Simple

It takes Will about a day to decide that Dr. Lecter is the best thing to happen to his career.

Not because he actually seems to be interested in Will’s mind for its own sake (although there is that.) Not because he rubber-stamps him without a second thought (although there is definitely that, too.)

No, the moment that Will realizes that Lecter is something special is around 10 PM the night after his first session with the man, when he lies in bed in the living room in Wolf Trap and takes his cock in hand. He’s intending to jerk off as quickly as he can, and then forget about the images that led him to orgasm as thoroughly as possible, and hopefully manage to fall asleep in the brief window of relaxation afforded by a post-orgasmic haze.

Instead, Will has a fantasy.

A normal one.

Lecter is sucking him off, or maybe fucking him. Or maybe Will is fucking Lecter. It doesn’t really matter; there are cocks involved, and tongues and big warm fingers, and the images flit through Will’s head like a hazy highlight reel of things that will probably never happen. He ends up stroking himself slower, drawing it out, enjoying it. When he comes with a moan into his own fist, Will wipes it off on the sheet beside him and stares up at the ceiling, shocked.

“I just had a fantasy about my therapist,” he says out loud. Like he’s sending the thought out into the world, to join in solidarity with all the other millions of people on the planet having innocuous sexual fantasies about unattainable authority figures.

So common. So very normal.

He sighs happily, and silently thanks Hannibal Lecter for being the single point of normalcy in Will’s weird, fucked-up life.

***

The next day, Will gets through an entire day of teaching without getting hard. He regards this as something of an accomplishment.

It’s an accomplishment he hasn’t been able to claim in a while. If he’s honest with himself, ever since he was introduced– in the form of a body in a lab– to the Chesapeake Ripper.

“Introduced” would be a strange way to put it to anyone else, but it’s also the only way that Will can think about it. It had felt like a first date, a courting, if the courting consisted of the Ripper reaching over and sinking his fingers gently into Will’s brain matter. Well, his brain matter and– other parts.

The first time he’d gotten hard looking at a Ripper crime scene, he’d written it off as coincidence. He jerks off every night, usually. Maybe he’d forgotten the night before. Maybe he’d eaten more for breakfast than usual. Maybe someone in the lab is ovulating and the pheromones are getting to him, whatever.

The second time, it had been from looking at a photo, and he was alone in the lab. A late night, just to review the evidence one more time, see something he hadn’t seen before, feel something of the Chesapeake Ripper that he hadn’t felt before. And, well, he had certainly felt something.

Will had driven home hard and aching, trying to convince himself he wasn’t going to jerk off while thinking about the crime scene the moment he slid into bed.

He’d never been great at lying to himself.

It had only escalated from there. More crime scenes, more uncomfortable boners at the FBI. Which had been bad enough, until Will’s mind started turning to the Chesapeake Ripper the moment he stuck his hand down his pants in his own goddamn bed.

By the time he snaps at his new psychiatrist in Jack’s office and gets only a curious stare in response, Will has started to dread the Chesapeake Ripper as much as he loves him. And he does love him, Will would have to admit to himself, or at least he lusts after him, and the two seem inextricable when thoughts of the Ripper consume every spare thought, and especially every sexual thought.

Until Hannibal Lecter.

This is, possibly, the kind of thing that most people would keep to themselves. But if Will is going to be honest with Lecter– and he suspects that he is, as if the decision were being made outside of him and without his conscious input– then he might as well tell him this. After all, this is hardly the most disturbing thing that Will is likely to tell him. That’s the whole point.

Will is sitting in his customary chair, knees spread comfortably, fingers curled deliberately loosely around the armrests, waiting for the psychiatrist who in his fantasy Will calls Hannibal when he cries out his pleasure to speak.

And as if Hannibal can hear Will’s thoughts– wouldn’t that make this whole process easier– he asks, “How have you been sleeping, Will?”

Will inclines his head a little, and his heart beats faster. He swallows, allowing his nervousness to show in what he hopes is a tactical display of vulnerability. Or perhaps it’s just regular old vulnerability. “Better since I met you,” he says.

Hannibal doesn’t, as a rule, move his face all that much. His expressions happen with tiny muscular twitches, and Will finds he enjoys needing to actually pay attention to figure out what someone else is feeling.

Hannibal is feeling interested, now. But then, he’s nearly always interested. He doesn’t do anything so obvious as ask Will to elaborate, because he knows Will is going to anyway.

“I had a sexual fantasy about you,” Will says. “More than one, actually.”

Hannibal’s face is entirely blank, not so much as a twitch of the lip in response to that statement. Will wonders for a scant moment if he puts on faces, for other patients. Masks of emotion, to tell the less empathetically adept what he’s thinking, or at least what he wants them to think he’s thinking. Sympathy, anger, understanding. He wonders what mask he would put on now, what kind of caring-yet-professional expression would be appropriate when a patient tells you that you feature in their wank fantasies.

That would be the professional thing to do. Hannibal doesn’t. The extremely unprofessional thing to do would be for Hannibal to say I thought you didn’t find me that interesting. That’s what Will would do, which is why it’s a good thing that the closest thing Will does to practicing psychiatry happens on absent murderers and dead bodies. Naturally, Hannibal doesn’t do that either.

“Sexual fantasies often point to the emotions and experiences we desire, instead of the specific people,” he says, and the utter neutrality of that statement feels like the equivalent of a blush, on another man.

Will smirks. He feels on firmer footing now. “No,” he says, “I’m pretty sure they’re pointing to a specific person. But actually, I’m more interested in who they’re pointing away from.”

Hannibal inclines his head slightly. This is almost cruel of Will: on one hand, he’s presented Hannibal with an opportunity to have the conversation be about himself, which Will knows Hannibal desperately wants. On the other hand, the presence of another, unknown quantity in the conversation– a psychologically and perhaps pathologically relevant one– will be, Will suspects, impossible for the man to ignore once he’s caught the scent of new information.

Will was right. “Who are they pointing away from?” Hannibal acquiesces. Even the asking of the question itself– unnecessary, when Will had already indicated a willingness to volunteer information– feels like a point in Will’s favour.

And he’s going to need all the points he can get. He takes a deep breath, and allows his eyes to slide from Hannibal’s eyes down to the foot of his chair, then thinks better of it and forces them back up. “You rubber-stamped a special agent who has sexual fantasies about serial murderers,” he says calmly.

At least, Will hopes it sounded calm. He lets out a long, slow breath of air.

Hannibal is smiling. Well, not exactly smiling like other people smile, but as close as he gets during these sessions. Will wrinkles his nose. There’s no time to censor himself, so he just ends up blurting out: “Ugh, of course you think that’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Psychiatrists just eat up deviant sexual fantasies with ladle-sized spoons, don’t you?”

Now Hannibal actually does smile, a full-sized one, showing a mouthful of pearly white teeth with a few incongruously crooked ones pushing out in front. It’s oddly charming, and allows him to momentarily avoid the fate he had nearly been assigned to in Will’s mind a moment previously, which is to be thrown into the scrap heap of nosey, ineffective head-shrinkers that Will carries around in his bizarre and possibly defective brain like a graveyard.

“I apologize, Will,” he says, and seems entirely sincere. “I was merely contemplating the implication that your sexual fantasies would have been a sufficient reason to prevent me from writing your recommendation to Jack, and wondering how many of my other patients I would then need to prevent from doing their everyday jobs.”

Will narrows his eyes.

“Among other things, I admit,” says Hannibal gently. “I am frequently following multiple trains of thought at the same time, for which I hope you will forgive me.”

I hope you will forgive me. Absolutely transparent manipulation. Will has to prevent himself from giggling. His lips twist anyway, and he uses the laughter burbling up in his throat to say, “I can forgive you, since thinking about you fucking me into the wall prevented me from thinking about the Chesapeake Ripper for three nights in a row.”

Manipulative also. And not entirely true, since Will had spent just as much time thinking about fucking Hannibal into the wall as the other way around, among other activities. His imagination has never had any problem spinning out compelling fantasies, once it gets going. It just needs the raw material.

The raw material is sitting across from him, one leg crossed over the other. Will can’t remember if he’d sat down like that, or if he’d crossed his legs only after this particular conversation started. He’s pleased with the effect of his choice of phrasing: the use of the word fucking is vulgar enough to rattle Hannibal, and the deliberate invocation of Will in a supposedly submissive position is to intrigue him.

Hannibal is intrigued, all right. And Will realizes with a jolt that this is, undoubtedly, a seduction, and likely a successful one. He hadn’t planned it that way, exactly. He’d wanted to be honest, and he’d wanted to be honest in the particular way that Hannibal is honest, the way that cuts right to the core of him like a hot knife. He hadn’t specifically imagined this ending with his fantasies playing out in physical reality, which was either an accidental failure of imagination or a deliberate failure of imagination, which implies that whatever shadowy part of his brain decided to serve up Hannibal as wank fodder also decided to send Will after him with absolutely no plan.

“Tell me about your previous fantasies,” says Hannibal. “The ones you are so desperate to get away from.”

It’s a very psychiatrist thing to say. Focus on the pathology. He’s not asking to hear more about the fantasies of him, which on anyone else might appear as admirable restraint.

Hannibal no longer looks restrained. His eyes seem to be glowing slightly, and he he leaning forward in his chair. In the crease of his pants Will can see, despite his crossed legs, an unmistakeable erection.

He hadn’t really wanted to share this part in much detail. He’d probably have preferred if Hannibal had asked about the new fantasies– especially now that Will is becoming fairly convinced that they’re going to play them out in some way. Still, the idea doesn’t seem as repellent as he’d thought it would be. Hannibal’s office is not a safe space in any conventional sense of the word, but if the airy, shadowy, subtly terrifying room is a safe space for anything, fantasies of death and gore are probably that thing.

Will shrugs, affecting a nonchalence he doesn’t quite feel. “My job is to feel like I am the killer who left the body in front of me,” he says. “So the fantasies are usually re-hashings of that. I kill someone, and I get off on it.” He licks his lips, considering. “The Ripper… I keep coming back to his crime scenes. A lot of the killers do get off on it, it’s specifically sexual for them. The Ripper…” Will trails off, shakes his head. Even talking about it, the images are filtering back into his mind, trying to form some sort of arrangement that makes sense. That would allow him to see the whole of their creator.

“Does the Chesapeake Ripper derive sexual pleasure from his crime scenes?” Hannibal asks, quietly.

Will winces. It grates on him, like wrong information always does, the screech of the pieces of a puzzle not quite fitting together. “I don’t think so,” he says, and realizes as he said it that he’s actually certain about this, now. For the first time. “No. He doesn’t. There’s something else to it, though. Something base and animal but sophisticated and elegant, just like sex can be. Whatever the Ripper feels for his crime scenes, it’s something that I don’t feel quite the same way as him. An urge that I don’t quite understand yet, so it translates into a sexual urge in my mind.”

“It’s the closest you’ve gotten yet to understanding him,” says Hannibal, and he is definitely sporting a prominent erection now. Will wants to crack another one about how it is just like a psychiatrist to get horny for this stuff, but he doesn’t. He wanted this, after all. Or some part of him did.

He just nods instead, and allows the grimace he feels to come through on his face. “Yeah,” he admits. “It’s just that they’re not exactly… relaxing, these fantasies.”

“You are agitated even now, discussing them with me,” Hannibal notes, and that’s it there’s the opening Will’s been waiting for. He hesitates for a moment, like he’s about to jump from a great height. Then he says, “Thus my preference for the ones about you.” He allows a pause to stretch out like taffy, trying to see how long he can go before Hannibal opens his mouth to speak again, and just at the moment when he does, Will adds, “You’ve agitated me, Doctor, asking about my Ripper fantasies. Are you going to send me out of your office with those images in my mind?”

Crude. Incredibly crude, to the point of farce. And yet Will finds himself holding his breath, because if that indelicate proposition actually works, he’ll know a great deal more about what Hannibal is willing to tolerate from him than he did before.

Hannibal stands. He gestures across the room, to the patch of bare garnet-painted wall directly to the left of the blue sofa. There is a space in between the sofa and the next painting along the wall that is more than adequate for a man to get fucked against.

Butterflies explode in Will’s stomach. This is what he wanted, what the part of his mind that he does his best to keep buried sent him here for nearly without his conscious input. Hannibal is standing very still, waiting for his response. He is doing his best to remain in control, but Will can feel the edges of it cracking. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Will is– despite the position he will shortly be assuming against the wall– in complete control of this situation. He conjured it in his mind, then transposed it onto reality.

He just needs to convince himself he’s in control, and everything will be fine. Will places his palms on his knees and pushes himself up, disguising the slight wobble in his knees with a wide and confident stride as he makes his way over to the wall. He presses his back against it, and finds it warm and comfortable; the waiting-room on the other side of it is as well heated and insulated as this one. He spreads his palms against the smooth paint on either side of his hips, raises his eyebrows at Hannibal. He does feel more in control, now. The butterflies are still there, but they are pleasant. They were part of the fantasy, probably; it’s only natural that a sexual encounter with one’s doctor should include some nerves. “Like this?” Will asks.

“You have written the script for this encounter, not I,” says Hannibal. He removes his jacket, and drapes it over the chair he had been sitting on. Then he undoes his cufflinks and places them carefully on the desk before rolling up his sleeves in a precise, practiced motion, and oh god, Will is suddenly aching. “The script is… variable,” he says.

“Does it involve lubricant? I hope it doesn’t surprise you to learn I have none in my office.”

Will takes in a shaky breath. “Hand lotion?” he suggests, and watches as Hannibal looks thoughtful and goes around his desk to inspect the drawers for some. Will thinks, as he does, that he would probably still beg for it dry, if Hannibal would do it. He would let Hannibal hurt him, tear him, and he would feel his aching ass as he falls asleep and let it remind him of this, in the moments when the Ripper stands by his bedside, demanding entrance.

He won’t have to. Will feels a small pang of regret when Hannibal pulls out a small bottle of lotion from a desk drawer. Then he reminds himself that hand lotion is not an anal lubricant, and this is probably going to hurt anyway.

Hannibal brings it with him, as he slowly comes around the desk to stand in front of Will. Will presses himself back against the wall, not so much trying to avoid Hannibal as hoping that Hannibal will press closer, which he does. Will can smell his aftershave, something simple and probably expensive, and when he closes his eyes, he can also smell something that reminds him of blood: not old blood, but new, gushing, red in the sunlight and black by night. It can’t be real, must be just some strange remnant of the fantasy Hannibal is supposed to be chasing away, but he can’t stop himself from lifting his head to get more of it.

“Undress me,” Will says, and his eyes pop open when there is sudden pressure on his head and then searing pain.

Hannibal has grabbed hold of his hair, and is pulling up very slightly. “In the fantasy,” he growls, “Were you giving the orders?”

Will can hear his own ragged breathing. Hannibal’s hand feels huge and warm on his scalp even as it hurts him, and he’s pressed against his chest now, their hearts beating just inches from each other. He hadn’t gotten this far by being dishonest, though, so he gasps out, “Didn’t specify. I usually…” he whimpers a little as Hannibal tugs harder, and can feel the erection pressed against his thigh growing. “I’m good at translating reality into dreams. Going the other way around is new for me.”

Hannibal lets go of his hair, and brings his hands to Will’s shoulders instead, and then he is mouthing over Will’s neck like he plans to eat him. Will wants to ask and you, are you better than me at translating dreams into reality? but there are teeth and tongue and hard suction working at his neck and under his jaw and he can’t speak at all. Somehow, though, he knows the answer must be yes.

That’s what the Ripper does, too. Dreams to reality, drawing the shadows into the light. He must see his creations in his mind’s eye in exquisite detail– all good artists do.

Will moans. He tries to block the Ripper from his mind by letting his own incoherently flailing hands land on Hannibal’s waist, feel the way the open-and-shut of his ribcage tapers into hard abdominal muscle and the soft vulnerability of organs at his sides.

Hannibal has undressed him, he realizes, exactly as instructed; while Will was distracted by the mouth at his neck (and it’s going to bruise, oh god, he’s going to walk into the FBI tomorrow with hickeys so high up that even a turtleneck wouldn’t cover them, and at least that’ll be something people can stare at him and whisper about that has nothing to do with murder victims) Hannibal’s hands had undone his fly and pushed his pants down around his ankles, and now they are threatening to trip him up. Will manages to shake them loose over his shoes, aware he looks completely ridiculous but willing to get fucked with his shoes still on if that’s what it takes, and then nearly protests when Hannibal lets up for long enough to pull at Will’s shoelaces.

He’s wearing simple white cotton briefs, the kind of underwear that nobody puts on with the expectation of attempting a seduction. Perhaps the part of Will that had gotten dressed this morning was still in the dark about what the recesses of his mind were planning. It’s fine; Hannibal snaps the waistband of them, an almost childish way of stating that he wants them off, and despite the fact that his pants and shoes are off and there’s not really anything to trip over, Will manages to nearly trip anyway puling them down as he’s distracted by the sight of Hannibal. Hannibal pulls his pants and underwear down and manages to casually fold them before throwing them onto the sofa. He stands there, watching Will re-align himself back against the wall, and Will can only stare at the way he seems not quite dignified, but somehow more dangerous, clad only in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the tails nearly brushing his hard cock.

Fucking my psychiatrist was an excellent choice, some part of him thinks weakly, although he’s not certain if it’s an honest reaction of if some other part of his mind still needs convincing. Maybe the part that is staring at Hannibal’s strong forearms that lead down to surprisingly delicate wrists, and thinking, he would look so good holding a knife, he could cut a man open just as easily as the Ripper does, the way blood stains would look on that shirt, oh god–

Will balls his fists. “I’m still fucking thinking about him,” he admits, and it comes out hoarse. “The Ripper. God. Fuck. Please distract me.”

Hannibal crashes into him. It feels like a crash, a physical impact that knocks all the wind out of him and it’s only after a moment that he realizes he’d raised a hand up to cradle the back of Will’s head so as not to smack it into the wall. (He’s probably more worried about denting the wall than hurting me, Will thinks, and tries to evict the thought when he realizes it’s still about the Ripper, not Hannibal.) Hannibal is grinding against him so hard it’s painful and Will realizes he can lift up on his toes, and then tentatively take his legs entirely off the ground, and Hannibal just grabs the bottom of his thighs and helps Will to wrap his legs around Hannibal’s waist.

It’s better like that, their cocks slipping against each other with nothing but sweat and the slick of precome. Hannibal is still macking on his neck, there are going to be tooth marks as well as hickeys, and it’s pleasing to realize that that’s something that never featured in Will’s fantasies. That’s pure Hannibal, as he really is, clearly some recurring sexual interest in marking another person, and–

--oh god the way he leaves his bodies, claimed, a trophy missing, utterly owned, tomorrow everyone will be able to see that Will has been owned just as thoroughly as those, fuck, no, stop--

Will is drawn back to himself by pressure at his lips. Hannibal is pressing his index and middle fingers into Will’s mouth, and despite the lotion still clenched in his other hand, his intent is clear. Will will participate in the breaching of his own body (like a victim awake for the removal of an organ, fuck) so he slobbers on Hannibal’s fingers as much as he can, swirls his tongue around them and watches the way Hannibal’s eyes go every so slightly darker.

Hannibal pulls them out and Will has to clutch at his shoulders and hook his feet together behind his back to stay in position as Hannibal pulls away enough to get his hand in between his own body and Will’s. It’s sweaty and slippery and humid and he pushes a finger in as soon as he gets there, no teasing, and Will gives a tiny yelp at the sudden onslaught of weird sensation. An invasion-- one he had asked for, but an invasion nonetheless.

Hannibal strokes a few times over his prostate and Will digs his fingers harder into Hannibal’s shoulders, whimpering, hoping he can leave a couple small bruises of his own even if nobody will see Hannibal’s the way they will surely see Will’s. Hannibal presses around inside him, kneading the tightness of the muscle just inside his entrance pressing him open in a way that is entire utilitarian and so fucking hot that Will has to give him and put one leg back on the ground, knee bent and tilting his hips up to allow Hannibal access, just to avoid slithering to the floor.

Hannibal takes advantage of Will’s relative stability to remove his fingers and slather the lotion– white, smelling vaguely of pine– in great gobs all over his cock. Will just stares, the indignity of the uneven coating of slippery white stuff coming off in little flecks and sticking to Hannibal’s pubic hair somehow mesmerizing. Will thinks briefly how close together the highest aspirations of art and the basest animal urges are– the Ripper thinks about that as he kills too, Will realizes– and then is picked up again by the thighs and is not nearly ready for it when Hannibal lines up his cock and presses home in one thrust.

Will feels momentarily dizzy, practically nauseous with a strange mix of pain and pleasure and sheer invasion. His gasp sounds like a sob, and he lets his head fall forward onto Hannibal’s shoulder. It hadn’t been quite slick enough, and Will can feel a burning sensation everywhere Hannibal’s cock touches, but unbidden he thinks you don’t get to choose when he’s going to do it and then he pants out “god yes, please, Hannibal–” and Hannibal starts to move.

It feels like dying. Not the penetration itself, which Will can feel the pain of distantly but the pleasure of like a star so bright it hurts his eyes. But the way Hannibal is holding him, one hand underneath his ass and one on the back of his neck as he slams him into the wall had enough that surely, if there is anyone in either of the waiting rooms, they will know exactly what is happening in here. But there isn’t; Will always seems to be Hannibal’s last patient of the day. He’s going to have a bruise on his tailbone, probably, and he can barely breathe every time Hannibal’s cock slips inside him as far as it can go and Hannibal holds him there, an infinitesimal moment of far too much pressure and pleasure and fullness. His fingers and toes start to tingle, the blood rushing out of his extremities to attend to his vital organs as is his body really doesn’t know that he’s going to come out of this alive.

Hannibal could do absolutely anything with him right now, Will realizes, and he would allow it. He could kill him. Will wants him to. He thinks distantly, from somewhere outside his body, that this was exactly what he didn’t want. He wanted to keep Hannibal and the Chesapeake Ripper separate, a world apart in his mind. He wanted to be able to use one as a ward against the other. Instead, everything is getting mixed up, and Will tastes blood that is probably only him biting his own lip but could be anything, and when he wonders if that’s how good it feels, to the Ripper’s victims. If, when you are finally permitted to slip away after having your organs removed, it feels like the sweetest pleasure on earth.

It takes Will a moment to realize that he is no longer being slammed into the wall. He’s merely being pressed there, no longer so hard as to remove his breath entirely. Hannibal is breathing hard into his shoulder, and he can feel Hannibal’s cock softening inside him and the semen that will shortly start threatening to start leaking out and down his leg.

When Hannibal finally slips out, and Will puts his legs back on the ground, he realizes that he is alive, and that he has very possibly ruined the one thing he’d ever found to keep the dark tides of his mind at bay.

Shit.

Hannibal picks him up again– and oh god, he hates how much he could just live in this man’s arms– and carries him to the other couch. The ridiculous psychiatrist one, that Will’s not yet gotten up the courage to ask if anyone ever actually uses. He stretches out, feeling the way it pulls at bruises on his back and thighs and shoulders. He would feel amazing, if it weren’t for the fact of how royally he’s fucked up.

Will cracks an eye open and sees Hannibal looking down at him. He has no idea how to place his expression. If he didn’t know better, he’d say that Hannibal looks… wistful. As if he’s looking at something he can’t possibly have. Which is ludicrous, considering how thoroughly he’s just had Will.

“Wow,” says Will croakily. “I… fuck.” He laughs a little, and Hannibal smiles back. He traces the outline of a bruise on Will’s shoulder.

“Thanks?” Will offers, struggling to sit up a bit, then realizing that Hannibal had placed him directly on the upholstery, which he’s currently leaking onto. “…sorry,” he adds, and Hannibal chuckles. His eyes alight on the place where his own semen is leaking into the furniture, and he looks more interested than irritated.

“Was I successful,” Hannibal asks, “In chasing away your unwanted fantasies?”

Will feels the bottom drop out of his stomach.

He wants to tell him. He wants to say fuck, fuck, I’m sorry, it was so good, and I’m just too fucked-up for any of this. I’m too fucked-up to have sex with you without my brain superimposing you on him, and now I can’t think of your gorgeous hands or your hard cock or your amazing mouth without imagining that they’re his, too.

But you can’t say that. Everyone has limits, even psychiatrists with a high tolerance for personal fucked-upedness. You can’t tell someone that your brain is trying to convince you that they’re a serial killer.

It wouldn’t be fair to Hannibal, to put that on him. So Will presses his lips together to keep them shut, then forces them into a smile. “Yeah,” he says.

And Will is surely imagining the tiny sliver of disappointment in Hannibal’s eyes, because the next thing he says is, “Then you may ask me to do so again whenever you please. May I cook dinner for you tomorrow night, Will?”

Will nods. He’ll just have to be careful, is all. To keep his own mind in check, not allow it to make associations that it shouldn’t make. To keep the categories of “Hannibal Lecter” and “Chesapeake Ripper” as far away from each other as possible.