Fic rec - Ravenous

[sakura_no_miko]

Title: Ravenous

Author: rageprufrock

Fandom: Hannibal (tv) / The Silence of the Lambs

Rating: R

Pairing: Hannibal/Will

Warnings: canon-typical violence, including serial murder, cannibalism, kidnapping, imprisonment, torture, depiction of an autopsy, sexism

Other notes: alternate universe, canon divergence, crossover (of sorts), prison, interviews, outside PoV

Length: 40k

Summary: Clarice Starling meets Hannibal Lecter armed with a copy of the Buffalo Bill file.

My thoughts:

 

So, if you’re familiar at all with the Hannibal tv show, the plot mostly came about because they couldn’t get the rights to Silence of the Lambs, the most well-known story arc, so they did a prequel, using some history that’s only vaguely alluded to in flashbacks and making a full story out of it. There were plans to eventually adapt the Silence story arc, but the show got canceled before that could happen.

As you can imagine, fandom got right on that.

The story here is Silence, but seen through the world set up in Hannibal — the twisted intimacy between Will and Hannibal, having more of the characters as women, and book ending everything with the florid prose of Freddie Lounds. 

Or rather, 

“Freddie Lounds’ terrible, compulsively readable dumpster fire of a book.”

I bet the author must have had so much fun with the prose here — Clarice’s is plain, methodical, detailed, all very fitting for an FBI agent-in-training, but also has some biting wit and sarcasm. Then you get Freddy interjecting this over-the-top, verbose purple prose —and, if you’re looking at things from canon, you know she’s lying and exaggerating and maybe making some of the subtext less sub and more blatant text. We know she’s exaggerating Will and Hannibal’s relationship into this twisted romance. She’s making it look sordid and sexual to sell books. And yet, none of us would be writing fic if there wasn’t a ton of subtext and tension between them. 

I feel like I’m not explaining this well, but, from a meta perspective, Freddie is writing in universe fanfiction. She’s being obnoxious and cheap as all heck, but she’s writing the exact same things that we, the fic writing audience, would write ourselves. 

This is also another fic, like Conversations, where there’s this small thread that keeps getting bigger: the timeline. At one point, Clarice thinks about playing Two Dots on her phone, so, wait, this is modern day. Well, more modern than the movie. Then there’s Hannibal being captured six months prior, which… I sat there thinking for a moment, because, wait, in canon, yeah, they captured him, and then Will came back for the Tooth Fairy murders, and then, even later, we had Buffalo Bill. And then there’s this very small, interesting turn of phrase:

BLOOM:"The next time I was at his house was the night he killed Will in his kitchen." 

Wait a minute, you think. He…killed Will? So we’re still deep into the Silence storyline, but something is missing, something is wrong. Where is Will Graham? 

Because Will is all over this fic — Will and Hannibal, moving from past to future through Freddie’s interludes. Because, of course, Will isn’t a part of the canon Silence story. Why put him back into the narrative, only to be a ghost?

I’ve mentioned before that I am no good at writing mysteries, myself, or doing decent foreshadowing, so reading this whole batch of mystery fics is just fascinating to me. 

Which is what makes this interesting to me — it’s still following the plot of Silence, but we’re getting more insight into Clarice’s thoughts, how she sees the world. Kind of like what I was saying with Black Rock Mountain — what we had to understand visually in the movie, through the actor’s body language and the cinematography,has to be expressed through prose here. 

Like, hmm:

He looks as ravenous as he did drinking down the slippery cold grief of Clarice's childhood. Clarice thinks about Zeller and Price, their warnings in the car. She thinks about Crawford's testimony, Bloom instating herself as a sentinel. Clarice feels a sudden, sharp fearfulness run through her with the pure tone of a struck note: something is happening; something is about to happen.

That right there is sensual. Literally sensual — that Hannibal is devouring her grief, that Clarice hears the fear as strongly as she feels it. You know that feeling, as you read — you know that chill that goes down your backwhen you’re afraid, cold and clear as a bell ringing. 

You know that feeling, but did you have the words to describe it? Agh, I love reading good prose. Put the words right into my mouth. Tell me how to explain feelings. Love prose, love it. 

Another one I liked:

The sudden surge is crazy, the typhoon rush of her heartbeat and all the heat gone up in her body. Clarice knows she's flushing, that from the outside she must look nuts. But inside she's thinking about the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane again, the long corridors and doors to Lecter's plexiglass enclosure, his books and his letters, the secrets he'd cut out of her — the organs he's cut out of everyone else. She is helplessly, hugely, immediately flattered, feels something pleasurable curling in her belly to be singled out, to know that she's left a mark. It's the sweetness that whispers arsenic, and joy and disgust lap over her like waves breaking: water sweeping in after whitecaps.
 

This is a fic where I could just keep pulling quotes out over and over, just to marvel at the prose. Aggghh. A sweetness that whispers arsenic. 

Also,there’s the entire Hannibal/Will love story going on in — well,not the background, but. There’s this one part of the exchange between Will and Clarice at the end:

"It sounds like you let him get caught," she retorts, ignoring his point, the subtle threat. 

"This entire episode was a necessary inconvenience. A bit of advice: don't make ultimatums unless you have the fortitude to mete out the consequences," he counsels, and adds, "I trust you understand my meaning." 

And — ah, I wonder, am I reading that right? Because that really sounds like this entire plot, the entire reason Hannibal got imprisoned in the first place, was because he and Will were having a lover’s spat? Hey, babe, you’ve kind of pissed me off, so I’m gonna arrange for you to end up in a maximum strength psychiatric facility until you apologize. 

Or, rather, given the few lines before it — Hannibal was “effusive,” hmm. Effusively pissed off? Enough to make a giant show of killing someone and get caught?

Now I’m wondering which of them made the ultimatum, and which one didn’t back down. Ah, well. This is the sort of show where people kill people and arrange the bodies artfully as a sort of macabre love letter, so throwing your partner into prison for a few years to settle down is somewhat par for the course.

 

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Originally crossposted to tumblr and pillowfort on 11/11/18