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

Chapter 47

When you were a child you moved from a clapboard house that groaned in the wind to the solid redbrick of the Lutheran Orphanage.

The most ramshackle family dwelling of your early childhood had had a warm kitchen where you could share an orange with your father. But death knows where the little houses are, where people live who do dangerous work for not much money. Your father rode away from this house in his old pickup truck on the night patrol that killed him.

You rode away from your foster home on a slaughter horse while they were killing lambs, and you found a kind of refuge in the Lutheran Orphanage. Institutional structures, big and solid, made you feel safe ever since. The Lutherans might have been short on warmth and oranges and long on Jesus, but the rules were the rules and if you understood them you were okay.

As long as impersonal competitive testing was the challenge, or doing the job on the street, you knew you could make your place secure. But you had no gift for institutional politics.

Now, As you got out of your old Mustang at the beginning of the day, the high facades of Quantico were no more the great brick bosom of your refuge. Through the crazed air over the parking lot, the very entrance looked crooked.

You wanted to see Jack Crawford, but there was no time. Filming at Hogan's Alley began as soon as the sun was well up.

The investigator of the Feliciana Fish Market Massacre required filmed reenactments made on the Hogan's Alley shooting range at Quantico, with every shot, every trajectory, accounted for.

You had to perform your part. The undercover van they used was the original one with body putty, unpainted, plugging the latest bullet holes. Again and again they piled out of the old van, over and over the agent playing John Brigham went down on his face and the one playing Burke writhed on the ground. The process, using noisy blank ammunition, left you wrung out.

They finished in mid-afternoon.

You hung up your SWAT gear and found Jack Crawford in his office.

You were back to addressing him as Mr. Crawford now, and he seemed increasingly vague and distant from everyone.

"Want an Alka-Seltzer, Y/N?" He asked when he saw you in his office door. Crawford took a number of patent medicines in the course of the day. He was also taking Ginkgo Biloba, saw Palmetto, St John's Wort Viand baby aspirin. He took them in a certain order from his palm, his head going back as though he were taking a shot of liquor.

In recent weeks, he had started hanging up his suit coat in the office and putting on a sweater his late wife Bella, had knitted for him. He looked much older now than any memory you had of your own father.

"Mr. Crawford, some of my mail is being opened." You said.

"I know. They're not very good at it. Looks like they're steaming the glue with a teapot." Crawford said.

"You've had mail surveillance since Lecter wrote to you." Crawford said.

"They just fluoroscoped packages. That was fine, but I can read my own personal mail. Nobody's said anything to me." You said.

"It's not our OPR doing it." Crawford said.

"It's not Deputy Dawg either, Mr. Crawford - it's somebody big enough to get a Title three intercept warrant under seal." You said.

"But it looks like amateurs doing the opening?" He said.

You were quiet for long enough for him to add, "Better if you noticed it that way, is it, Y/N?" Crawford said.

"Yes, sir." You said.

He pursed his lips and nodded. "I'll look into it."

He arranged his patent medicine bottles in the top drawer of his desk. "I'll speak to Carl Schirmer at justice, we'll straighten that out." He said.

Schirmer was a lame duck. The grapevine said he'd be retiring at the end of the year - all Crawford's cronies were retiring.

"Thank you, sir." You said.

"Anybody in your cop classes show much promise? Anybody recruiting ought to talk to?" Crawford asked.

"In the forensics, I can't tell yet - they're shy with me in sex crimes. There's a couple of pretty good shooters." You said.

"We've got all we need of those."

He looked at you quickly. "I didn't mean you."

At the end of this day of playing out his death, you went to John Brigham's grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

You put your hand on his stone, still gritty from the chisel. Suddenly you had on your lips the distinct sensation of kissing his forehead, cold as marble and gritty with powder, when you came to his bier the last time and put in his hand, beneath the white glove, your own medal as Open Combat Pistol Champion.

Now leaves were falling in Arlington, strewing the crowded ground. You, with you hand on John Brigham's stone, looking over the acres of graves, wondered how many like him had been wasted by stupidity and selfishness and the bargaining of tired old me.

Whether you believe in God or not, if you are a warrior Arlington is a sacred place, and the tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

You felt a bond with Brigham that was no less strong because you guys were never lovers. On one knee beside his stone you remembered: He asked you something gently and you said no, and then he asked you if you could be friends, and meant it, and you said yes, and meant it.

Kneeling in Arlington, you though about your father's grave far away. You had not visited it since you graduated first in your college class and went to his grave to tell him. You wondered if it was time to go back.

The sunset through Arlington's black branches was as orange as the orange you shared with your father; the distant bugle shivered you, the tombstone cold beneath your hand.