PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Kat
OOC Journal: ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) sixbelow
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?:
Email + IM: katastrosity[at]gmail[dot]com | AIM; thegreatdefector
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Brian Kinney (heterophobe)
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Hannibal Lecter
Canon: Hannibal Rising (novel)
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: From the end of the novel.
Number: » 007 » 013
Setting:
A gruesome view of one part of World War II, when the front line is staged in young Hannibal Lecter's backyard. It goes from there, spreading throughout Europe and his life as the war ends and he grows up. A grim time, perhaps, to be a survivor of a war crime. When he's old enough, it centrals around France and the lives of the men who wronged him and his family as a boy, specifically his sister.
There are no monsters, except the ones who wear men's faces.
( wiki on Hannibal Rising ) + ( Hannibal in general )
History:
To be clear, Hannibal was an unusual child even before the war that ripped apart his life. According to his Nanny, he was reading at the ripe age of two in her accent, out of the book she would read him. Upon discovery, Count Lecter (his father) put him to reading and becoming fluent in English, German and Lithuanian. He explains his best birthday gifts as mathematical theorems or equations - things he got to learn about and explore with his own mind. So much in fact, that his instructor often forgot he was speaking to a six year old. He had figured the height of his childhood home, Lecter Castle, based on its shadow, with the help of a rock and his yo-yo.
His quiet life is uprooted when his parents decide to flee their home and seek out their cabin, hoping it will be somewhere they can be safe for the remainder of the war, until they can return to their home. They plan ideally, bringing with them only what they need and send the Cook off to gather food from the town. It seems like the perfect solution and it works for three years, until a Soviet tank stumbles upon the hunting lodge in search of water. They claim they wish the family no harm, though they do order the adults to stand out in the snow. They permit the children, Hannibal and his younger sister, Mischa, to stay inside. Whether they intended to keep their word or not is of no relevance, because a German bomber spots them and they open fire, with civilians in the field.
Both Hannibal and Mischa are powerless and can do nothing but watch as the tank takes down the plane and it consequently crashes into the yard, killing all the soldiers, his family, and the hired help. He runs to his mother, cries to her as shells continue to explode in the yard. It is when wolves attempt to eat the corpses of his family that he has to choose between the dead and the living; he chooses Mischa and drags her back into the lodge, making the choice of an adult. How he planned to keep them alive is anyone's guess and never shown because men posing as German medics fleeing from the front line siege the lodge and take the children hostage, to use them to claim their salvation.
Most of his time with the soldiers was spent chained to a banister with his sister, feeding her stale bread crumbs he kept in his pockets. It is presumably the darkest time of any of their lives, where human nature comes out. Kill or be killed. He identifies the men in his head as Blue Eyes, Bowl Man, Pot Watcher... so on and so forth, unable to remember what they called each other in his trauma. What happens in the hunting lodge (though it is inaccessible to him for many years) is a terror no human being should have to endure but that was not uncommon on the Eastern Front - cannibalism. It is mentioned that Hannibal and Mischa met another child in the barn, surrounded by many children's clothes, who only speaks Albanian. He makes chopping motions and whether he is referring to the deer the men have in the yard or something else is left vague.
Later, chained again, there is a reference to the deer's skull boiling on the stove and an ominous sentence of: "Then there was meat again and the men ate with grunting sounds, not looking at one another. Pot Watcher gave gristle and broth to Hannibal and Mischa. He carried nothing to the barn." The barn, where they met the other boy. It gets much worse from there, after witnessing the self-acclaimed leader, Grutas, eat a bird raw, mouth full of feathers. He informs the soldiers that they must eat or die, the truth hangs in the air with a sense of dread. The soldiers took his sister from him and butchered her in the yard, but not before breaking his arm with a barn door and cracking him in the skull, rendering him unconscious and in a state of delirium, when they cook her the same as the deer.
Thankfully, Hannibal consciously remembered nothing after Grutas' incriminating declaration. He woke stumbling out in the snow, chain looped around and frozen to his neck, discovered by Soviet soldiers who opened fire on him (but stopped when they realized it was a child) and brought him to an Orphanage. It just so happened to be his castle that they had converted. He remains there for eight years and the next we see of him in 1946, he is thirteen years old and observed as having no respect for the pecking order.
He's a troubled teenager, completely mute, except for in the dark of the night during his nightmares when he yells Mischa's name. When he's sleeping is the only time he can remember what happened but never fully. It slips away from him in reality. An irritating admittance. His uncle comes for him within the week and takes him to his home with his wife, Lady Murasaki, welcoming Hannibal into their life openly. They are warned of his instability and how attached he will become to them and they think little of it. It is in his time with them that he learns to speak again, going to see a doctor on the matter and dealing with both Robert and Murasaki constantly. His first few words are sparse and rusty and he says them, all three times around Murasaki.
First, to thank her for stitching up his finger when he cuts it trying to help her with flower arrangements (and he flashes to a bathtub boiling on a stove) and secondly, when he defends her honor to a rude butcher in the market. He rasps out the word: beast. Hannibal attacks the man with meat. Paul Momund is much larger than he is but that doesn't stop him from getting him on the ground and assaulting him. It's when Paul gets the upper hand that Murasaki interferes until the police can aid them. He ends up getting a get-out-of-jail free card on account of the man being much hated and also because he's very young. He is warned that while a temper may be useful, he should learn to use his judgment, lest he wants to live out his life in a cell. They try to conceal the event from Robert but once he learns of the insult to his wife, he confronts Paul and unfortunately, ends up dying of a heart attack due to his poor health.
Hannibal takes up speaking at the funeral, sensing Murasaki's vulnerability and it's as if something awakens in him then, because with the words comes less screaming in his sleep. His time in her cultured life, learning of her ancestors, he too chooses to confront the butcher. He plays a lute in an abandoned meadow by the lake, where nobody can hear either of them scream, should it come to that. He demands a written apology and does not appear surprised when he does not get one, rather he almost seems delighted. He slashes Paul Momund, several times over, shows him the drawing he depicted of the man and then finally decapitates him as only a samurai could appreciate. He steals the man's spoils (a large fish) and brings it home for dinner, learning that the cheeks are the finest part to feast on.
He presents the head of the butcher on Lady Murasaki's shrine for her later that night and when she declares that he did not have to do it for her, he said he did it for himself and her worth as a person. It is not her first impression of his darkness but is the first fleshing out of it in reality. He tells her that she need not be afraid and that he loves her, that he wouldn't approach her without flowers. She's afraid of what it could mean for him, what will happen and he is as calm as he's always been, even throughout questioning by the police, and an inspector named Popil. They ask him a series of relevant and irrelevant questions, testing his heart rate on a lie detecting machine and it stays even throughout, never once jumping. It throws them and leaves a dirty taste in Popil's mouth. He can see straight through Hannibal, much in the way Hannibal sees through him. Whether it could be proved that he was connected to the murder or not was never tried because of Lady Murasaki's quick thinking. She takes Paul Momund's head and places it on a pike in the square, but not without depicting a Nazi symbol on his forehead to make it look like a hate crime and proving that Hannibal was elsewhere while it happened.
It is with that, Murasaki's expiring welcome mat after her husband's death and Hannibal's admittance as the youngest student to medical school that they relocate to Paris, France. While looking for ways to pay for his schooling, he renders drawings and paintings to sell to any that will have them. He steps into a shop and finds a painting from his castle, which he sets Popil onto. The three of them: Popil, Murasaki and Hannibal go on a search to find more of the stolen artwork. They go to a showing where Hannibal spots Mischa's handprint on the back of a particular painting - he tells someone from the Registry of this and before they leave, the handprint gets wiped off to rid it of sentimental value. The painting, "Bridge of Sighs", and how easy it had been to erase a memory triggers him. It stands out to him that the beast who took his sister from him still lives. More and more over the next few years as he visits the paintings put away in a vault it eats at him.
At eighteen he is battling with restlessness in himself, to a great many things. His frustration with Popil and the inspector's ever present interest in Lady Mursaki, not to mention his own. He is not sure which affection she reciprocates (if any at all) and she informs him that if he can remember the important parts of the textbooks he returns, he should know better than to taunt the inspector because unprovoked, he is harmless to the both of them. Her words do not reach him because his dreams return and with it a renewed vigor to find all of the men in his dream and a dire need to remember the events of that winter.
In his study of preparing bodies for the anatomy class at medical school, he comes across Popil examining a war criminal before execution. Hannibal is intended to collect the body and he petitions the man's ego to use his body for science, thereby witnessing when he is injected with thiopental sodium. A last ditch effort to help the condemned remember repressed memories. Knowing that vial is the key to regaining the part of his life buried in his mind, beyond the reach of his Memory Palace, he lies and tells the medical examiner on duty that he'd like a sample to run some tests for school. He ends up injecting himself later in his bedroom and forces himself through the entirety of the memory, past the thing he could never bear to see in his nightmares.
After that, the rest of the story goes in quick progression. He forges documents to take a train back to Lecter Castle, close to the hunting lodge, sending up a red flag with his name on it to Grutas. Hannibal borrows a horse from the castle, the same one from his childhood and takes it to the lodge. He digs up military dog tags in the wreckage, learning the names of the faces that haunted his memory for so long. He buries his sisters remains, to the best of his ability, where they had been left in her bathtub. But he also discovers he is being followed by someone he dined with during the war, Herr Dortlich, he calls him. He knocks him unconscious with a shovel and ties him to a tree and waits for him to awaken before he puts the other end of the rope to Cesar's saddle. He urges the man to sing for slack, implying he has a chance to survive (though, it is far from honest) as Hannibal walks the horse farther and farther away, strangling Dortlich. He makes him sing Das Mantlein, the same song they sang before eating Mischa, considering it was her favorite.
He finds out where he can find the others, right under his nose in France but still he kills the man, urging Cesar to look away. Once he suffocates, Hannibal makes a brochette of the man's cheeks and sends the horse home, leaving the destruction for the police to find. Popil gets air of the case, suspecting it is of Hannibal's doing since he cannot find him and he was spotted near the border a day before. It also helps that he trespassed into Hannibal's room and found the drawing of the man (sans his cheeks) which he shows to Murasaki. He asks her to turn Hannibal over to him and she does the opposite, instead informing Hannibal that she will go with him wherever he wants, possibly assuming she can stop him and reach him before it's too late.
He finds Bowl Man (Herr Kolnas) in Fontainebleau as the owner of a restaurant and takes Murasaki there for a sundae so he can scope him out and prove what a monster he is. It is meant to persuade her but it he is the only one convinced he is doing the right thing. Kolnas' daughter approaches their table and he immediately notices Mischa's silver bracelet on her wrist. He sings to her and places Kolnas' dog tag in her pocket for him to later find at church, alerting Grutas that Hannibal is onto all of their trails. Murasaki asks him to forget and forgive (likely for the children) to turn them over to Popil for justice. As a last stand, she kisses him and offers herself to him (a life for them both, far away from his past, where they can flee to Japan.) He refuses her, claiming that he already promised Mischa. It is never revealed if she requests this of him because she is attracted to him and shares his aforementioned love or if she does it because she thinks it's the one way to get through to him. Whatever her true intentions, her womanly wiles fail.
Dortlich's death is a warning, a prelude of what's to come. It spurs Grutas to send on of his men, Milko (another soldier from the lodge) to take care of Hannibal. But his senses are acute and he detects the open draft of a window and surprises Milko, injecting him with a syringe to knock him out and submerge him in a tank full of embalming liquid, held up by chains. He interrogates him much in the same way he did Dortlich, asking him questions and inflicting pain, watching him suffer, then spraying him off. He learns of the estate Grutas is staying on and then he closes the tank doors above Milko's head, letting him scream as fluid fills it to the top. He is in the process of drowning when Hannibal returns to his lab and finds Popil snooping. He covers the sounds of the man by working while they speak, blaming any noise on the body he is preparing. Claiming that they groan sometimes and it cannot be helped.
Popil accuses Hannibal of killing Dortlich, to which he calmly ignores. When Popil demands the location of Grutas, Hannibal says that if he knew where he was, he would bring him to the other man's attention. An implication that he doesn't appreciate because if he'd been brought to Popil's attention, it'd likely be through another police report. He is still as honest as he's capable, confesses that Grutas killed and ate his sister and when asked if he would testify, he does agree (though, he isn't seeking the justice a cell can provide.) Later, after he's bid the detective good night, he burns all of Milko's possessions and then his body, closing the iron door without remorse. There are other things to prepare. He hires a girl to take Milko's delivery truck back to Grutas and sneaks into the house by a crate. He rigs the basement with an explosive, composed of a glove dripping over a powder dish with a fuse and hides in a cloud of steam, in the bathroom while Grutas bathes with one of the girls he plans to sell.
Hannibal surprises him and draws a gun, holding him still as he warns the girl to wet a towel and cover her face, then he flings a bottle of alcohol above Grutas' head, spilling it in the water. As he flicks open a lighter to toss it in, a man creeps up behind him and Grutas overcomes him, holding his face above the bathtub, claiming that both he and his sister can both die in one now. He gets no apology and is shamelessly told that he will never get one from Grutas. He asks Hannibal if he would have fed him to Mischa in order to keep her alive, when he confirms that yes, he would have.. Grutas says there he has it. Love is powerful and he loves himself that much - it warrants no forgiving. It was during the war, like suddenly it holds no bearing on anything that happens now. The past is the past.
Before Grutas can kill him, the house blows up and Hannibal escapes, posing as a servant with intentions to get the hose while he flees.
He swings by the Lady Murasaki's place with flowers to find Popil in her place, threatening him with an arrest. He asks him to disclose the information of Grutas' whereabouts. That it's the only way he'll be given his freedom and have the law off of his back, basically Popil will leave him alone and turn a blind eye. Hannibal gives him something he found on Louis' (the prisoner that was executed) body, a letter that details the absence of the police when the Nazis dragged the children off to camps. Hannibal accuses him of waving goodbye as they were shipped off, of being a traitor, impossible to trust. He asks why he should turn over criminals to an obviously dirty cop? Still, he promises on Murasaki's life to keep Popil updated, even if it is a lie. When he walks free, he still cannot find Murasaki and a call from Grutas solves the mystery.
He has taken her from him.
His only instructions are to arrive at a telephone booth with further instructions, where Grutas commands his men to kill him on sight and bring back his balls. Hannibal instead goes to Kolnas' restaurant (where Grutas previously was) due to birds he recognized singing in the background. Though, not without paying a visit to Kolnas' home and taking Mischa's bracelet off of the little girl's arm. He misleads the man into believing he has his children, that he brought him a present - he throws the bracelet onto the counter, followed by a bloody bag full of a beef roast and a melon. Kolnas, in shock and horror, believes it to be his daughter and it takes him a sob or two to bring his hands to open the sack. Enraged at the deception, he attacks Hannibal with bloody hands but Hannibal comes out victorious.
A simple exchange: information on Lady Murasaki's location for his children. Hannibal says that with the information, he will let him live on behalf of his children and promptly forget his face, so he tells him, somewhat warily. He then dials the home number and gives Kolnas the receiver, allowing him to speak to his wife to tell her to check on the children. They were home the entire time and he never harmed a hair on their heads. Furious with the trickery and doubtful of Hannibal's word to spare him, he attacks and Hannibal murders him with a blade through his skull. For the irony of it all, he places a bowl over Kolnas' face and frees the birds from their cages.
With the new knowledge of where Grutas is holding Murasaki, he single-handedly invades the ship and takes out two men with Milko's gun, locking the door behind him in the lower deck of the ship as he descends the stairs. Shot in the arm but still determined. His hastiness is reckless as anything and when he rushes through the second door he finds Lady Murasaki tied to a chair; he ends up getting shot in the back while trying to reach her. Grutas assumes that he is paralyzed (a bullet to the spine) by all rights, he should be dead. Or nearly there. He lets Grutas think this of him, until he turns his back and Hannibal pulls the tanto knife he had shoved down the back of his collar. It splintered where it took the bullet and he uses it to slice Grutas' ankles, sending him toppling. They struggle, the gun goes off and Hannibal attacks him again, disarming him. Once he frees Murasaki, Grutas stops his struggles to confront Hannibal, This time with words.
An ugly confession flows from his mouth. He points out that if everyone who knows what happened to Mischa, that everyone who ate her has to die, then he should kill himself and Murasaki too, since she now knows. Something that he tried to tell Hannibal in the bathroom of his burned home returns: the soldiers weren't the only ones who dined upon his sister. It is his snapping point, the final shove, regardless of whether or not he is lying to get to Hannibal. He covers his ears to hide from it and listens to none of Murasaki's endless pleading that he hand Grutas over. He leaps onto Grutas and carves an 'M' gruesomely into the man's chest, declaring the letter is for Mischa. The captain barges into the room behind him and he is only distantly aware of the sound of the gunshot, when he turns to find Murasaki trembling, from where she killed the captain, to protect Hannibal more than herself. He proclaims his love to her and she turns her back on him, asking him honestly, what is left in him to love?
The ship detonates at his back once he is off board and wandering through some fields, mindless and never once turning to see what's behind him. For all his brilliance, he is still arrested and imprisoned for a time. Protests for his release spring up, once it is learned that the ship was owned by sex slavers and child-murderers. He is eventually freed on principle because while he could be convicted it would be politically unpopular and as both Popil and Murasaki know he killed all of those men, she still defended Hannibal and there was not enough proof from Popil to thoroughly hold him. Eventually, he gets offered an internship to John Hopkin's in Baltimore, moral gray area aside. This is, of course, bearing in mind that he petitioned the court for a return to medical school.
When Murasaki next speaks with him, she declares that he has frozen over inside and the boy she knew is no longer there. Hannibal's doctor states plainly that he never saw it to begin with, reinstating that he had always been opaque. In three weeks, he walks free and returns to his room at school. He doesn't stick around long. The first thing on his agenda is going to the apartment Murasaki was living in to look for her but what he finds instead is a note in her handwriting and a twig from Japan. She went home, leaving him and the devastation that would have rattled through a lesser man or a greater one (depending on who you asked) doesn't so much as scrape against his heart.
By the end of the novel, he has reached a closure. He isn't ridden with nightmares or anger anymore and he takes a break from his internship in Baltimore long enough to seek out the last soldier in Canada, finding wry humor in the fact that he stuffs animals for a living. As he walks through the door, his greeting is sparse but clear enough. He informs the man, Grentz, that he's come to collect a head and when he doesn't immediately see it, Grentz admits it may still be in the back and Hannibal suggests that he follows. He kills him because it was ideal to skiing, not for any kind of personal fulfillment as it's apparent he achieved all he needed when Grutas fell or perhaps lost his sense of who he used to be knowing that he'd been sustained by her death, too.
Personality:
❝The little boy Hannibal died in 1945 out there in the snow trying to save his sister. His heart died with Mischa. What is he now? There's not a word for it yet. For lack of a better word, we'll call him a monster.❞
Hannibal is and isn't everything he used to be as a child. Everything he had was stripped away from him and bleached out of him when he collapsed and sank into that snow. Salvaged but irreparable. For the next eight years after soldiers rescued him from the woods and cracked the chain off his body, he was mute. A development from the trauma. But it wasn't that he didn't have the capacity for words because he could scream out names (one name in particular, his sister's) in the dead of night under the repressed memory he was forced to relive in his nightmares, night after night. For some reason, he's allegedly shielded from the impact of the death of both of his parents in front of his eyes, one of their servants, and his teacher - all of them shot down in the snow, caught in crossfire between the Germans and Russians.
Mischa's death strikes the strongest chord in him, reverberates in the hollow of his soul, perhaps because it is such an unjust loss; so uncivilized and macabre.
To grasp his truest damage, you have to understand that he witnessed men at their weakest points, starving and desperate, willing to hold two children hostage as a means to keep them alive. They kept the young orphans chained to an upstairs banister, except for when they were in a barn with another child, with children's clothes scattered everywhere (some of them stained), where meat was hard to come by until it wasn't and that kid in the barn was never seen again. And then, the cruelest chapter - so was his sister.
For several years, he's left abandoned in a castle that should be his but isn't because it had been remodeled into an orphanage. When his uncle gets word of his lineage, he retrieves him and takes Hannibal home to his wife, throwing caution to the wind. The headmaster warns him against Hannibal's sheer refusal to respect the pecking order, that he doesn't roll over. He's a fighter and he does not abide by bullying. Bigger and older boys constantly get hurt when they're around him, although, he doesn't mind the younger ones so much as he gives them extra treats when he has them.
There is a certain gentility he reserves for children and animals, often overlooked or unnoticed by others. He sets the butcher's line of fishes free after he murders him, turns his childhood's horses eyes away from a man he intends to crush with rope, releases birds from their cages where they've been trapped listening to their species cook in the kitchen. There's a certain reverence for swans (a remainder from a black swan on the lake of his childhood) and their wingspans, how they stand tall.
It isn't until his uncle and his wife, Lady Murasaki, reach out to him that he begins to grow into his own. He learns and listens intently to their cultured life, learning Japanese and folding paper cranes, hearing of her ancestors and being able to express himself creatively with his uncle's insistence to paint. At thirteen years old, he doesn't dive much into the craft of painting or sketching until his aunt is insulted in the market by Paul Momund and Hannibal attacks him with meat since it's the only thing readily available. He gets a slap on the wrist and is informed that lest he desires to end up in a cell for the rest of his life, he should learn to harness his anger with judgment. However, once his uncle dies of a heart attack from hearing of this injustice on his wife's honor, Hannibal takes up speaking for her at the funeral. He speaks and speaks and does not stop.
He shows no remorse for his actions upon the butcher, claiming, "Paul Momund killed himself. He died of stupidity and rudeness."
In a plain and simple phrase, Hannibal conducts his life in a highly clinical way, with a frosty surface.
He's the picturesque example of cordial smiles and polite gestures. He says all the right words when he's supposed to, pulls out chairs, rises when someone of significance walks into the room and bows his head as a sign of respect. He has etiquette and he knows how to use it, as might be expected of someone who once held the title of Count. He follows protocol in social standards and he has high expectations for others to live up to them because he doesn't abide by vulgarities or particularly crude remarks. He loathes to accept the ignorance of others and isn't above demanding an apology for the offense, although, whether forgiveness is actually upon the table is another conversation entirely.
One of the most important things to remember about Hannibal is that you know as much about the inner workings of his mind as he wants you to know. He's withdrawn, closed off and sealed from the public. He has a certain sense of calm at his core that most people never tap into. Yellow crime scene tape that can't be crossed. He isn't always misleading about his thoughts or what he's up to, in fact, when someone knows how to look he likes to hang it directly in front of them as a snub, to show how inferior they are. He twists his words in manners that deeply amuse him, uses word play and dark humor as bait. It's as if he can't seem to help himself. He often finds facts to be obvious pointers in and of themselves, even when a lesser-minded person might stumble blindly, failing to connect the dots.
In all this self-control, there's little that shocks him. He stares at the world unblinking and can pass a lie detector's test easily. His face is an impassive mask on a regular basis and he reveals scarce little if he can help it, too busy trying to crack someone else's skull like a shell. Which is to say, he reads and absorbs people like books, witnessing what their body language confesses and what he already suspects about them to be able to compare it to the details he can dig out of their mouths and through research. Hannibal is never not (in some form or another) sizing people up. He thinks most people's desires and motivations are transparent and what he sometimes forgets is that those who are close to him can see his own too.
If you chip these away, he isn't without his shades of humanity. In all rights, they should have been drained from his body but they linger, remind him every day.
M I S CH A »
❝"Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in a Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day.❞
The younger sister who is dead but may never die because she's lodged in his throat, locked in his chest. He wakes for so long on command to the sound of her screaming his name in her child's tongue: "Anniba!" He feels that it fell to him to keep her safe and alive, with his parents gone. He tried to fight as much as an eight year old can and came out of it with a broken arm, a head injury that keeps from thinking about one thing at a time. He buries her remains and still does not grieve for her and release her. He can't move on until all of the soldiers from his family's hunting lodge are dead and she is avenged, so that maybe she will finally stop screaming in his head.
M U R A S A K I »
❝I fold cranes for your soul, Hannibal. You are drawn into the dark."
"Not drawn. When I couldn't speak I was not drawn into silence, silence captured me."
"Out of the silence you came to me, and you spoke to me. I know you, Hannibal, and it is not easy knowledge. You are drawn toward the darkness, but you are also drawn to me.❞
His late uncle's wife has always had an allure in his eyes, from the moment he was brought to their home and his first glimpse of her was in the bath. It hung heavy in his mind's eye (in his memory palace) and would haunt him for years to come. She is reservation and rationality, sensibility and soft morals where his are shriveled up. She loves him and knows him, inputs that it isn't an easy knowledge and is consistently on his side because she can relate to him. She too lost her entire family in the war, to Hiroshima.
She is Hannibal's most and only adored living companion; he confesses that he loves her more than once. Although, when she offers herself to him, he shoots her down because he can't stop the mission he's already onto or break the vow to Mischa.
P O P I L »
❝He wanted his crucifix to remain with his head instead of his heart," Popil said. "You knew what he wanted, didn't you? What else do you and Louis have in common?"
"Our curiosity about where the police were when the Nazis threw the children into the trucks. We have that in common.❞
Probably one of Hannibal's greatest downfalls because he inspires a spew of childish reactions from a young man that is otherwise expressionless. He suspects Popil's affections for his beautiful aunt and spits battery acid at him, poking fun at his feelings, at his lesser intelligence. He makes offhand comments that are downright rude in spite of the fact that Popil does like him and admires his education and his aspiring career to be a doctor. He never outright lies to the man but his wordplay never veers far from the fact that Hannibal only ever intends to throw the inspector bare bones - his scraps of Grutas and the rest of the soldiers, after he's through with them.
He's also one of the few men who can see straight through Hannibal, at least in regard to his intentions, that he's a monster. Popil is always at war with whether he should let it slide (because he cares for him) or if he should be against him because he's dangerous.
G R U T A S »
❝I've waited so long to see your face," Hannibal said. "I put your face on every bully I ever hurt. I thought you would be bigger.❞
The monster that haunts Hannibal's dreams with feathers in his teeth. He searches for Grutas with a kind of desperation, without regard of where it will leave him or anyone around him. When bodies with dog tags start cropping up, Grutas defends himself by kidnapping Lady Murasaki and trying to use her against Hannibal. It works, in the same way that he knew when he invaded the lodge to threaten Mischa. He is much like Hannibal in his refusal to apologize or feel remorse; he did what he had to do. Nothing less, nothing more.
He's highly impressionable, likely because he has so few impulses and desires of his own. He coins his trademark of dining on the cheeks of some of his victims because Murasaki's cook preaches to him that they are the tenderest morsels and you would offer one to lady at the table and one for yourself, or another guest of honor. From Murasaki, he beheads the butcher because that is what her ancestors did as samurai. Most serial killers undergo the process of searching for their signature and Hannibal is no different, absorbing histories and techniques from the people who impact him.
Bearing those in mind, the ways in which he is a monster and not a man should be recounted too. He finds pleasure in other's suffering. There isn't a scene where a murder is happening where he isn't also grinning or smirking. To be fair, he has only gone after men who have wronged him or his family in some way, so it could also be that nothing tastes sweeter than revenge. Considering that he finds glee in outsmarting others and knowing what they're thinking or being able to figure them out, I lean towards the first one, even if it hasn't been as ironed out as it gets in his future.
He does not feel loneliness as other men do, trembling in misery. In fact, he doesn't feel it at all. The wires come free with Grutas' death and Murasaki's departure back to Japan. He isn't burdened but free to do as he pleases (as he's always been), not to say he doesn't think of them. He has spots in his Memory Palace where they'll be preserved forever, where he can revisit them any time he sees fit. It is both comprehensive in knowledge of languages, literature, places, medical terminology and people, and so it goes on.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
• DIABOLICAL MANIPULATOR
He tweaks this to his advantage wherever he deems fit, playing people to their strength and as an end to his means. There's a reason he enjoys collecting trivial details and using them to pry out major ones. He wants to get his fingers inside skulls, to feel the wet gore and pull the strings. Without a careful eye trained on him, Hannibal will talk his way through people. It helps that he can keep a blank face through all of it, ensuring that he knows what's best.
• INSUFFERABLE GENIUS
Of his time, he was the youngest student accepted into medical school and he has the intellect to show for it, proving that he can be seated at the back of the class, do his work and still have time to make sketches he can sell for coin. He's fluent in English, German, Lithuanian, recognizes some Polish, along with French and some basic Japanese. He stores much of what he knows in his Memory Palace, where he keeps the important things. He's been known to purchase his textbooks and read them from front-to-back and then return them within the week to get his money back.
• STUDENT SURGEON
He's very capable with the human anatomy but he typically performs autopsies and prepares bodies for showings in classes, rather than on live patients. He isn't accustomed to working on live patients.
• EXOTIC CHEF
Never eat his cooking. Never. He likes to cook human body parts into exquisite dishes, luckily though, he hasn't evolved to brains or livers yet. Hannibal's impressionability keeps him stuck on the cheeks because that's the tenderest morsel in fishes.
• GRUESOME ARTIST
His artwork may not be lining the walls of a museum but he is still talented; he lines the walls of his bedroom with sketches, most of them morbid. His professor wanted to use one of his anatomical drawings as an example where he would receive credit and there was another man he could count on to put extra francs in his pocket with his purchase of Hannibal's Japanese-styled pieces.
• FORGET ME NOT
For all of his ego, he wouldn't thrive very well without being the center of the spotlight which is probably the main reason why he doesn't try to reveal much of himself or answer the questions of many that get put on him under spotlight. Would they be so interested if they knew the truth, where it all started? Why he is the way he is?
• BORED TO DEATH
His regular pulse of seventy-two is a hard thing to deter without rigorous exercise because he does not have a sense of fear, for his own safety that so many inflict themselves with. Pain doesn't mold him to command and neither do threats; the only thing that can condemn him to "good" behavior is the looming idea of boredom. The loss of books, the removal of a view, trapped to restlessness.
• MORTALITY
In spite of his ingenuity, it can't save him from deterioration. One day, he's going to die and if he crosses the wrong person on board, he could die just as easily as anyone else.
Inventory:
• one (1) medium satchel containing:
- one (1) samurai mask
- one (1) vial of sodium thiopental with the formula and dosage on the label
- one (1) outfit ( one plain dress shirt, one pair of slacks )
- two (2) pairs of socks and underwear
- one (1) pair of dress shoes
- one (1) tanto blade
• art supplies
- three (3) pencils
- two (2) sketch pads
- one (1) box of charcoal
Appearance:
In the novel(s), he is described as having maroon eyes while his younger sister's are blue. A genetic anomaly, that reflect red in the light. However, I am using the movie actor for his played by and he has blue eyes and black hair that is typically slicked back. He stands roughly at 5'11" and is well-built, or else he wouldn't be able to as much as he does without physical struggle. He's fair-skinned and because the addition of a sixth finger isn't mentioned once in Hannibal Rising, I'm forgoing it. His smile (when he remembers to use it) is frightening to some and uncomfortable to others.
Age:
Eighteen
AU Clarification:
SAMPLES
Log Sample:
( a gore-y excerpt from a played out scene )
He likes to hear them pant and gasp and beg, choking on letters they can't pinpoint. So wound up they barely scream, scarcely yelp. Subdued and reduced to the nothingness he knows they've always been, that they must surely recognize now. There's little to compare a window that's been shattered in the mind by the brick of reason. He wants them to feel it all, know through every minute how gone they are while he memorizes their faces and pries subtext from their eyeballs with a gouge of his fingers, reading them methodically like all his books. He doesn't like to inject them but sometimes he doesn't have a choice - the powerfully willed ones; as for the men who are bigger than he, they have never warranted a taxing amount of concern. He once saw Grutas' face where their blank ones should have been and now he sees them for what they are - game.
Rushing in his ears and red blooming at the corners of his vision, (he's been on his very best behavior, Doctor, just a bite) he flattens his palm against a man's windpipe, feels an electric shock ripple through his body because at any moment he could crush the skin and the air and collapse his throat, rupture his lungs with a pen or fracture his skull with a particularly heavy-handed shove. Hannibal exhales, hot and twisted, explosive and toxic, breathes into the man's (Wesley, wasn't it?) existence and pretends he can taste his soul thick like smoke poisoning the bloodstream.
(no indulgences until after you've finished your supper. until you've licked the plate clean and it's gone and you're full and there's no more room, because you couldn't possibly-) Just a nibble. Just a snap of teeth, ripping skin like fruit, like bubblegum pops in your face. Sticky and stringy and tough. A concealed knife much longer than his palm traces a lover's touch upon a firm jawbone, down to his clavicle, back up into his throat. White noise envelops him, eclipses any and all pleas. He is unreachable here, and now, no longer interrogating and searching in men's eyes for his little sister. (they are like us - they hear the others cooking in the kitchen and still they try to sing.)
There are a series of non-fatal cuts on the canvas of Wesley's body, seasoning him for what's to come and he's highly tempted to add another, he twists his fingers cruelly into the man's side, in a shallow cut beneath his ribcage, mind racing, manic grin widening and all the while his heart beat remains at a steady seventy-eight. Thump, thump, thump. (pot watcher fed her to you in a broth.) Guttural rage and hunger surfaced, hurled from his innermost thoughts, he tears into skin with a ferocious mouth, and this time it's the spot where neck and shoulder meet. Why should it always be the cheeks? A sharp scream, elongated and frenzied and a wet gnawing crunch that gushes into both of their faces.
Comms Sample:
TEXT | 001
[ this technology is foreign to him, unusual even. he prefers letters and handwritten poetry and so far he's found that everything here is alien. he takes all the time he needs, messing with the letters and punching in one at a time until he gets it right. ]
Greetings, Tranquility. I'm told there is much to sort through by way of archives if any of one us intends to determine a thorough history of our captors, or this ship. [ he leaves his doubt enclosed in the walls of his skull, tucked away. ] If someone would point me in the right direction, I'd be generous in my display of gratitude.
[ why should one stranger show another kindness? he isn't naive. ]
You may collect with the name: Hannibal Lecter.
To that extent, I offer my medical services and expertise to the passengers and medical staff already present. Should there be an opening, I am practiced primarily with autopsies, however, I am not limited to those procedures.
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