So after literally thirteen years of over-analyzing Hannibal Lecter, I'm finally writing a fanfiction where I get to over-analyze Hannibal Lecter, thanks to the awesome characters Bryan Fuller has given the fandom. I will warn that this canon's Hannibal is my own interpretation and can be odd on a lot of levels, but I'm going to try my best to explain everything I can and I'm going to fill in gaps, I swear. This Alana Bloom belongs to a very good friend of mine who has characterized her in the most interesting light I have ever had the pleasure of reading. This AU works off the idea that season 2 hasn't happened as we know it right now (the whole thing was a roleplay written long before season 2) and I'll be taking ideas from it as I go, but otherwise, operate under the assumption that season 1 is your canon and this is more or less my season 3 or so, I guess. I don't know, I'm rambling. But this is a hell of a labor of love. I own nobody and nothing. Welcome to my attempt at reforming Hannibal Lecter in the best way I know how, with Alana Bloom's help.

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Clarice Starling comes into their lives and leaves a scent like earth burned beneath the hammer-blow of a lightning strike. Hannibal behind glass and Alana Bloom a specter of herself, desperately clinging to the freed Will Graham in a fragile sort of happiness that drips off life's canvas like running oil paints. And her heart is in that Baltimore Asylum, shut up in the dark at a sub-level so buried the only things that can reach it are the hopeless clicks of her heels at every agonized visit. There's pretense that she wants to understand him, treat him, learn him. But he looks at her with the same burgundy eyes she remembers as a young, bright-eyed intern and she doesn't know where to find herself. Every single time he strips away his usual condescending intimidation and asks her something personal, refers to something past, she is miniature again, a little girl, too small to feel like Alana Marie Bloom has ever felt.

But she can't stop visiting him. He's left something in her deeper than a gash. It's confusing, and it feels like what might be self-inflicted. She's walking around with the knife in her back and he stuck it there, even if she held a gun on him in shaking hands and he froze before biting the blade into her flesh. His freeze got him caught, and his catch has him under Dr. Chilton's unforgiving, cruel ownership. Chilton must own him, after all. This is Frederick Chilton's Zoo for Dangerous Wildlife and Hannibal Lecter is like his exotic Komodo Dragon.

His destruction of her had been a complete cycle, the most perfect circle. It's perfect because she still expects to pick up the phone to tell him something important, to call him to ask if he wants to have dinner, to ask him if he wants to have a glass of wine or four over an old Bela Lugosi film.

But the only line she can call leads straight to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There's no wine there. No Chateu De Petrus (sometimes too wealthy for her palette, she thinks). The only movies that play are the ones Hannibal Lecter has memorized behind his eyes, and they're made for a one person audience.

The best way to destroy someone, after all, is from the inside-out. Like the chest burster from Alien, of course. Inhabit the person completely (so completely they don't even know you're sitting inside them) and then just claw out of their ribcage with completely malicious abandon. There's a way to mutilate a heart, and it isn't physical.

She doesn't eat much. She hardly eats at all. Eating is something unbearable, now that she knows she has been eating human mystery meat for uncountable years. It's a lot of store-bought salads, picked at and forgotten, and every single thing under the sun without a single relation to meat. The very idea of steak is enough for her to taste bile. The actual smell of it cooking, though, has caused her to toss cookies in guest room sinks and public bathrooms more than she is sure can be considered dignified. (They ate oysters and champagne once, and the oysters were brilliant, savory, and the champagne was transcendent, and she didn't throw up just considering that anything she was looking at was just masquerading homo sapien.) He's diseased every area of her life and yet she misses him.

And this is why, of all the damage he did, the havoc he wreaked, Alana is the worst off. Because she was the one he never intended to become collateral damage. And her damage isn't collateral. It's a fatal wound and she's still hemorrhaging.

Buffalo Bill caught. Will Graham meets a woman named Molly and it's better for him, Alana knows, far better than she is. The two of them were survivors adrift on the sea, clinging to the wreckage of old trauma to understand one another more intimately through that pain. But pain is about closure and healing, and where Will Graham has made peace with Hannibal about his misdeeds he carries a resentful hatred in his heart for the man. Alana? Well. She doesn't know what's in that heart of hers, much less if she even still has one. She just knows Hannibal has pulled his greatest act of all and she can't share Will's resentment. All she can recognize when she sifts through it is pain. In Bella's death Jack is distant and unfamiliar, becomes more a cordiality than a friend, more a fellow soldier than a war buddy. To some small extent, Clarice Starling fills in the cracks. Alana would never say it, but Clarice seems to her like a Will Graham success story.

Hannibal gets out. She's the first to hear about it, because Jack, dutiful to the depths of his faithful heart, says she should be careful. What if he comes for her? He can send her an agent- she cuts it off with a laugh that is not quite a distant, sardonic chuckle.

"He didn't get out of prison just to eat me, Jack. He won't care about that at all. He just wants to run."

Her phone rings. The number is blocked. She picks it up after one shrill, high sound. The voice on the other end sounds strange and smooth through a receiver, "Good evening, Dr. Bloom."

It should make her angry that he knows she won't trace the call. It should upset her that he's taking advantage like this. But instead she feels the filtered anger through a frosted window, staring at her nails. How interesting.

"I felt it would be rude of me to depart the country without saying goodbye." He's burned the righteousness out of her. It's useless and evaporated, now. She has no sense of justice to be served. She serves only her own ability to crawl into bed and question the possibility of this, and how it went all so wrong. It should make her furious that he can speak in that smarmy tone, laid thick like honey with the tantalizing sound of his Lithuanian motherland sitting on the tip of his tongue.

"You're running." She says. And she's quite far outside herself. "Let me run with you."

Silence on the line. It's a long minute and she can faintly hear chatter in the background, announcements. A tell-tale ping, the mechanical kind of voice, the one that makes you think of enthusiastic little kids exhaustively kicking the back of your chair, your tray in an 'upright position' and your electronics all turned off.

"That would be an unwise detriment to you, Dr. Bloom."

"You owe me." She sounds angry now, at who she doesn't know. Her teeth bite down, almost chip enamel away. "I don't give a shit."