I’m still clinging to my Star Trek Hannigram AU from, like a million years ago, based on this episode of Voyager.
Hannibal is the ship’s counselor (previously chief medical officer), and a Vulcan. Though he is detached from his emotions, he is fascinated by them and enjoys provoking emotional responses in his patients and seeing how encouraging their darker emotions plays out, and with his massive God complex uses his logic to justify the actions he takes. Knowing the crew intimately and in a position where he is trusted by everyone, he is able to kill without ever attracting attention. He manages to make the deaths look like accidents, or implicates others who he knows have motive, or makes it seem like they simply disappeared when the ship is somewhere for shore leave, etc.
Until he slips up. An emergency calls the ship away from shore leave early, and he’s now stuck on the ship with the body he was going to “disappear” on the planet. So he shoves it in an EPS conduit, knowing it will disintegrate the body and all will be well. Only during the emergency engagement, the warp core is damaged, so the EPS conduit fails and during repairs, the body is found.
Enter Will Graham, the emotionally unstable betazoid. Raised off Betazed (possibly on Qo'noS, Cardassia Prime, or potentially a colony with some less…stable alien species, where he was constantly barraged by intrusive, violent thoughts and as a defense mechanism, figured out how to dull his psionic abilities with drugs and alcohol.
He isn’t a Starfleet officer, but trains security officers at Starfleet Academy, and is only on the ship because it’s his ride to some conference in the Beta Quadrant. Here it plays out much along the same lines of the show, with Commander Crawford, head of security, turning to Will for help in the investigation.
Poor Will, he hates to use his abilities because of what he sees when he does, and on top of that, as a Vulcan with his own psionic abilities, Hannibal is able to protect those thoughts of his from being read. The two of them are working together and he has no idea that Hannibal sees him as the perfect patsy and is setting him up along the way.
Of course, Hannibal doesn’t realise how deep he is until Will is actually arrested and they get nothing during his interrogation, and Jack calls Hannibal in to mind meld with him, and oh boy. On the scale of bad ideas Jack has had in his life time, this one definitely takes the cake in the most spectacular way, because…
Suddenly Hannibal is bombarded with and seduced by all of Will’s darkest thoughts and this huge swelling of emotion that Will has kept buried, and Hannibal is utterly incapable of controlling. And Will is experiencing all the super violent Vulcan emotions that they struggle to control, and he also now knows exactly who Hannibal is, but has no barrier to hide from who *he* is any longer, or how he truly feels about what Hannibal has done–the fact that he finds it beautiful…
