Chapter Text
It was a bitter winter, barren and harsh, and Erwin Smith was still a young boy. He knew little of anything, then. There was everything to discover and nothing to fear. It was a wondrous state; a blank canvas, a burgeoning. It was the season of genesis.
Erwin’s father was a clever man, an academic. This, Erwin supposed he had known for all his life; when people spoke to him there was admiration in their eyes. He taught the younger kids of the town – Erwin included – and Erwin cherished his lessons deeply. Anything seemed interesting as long as it was told to him by his father.
He wore glasses that were small and round, always pushed down to the very tip of his nose. This way, no matter who he was speaking to, he managed to appear the taller man. He was always looking down at you.
Erwin was only let into the office when he was old enough to start school. It was a small room, clad from floor to ceiling in bookshelves that were stacked to the brim. It smelled of old wood and dust. Erwin knew it as the safest place on earth.
The desk was supplied with a chess board that looked pristine enough for Erwin to know it was one of the more well kept possessions of his father’s. While being taught the rules of the game, Erwin developed a habit of second guessing. “Is this what I’m supposed to do?”, he would ask his father, and he wondered for the same reason he wondered anything else: he wanted to know the correct action, the optimal one. He did not want to fail, especially in front of his father. He wanted to know what his father knew, even when it seemed like he knew everything. Erwin wanted to understand.
His father would trick him, of course, telling him to make ineffective moves simply because he knew that Erwin would listen. And though Erwin suspected a pattern, he could not stomach avoiding it. He was bound by his curiosity, by his want to believe.
He never won a game of chess against his father.
It was to teach him some kind of lesson; Erwin knew that, too. It made him feel small.
The foregoing autumn, his father had grabbed him by the shoulder and told him, “Your trust is the most valuable thing you will ever own.” There had been a toughness to his voice that it was usually void of. “You must ward it. Never lay it in places where it does not belong, with someone who is not deserving of it. Never get too comfortable. It will be the end of you.”
It still did not make sense, even after all of Erwin’s losses. Erwin trusted his father, admired his knowledge; he could not see why that was wrong, why it meant that he had to lose.
The things his father later revealed to him outside of school were different. They seemed of greater importance, Erwin thought; the Royal Government, the Walls and the Outside, and everything his father theorized was beyond them. He quickly came to find it more interesting than anything else. It was unexplored, secretive. It was practically begging to be traversed.
Thus, Erwin learned more in his ninth year of life than he could have ever imagined was available for discovery. It did not feel as delightful as he had expected.
His father soon began expecting more of Erwin. He grew more stern, even cold and hard at times. He was an unrelenting man, but he meant well. He wanted Erwin’s best. For the first time, Erwin felt afraid; not of his father, but of disappointing him.
Erwin thought there would never be anyone in the world he admired as much as his father. He revered him like a God. Being his son felt like something sacred.
Erwin’s mother was a much softer woman, blurred at the edges. She was kind and loving, and she treated Erwin as if he were the most precious thing in the world. By the brightness of his father’s glory, she often appeared hazy, though it wasn’t unwillingly; she tended to stand back and allow him to excel. Regardless, Erwin knew she was clever, but she bore a different kind of intellect to his father. Where he was well-read and educated, she had a certain sense for even the things he did not. She knew how to act in any situation, how to solve every problem, how to repair every broken thing.
She was wise. Erwin never dared to look up to his mother in the way he did his father, simply because he knew he would never be quite as cunning and apt as she was. He adored her to the extent that he almost grew jealous of her.
The history books Erwin borrowed from the office were long and difficult, and he often needed his father’s help in deciphering them. They were factual retellings, bland and uneventful. It was not until his mother showed him the collection of fiction she kept hidden in a cupboard, that he fell enamored with literature.
They sat together in the blossoming grass by the river and she read them aloud to him, and he thought that this is what he had been missing before. The stories of lives so unlike his own; of people who reminded him of himself, nonetheless – it all pulled him in until he felt as though he were tangled up in it. When he told his mother as much, she smiled warmly at him. “My wonderful boy. That’s because you’re kind. You care so much that it entrances you.”
To be entranced in affection sounded sweeter than being tangled in it, Erwin decided. His empathy was a warm embrace.
Erwin’s mother taught him about cause and consequence, about adapting to your surroundings and creating solutions. After he returned home from school, she would put Erwin on her lap and make him question what his father had taught him. Erwin disassembled it and put it back together repeatedly in new and unique ways, until she nodded in satisfaction and let him go.
When he played chess against his mother, he never won, either.
They had moved the board out into the garden, and the sun beamed on them as they dueled. After hours had passed in silence, she spoke.
“Do you think I should move this here?” She held her white bishop above one of the squares. Erwin observed that, were she to make the move, he could capture it and gain an advantage.
“Yes,” he told her, wary of keeping his tone neutral.
She nodded once, and placed it down. Erwin was quick to seize it, and he looked up at her as he put the piece to the side. She looked vaguely amused, in a far-off way, smiling faintly at the board. Moving her queen over a few squares, she checked him.
He frowned, staring dumbly at the bishop he had lost the game trying to capture.
“What is it your father always says about trust?” She mused, moving to tidy up the pieces on the board. “Remember what I have taught you. Do not fear trust simply because your father says so. Study it, question it, but do not fear. You must learn to wield it.”
Erwin was the most clever student in his class, more well spoken and matured than the rest of his peers. Most of them despised him for it. He did not care. What he had learned was more important than any of that. He was bursting at the seams with it; he had to share it with someone, or he would go mad with it.
It cost him his father’s life.
In the morning, Erwin woke to wails of distress from his mother. She was folded in on herself on the kitchen floor, grasping the hairs on her nape as she swayed in place.
When she calmed at last, she quietly explained to him that his father had passed. He had gone to a town far from theirs, and had been in a terrible accident. He looked at her tear-streaked face and he felt nothing. He felt hollow. He thought that he should cry, or hug his mother’s shaking frame, and he did not do anything.
It was his fault, he realized. This was what he had caused. Guilt washed over him instantaneously, heavy and ruthless, and his knees buckled under its weight. His mother reached out to hold his hand across where they both sat on the ground. He could see in her eyes that she realized it, too. It was his fault.
Erwin did not sleep for five days on end. He barely even made an attempt. Rather, he fought to stay awake, wallowing in his regret until he finally heard the birds chirp outside his bedroom window and saw rays of sunlight falling through the curtains.
He and his mother did not speak much during the week that followed. She would cook meals for him and then retreat into the office without a word. Erwin worried that she never made any for herself. He had no appetite; he swallowed down a few bites and then threw the rest of it out.
The funeral took place on the two week anniversary of his father’s death. Erwin walked with the rest of the attendees down the winding roads that led to the site. It was a cold day, clouds hanging low in the sky and casting their shadows over the cemetery as rain poured down furiously. Erwin didn’t mind. He did not seem to mind anything much these days. Even his guilt had vanished, leaving something worse in its wake — an emptiness as bitter and dark as the day of his father’s burial.
The service began, and Erwin looked to his mother.
If he had thought she seemed faint in the presence of his father, it was nothing compared to what remained of her without him.
The flush that usually adorned her cheeks had disappeared as her features had hollowed out over the latest fortnight. She shivered furiously. She looked sickly. Perhaps she was. Nothing that was characteristic of his mother seemed to exist anymore. Erwin barely even recognized her.
It did not take more than a couple of months before she was so ill Erwin had to request a physician. He was told that there was nothing wrong with his mother, she bore no sicknesses and she did not even have a fever. The physician declared, simply, that it would pass soon.
When Erwin entered the kitchen a few days later, she had collapsed on the floor.
It reminded him of the morning after his father had died, except she was not swaying or shivering. She was not moving at all. Blood lay gathered around her head, weaved through her hair; she must have hit her head when she fell. Erwin stared at her for minutes, maybe hours, before he dared to walk the last few meters over to her. He knew what he would find.
The men of the Garrison did not know where to place him, after that. He had no other living relatives, no close friends whose parents could take him in. They decided he will enter into the Cadet Corps a year early, if simply for the lack of a better placement for him.
Erwin was solitary, at last, though it did not feel like it. His parents’ presence lingered around him constantly, reminding him of what he had done.
The love Erwin Smith carried for his late parents was bottomless and heavy, and it pulled at his chest. It took up all the space he had within him, leaving no room for any other feeling. He could hardly bear it, all of this affection that neither of them was alive to receive, yet he had no other place to put it. He felt it so clearly and thoroughly it left him wanting to rip into his skin, if only to be able to tear it out at its core.
There was a cavity in his heart where he now held the remnants of his love, and in its entrapment, the fondness had distorted into sorrow and agony.
And then, on the morning of his first day as a Cadet, he woke up and he could barely feel it. Instead, the guilt he had managed to suppress returned, so profound that he mistaked it for anger. He thought it would be the end of him. It was almost a relief.
He was invigorated, his spirit rekindled, and he was goaded into action, at last.
Sorrow morphed into suspicion; someone as clever as his father had been taken away from him, and Erwin thought they must be hiding something. His parents had taught him to be clever, to question, and he would not let them down, this time.
Guilt created hatred; hatred for everyone who had a hand in his loss, but mostly hatred for himself. His guilt had come down on him, engulfing him completely. He hated himself for what he had done. He could never be forgiven.
Love bred devotion, obligation, duty. He owed his life to his father, and he would use it to honor him. He would do everything he could.