#tattler

(first ultrasound. The chapter will be divided into two parts, the second one with our favorite cannibal :). Feedback is appreciated)

Clarice Starling and Ardelia Mapp sat next to each other at the speech that took place every weekend at Quantico. Starling might not have attended at the lecture if she didn't need to keep appearances, but now, even as things seemed to fall apart little by little for her, she understood dissimulation was a small price to pay for her privacy.

Two weeks had passed since the roommates talked about Starling's secret, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to hide the her condition. She would convince herself and Ardelia that she was still fit for the remaining tasks at the Academy, only to frustrate herself when nausea aroused and her friend had to tell the other students she went to retouch lipstick while what Starling did indeed was retch in the small restroom stall.

As if on cue, Clarice pressed her hand to her mouth and stood up quickly, leaving to the restroom.

Mapp sighed and followed with her eyes as Starling left the room. A curious and somewhat concerned colleague was furrowing her brow at her.

"Is she okay? Starling, I mean," the girl asked. She was only a little bit younger than the two now-agents, but carried herself with naivety in the way she talked and acted. She hadn't gone through the life-altering experiences other agents had. "She's left twice already."

"She's good," Ardelia answered with discretion and simplicity. They couldn't afford suspicious. The girl's wide hazel eyes stared at her in the dimness, and Ardelia leaned forward a bit to speak closer to her ear. "Narrow space, low lights. Triggers bad memories. You know how her first case went"

"Oh." The girl breathed before shutting up, looking relatively guilty, and so did Mapps. She hadn't intended to use Clarice's PTSD with Buffalo Bill to excuse her travels outside the auditorium, but it was getting harder and harder to find new pretexts.

There wasn't enough lipstick in the world to survive Starling's hypothetical retouches. And everybody knew Clarice didn't spend that much time before the mirror, examining her reflection; she was just that pretty. Other justifications had been spent as well.

Once Mapps found a gap to disappear from the crowd, she did, and in a few minutes she stood before Starling's stall in the Academy's bathroom, which was mercifully empty. She knocked on the door.

"Starling?"

"Dee...," her voice sounded wobbly inside the stall, and soon retching could be heard again. Mapps closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then knocked again.

"Starling, let me in." The black woman said. "Let me help you"

Inside, Clarice felt tears sting her eyes, but they weren't from the discomfort of vomiting. She felt incapable for needing Ardelia's help while her friend should be there at the auditorium, studying and asking questions and gathering knowledge that would be the most useful for their career. She felt guilt for making her miss this opportunity in order to assist her against her body's betrayals. She felt.. emotional, almost. Stupid, Starling shook her head to herself. Don't. Don't cry now. What does that solve?

She unlocked the door, let it whisper open. As soon as Ardelia was in, her gaze traveled over Clarice, taking in her reddened scleras, the quivering of her legs and hands, the dampness around her mouth.

Mapps teared a piece of bathroom tissue and gave it to Clarice, watched with worry as she sat on the toilet and wiped her mouth with it, and hated the man responsible for her state a little more as she breathed deeply to recompose herself.

The pregnancy was taking its toll.

Starling and Mapps said nothing, enveloped by the safety silence granted them.

"I made an appointment for tomorrow morning," Ardelia said at last, and Clarice's eyes shot up. "At the doctor, for difficult pregnancies," she clarified, and saw understanding dawn in her friend's eyes along with frustration. "I know it must be early for prenatal appointments, but Starling, you're shaking," she squatted close to Clarice, whose skin was ashen. "You threw up four times today. I'm not a pregnancy expert, Clarice, but it looks bad"

"It feels bad," Starling retorted quietly, without real bitterness towards her friend, squaring her shoulders. What she hated was the situation. She hated making Ardelia miss her studies to tend to a pregnant friend who shouldn't even be pregnant in the first place, and she hated feeling that way when she had been aware, lately, from researched, that her baby could feel what she felt. "I don't want you to miss out because of me."

"I have someone annotate for me," Mapps said. "Starling, you wanted to go through with this pregnancy, so you have to do it right. I can't have you running to the bathroom every two minutes. People talk. I could go with you tomorrow, I'm not working right now"

"I know," Starling sighed lengthily. Silence extended again between them. "Okay, I'll go. I'm sorry."

"No need to apologize, girl." Ardelia stood up and crossed her arms, then helped Starling up and peeked outside the stall to check if there was anyone out. They could discuss the details of their little trip later, once they were back to their post and out of the spotlight. "My pleasure, in fact."

.

The OB GYN waiting room was nothing like what Clarice and Ardelia were accustomed to as part of law enforcement. The lounger was undoubtedly softer and less bleak than the morgues they would visit whilst investigating criminal cases, the walls painted in hues of beige and white, parenting and pregnancy magazines scattered on the coffee tables.

They drove there on Ardelia's car. It was safer that way-- the journalists had made sure to make Clarice understand she was their greatest source of content since Will Graham, in a way that caution was never enough, hence why the redhead was wearing a baseball cap and different clothes. The waiting room was filled with a diversity of women, none of them acquaintances to Starling.

Most of these women were older than her, and she found herself guessing what each one was there for with the same analytical mind she dedicated for profiling. Two heavily pregnant women sat alongside their partners, both about ten years older than Starling, and glancing at them, she felt as though she had "UNWED MOTHER" written on her forehead in bright red letters. She then admonished herself for projecting her self-recrimination on those women, who thought no such thing of her. Seeing them, she felt acutely reminded of her youth, of how their circumstances were different.

And then she was called in.

The examination didn't extend for long. The physician, Doctor Mitch, was a middle-aged man with blue eyes that crinkled when he smiled and who seemed to immediately fish up it was her first pregnancy. He offered Starling a quick and accurate diagnosis-- Hyperemesis Gravidarum, which he explained to her as being the extreme nausea that accompanied her stubbornly all times of the day. It relieved Clarice somewhat, to have a name for her condition, made her symptoms feel more like something that happened and less like a failure of hers.

The doctor receipted her safe medications to help with the morning sickness and told her to eat small, frequent meals, to what Starling nodded her head in obedience.

The ultrasound room was dimly lit, the machine humming softly. Clarice lay back on the examination table, her white shirt pulled up to expose her still-flat belly. The gel was cold, making her flinch, but then the medic was moving the wand across her skin, his eyes focused on the monitor.

And then her baby was on the screen.

The image was grainy, black and white, hard to interpret, but as the wand moved across her stomach- it was there. This tiny being living within her body, a cluster of cells that thrived and somehow was already becoming its very own person, with the suggestion of limbs and the rapid flutter of what the doctor identified as the heartbeat.

"It's beating so fast," Starling whispered, unable to avert her eyes, the words leaving her mouth in wonder and concern.

"That's completely normal at this stage," Dr. Mitch assured her, checking the heart's growth. "Your baby is developing healthily, Miss Starling."

Starling stared at the screen, under the spell of the image on the monitor, marveling at how small and yet perfect the life inside her was. For all the trouble it'd been causing her, with all the intense symptoms and the nausea and the fear she felt every single time her thoughts wandered to her future with that life, that was what it was-- Just a little baby.

Her little baby. Real and alive and growing inside her. This was real.

Clarice felt tears prick her blue eyes, which didn't go unnoticed by Ardelia, who stood beside her on the cot, one eye on the monitor, the other studying Starling's expressions.

"Let's see," Dr Mitch moved the wand over her stomach, and both women were greeted with a new perspective on the baby's position, curled up in a teeny ball. "There's your baby. Heartbeat is good- 110 beats per minute -, that's the ideal. Steady heart development; brain expansion is going properly" the doctor used simple words that would have satisfied simpler women's curiosities, but Clarice's attention was not fully on the evaluation.

"See these little buds here?" He pointed to the little forming limbs, the ones Clarice and Ardelia had already identified by themselves. "These will become your baby's legs and arms. It is about the size of a grape right now." He spoke softly.

"Oh my God, Clarice," Ardelia exchanged a look with Starling, whose face was flushed and bright, and they smiled giddily, eyes twinkling with excitement like little kids. "It's so weird, but so cute" she admitted, and Clarice giggled and nodded in agreement.

While the doctor took the fetus's measurements and checked for other gestational sacs, they just gazed at the form there, floating in Clarice's uterus like a little fish, the image too granulated for them to take a better look, but the redhead could feel her heart swell and clench inside her chest. This was her reality now. A difficult reality, one that kept her awake at night and made her feel tired at strange hours, but it was the reality she'd chosen. For all the trouble it caused, her baby wasn't a problem to be solved, and that truth hit her hardest that moment.

All those years solely on her own, being tossed from relative to relative, orphanage to orphanage, struggling with human company, and now she had somebody who knew nothing but her. She was its entire world, and the idea frightened he at the same time it gave her the faintest fleck of thrill. In the doctor's office, Clarice finally allowed herself to think beyond surviving and hiding her pregnancy, to feel the tiniest, rarest positivity towards it.

She pictured what her baby's face would look like, her imagination wrestling with concepts too far-fetched for her. No bigger than a grape. And for maybe the very first time in her condition, Starling felt something close to peace.

They left the clinic with a prescription, a bottle of prenatal vitamins, and a follow-up appointment card. Clarice clutched the ultrasound photos in her free hand, putting it away in her handbag, still unable to fully process what she'd seen.

Clarice and Ardelia Mapp walked down the staircase of the Women's Clinic side by side, and Mapp glanced at the hand Starling tentatively ran over her belly.

"Are you okay?" As usual, Mapp got to the point at once, glancing at Clarice's sky blue eyes.

"I think so," she said quietly, not taking her hand off for the moment. It was sunny and windy as they left, the wind blowing through the trees surrounding the building. Starling looked contemplative in a way Ardelia understood well. "It's just...seeing it, it made it so much more real."

"I know. The heartbeat..." Ardelia trailed off, shaking her head. "I can't believe you're really having a baby."

"Neither can I, sometimes." The redhead said earnestly. Yet for the first time, the future seemed more manageable.

She was hopeful. Hopeful enough to forget that calm, in her world, was what preceded the storm.

.

A few hours later, a reporter studied the pictures of Ardelia Mapp and the renowned Clarice Starling walking down the staircase of a Pregnancy Clinic, Starling's palm against her stomach in an universal gesture. Neither women noticed the photographer lurking behind a nearby tree, nor heard the noise of the photograph being taken.

"Imagine when people hear this story," he spoke to the photographer, smoking a cigarette and delighting at the incongruous tableau. "Bride of Frankenstein, not so untouchable after all."

But the Americans didn't need to paint the image in their minds; the National Tattler would make them a juicy, in-depth canvas regarding the existence of humble American heroine Clarice Starling's first child, and it would be relentless.