Ten year old Hannibal Smith peered down into the casket containing his grandfather, all dressed up in Alliance military attire. The ceremony was solemn. Faceless military men and women dressed in their best uniforms stood in the background. The rain poured down on the crowd gathered for the funeral but not a single soul moved. This man was loved. Hannibal didn't remember his grandfather so well but from all he heard from his dad, the old dude was apparently a badass. Several combat medals, multiple deployments. This old dude had found every single rare conflict at this point in space-faring human history and threw himself into every single firefight. He remembered the damning report: assassinated by insurrectionists. This poor old man was assassinated.
Ten years later, Hannibal attended a similar funeral, only this time the casket contained his father. Same uniform. Different enemy. Fought valiantly in the First Contact War - his mentor was capped by aliens instead of Humans. His old man was later immortalized in the D.C monument containing the names of all 623 human lives lost in the conflict. Hannibal had three other brothers - Stewart, Mason and John. Stewart in the Alliance Navy was some sort of chief engineer. Mason commissioned from the academy and became an Alliance Marine. He's now supposedly an artillery officer who according to him, gained the admiration and respect out of his entire company. He refuses to elaborate. And John became an N7 Operator. John's kicking ass, taking names and going on missions that are supposedly top secret. Hannibal despises that man. He also loves him to death, though.
Hannibal himself was a rough looking boy. He walked around with a little bit of swagger in his step and was one of the few people in his friend group who wasn't afraid of speaking his mind. Tall at 6'3, with a personality that to others was just as intimidating. But to those who knew him intimately, he wasn't an asshole. He was just headstrong and bold. Deep down, he was contemplative and stubbornly tenacious. His ex admitted that he was, no-shit, secretly the kindest man she ever knew. And where was Hannibal? He's sitting a cozy coffee shop in downtown New York making frappuccinos to comfortable, spoiled teenagers who don't do anything but gossip about celebrities or talk about which Alien races look fuckable. For God's sake, was he this stupid when he was sixteen? He's only twenty-one, though. Yet twenty-one and he's residing in the old Smith-family coffee shop - the special hell that all Smith's who don't serve rot in. He isn't even a worker, he's the god-damned manager. This is it. His life stops here. No excitement, no long-term career. This is where the story of his life ends.
Nah, fuck that. Later that day he went over to the Alliance recruiter to get shipped off as far away as possible from that place. The next day, he was already halfway across the galaxy. He joined, along with tens of thousands of young men who wanted to join to experience what was known as 'the Greatest Moment in Human History'. The human race, confident after it's scuffle in the First Contact War against the Turians, began expanding outward into the galaxy. These Alliance Marines and sailors would spearhead the front into the unknown. Hannibal was now the successor of a 16th-century explorer for the new, new world...or to some, a conquistador.
The way a lot of his friends and family saw it, his leave was pretty abrupt. One of his good friends visited his coffee shop on the day Hannibal left. "Hannibal snapped" he said. "The crazy shithead went over to some blogging teenager, grabbed the mug out of her hands and poured it all over her face. It was the weirdest fucking thing ever. He pranced around, cursed the shit out of his family tree and ripped his 'Smith Coffee' shirt off. Fuck you, he said. Fuck you, you, you and especially you. I'm gonna finally live my life. I'm gonna go kill some aliens." He paused. "To be honest, we don't really miss him much. He was everyone's least favorite Smith."
It didn't seem like Alliance military life changed him much either. He was the same man, just in a spiffy-looking uniform. He was only endowed with military slang and the lethality of an Alliance Marine. He got a nickname too: Cannibal. "Cannibal Smith". The name stuck, and for the rest of his career he would always be remembered as the guy most likely to eat everyone on the ship. The other Marines never seized to poke fun at him. They liked him, though. They could have called him other nicknames - Shorty, Jizzkid, Cousin-fucker, Meat-Slap - and that's just being tame. And Hannibal liked military life. He hated the monotony of it, but he liked the fact that he was doing something useful for a change, just like his brothers. He liked a couple of the guys that he was with too. Many were immature souls like him who joined up for different reasons - they wanted to get an education, they wanted to fight Batarian-pirates like in the commercials, they wanted to escape abusive homes and some even wanted to serve their country. Most were cool. Some talked shit all the time. A couple of pussies, a few badasses who owned up to what they said. The young LT in charge of his Platoon wasn't bad either. He was modest and soft-spoken, but he cared and tolerated Smith when he got his stupid-ass in trouble from time-to-time.
Eventually fate had it that Lance Corporal "Cannibal" Smith was deployed to Torfan to take out some "googly-eyed" Batarian criminals who hit Elysium a while back. The entire pirate compound was assaulted by Alliance forces. As recorded in the codex, the mission would go down as one of the deadliest battles in Alliance history. Cannibal remembered it all very clearly. Some brilliant Alliance tactician thought to drop his team in the middle of a killzone during the initial assault. This was one of those rare times that Alliance Marines didn't have the upper-hand. After the operation most of the buddies in Cannibal's platoon were dead, some of them shredded by the brutal and almost-archaic technologies of Batarian forces - nets, spikes, spears, you name it. The LT was blown to bits immediately after landing on the planet. Poor guy. The ones who were left went crazy and spent the rest of their lives in the psych ward. And Hannibal? He was knocked out by a concussive shot that probably wasn't even supposed to hit him. And there the least favorite Smith lay, while dozens of Alliance Marines around him were fighting and dying.
After the battle, he spent the next few weeks recovering and being evaluated in the med-bay. He was meritoriously promoted to Corporal. He found out that some crazy Alliance officer from another company led his squad into the heart of the base and killed every single last Batarian inside. Haters and hippies dubbed him, 'the Butcher of Torfan'. Ha, fuck those guys. Keep doing what you do, Butcher. Get some, Butcher.
Eventually the Butcher of Torfan grew into the famous Commander Shepard who - a few years later - saved the Citadel from the Geth. In the meantime, on the other side of the galaxy, "Hannibal the Cannibal" Smith's enlistment ended and he was back in the coffee shop, back in a peaceful earthling community that was just as alien to him as a Quarian starship. People who heard of his deployment scowled at him when they heard he came back from Torfan. "The Butcher's Minion", they'd call him behind his back. Friends, family flocked to him back home asking him shit. What was it like? Was it scary? Or his favorite: did you kill anyone? And they had the gall to walk away, disappointed after he told them that he got knocked out in his first and only fight. Jesus Christ. These people wouldn't last five minutes out there. Well neither did he, technically.
And eventually, as the Alliance got more prominent in the galaxy, humanity was growing with a confidence that bordered arrogance. They finally had a spot on the galactic council. They saved the Citadel. They made the Geth fleet their bitch. No more, were humans viewed as an aggressive, inferior species. They were the envy of the entire galaxy, looked up to for their resourceful-ness. Turian generals sought out humans for expertise on warfare. Salarians collaborated with human scientists on high-class expeditions. Krogans sought to recruit human mercenaries into their ranks - giving the puny, squishy little meat-sacks a chance to prove their worth. Asari around the galaxy took a special liking to human men and women. Any Alliance soldier who looked half-decent in his or her uniform didn't last long before being pulled into bed by an Asari wanting to see what it was like to fuck a "courageous, adventurous and dirty" human. This inter-galactic wave of human pride rubbed off on him and he decided: fuck it. He took another stroll to the New York recruiter's officer and found the same guy who had signed him up a few years back. His uniform looked pristine. The curious man looked up at Hannibal, amusingly.
"Oh? I thought you went back to being a preppy-little barista."
Hannibal smiled. "Give me a break. I'm not done yet."