“I love that side of Will,” Dancy says. “He’s such a superficially unsympathetic character because he keeps everyone at arm’s length. And then you see him in his home with his dogs and that instantly lets you understand who he is, for real.” [x]

One of the (many) amazing things about the characterization in this show is how visible Will’s walls are.  When he’s around people, even the people he likes and trusts the most, he’s always standoffish.  Impregnable.  (Except he’s not; Will’s walls are porous as hell on his best days, but he has to make himself a rock just to function around other human beings without becoming them.)

But when he’s with his dogs, you see just how gentle and intensely vulnerable he is.  He’s the most loving person—the almost inevitable result of all that empathy run amok.  When he’s not around people is the only time he can be truly free; can even truly be himself.

(Nasty but not explicit talk under the cut.)

Which brings you to the true horror of what Hannibal’s done—is still doing—to him.  Will says, “I’ll remember what you did to me, and there will be a reckoning.”  But what Hannibal did to him is not just the moments of blackout when Hannibal did awful things Will can’t remember.  It’s every moment Will has spent in his company.  Every single moment when he let himself be this man’s friend, let himself empathize, let Hannibal crawl into him and Will didn’t try to stop it because he didn’t know what kind of poison he was sucking down.

And now he’s in a cage, and Hannibal can see him whenever he wants, and he’s in Will’s mind so deep that his shadow falls over Will even when he retreats to his happy place (I can’t stop chortling that I get to write that with no irony at all).  And Will is still sucking him down, deliberately, because he needs to consume as much of Hannibal as he can to understand him enough to find his weakness.