Return Of The Cannibal(Hannibal x Reader)(Book 2)

Chapter 5

You were a efficient housekeeper, but not meticulous one. Your side of the duplex was clean and you could find everything, but stuff tended to pile up-clean unsorted laundry, more magazines than places to put them. You were a world-class last-minute ironer and you didn't need to primp, so you got by. When you wanted to order, you went through the sham kitchen to Ardelia Mapp's side of the duplex. If Ardelia was there, you had the benefit of her counsel, which was always useful, though sometimes closer to the bone than you might've wished. If Ardelia was not there, it was understood that you could sit in the absolute order of Mapp's dwelling to think, as long as you didn't leave anything. There you sat today. It is one of those residences that always contains its occupant whether your there or not.

You sat looking at Mapp's grandmother's life insurance policy, hanging on the wall in a handmade frame, just as it had hung in the grandmother's far tenant house and in the Mapp's project apartment during Ardelia's childhood. Her grandmother had sold garden vegetables and flowers and saved the dimes to pay the premiums, and she had been able to borrow against the paid-up policy to help Ardelia over the last hump when she was working her way through college. There was a picture, too, of the tiny old woman, making no attempt to smile above her starched white collar, ancient knowledge shining in the black eyes beneath the rim of her straw boater. Ardelia felt her background, found strength in it every day. Now you felt for hers, tried to gather yourself. The Lutheran home at Bozeman had fed and clothed you and given you a decent model of behavior, but for what you needed now, you must consult your blood.

What do you have when you come from a poor-white background? And from a place where Reconstruction didn't end until the 1950's. If you came from people often referred to on campuses as crackers and rednecks or, condescendingly, as blue-collar or poor-white Appalachians. If even in the certain gentility of the south, who accord physical work no dignity at all, refer to your people as peckerwoods - in what tradition do you find an example? that we whaled the piss out of them that first time at Bull Run? That great-grandaddy did right at Vicksburg, that a corner of Shiloh is forever Yazoo City? There is much honor and more sense in having succeeded with what was left, making something with the damned forty acres and a muddy mule, but you have to be able to see that. No one will tell you.

You had succeeded in FBI training because you had nothing to fall back on. You survived most of your life in institutions, by respecting them and playing hard and well by the rules. You had always advanced, won the scholarship, made the team. Your failure to advance in the FBI after a brilliant start was a new and awful, experience for you. You battled against the glass ceiling like a bee in a bottle. You had had four days to grieve for John Brigham shot dead before your eyes. A long time ago John Brigham had asked you for something and you said no. And then he asked you if you guys could be friends, and meant it, and you said yes, and meant it.

You had come to terms with the fact that you yourself had killed five people at the Feliciana Fish Market. You flashed again and again on the Crip with his chest crushed between the cars, clawing at the cars top as his gun slid away. Once, for relief, you went to the hospital to look at Evelda's baby. Evelda's mother was there, holding her grandchild, preparing to take him home. She recognized you from the newspaper, handed the baby to the nurse and, before you realized what she was about, she slapped your face hard on the bandaged side.

You didn't strike back, but pinned the older woman against the maternity ward window in a wrist lock until she stopped struggling, her face distorted against the foam and spit-smeared glass. Blood railed down your neck and the pain made you dizzy. You had your ear re-stitched in the emergency room and declined to file charges. An emergency room aid tipped the Tattler and got three hundred dollars.