I kind of get her though tbh. Imagine being a child, and all of a sudden this traumatized orphan who doesn’t say a word all day but screams about his dead family all night in his sleep moves into your household. Eventually he starts communicating, nonverbally at first, and the two of you start to spend time together. Learning and perfecting new skills, trying desperately to mold yourselves into the adults you are still far from being.
But as the two of you grow, he begins to perfect his mask. Growing cooler, more distant. It’s hard to tell if he even feels the same emotions he used to, screaming in the night. But the two of you were friends once, are family still.
And one day you learn he has been killing. At first, his sister’s murderers, but you have a feeling it won’t stop there. You plead with him to stop, for his own sake if not anyone else’s, and as a punishment he assigns you the task of looking after the now-prisoner he had been about to kill, somebody complicit in the murder of a beloved child. The cruelty of essentially taking your freedom by using your morals against themselves hardly surprises you anymore, though it does make you a bit sad.
Eventually you learn about it all, the Monster of Florence, the Chesapeake Ripper, either through your own suspicions and investigations or through the articles that one day come out. And you finally see the entirety of the monster that your sort-of-cousin, sort-of-brother has grown to become.
But you still remember the mute boy that practiced origami with you, the verbal but soft-spoken boy that taught you to recognize materials by the scent of their burn. And you know that boy wasn’t a mask, because you were with him as he improved and perfected his mask, his person-suit, that complemented and then came to disguise the monster that evolved along with it.
And surely that boy hasn’t died entirely, right? You are occasionally in contact with him, and sometimes you think you can see glimpses of the boy in there still, though they’re becoming harder and harder to detect.
Then, one day, a strange man comes to your prison home talking about Hannibal, showing you the scars Hannibal left on his body in a way that makes you wary, but also surprised that Hannibal let his guard down enough to get found out, enough for this man to find his estate and try to learn more about his history.
You can think of only one reason why Hannibal’s near-perfect person suit would fail so spectacularly, and you think you can see hints of the same in this man who is so desperate to understand your cousin. So you try to give him some hints about what he should do, cryptically, as is the family specialty.
The man appears to be tragically oblivious to these hints, and you are forced to shoot him (non-fatally) to keep your cousin in one piece. You can’t allow any harm to come to Hannibal like that—because family loyalty has been engrained into you from a young age, yes, but also because you still care for him, this half-man-half-monster that was nevertheless at one point your closest companion. And who you know can still be hurt, can still die, no matter how invulnerable he seems.
So you find yourself here, in the role of a morally-grey protector and accomplice of a killer, because you still feel that connection with and responsibility for him. And you think he is still fond of you, still appreciates you in some way, because he lets you do this for him even though he resents accepting help without a clear price to pay in return. And you can only assume that it’s because the boy is still in there somewhere, and he still remembers learning with you, growing up with you, being your companion—and you his.