond to. Even in the asylum Hannibal expresses compassion for struggling fellow inmate Sammie (whom the authorities have given up on), which startles Clarice, and helps the nurse Barney with his correspondance courses, finding a certain pleasure in a responsive, respectful student. Hannibal thrives in a position of respect and power, such is obvious when he takes the position in Florence, but he is more than content being in that position over only one person.
Hannibal Lecter eats his trophies from his victims, though he doesn't think of them like that. He also claims that he didn't go out of his way to feed human remains to his guests. He explains that it's like realising you have guests coming over for dinner and no time to rush out to the supermarket, that you use whatever it is you have in the back of the fridge. Whether or not that's true, or just a jest--again, it's debatable. Hannibal's words always walk a fine line of truths. He has an incredibly dark sense of humor, which makes it difficult to reconcile against the reality of his life, and in fact is a strong motivator in his actions. He expresses them in his tableaux. His murder of Pazzi is an example, as is his decision to string up the bow hunter and decorate him like the Wound Man, and Starling has to stymy a laugh when she's shown the bodies of the hunter and the deer, both stuck through with arrows and butchered the same way, no matter how grizzly it is.
There's one other strong theme to Hannibal's murders: justice. The justice he has is a stilted thing, or perhaps to be more accurate an eight year old's version of it - and must be from Hannibal's hand, when it comes to the hurts done to him. It powers him all the way through Hannibal Rising, in his hunt for the men who killed Mischa. As a result of that experience, Hannibal also lost his love for God. He finds himself drawn toward irony there, too, such as the oft repeated quote about God dropping a church roof on his worshippers as they grovelled through a hymn. In the novels, it's made clear that Hannibal collects clippings about church collapses, finding a bitter pleasure in it. It's his hobby.
Hannibal respects learned men in a variety of fields, and keeps up with modern science; he takes a particular liking to Stephen Hawking, for example, who he believes to have an understanding of science and mathematics far beyond even his own. It's a fascinating and rare moment of modesty from Dr. Lecter.
Physically, Hannibal is a man who expresses himself with the minimum amount of movement and emotion. He empowers every inch of his slight frame with presence, moves with barely a sound, and surprising grace. I wanted to mention it because the way Hannibal comports himself is as much an expression of his personality as anything else. He has the frame of a dancer, Clarice describes it, although at one moment in the cell, he's described as having a sinister spider-like quality, comporting himself with menace. Both are Lecter.
Hannibal's taste is the one enduring and certain thing about him. It's what helps Clarice track him in Hannibal, as she looks back over years of receipts and puts alerts on certain items of food, clothing, furniture etc. that Hannibal is likely to purchase. These are usually expensive and rare items, although not always. Some Hannibal laments he can't purchase in America. He likes the feel of a turbocharged V-8 engine--it's one of the first things Clarice surmises, since she herself understood cars; one of the few things they had in common. Hannibal even has a favored seat in the theatre.
His interests are massively varied, including language, cookery, science, medicine, mathematics, art, music, oprah, history, geneology, mythology. The list barely touches the surface; Hannibal's expertise expands out into more specialised things, too, such as martial arts, flower arranging, fishing, pigeon racing, butchery, horse riding. He has a scholarly opinion about most things, and locks all the information away in rooms in his memory palace.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
At the present time, Hannibal is still suffering from night terrors and flashbacks of Mischa that wake him from his dreams. In time, settled with Clarice, these nightmares would subside.
Already at the age of two, Hannibal had taught himself to read, simply by following his nanny's voice and the words in his copy of The Brothers Grimm. He read out loud and in her accent. By six, he could use advanced mathematics to measure the height of the towers at Rabenstein, and could already appreciate such complex books as The Treatise on Light and Euclid's Elements. His father, nurturing his talents, brought him dictionaries in English, German and Lithuanian, and then later a Jewish tutor, who would share with him his education and his memory palace. This intelligence and wide variety of smarts is the sharpest tool in Hannibal's box. He is a polyglut, speaking a number of different European languages completely fluently,
Hannibal uses his intelligence incredibly ruthlessly. He employs it in his wit, his conversation tactics, his incredible resourcefulness and commanding ability to plan. Hannibal can make these plans far in advance, but it could be called a weakness that once he commits himself to it, he loses some of his perspective for the bigger picture, which is why he ends up being caught by Verger's men in Hannibal. Otherwise, when Hannibal's perception is completely focused on someone or something, what he intuits from this "high powered perception" is usually accurate.
Hannibal uses every inch of his own experience, and every hint of information revealed by the other person to pick them apart, from their shoes to the scent of their hand cream. His history in psychiatric medicine gives him the edge. It's not intuition; Lecter applies what he sees and hears and tastes and smells, draws his conclusions, then picks his way through to the bottom line. It's close to what Patrick Jane does on the Mentalist, in that it has the appearance of being superhuman, or magic, and yet is based entirely on simple observations. It also means that he misses very little, so when Pazzi's behavior changes in Hannibal, he is immediately suspicious. It isn't by luck that Hannibal kills the pickpocket in the market--he knows what he's doing.
Hannibal escapes the very first time that he isn't held by someone with direct previous experience. He takes small advantages where he can, he lays red herrings, approaches everything with a remarkable calm. In the ambulance after his escape, not knowing how to drive it, Hannibal calmly climbs into the driver's seat, presses all the buttons, makes sure he knows where everything is, then drives away, uncaring of the fact that the vehicle has come to a stop on the freeway and is holding up traffic behind it. Attacking a nurse, his heartbeat doesn't rise above a resting speed. He's a good actor. He plays with accents, and is incredibly convincing, especially on the phone.
Hannibal is incredibly strong, physically, even despite his present age. He can pick up a man single handed and bundle them into a vehicle. Hannibal demonstrates this again when he saves Clarice's life, but he also demonstrates another ability, his presence around animals is such that even the most aggressive of them will respect him. A sow challenges him in the novel, then reconsiders after Lecter squares off to it, heading off to find easier prey. Hannibal displays this same presence around dogs, deer, swans and horses, too. Lecter is also capable of manipulating the people around him. He directs Miggs to swallow his own foul tongue from another prison cell, without even direct eye contact. During his time as a psychiatrist, Hannibal also hypnotised a number of his patients - he uses the same method on Clarice - sometimes with the aid of narcotics.
Possessing a good nose, Lecter is able to appreciate many of the finer things in life, but there's no doubt that it's the closest thing to a superhuman ability that he has. Lecter can identify unique smells, unique blends of smells, even from a distance. It's likely he can also smell fear, for instance through perspiration, though he never mentions it. He has a medical degree, and can perform precise or emergency surgery; his knowledge of the human body is next to none, as he spent most of his childhood dissecting, drawing and reconstructing the human form. At home, even in his prison cell, Hannibal owns a collection of rare and expensive books, usually first editions. He has a good eye for the finer things, is an artist and a musician in his own right, and a remarkable chef and host. Hannibal flourishes at most things he puts his mind to.
Hannibal has an incredible memory. He has a memory palace, where he keeps everything from textures to smells. He uses rooms where he's been, images and smells to mean people, locks into them addresses and numbers and personal memories, even recipes. His palace needs to be well lit, Hannibal concedes, as he once stored some information in a dark place, and couldn't draw on it when he wanted to.
In terms of weaknesses, Hannibal is only human. He can die, though one supposes that were he not shot enough times the first time, he'd rise back up horror movie style and have a second go. The villains in Harris' novels do like to do that. He shows no aggression toward children at any point, and shows a clear weakness for women. Not all women, but certainly those that he can project Mischa or Lady Murasaki onto, in which case they need to possess certain traits. As mentioned before he can be caught off guard, should he have one singleminded goal in mind, and fail to account for all the variables. Hannibal isn't psychic, he does make mistakes, and he is most susceptable to abberations in human behavior. If someone does anything he thinks beyond their skill level, or outside of their normal routine, it can unsettle his plans. He is also weakened by his own contempt for other people.
Hannibal's greatest weakness, at least in regard to Ataraxion, will concern the fourth wall.
Inventory:
Lecter's mask
His box of art supplies; charcoal, erasers, pen and ink, sealing wax, pencils in various grades and a thick roll of expensive, European made linen paper.
His copy of Alexandre Dumas' Le Grande Dictionnaire de Cuisine
A case of wine; three bottles of Batard-Montrachet, an expensive white wine from France, three of Chateau Petrus from Bordeaux; a red.
Two outfits, with accompanying scalloped hankerchiefs and driving gloves, and a good pair of leather shoes.
Appearance: Lecter appears younger than his almost sixty years; he is spry and fit, sleek, although not a particularly imposing figure, as it's his routine to blend into the crowd. Thinning and graying dark hair, and blue eyes, which appear to contain in them flecks of red in certain light. As in the movie version, I'll be using Sir Anthony Hopkins as a PB.
Age: 58 (assuming date of birth in 1933)
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample: Hannibal's lungs filled, chest swelling with the thick, exotic scents in the garden. His eyes were closed. There was no point in trying to work out what earthbound variety any of the plants smelled like. They were as foreign and alien - as individual - as they all needed to be. Alien plants, millions of species, many of them edible, some with medicinal qualities, others that simply smelled pleasant--they had all been put on this ship for a purpose, to provide oxygen, maintainable supplies and of course recreation.
After sating his curiosity about the ship, its technology - so far in advance of anything that Hannibal had ever seen - its library, its culture; Hannibal had settled on the gardens as his favorite place on board. There were lifetimes of discovery here, and Hannibal was still learning things about his own world! Where did it stop? With alien worlds, cultures, and planets there could be no end to the wealth of information available. It was simply beyond him, though Hannibal didn't enjoy the declaration. He prefered to think that he was capable of anything, but even he had his limits.
He would start with the garden. He would start here, and one plant at a time make himself familiar. The new scents had drawn him in, and Hannibal had opened a new wing of his memory palace for them. The wing was constructed of the same stunning gothic architecture that the Tranquility was built from, though it hardly differentiated it from the romantic structures that made up the rest of the palace. They were not dissimilar, for example, to the great walls and towers of Colonne's magnificent cathedral. The hallways were too dark, so Hannibal lit them with gas lamps, their strange flickering glow through the glass like a study of sunlight through water. Some of the species of moths he'd observed in the garden flickered against them, their wings blurring as they swirled around the light.
Off the corridor were doors, and beyond those doors were rooms waiting to be filled; rooms with vast ceilings like the gardens, rooms full of lockers, and inside of them so many wonderful secrets. He'd fill them all, in time.
Hannibal retreated from it all for now; there was a face he wanted to visit, back in one of the rooms he had taken from the Smithsonian so many years ago. Clarice waited there for him. Following one of the moths, Hannibal found his way back. The paths had become more complex as of late, but he found the painting there, the Madonna and Child, only the Madonna was Clarice, her breast bared to the infant, and she wore a reckless defiance in her gaze. The halo that framed her hair made her look radiant. Mischa was the child she held. Fat little Mischa, a baby again, with her dark downy hair and her plump, grabbing hands.
Eyes opening, Hannibal looked up at the glittering water as it tumbled down through tiers of forest canopy, sending up a magnificent spray. He'd find a spot on the grass - somewhere where the water couldn't reach him - and begin his catalogue. Perhaps, he thought, he would find the time to draw another picture of Clarice, for fear that the image might somehow fade from his mind.
Comms Sample:
[ It's exceptional that Hannibal feels recording a message necessary. He had never privately recorded video of himself, though there had once been thousands of audio recordings of his voice in his patients records, all of them destroyed by request of the victims families.
An audio recording is all the network gets for now. Hannibal's voice is clear, his accent indefinable. There's something Eastern European, transformed by Japanese, French, Italian, American. It's crisp, each syllable pronounced, and no louder than it needs to be. ]
Many cultures believe that when their photograph is taken, the image steals away their spirit. But what is a spirit? A soul? The desire to protect something entirely without basis in reality is unique to humans. A curr will fight for its life, even spar for a mate that it can only smell, but it has no use for a soul. For those with faith, a soul represents something greater even than themselves. To others, it is a part of them that lies beyond physical harm, beyond the confines and dangers of life.
Soul is something quite impossible to miss in the grand gestures inherent to Leonardo da Vinci, or the moving gravity of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Art exists in the moment, a manifestation brought into existence by the painter, the musician, the mathematician. Our souls grow richer through our experiences, but they serve us only here. There is no heaven, no great white stairway disappearing into the clouds, no pearly gate. We must be inspired in this life, share the wealth of our experiences, allow them to inform further generations. [ A pause. ] Someone built this ship. I can only wonder at where they found their own inspiration.