Chapter Text
chp.1
Hatred is cumulative.
It burns and burns and burns in my mouth until I can no longer taste the disappointment of fear. But that’s alright, because I still have four other senses, four cursed senses, where I can smell the wet ash and the stench of burnt meat, hear the screams that seem to go on forever, feel the stickiness of blood between fingers that aren’t mine, and see the light of the sun go up, up, and up.
What’s wrong with you, people tend to ask.
I’m born again, with a body that isn’t mine in a foreign world of fantasy and horror, in the years before war. This is what’s wrong with me. I’m a slave, I should assume, to the powers that be, because the fate of this world is already written in stone, engraved in blood, and I’d be a fool to dismantle something so out of my reach. So I live quietly – mute, blind, deaf, and unfeeling.
“I feel as though it’s my responsibility to inform you, Elkie,” Willy says to me one day. “I know you’re protective of our sister, but I discussed it with grandfather and we think that Lara should be the next War Hammer Titan.”
Breathe in, breathe out.
If I could taste, there would be rotten roses on my tongue, thorns piercing into the soft flesh. We’re the Tyburs, an ancient Eldian family lucky enough to live beyond the walls of internment camps, abroad in luxury and nobility. Willy and I sit in his private drawing room, adorned with gold, decadence, and greed that knows no other name than ours. I sit on plush velvet cushions soft enough to sink into like sand, trapping me in, a cage of my own making. My own foolishness.
“You’re telling me before her?” I ask.
Willy Tybur. The heir to the Tybur name. He’s already halfway there, given our father’s poor health and the inability for women to inherit the role. He’s tall, golden, and beautiful, with a penchant for the theatrical. I don’t know if I love him the way I love my sister – soft, sweet, shy, innocent, very much afraid – due to our age difference, but I remain the way I always do: stay unassuming and quiet. His storm grey eyes hone in on my face, in the sort of sadness I always notice when he looks at me, and he leans over to cup a hand on my cheek.
He smiles. It’s a handsome look on him. “Elkie. Lara looks up to you. If you agree with it, grandfather says, then she’ll be willing to take on her duty without hassle.”
Swallow. Push the saliva down.
Lara Tybur. My older sister, one of complete poise and perfection, yet looks up to me, the younger sister, for advice. Perhaps she still thinks of me like a doll to play with and tell me everything about her life. We’re both almost women grown by now, and it’s surreal to look back in the mirror and see this strange, foreign woman.
I love her.
When I came to be in this world, a world of hatred and terror, I clung to her the way an ant clings to fresh fruit. I was a parasite and she, the willing victim.
“It would be helpful if you could break the news,” Willy continues, his hand lingering on my cheek, then sweeping up to brush his pianist fingers through my hair.
If I could feel, there would be needles stabbing through every part of my body that could feel pain. The dead flowers in my mouth wilt and wilt until I could choke on the sopping wet mess of floral mush and detritus, and fungus sprouts inside my lungs and pollutes my insides the way my outside has been forever marred by this foreignness. I would be walking on hot coals with dead feet and carrying boulders heavier than the weight of my purposeful ignorance.
Teeth clench, tongue furled, toes digging into shoe soles.
If I could hear, the screams of millions of lost Eldians would reverberate in my brain for the rest of my life. My ears would bleed. The blood dripping to the ground would sound so sweet.
I practice a smile at my brother. “I have to admit, Willy, that I’m not pleased with Lara’s future being cut off like this. Why her?”
He leans back in his seat. There’s a sad smile on his golden face. He repeats everything the inner family told him to say, that she’s a respectable young lady, so no one would suspect her to be the War Hammer Titan, that she’s intelligent and wise beyond her years, and she doesn’t want to marry and have children anyway, so it’s better off for her to at least service herself to the Tybur name this way. We’re all taught as children to be proficient in hand-to-hand combat and basic weaponry in case one of us needs to take up the Titan mantle, and she always excelled in combat.
I was an excellent student, too.
Breathe in, hold it in, feel the pain in your lungs, realise what it means to suffocate not just mentally.
“Well if you put it like that, the choice is indeed fairly obvious,” I say.
If I could smell the rotting meat of my cowardice, I would finally stare up at the sky and reach up for freedom. I sit in a field of wildflowers, decomposing, with the sourness of my own pathetic self infiltrating the lovely scent of the outside.
Breathe in, breathe out.
Willy laughs. “Of course it is.” Then he holds out a hand. “Are we in agreement, then? Can you help me out here? I don’t want to break the news to Lara alone, she gets scary when surprised.”
And I don’t have to imagine what it would be like to see, because I open my eyes for the first time in many years and look at myself and my life. I hate it. I want to escape. But I don’t want to die, and I don’t want her or anyone else I care about to die. I open my eyes and see an open ocean of wonder, an island of paradise, and a chance to wake up and take control.
“No,” I say.
There’s a mirror in Willy’s drawing room, gilded with glittering gems from slaving internment camps in the nation of the Middle-Eastern Alliance. Marley plans on going to war with them soon. I look in the mirror born from the trembling, bloodied fingers of my slave brothers and sisters, and see myself – this foreign, unnatural woman, with features I’m still not used to.
The grey Tybur eyes stare back.
No matter.
I will fight, I will live, and I will survive.
“No?” Willy echoes back. There’s more shock than anger at my rebellion. The golden child, the golden sun, so beautiful yet so cold.
I stare at him and I smile. “You and grandfather are correct. I’m very protective of my sister. So, don’t make her the War Hammer Titan. Use me instead.”
Elkie Tybur. The second daughter. And second in line for the acquisition of titan powers, because Willy is shocked and amused enough at this outburst to agree, and he somehow convinces the inner family to change their minds. Neither of us sisters had been very enthusiastic about socialising with Marleyan nobles or our prospects of pending marriages, but now maybe I’ll be an aunt. It’ll be awful for her if I force her into a different cage of dresses and vows, but there’s also protection in marriage.
Once she has children, they’ll never again consider her to take the burden of the War Hammer Titan. Too busy tending to our noble name and playing with the children, they assume.
I want her to live a long life.
I don’t tell her any of this. I tell her that the inner family has unanimously decided upon the future family titan, and they chose me. Willy is tricky enough to use this as blackmail in the future if he so desires, but for now, before Lara can even think about trying to change the decision route, this will be enough.
An animal could not scream louder than her. She rages, red in her eyes and mucus in her throat, with trembling hands and a shivering embrace. Once, not if, she discovers that I went behind her back to become the War Hammer Titan in her place, I don’t know if she’ll ever hug me again, so I savour the warmth.
This love smells of a laurel of fresh roses.
She sleeps next to me once all the rage has subsided into exhaustion, curled like a baby, this sweet precious thing. We’re still young, maybe, but I don’t know how old I am still. Reincarnation isn’t exactly a well-researched science – this world prefers to invest its time and effort into military technology and freaky blimp travel. Am I the adult from my previous life or am I the teenager of this current body? Is age cumulative, an average, or inconsequential?
The sun sets. Her skin is the colour of paper under the moonlight trickling through the windows. I kiss her forehead, the last love I can show as a human, and head down to the Tybur manor underground, into stereotypically creepy basements built into ancient cave structures of the mountain.
“You’re a bit late,” Willy teases.
Grandfather sighs. “No matter – she’s here. Come, child, and say your last words as you are now.”
My uncle, a shifter of twelve and a half years, fast asleep thanks to sedatives, lays sprawled on the cave floor. Next to him is a single syringe of glowing evil.
Breathe in, breathe out. Your last breaths of humanity.
The two men step back into a cage built into the wall, strong enough to resist a dumb baby titan’s attacks if the process doesn’t go smoothly.
Perhaps this is wrong, the path that mustn't be, where Ymir will smite me from the heavens for straying from the path that she set out for the demons on Paradis Island. Lara Tybur is meant to die, Eren Jaeger is meant to eat her like the monster he is, and we’re all supposed to root for the extermination of the majority of all life on this planet. But God’s will doesn’t stack up against the final determination of an ignorant fool. Stupid is as stupid does.
I lay down into my own grave. I wish for a garden to eat me alive and allow me the peace of being beautiful, fair, and remembered. I can taste soft petals and fragrance enveloping this ruined tongue of mine.
My last words don’t matter. I pick up the syringe and stare at the sleeping shifter. I’m not the smartest or the strongest, but as long as I reach out to those with all the brains and power, then we can make a plan together, with my own newfound selfishness at their side. Go-getters and losers.
Stab.
The needle goes in.
What occurs next is the thing of nightmares – no, worse than nightmares. It’s when you’re being chased by an unspeakable evil in your dreams, but your legs slow down and it feels as though you’re running through syrup. I run and run and run, but the monster always catches up. In these kinds of nightmares, you’re supposed to wake up right before the monster kills you, but instead I’m stuck in the stasis of the moment right before the dream ends. I’m face to face with the insurmountable horror and there’s nothing to do but stare helplessly.
There’s nothing to be said about losing my mind. It’s completely, utterly gone. I cannot think, cannot feel, cannot sense anything that I had only just gained that day, and the lack of life ruins itself entirely. Vaguely, through an external sixth sense, I see the world, I see the darkness of the cave, I see the body before me, and I see the men in the cage. Silly birds, trapping themselves inside when they cannot escape. With enough time I could tear those bars open and chew their legs off, slurp their intestines out like jelly, and crunch their skulls until the bones scratch against the inside of my mouth.
Eat.
I have to eat. I’m not hungry, but I have to eat. It’s an order that spreads beyond reality, plaguing my entire existence. The true horror is knowing that I don’t want to eat humans but my body moving forward anyway, terribly bloodthirsty. There are no thoughts other than the need to eat. This is the curse of Ymir – eat your friends, family, and loved ones. Cannibalise on their flesh, hear their screams, dig into their delicate spinal cords just as her three daughters did to her. Acknowledge and be aware of these moral crimes against sainthood because that’s what being a titan is all about – cognitive suffering.
And I eat my uncle.
Perhaps other titans in the stories that uncle used to tell Lara and I when we were young had bouts of amnesia, but I do not. He told us, cheerfully in the way kind adults are to inquisitive children, that he doesn’t remember the transformation between human and titan. It happens in the blink of an eye, one moment to the next, with only the heat of his body accompanying the lost memory.
As always, the cosmos laughs at my misfortune. I feel my skin stretch and break, muscle ripping apart, and an undeniable change to my soul sweltering through the core of my very being. The monster inside is evolving into something worse than this immature titan form. I want to scream but I have no mouth during the transformation, so instead the noise bounces and echoes in the emptiness of my mind.
Fifteen metres.
My head nearly crashes into the cave ceiling.
The syrup disappears. I can finally run again and be free. A blanket lifts up, releasing myself from the deep end of the pool, and I lift my head up and gasp. Water droplets burn my throat, but it’s the good kind of pain – the pain that reminds me that I’m still alive.
This name, this language, this culture, this body isn’t mine, but this power is. I stand tall and strong with a moon husk body and a face that exists in the shade of a child’s greatest fears. Strength accents this form, imbued so naturally and effortlessly that I don’t ever want to revert back into a human body. The tiny people in their birdcage are puny and helpless whilst I’m up here. It would be so easy to kill them.
“Elkie!” Willy shouts from all the way down there. “How is it?! You awake in there, yet?!”
There’s fear in his breath. Subconscious or not, it’s the primal taste of fear in the air from the big, tall men of the Tybur family that sends pin-prickles into my fingertips.
I can’t do anything with this face except smile wider, needle teeth sharpening into little lines.
Stop breathing.
You don’t need to breathe in this form.
Willy had never been mean to Lara and I, but the natural disconnect between us from the age difference and in allocation of noble duties meant he and I spent little time together as children. I still don’t know him well, but I know of his confidence and cockiness. His beauty and grace. His status of undeniable, ubiquitous, omnipresent power.
Yet I’m the fifteen-metre tall demon and he’s the human.
I could crush him like an ant.
And there’s the little things that build up over time, the suspicion of his character, the flamboyance in his drama, and the odd way he looks at people, as if plotting the best way to get under their skin, either literally or figuratively.
He’s supposed to die, too, in the future. Maybe I should save him – if he grovels enough.
But fatigue sets in quickly. The titan form sheds away like snakeskin and I emerge, breathless, from the crystal at the feet of the monster. I’m tiny again, a weak human, but the battle has yet to even begin. Willy claps gaudily, grandfather sighs and offers a stiff congratulations on the success of the transformation, and I force myself to look up at them and smile.
I don’t want to die. I want to live, to enjoy life again, to feel the sun on my skin and the breeze through my hair. I want to eat good food and laugh at silly conversations with my sister. I want to learn more about this mesmerising character of a brother, to indulge in secretive gossip of the night whilst leafing through ancient texts of rich history and wonder. I want to stand up, cut down all the shrinking violets of the past, and earn the glory of satisfaction and happiness. I want to live longer than thirteen years from now, in a world that isn’t decimated with hellfire and the footsteps of the devil, and explore all the new lands.
“I might need more training to maintain that form for longer,” I say.
Willy has an odd glint in his eyes – an emotion not even I can name. “Yes,” he agrees easily. “But it shouldn’t take long. You’re a taker, aren’t you?”
The world is bright and beautiful from up here in the skies. The clouds tickle my nose and I sneeze out gold. I want to thrive and be blessed, but I’m not smart. It took me sixteen years to get to this miniscule amount of self-respect after a lifetime of blindness, and I know I don’t have any good plans by myself. Zeke’s plan of ethnic euthanasia – a gentle genocide – seems to be the best method, but I have to look forwards to something brighter and better. I want to play with my future nieces and nephews as they tangle themselves between my legs and run around with toy trains. I want to live.
Right now, there’s only one man on my mind who has the wits and the wiles to think up a master plan. Of course, there ought to be a team of intelligent and capable people working together on this issue, from Marleyan and Eldian perspectives alike, but I can start with just the one, first.
Erwin Smith.