Chapter 1: Uncomfortable Introductions
Chapter Text
August 1st, 835
Pieck remembers remarkably well the first time she realized the world wasn’t what she thought it had been. She hadn’t been stupid, far from it. She knew the armbands her family, and everyone she knew, wore were compulsory rather than a choice, and that the way the gate guards jeered and hollered as they passed wasn’t right. Her father reminded her of it every time they walked past. They’re small minded, Piku. You don’t talk to people like that, you’re better than that.
Pieck knew what being Eldian was, but the implications of it were lost on her. Her father had a series of state sponsored storybooks on the highest shelf of their bookcase, but he would never read them to the siblings when they asked, unlike every other book on the shelves.
The insults shouted from her commander confused her instead of being scathing, the shame Reiner confessed to her between exercises seemed excessive. Virtually everyone she knew was Eldian, and most of them were lovely people.
But Pieck had never been outside of her little corner of the world before that day, she really had no idea. Her father had left her younger brother, Dietrich, behind with their neighbors, so he could take Pieck beyond the Liberio Internment Zone’s intimidating walls.
She was going to be seven, she recalled her father saying, and seven was old enough to pick up your own birthday cake.
Convincing Pieck to leave the house that day had been hard enough. She had always been a shy child, but in hindsight Pieck wishes she’d made it harder. Maybe they wouldn’t have ended up leaving at all, cake be damned. Her father had to wrestle her into the nice lace dress Mrs. Kohler had sewn her, and then dragged her down the stairs of their small townhouse in order to get her shoes on her, and then finally held her arms behind her back so he could fashion the yellow armband into place. He wheezed and panted through the effort, but the panic wouldn’t allow her to cooperate with his efforts.
She’d felt bad putting up such a fight for her sickly father, between her Warrior training and his weakening lungs she was already getting to be stronger than him. When he’d started coughing after leaving their front door, she felt awfully guilty for how she’d hurt him.
Pieck settled down walking through the familiar streets of Liberio, the polite greetings from those she saw nearly every day doing its part to settle her nerves, even in the face of where she was going. Pieck had never been outside of Liberio without her group of fellow Warrior Candidates, and that’s how she liked it. When she was with Commander Magath and her classmates, she was important, she wasn’t something the Marleyans were scared of and was instead a point of pride for her warmongering country. Now that it was just herself and her father and their day pass to leave the internment zone, she was nobody. She had heard things of what happened to Eldians outside of the safety of their walls, and their yellow armbands and permit to leave would only do so much to shield them from such treatment.
When they did reach the edge of town and the gate into Marleyan Liberio, Pieck tightened her grip on her father’s arm, hiding from the tall guards behind his leg. She didn’t know what her father could or would do to stop them should they set out to hurt her, but she wasn’t rational at that age. Her father was safe because he was her father, not because he could do more to defend her than she could to defend herself.
“Exit permit?” The gate guard on the left, a young man no older than 20 had asked her father. But this child of a man held their lives in his hand at this minute. He could send them to prison, send them to the penal colony (“Paradise”), or just gun them down here if he decided their papers weren’t up to his standards.
Her father procured the pass from his pocket with little trouble, handing it to the guard without a word.
“Gerard and…” the guard looked from her father, and down to her, “Pieck Finger, day pass.” The guard continued to stare at her, but with no more recognition than one would have for a rat, “For what purpose?”
Pieck blinked, trying to digest his words. Was he asking her? Right as she looked at her father to request he answer on her behalf, the guard shook his head and squatted down to her level, “No, you. For what purpose are you leaving the internment zone?” The guard, ‘O. Mueller’ she could see now that his nametag was within her line of sight, asked with an increasingly hostile tone.
“We’re going to buy a birthday cake, sir,” Pieck kept her tone politely neutral like she’d been taught to, even as every outcome of this situation rattled around in her brain. She didn’t say more than she needed to, just tried to appease the Marleyan soldier.
“A birthday cake. Is it for you?” Mueller asked her, a slight grin pulling at the corner of his mouth. When she nodded to confirm, he continued, “How old are you turning?”
Pieck was cautious, to say the least. Her father had gone still next to her, gripping her hand as if one of them was going to try to drag her away from him at a moment’s notice. The other guard hadn’t moved from where he was reading, leaned against the gate during the entire interaction, but she knew better than to question her father’s assessment.
“I’m turning seven, sir, this Thursday.”
“Alright, then.” Mueller stood up without any further preamble, and moved out of their way, “Curfew’s six p.m., Gerard-and-Pieck Finger,” he said, handing the permit back.
To say her father dragged her out of range of those guards would be understating it. She felt just as strong a need to get away from them, though, the twisting anxiety in her gut getting to be unbearable.
“Pieck,” Her father said after they’d been walking for a few minutes, “Promise me you won’t talk to that soldier, not unless you have to.”
Pieck perked up at the odd request, quirking her head to the side, “Why?”
“He isn’t safe. Not as safe as soldiers can be,” He answered.
She didn’t question that. She had no reason to. Her and her brother’s safety was the most important thing to her father, and Pieck wouldn’t question the things he set forth for her as rules in order to keep her safe.
The rest of the walk to the bakery was quiet and without remark. She held his hand, and trusting he wouldn’t let her run into anything, she stared at her feet so she could count her steps. She skipped pavers, made sure her feet fit into them a certain way, until she’d completely forgotten she was beyond the internment zone at all.
Pieck only looked up when her dad pulled her towards a green glass-paneled door. He pushed it open, causing a bell to chime, and ushered Pieck to walk in before he followed.
The shop was quaint, an L shaped counter taking up the right and backside of the small rectangular room. Through a window, Pieck could see a kitchen opposite the door, a bulky middle-aged man using a metal tool to remove trays of bread from large ovens.
It was a woman of about the same age as the man in the kitchen who came to greet them, wiping her hands on a flour sack towel. Her smile dampened slightly, Pieck noticed, at the sight of their armbands, but she didn’t elect to say anything about them.
“Good morning, folks. Are you picking up an order, or can I help you pick some things out?” She asked. In Pieck’s opinion her tone of voice was frightfully fake, but who was she to comment? Every interaction she had with a Marleyan was fake.
“Picking up, then we’ll be out of your hair. A blue cake, for Finger?” Her father stated, letting go of her hand.
The woman hummed an acknowledgement and walked to a large book full of pasted in notes, trailing her finger down a ledger until she presumably found the order to which Pieck’s father was referring. “Right. Since you paid the deposit that’ll be… one hundred and fifty dollars.”
Pieck’s father took a money clip out from the inside pocket of his jacket and thumbed out the cash.
Pieck wandered about, walking up to the case and looking at the pretty pastries and cookies behind the glass. She didn’t touch her hands to it, having been warned before about leaving tiny fingerprints and making more work for others.
The man in the back smiled at Pieck and waved at her, and Pieck waved back. Not everyone who lived outside of the internment zone hated her, see?
“-requested that it say my daughter’s name, I believe,” Pieck perked up at the sound of her father’s voice, his tone the strained one he used on her and Dirk when he didn’t want to yell.
“Yes, you did, but we weren’t sure if you were going to come in. I’m sorry, I think it’ll still hold candles though,” she stated, though Pieck thought she didn’t sound sorry at all.
Her father muffled a sound of discontent. He set the cash he’d been holding above the open cake box on the counter neatly folded, so that his hand wouldn’t touch hers, and once she picked it up to count it and confirm the amount he stepped back, giving her space.
Soon they were heading out of the bakery, cake secured in a canvas bag in her father’s left hand, while she held onto his right. He wanted to get home soon for the party they had planned that afternoon, and while Pieck accepted that explanation, she couldn’t help but feel that wasn’t the only reason.
Wives sweeping their floors out of their door onto the street stopped to stare at them, Pieck noticed other children crossing the street to avoid walking by them, along with mumbled insults from people walking to work. It wasn’t as bad as it could be, Pieck reminded herself, but it didn’t make the blatant ridicule hurt less.
A sweaty man maneuvering a couch out of his front door with obvious difficulty stopped when Pieck and her father were just about to cross his path, looking them over. He snapped at Pieck’s father like he was summoning a dog, “You, Eldian, come here.” He ordered.
Her father cursed under his breath, and handed the canvas bag to Pieck, “Stay here,” he pointed to a section of wall next to them, “Do not speak to anyone, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Pieck felt that familiar knife-panic boiling up in her stomach again, especially when her father rounded the corner with the man and she found herself alone beside a street that was becoming increasingly populated.
Maybe ten minutes after her father disappeared, a well-dressed man and woman approached Pieck. The woman was smiling wide, and it didn’t comfort Pieck in the way she assumed it was supposed to.
“Hello Dear, are you lost?” She asked, looking Pieck over. Before Pieck could answer, she spoke again, “You look nice, what do you have in your bag?”
“My birthday cake,” answered Pieck, trying to be polite, “I’m waiting for my father to return.”
The man spoke next, his voice a deep bass that startled Pieck, “Where is your father?”
“He’ll be back soon,” Pieck whispered.
“That’s not what I asked,” He inched closer to her, and between him and the woman Pieck was cornered to the wall.
Pieck swallowed, and tried again, “I don’t know where he went, I’m sorry.”
The woman nudged a knee against Pieck’s hip, pushing her up against the man, “Do you like her dress, darling?” She asked, staring right at Pieck while she addressed who Pieck assumed was her husband. The sharpness of the woman’s knee in her hip was a pinching sort of pain, but she didn’t move an inch.
“Not really,” he muttered, grabbing Pieck’s shoulder and starting to squeeze, pulling at the sleeve seam in a way that would surely bruise her skin later.
“H-Hey,” Pieck began to interject, but she couldn’t continue her sentence when he ripped the top half of the sleeve from the bodice, making Pieck yelp.
“Oh! Jumpy little thing, aren’t you?” The woman laughed like she’d paid Pieck a compliment, but she dug her manicured nail into Pieck’s nice lace collar to rip it apart either way.
Pieck couldn’t contain her tears, not as the man started to snap off her mother-of-pearl buttons that she knew cost her father a small fortune and place them into his pocket. The autumn breeze made Pieck shiver, now that her dress hung open to reveal her white underdress.
She didn’t know how she’d tell Mrs. Kohler that the dress she’d worked hard on making Pieck for her birthday was ruined. Maybe Pieck could find some buttons on a dress she didn’t wear anymore and fix it before the party.
Pieck barely noticed the woman wiping away her rapidly-falling tears, or the way they hurried off when her father began to approach. She looked up when he stood in front of her, saying words she couldn’t hear over the rush of blood in her ears.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
That only earned her a frown. Oh. That must have been the wrong thing to say.
She watched as her father removed his armband and his coat, draping the coat over Pieck’s shoulders and slipping the band back on over his sweater.
“Don’t apologize, you did nothing wrong. Let’s get home, Piku.”
December 28th, 836
Pieck used to tell people, proudly and boisterously when her little brother was born, that he was her favorite thing ever. She had only been four, but in the wake of the loss of her mother, she’d been forced to help her dad however she could. She got really good at fetching the things baby Dirk needed or holding him while their father warmed a bottle.
She’d barely remembered her mother, due to losing her at such a young age. Toxemia stole indiscriminately from happy families, and just as soon as her brother was placed into her father’s arms for the first time, her mother was already shaking and convulsing against the nurses who were trying to hold her. At four years old, Pieck hadn’t understood anything more than her mother was acting strange, and it scared her. But now at eight she knew everything.
Watching her boy grow up, Pieck was sure that she was born to be an older sister. Their little family of three wasn’t perfect, with Pieck going to warrior training and their dad working long hours, but it was their family, and they loved one another.
Pieck was sure that eight was her favorite birthday thus far. The previous August she’d made cookies while her dad was at work, and when he returned home with her brother in tow, he told her the best news. Eight was old enough to watch her brother by herself.
While the rest of Liberio, and Marley as a whole, celebrated Christmas and the coming of the new year, the internment zone was quarantined with plague, the holiday season cancelled in the wake of a rapidly spreading outbreak.
Pieck had read in the newspaper that it wasn’t a severe illness, only children and the elderly caught it. Which to Pieck was a load of hullabaloo. Everyone knew a child, everyone knew someone elderly. And while Pieck was just barely old enough to be safe, her brother certainly wasn’t.
She watched him day in and day out, wheezing and coughing hard enough to shake his entire body. Even as Pieck tried to give him sips of clear broth, he couldn’t keep down any of it. She could barely stand to watch it, but seeing as she received time off from Warrior training for the holiday season and her father still had to work, Dirk was her responsibility during the day, and during the night if her father couldn’t be roused.
Pieck didn’t mind. She was good at staying awake for long stretches and loving someone wasn’t just caring for them during the good times, it was the bad times too. Vomit made her cringe, but she knew the walk to the Laundry by heart, and she was just grateful that it wasn’t her who had to deal with Dirk’s tiny, soiled clothes.
“Piku,” Dirk whispered in the afternoon, his lungs tired but calmed down from constant coughing fits, “Can you read my book?”
Pieck rolled her eyes at the silly familial nickname but climbed into the dining chair she’d dragged to his bedside. She picked up the red plain covered novel and opened it to read to her brother.
The Railway Children wasn’t a particularly complex book, if you asked Pieck. But, it wasn’t for her, it was for Dirk, who thought trains were the cat’s pajamas. When his eyes closed halfway through the second chapter, she didn’t think much of it. He needed sleep to get better, and thus Pieck kept reading so he would have adequate background noise for his dreams.
When Dirk hadn’t so much as coughed or sneezed in his sleep in over an hour, Pieck slid out of her chair and walked over to Dirk to check his temperature. When she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead and found him to be indescribably hot, she jumped as if his skin electrocuted him. Dirk had been burning up for days, never dropping below 102 degrees even though her father and Pieck tried everything to bring it down, but it going up wasn’t something Pieck was prepared to deal with.
“Dirk,” Pieck whispered to her brother, shaking his shoulder, “Dirk wake up.” When he didn’t move, Pieck frowned. Was he that tired? His breath was steady, but shallow, tight in his upper chest in a way that made Pieck anxious for a reason she couldn’t understand. She decided water would be a good idea. Water cooled you down, and he was sweating through his pajamas by the second.
When she returned with the glass, she was shaking. Climbing the stairs had been a battle, nearly spilling water with every step. She set the glass carefully on Dirk’s side table, and tried again to wake him.
“Dietrich, I got you water,” she whispered in his ear. All she got in return was a wheezy breath.
Her mind raced - she didn’t know how to deal with this. She had been told that he would sleep a lot, and that she needed to keep her brother clean and hydrated and entertained if he needed it.
“I’ll get you medicine, mkay?” She’d seen her dad and the doctor give it to Dirk, it couldn’t be that hard.
She sat on the top of the stairs and used her hands to move her weight down each stair. Pieck shook so violently with anxiety that she was sure if she tried to walk down them normally she’d fall, in spite of the railing. Maybe she needed to eat too, she couldn’t think of the last time she had.
That wasn’t what was important right now though. What was important was making her brother better.
The brown glass bottle of pills sat with all the other household medications, in the short cabinet overtop the sink.
Pieck had a short stool that allowed her to reach the normal cabinets, but she wasn’t meant to get into that one. Her eyes scanned the cramped kitchen, thinking over her options.
Fine, she could do this.
Pieck walked up to the sink and ignored how bad of an idea this was. Grabbing the edge of the sink counter, she straightened herself up so she could swing her weight up and onto the countertop. Maneuvering in the cramped space, the basin of the sink of course making up most of the standing room, Pieck managed to straighten her lithe figure up to stand, balancing her bare feet on the thin strip of counter between the basin and the front of the cabinets.
It was precarious, but this was a short term set up.
“Dietrich, Dietrich, Dietrich…” Pieck mumbled his name aloud over and over, like she’d somehow forget it. Most of the medicines were over the counter concoctions, meant for pain relief or typical colds, but her ailing father had his own fair amount of medicines up here.
Finally Pieck’s hand wrapped around the right bottle, pink capped with a name Pieck couldn’t begin to try and pronounce.
Getting down was a little harder than getting up, the bottle held delicately in her mouth so she could balance her way back down to the floor with all of the grace of a rock down a drain pipe.
Pieck huddled on the kitchen floor, and read the label carefully. Beneath Dirk’s name and the medication’s wizard name, the dosing instructions were listed with vocabulary Pieck had to chew on for a little longer than she’d admit.
“Okay… crush one tablet…” Pieck extricated a single white pill and placed it on a spare piece of clean counter amongst the mess. She crushed it into as fine a powder as she could with the bottom of the pill bottle, and then read the next instruction.
“Mix with soft food or drink,” Pieck nodded, mostly for herself, and went searching in their pantry.
The time of year meant that it was particularly bare, but Pieck managed to find a small jar of applesauce near the back. Popping the seal, she sniffed it. It seemed fine.
Pieck felt proud of herself bringing the bowl of dosed applesauce upstairs to her brother. She barely shook this time.
“Dirk I have medicine,” Pieck announced into their bedroom. He was still unmoving in bed.
She walked in and set the bowl down, stirring the applesauce as she went, “Come on, sit up.”
He didn’t move.
“Dirk,” Pieck set the bowl down and crawled onto the bed, grabbing Dirk by the shoulders and giving him a good shake. Instead of groaning at her and trying to roll away like she expected, he was limp in her arms.
Pieck startled, “Dirk? Dietrich? Baby?” Her voice was starting to break, and she could hear it.
She had seen before in training, when someone would press their fingers into someone’s wrist to check for a pulse. Hesitantly, she raised her trembling hand to his wrist, pressing down softly beside the tendon. Pieck saw how pale he was, how blue in the lips, but being unable to find a heartbeat in his tiny wrist was confirmation that it was real.
She knew she was screaming, but she couldn’t hear it. Her vocal cords ripped and throbbed with the effort screaming exerted, but all Pieck could hear was her own heartbeat. She fell back from the body- her brother, gracelessly crashing her back into the wall. Tears welled up in her eyes faster than she could breathe through them, to attempt to control herself.
She briefly wondered if Commander Magath would be disappointed to see her crying over one corpse. She saw dead people, no, corpses, every day, and she watched them die. She wasn’t a stranger to death even at such a tender age. What was one in a sea of so many?
At some point she emptied her stomach into the wastebasket beside her, but she doesn’t remember it happening. She was too busy keeping her eyes pinned to Dirk. She was his big sister, she was supposed to watch him. She had failed in her endeavor, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do now. Her eyes burned from being pinned open for so long. She failed at watching him before, she wouldn’t fail at watching over him now.
Pieck barely heard the front door open four hours later, but she knew it was her father. She could see the clock, from where she sat as the unmoving sentry for her little brother. It had been time for him to come home, he was even a few minutes late, but Pieck hadn’t considered what she would say when confronted with her failure. Her father would hate her, there was no doubt.
Eight was not old enough to go to a funeral.
Pieck had watched her father, her last living relative, dress in his fine black suit that morning. His yellow armband was the only stitch of color on his solemn person, and for the first time, Pieck wishes he could go without it. It wasn’t fair that he had to adhere to such a thing in his mourning. They’d already had to return Dirk’s tiny armbands the day after he passed, so the government was aware of what her father was going through. The indignity made something boil in Pieck’s stomach, a feeling she’d never experienced before.
While Pieck wasn’t attending, she did want to honor her brother. She hadn’t been able to protect him, but this was the least she could do. Pieck only owned one fully black dress at that age, and it was a bit short for the cold months. This would be the last time she wore it, and after this it would be another little girl’s funeral dress. Mrs. Kohler, who was staying behind to watch Pieck, would have to make her a new one.
Her father told her over and over, up until he left with the tiny coffin, that it wasn’t her fault. There was nothing she could have done, and that she’d done a very good job taking care of him. Better than he could’ve done, he said. He didn’t mention the stolen medication from the forbidden cabinet even if the evidence was all but hidden. He wasn’t an angry man, but Pieck more than made up for it with her own self-disappointment.
It was just her and her father now, and what had been much too small of a home for the three of them felt ridiculously large when it was only two. Going about their daily routines together felt ridiculous to Pieck. She wasn’t needed anymore. She’d been Dietrich’s older sister, and now she was nothing.
But, even that wasn’t necessarily true. She was a Warrior Candidate, the pride of her neighborhood and allegedly one of the best in her country. She was good enough to kill, to end thousands and thousands of lives. To inherit one of the nine and become a hero.
Pieck didn’t think any of that mattered now. She’d give it all up to be good enough to save a life, just the one.
Chapter 2: You Selfish Asshole
Chapter Text
July 8th, 843
The summer before Pieck turned fifteen was one for the history books, when it came to the heat bearing down on the metropolis of Liberio. Despite having officially been chosen to inherit the Cart Titan, Pieck could do nothing but smite the gods for sending such unfavorable weather for her to train through.
Out in the training yard with her cohorts, Annie, Bertholdt, Marcel, Porco, Reiner, and Zeke, Pieck raced from side to side around obstacles to try and outdo Reiner. Whenever she obliged any kind of competition like this, she couldn’t help but run through their individual competency assessments, that she surely wasn’t supposed to see, in the back of her mind.
Sure, Reiner was larger and thus had more power behind any motion compared to her, but he was also thick and bulky muscle, whereas she was all lean. Pieck was light as a feather on her feet, stepping around obstacles as if she could fly. Like in most things, it came down to execution. Their burdens and benefits left them closely matched, now it was a matter of who could do it better. Everything in training came down to strategy, in Pieck’s opinion, rather than inborn ability or luck.
By the time she’d completed three bouts on the course with Reiner, losing twice and winning once, she was ready to call it quits. Sweat had her braided black hair stuck to the back of her neck, and the beads of it running down her back had her shivering in disgust. Going home and taking a nice and cold ice bath sounded perfect, both to soothe her aching muscles and to bring her skin temperature down to something more reasonable.
Pieck moved to the edge of the training yard to gather her possessions, exchanging goodbyes and other pleasantries, along with promises to catch up with one another at the event they’d all be attending that evening. Pieck thought while she shoved her water flask and other bits into her bag about how silly it was to shove hundreds of people into a greenhouse in this weather. They had the foresight to schedule it for after sunset, but only barely. Not long enough after to let things cool down to a bearable temperature.
But it was the Cart Titan, Liesl Goodwin’s, last birthday, and Marley would use an influential person such as Liesl to both show their wealth and their might as a country. Every Titan shifter who wasn’t currently deployed was going to be in that building, along with each of their inheritors. Pieck noticed, after only a few weeks of officially being the Cart Titan’s inheritor, that she was treated less harshly, like before, and more as a commodity. A spectacle. Her fellow inheritors (only Marcel and Annie as of now, the brass was still deliberating over the rest of the boys) told her they noticed the same, receiving less sneers about the sins of their ancestors, and more questions about their availability, their families, their preferences. Pieck tried to take the brunt of it from Annie, seeing as she had five years on the girl and the questions they were fielding weren’t fitting for the ears of a ten-year-old.
Lost in her rumination on why the attention on her and her comrades changed, Pieck only barely registered Zeke Jaeger coming up to walk beside her. They lived roughly in the same direction, so him ‘escorting’ her wasn’t particularly rare, but considering all of the strange and odd concepts that had been filling her head as of late, she was still off put.
“Hey, you did good beating Reiner at that last turn,” Zeke began to praise. He slipped her bag off of her shoulder, and put it over his own, “I thought you were going to lose again.”
Pieck glanced up at Zeke. He had a foot of height on her, and the sun was right over his shoulder. That’s why she was glaring, no other reason. “Right. Thanks, Zeke.”
“You’re welcome. While I’ve got you here, I was wondering, are you going to the Gala with Galliard? Porco, not Marcel.” Zeke’s word vomit wasn’t as endearing as he thought it was, and Pieck had to fight to keep a grimace from her face.
“No, Porco wanted to go stag,” Pieck explained. She didn’t bother to air out how Porco mentioned wanting to woo foreign dignitaries’ daughters, knowing Zeke would do his best to get in his way
Zeke seemed to mull this over, “Good, good…” he muttered under his breath. “Would you be interested in going with me?”
Pieck stopped walking, her half-widened eyes locked on where Zeke had stopped a few steps ahead of her after noticing her stall. “Right, so,” Zeke began to backtrack, taking the look on her face as one of hostility, “Magath mentioned it might be a good idea to take you. He didn’t say I had to, but I think he thinks we should be better friends.”
“Right. Friends.” Pieck didn’t bother keeping her whispered remark to herself. It lacked real vitriol, because her gaze averted and she took a while to consider the layers of what he’d said.
Everyone knew Zeke had been the star pupil of the candidates, guaranteed a Titan after he’d been personally tutored by the Beast. Pieck also knew, though, that Commander Magath found Zeke contemptible. She wasn’t quite sure where she landed in the hierarchy of favor with the Commander in charge of the Warrior program, somewhere above Bertholdt and below Marcel if she had to guess, but she knew for a fact that it was high enough that Magath wouldn’t shove Zeke at her for the sake of public appearance.
But what if it was the higher brass? The Generals were ruthless when it came to experimentation they wanted done on shifters, and while she was normal for now, it wouldn’t be 6 months before she received her titan. She knew some things from Liesl, about what she could expect as the next cart, and if Zeke was one of those things-
“Pieck? Pieck,” Zeke called out to her from where he was standing much closer, now. He grabbed her shoulder and gave it a shake, causing Pieck to jump a little. She blinked and her eyes burned like sandpaper–had she just been staring that whole time?
“Yeah, sorry,” her soft voice placated his concern, “I wouldn’t mind going with you, but only as friends, okay?”
Pieck was sure the latter half of her agreement went in one ear and right out of the other with him, if the way his eyes lit up was any indication.
“Really? Thank you, Pieck–you won’t regret this,” Zeke promised. Oh, but she already was. She wouldn’t say that, not when he was pressing a kiss to her forehead and pulling her towards her street by their now-intertwined hands. But she thought about it, that and an increasingly long list of excuses she was already pre-preparing for later. Boundaries weren’t Zeke’s strong suit and she needed to be ready to deal with that.
When they got to her door, Zeke turned to face her.
“Thank you, again, for agreeing,” Zeke smiled. His hand came up to cup her jawline, his thumb brushing affectionately over her cheek. Pieck couldn’t think of anything to say, not when he was looking at her like he had actual feelings for her. Did Magath even ask him for this? Was Zeke lying straight to her face?
Pieck felt relieved and grateful in equal amounts when her front door opened, her father’s voice cutting through the awkward, romantically charged moment on his front pavement.
“Pieck, come inside,” he ordered without question. His tone was angry, but she knew it wasn’t at her.
Quickly Zeke pulled his hand from her face, addressing her father now that he’d been caught, “Good afternoon, Mr. Finger, I’m just walking Pieck home from training.”
Pieck’s father didn’t seem amused by Zeke’s presence, and under his withering gaze Zeke started to retreat.
“Wait, Pieck, what color is your dress going to be?” Zeke waited a few paces away from her for her answer, looking more boyish than he was. He always did that, when he was trying to seem innocent.
Pieck considered him for a moment, but she figured responding wouldn’t do any harm. “Red, like a maroon.”
Zeke grinned at what she was sure he perceived as a confirmation of her interest and turned to continue towards his own home.
The small dinner that Pieck and her father shared prior to the gala was tense and quiet. Prior to cooking, Pieck had put her hair into pin curlers with some powdery smelling setting lotion, and while that took hold, she made steak frites. She wasn’t a stranger to domestic work, on the contrary. Seeing as she was the sole female of her little two person family, such things fell to her. Despite the two of them both having full time jobs, Pieck couldn’t bring herself to demand a more equitable distribution of household labor from her ailing father. Not when she had no trouble with it, it being her duty as a daughter to a wife-less man.
She did feel tonight was different though. This wasn’t the first state mandated function she’d ever attended, and it surely wouldn’t be the last, and usually her father was kind about the entire affair. Making her promise to slip him some of the nice finger foods when she returned, helping her with her hair, and helping her to cook and clean up dinner before she left so she wouldn’t be tired for her long night ahead. But tonight, he sat quietly at the small dining table, silently watching her cook in her powder pink robe with lacquered red nails.
A few minutes after Pieck set their fixed plates on the table and sat to join her father, was when he decided to speak.
“So, the Jaeger boy,” her father spoke, and Pieck mentally rolled her eyes at the lack of a first name, “Are you interested in him?” He took a bite and chewed slowly, his gaze expectant.
Pieck already knew her own answer, but she still gave it a few moments of thought to get on her dad’s nerves. “No. I’m going with him because Commander Magath wants me to.” she answered truthfully.
“Okay. It would be alright if you were, Piku.”
Pieck grinned at the nickname. It absolutely would not be, she wouldn’t be okay with it, and she knew he wouldn’t be either. But his show of support was still kind.
“Thank you, Dad. I’ll keep that in mind.”
And that was it. Gerard Finger wasn’t a man of many words, and thus Pieck wasn’t surprised when he took her empty plate at the end of the meal and nodded for her to go upstairs with no further preamble.
Her dress was a nice number, a dark red cotton crepe making up the majority of it, with a below-the-knee a-line skirt that kept her comfortably covered. Her sleeves ended right above her elbows, which was significantly more conservative than the currently fashionable sleeveless style, and the design choice of a panel of fabric covering the entire underbodice gathering at one shoulder leaving her both layered and quite concealed meant not a sliver of skin below her throat showed. Pieck knew she looked a bit frumpy, but she’d likely be the youngest ‘woman’ at the venue due to Annie’s nonattendance, and she wasn’t seeking to make up the gap in age that would be present between herself and the others by dressing overly mature.
A loose skirt, covered shoulders, and an unrevealed décolletage was nothing to be ashamed of. Not at her age. Her father had told her she’d looked nice when she’d picked it out, after all.
Once her hair was loosened and brushed into place, and her yellow armband slid up above her left elbow, Pieck bid her father goodbye and slipped from the front door, locking it behind her. She didn’t expect to see Zeke standing there when she turned around, but there he was. His patterned dark brown suit was cut close to his small athletic waist, and the tie he wore was only a few shades deviated from her dress. Considering he was guessing, she gave him a point, and walked down to his side.
He spoke first, “Good evening, Ms. Pieck. You look fetching.” Zeke’s eyes dragged over her in a way that made Pieck shiver with mild disgust, but she didn’t bother to say anything about it.
“Thank you. You aren’t so bad yourself,” Pieck slipped her petite hand onto his sleeved forearm and nudged him to start walking with her towards the train station. Despite the event in question being in honor of an Eldian, it was across the city from the internment zone, making a brief train ride a warranted expense.
“I hope you weren’t waiting too long for me. I wasn’t expecting for you to escort me,” Pieck mumbled. Her voice was gentle, and with the soft night breeze that went right through her thin dress, she worried she wouldn’t be heard.
“Not too long. I was working up the will to knock.”
Pieck really scoffed at that. She’d seen this blond menace knock down men twice his size and choke them until his thumbs pierced their windpipes. Surely knocking on a friend’s door was no such undertaking, but maybe Pieck’s already mild opinion of Zeke was an overestimation.
“I’m glad I put you out of your misery,” Pieck settled on responding. His hand came up to rest over hers on his arm, a surprisingly affectionate action given the empty streets and low light.
“I’m glad you did too,” Zeke agreed.
When they arrived at the station shortly after, Zeke paid for Pieck’s ticket without a word from her and hurried her onto the train. A sinking feeling was beginning to build in Pieck’s stomach, but she shoved that out of the way, convinced she was being paranoid. Zeke wouldn’t do anything, he was annoying and a little creepy, but there were too many things tying them together and too many societal conventions he’d have to violate if he wanted to try something.
She took the window seat after offering it to him and let him put his arm around her shoulders as he clearly wanted to. He smelled nice, and Pieck didn’t mind.
The Melanie Altmann Memorial Greenhouse was no ordinary affair, not by a long shot. Towering walls made of polished iron frames hosting both crystalline glass panels and panes in every color imaginable meant that the sections looking down from the second floor could host fully mature trees from the far reaches of the continent, ones that wouldn’t be able to survive in the briny environment of coastal Liberio otherwise.
Nearly every window of the attached event hall was lit with the silhouettes of well-dressed whoevers just barely visible. Pieck swallowed and clung a little tighter to Zeke’s muscled forearm, letting him guide her through the ajar front doors of the luminous greenhouse.
Once inside, the ambient noise of conversation and the dynamic string music from the four piece band near the back acted like white noise on Pieck’s frayed nerves, soothing her back down to neutral and allowing her to scope her surroundings out with a bit more logic. She couldn’t see Magath or Liesl as of now, but she knew as her inheritor that her presence at Liesl’s side would be necessary at least until guests stopped arriving.
“I’ll be back,” Pieck placated Zeke, letting go of him and slipping away before he could raise a word in protest. She used her small size to her advantage, weaving through the crowd without a thought. Pieck made her way towards the back of the greenhouse, where there were a few small tables, and Liesl Goodwin, the Cart Titan herself.
Liesl looked like a fashion plate came to life standing there. Her sleeveless floor length gown was a shimmering champagne the same color as her curled hair and gently tanned skin; the only deviations from her monotone color palette were here cherry red lips, and the plain red elastic band adorning her left bicep
Pieck figured it must be special issue for the occasion, as she’d never seen a modified version of an Eldian armband, but she wasn’t sure why Liesl had been given such a privilege. Pieck had seen many glamorous outfits spoiled by the armbands, but they weren’t meant to be fashion accessories, they were utilitarian. Meant to signify both their penance and their danger as Eldians. Separate from the Marleyans they’d oppressed for millennia.
“Pieck! Come here, my little love,” Liesl’s sweet soprano cut through the crowd, and Pieck couldn’t help but smile and walk towards the older woman. Her hard ending consonants were already beginning to drag, something Pieck had come to observe as a common sign of drunkenness in the current Cart Titan, but she was a happy, bubbly drunk and thus Pieck felt no danger letting Liesl pull her into perhaps an overly familiar hug.
“Hi, Ms. Liesl,” Pieck spoke through her grin, looking up at Liesl with her bright silvery eyes, “Happy birthday. I hope your party has gone well so far?”
Liesl’s laugh was like a chiming bell. She kept an arm around Pieck as she straightened up to her full height, standing a head and a half over her inheritor.
“She’s so polite,” Liesl addressed the foreigners she’d been talking to before, instead of Pieck herself, “I’ve told her to call me Lee, and she just won’t do it. My sweet girl.” Liesl gave the top of Pieck’s head a kiss, “Isn’t she cute?”
Soon Pieck’s presence was forgotten, and she was relegated to Liesl’s side, exchanging shallow pleasantries with whoever was waiting to greet the Cart Titan.
To Pieck, Liesl seemed resoundingly popular, if the number of dignitaries and servicemen, both Eldian and Marleyan, who came to greet her was any indicator. It was anomalous. Pieck doubted she’d become half as popular during her own 13 year term no matter how many missions she completed.
The taste of champagne hadn’t ended up being anywhere close to what Pieck expected. It was dry in the most literal sense, the tannins sucking the moisture from every corner of her mouth. It reminded her of over-brewed tea in that sense but differed in the way it burned in the back of her throat. Zeke, who’d pulled her away from the prying eyes of the party to slip her the flute, seemed to be expecting an assessment of some kind.
“It’s fine. I think I’d prefer water, though.” Pieck confessed, taking another sip regardless.
Zeke rolled his eyes at that, and she felt childish for her answer. “The point is how it makes you feel, it isn’t about the taste,” Zeke chided.
She shrugged but continued to sip on her flute. “Did you see the General?” she attempted to make conversation, the awkward silence of the potting room begging to be filled.
“No, I don’t think he’s here. He’s too old for birthday parties.”
Well, he’s had more than any of them, Pieck thought. She wouldn’t say that, though. She’d instead say, “Commander Magath is here, isn’t he?”
He chuckled at her joke, a warm and low sound that made her smile, “I suppose he is. Do me a favor and don’t tell him, though.”
Pieck nodded and took another sip.
Sitting on a bench near a particularly robust collection of Solanaceae flowers, Pieck chatted with Zeke for well over an hour. She let him ply her with flute after flute of champagne, even when he wasn’t partaking nearly as heavily, because the cloudy feeling it gave her head was pleasant. She even let her head rest against his shoulder when it got too heavy for her to hold up anymore. Pieck’s eyes fluttered shut right as she heard his breath hitch, his hand laying overtop her own.
His voice cut through her cat nap, an unneeded but not unwelcome anchor in the calm sea of her intoxication, “Pieck,” he whispered.
“Mm.”
“Can I take you home?” Zeke asked, his breath tickling her ear.
“May,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“May you,” Pieck enunciated her correction carefully, trying to be understood.
“Oh. May I take you home, Pieck?” Zeke corrected, a touch of amusement seeping into his voice. She hummed her assent, and almost as soon as she did, he was on his feet in front of her, helping her to her feet. “Careful…” he warned, putting his arm tight around her waist.
“Thank you,” Pieck murmured. She smiled down at her feet, her head feeling too heavy to pick up.
The walk home was rather grueling, Pieck letting Zeke shoulder as much of her weight as he could while they took coordinated steps down her own road. Her feet barely reached the ground, with the way her arm was braced up over his back, and focusing on balancing meant she didn’t notice when they approached Zeke’s front door instead of Pieck’s own.
“Zeke?” Pieck whispered, watching him slot his house key into the front door deadbolt one-handed.
“Hm?” Zeke didn’t look down at her when he pushed the door open, just kept manhandling her into the house like he’d done it a hundred times before.
“Zeke,” she repeated, “This isn’t my house.”
Zeke finally looked at her, but only because he was guiding her into one of the nearby living chairs and taking her ankle strap shoes off, “I know. It’s past midnight, and I don’t have a key to your house, Pieck.”
That reasoning sounded… flimsy, but Pieck couldn’t place why. Sickness was starting to claw into her stomach, and she couldn’t pin her thoughts down with her mind swimming as it was. Once her shoes were off, he did away with the pretense and picked Pieck up fully, gripping under her thighs and guiding her legs around his waist.
Nausea and disorientation hit Pieck harder once her feet left the ground. She gripped onto Zeke’s torso wherever she could to steady herself, but it didn’t feel like enough when he started to ascend the stairs.
“My grandparents are asleep, don’t make a sound,” He breathed directly into her ear, and despite being limp in his arms Pieck shivered at the feeling.
Zeke was surprisingly tender, undressing Pieck. She was exhausted, as she felt she would pass out if she wasn’t using every fiber of her being to will herself awake. His hands ghosted over her skin with reverence, pulling the straight pin holding her armband in place out and placing both pieces onto his side table.
Pieck tried to reach out to his left arm to return the favor, her drunken mind seeing that as the only course of action in such a bizarre situation. Her advance was gently rebuffed, as he grabbed her extended wrist and moved her to lie on her back, wrist pinned above her head. He slotted himself between her legs without a hint of pretense, like this was normal for them, but Pieck couldn’t collect her mind on why her survival instincts were ripping her apart right now. She needed to run, to escape this older boy who’s led her to his house-
“Stay here,” Zeke mumbled, his nose nudging against her collarbone, “I’ll go get you a shirt, to sleep in.”
And as easily as he’d crawled onto her, he crawled off, moving towards his dresser so he could begin to look through the drawers.
Zeke sat in front of her and leaned her weight against him, chest to chest while he unzipped the back of her dress and unhooked her bra.
Pieck’s glassy eyes rolled shut when she was laid carefully back down. Zeke maneuvered her dress down and around her hips, dropping the garment onto the ground with an audible thump. He pulled her bra off with much more ease, laying it atop her discarded dress, but he made no move to help her into the shirt he’d brought over for her.
“You’re beautiful.”
Zeke leaned down and attached his wet mouth to her neck. Pieck slid a hand between them and tried to push Zeke off of her nearly naked form.
“Zeke, please,” She groaned as he bit her jawline, “I don’t feel well.”
His mouth moved lower, lips pressing gently to soft, cool flesh until he hovered above her exposed nipple.
“I’ll make you feel good, I promise,” Zeke looked up at her with pleading eyes, “Trust me, darling.”
Pieck did not trust Zeke. In fact, the limited trust she had in him as one of her childhood friends and fellow Warrior Inheritors was decreasing by the second. Her noises of protests were trapped in her throat when he latched onto her nipple, suckling the sensitive flesh until it hurt.
She was sure the skin of her breast would bruise, and she silently thanked her lucky stars when he relented the brutal treatment and switched to long, flat licks against her nipple. She was still sore, but this was better than the hard sucking.
Pieck rescinded her thanks moments later when she felt his hand begin to trail down between her legs. Zeke’s large hand covered her vulva overtop her yet to be removed underwear, fondling her awkwardly.
“Stop, please-” Pieck tried to plead with him when she felt his hand and realized just how far he intended to take this. But he weighed fifty pounds more than her and was easily a foot taller. With alcohol still suppressing her system, in addition to something else perhaps, she could barely manipulate her own limbs meaningfully, let alone put up a fight to his unwelcome touches.
His tongue slipped into her mouth when she’d opened it to speak earlier, she realized. Zeke kissed her like she was a doll, limp and yielding to his every advance because she wanted to be, not because of misfortune.
Zeke bit her bottom lip and pulled it between his own lips, toying with it gently. His tongue eased her mouth open, and he tilted his head to the side so he could get at her mouth as deeply as he wanted.
She was disgusted by him, disgusted by what he was doing. Her first kiss was a mockery, stolen from her when she was powerless to stop him from taking it. Pieck realized the purpose of the gross swapping of spit when she felt his hand move between her legs. Attention caught, she felt the exact moment Zeke’s finger trailed up between her labia and slid into her hole.
Pieck gasped but the sound never made it past Zeke’s own mouth. The stretch of something inside of her for the first time made her ache. She was barely able to accommodate his one finger, and the second burned.
The tight fit between her thighs meant he didn’t have much room to thrust his wrist against her, and when he did it pushed against her cervix in a way that made her stomach hurt.
“Pieck, quiet, remember?” Zeke finally pulled his mouth away from hers and sat back on his haunches. He peeled his jacket and tie off without much pretense, wrenching his dry fingers free of her to do so. She watched him strip down to nothing and pull her own underwear from her body. He left them both completely bare in front of one another, but despite this Pieck still felt like she was the one who was naked in front of a room full of strangers.
She thought more about it, while she ignored him stroking himself. She knew what was going to happen, her father had explained everything to her after she’d gotten her first period, about how people touch each other to make children, or for pleasure. But this didn’t feel good, and she was too young to have a child. Was Zeke feeling good? If Pieck allowed her eyes to focus she’d see his grim smile as he stared at her bare vulva. Reduced to only this singular purpose, just a warm hole for a selfish boy to use, Pieck’s mind wandered. Wandered far from her body. She barely felt the head of his cock slip into her, barely heard him groan her name while he shoved himself to the hilt inside of her. She didn’t miss the fact that she was bleeding, the smell of iron was distinct in the stale air of the small room. Pieck couldn’t focus. She couldn’t fight, or protest, or tell him to stop. Her mind scattered, and her entire existence felt reduced to the small pants escaping her mouth whenever he thrust home against her cervix.
“Pieck, fuck,” Zeke’s hands gripped her hips, pulling her into every motion with surprising strength. His thumb fit into her hollowed hipbone like a hook into an eye, but the excessive force would surely leave only more bruises.
A small, sick part of Pieck’s brain felt claimed. Her first kiss had been stolen as easily as candy from a baby. The bitten hickeys on her neck were purpling already, and would be hard to hide or explain should anyone ask; a visual representation of Zeke’s assertion. Her thighs forced open, her hips held down, her purity stolen with no regards to her comfort. Just more and more visual markers that he’d felt entitled to leave on her. That’s what Zeke was, Pieck decided. An entitled, spoiled little boy.
She was brought back from her rumination–no, her seething over his entitlement to her body and assumption that she’d just allow it–by a number of harder, pounding thrusts. The pain was vicious, Pieck could barely breathe with the way he was using her like she wasn’t human.
“Please-Please!” Pieck gasped out. She hardly recognized her voice, raspy with ache and spent tears, “Zeke, please, you’re hurting me.” She insisted, trying to shove his marring hands from her hips.
“I don’t care,” He breathed out. His tone was tight-strung, like he was struggling to get the words out. He did, however, let go of her hips, but Pieck wishes he hadn’t.
Zeke grabbed her wrists and shoved them back, clearly annoyed at her attempt to push him off. He pinned her wrists above her head without difficulty, and went back to his punishing treatment of her vulva. His cockhead slammed into her cervix with every thrust in, forcing wheezy whimpers from her mouth in return.
“You feel amazing, you know that?” Zeke looked down at her, and used his free hand to grab her chin to force her to make eye contact. All of his weight was being pushed onto her hands, but she could only whine in protest. “Is this your first time, Pieck? It feels like it is,” Zeke groaned, and she thought maybe that was supposed to be a compliment.
It was over quickly after that; Pieck thanked Ymir. Zeke groaned deep, with that awkward teenaged voice of his, and after pushing himself as deep into her as he could, she felt him pulse. The warm wetness wasn’t what she was expecting, nor was she expecting him to pull out of her with a hard tug.
He held her when she started to cry, finally too overstimulated and overwhelmed to hold it all in anymore. Pieck laid on her side and stared at the closet across from his bed until the tears made it impossible to see. Zeke pushed up behind her, his arms holding her firmly to his warm chest.
“I’m sorry,” Pieck wheezed out in a broken voice, “I’m so sorry.” She wasn’t sure why she was apologizing, but it felt right. Every impulse in her brain was scrambled and making him put up with her sobbing wasn’t fair.
“It’s okay, Pieck,” Zeke’s drowsy voice responded from behind her, “Go to sleep, we’ll talk in the morning.”
With the feeling of his seed still seeping from her bruised vagina, Pieck felt no inclination to talk in the morning, or to even be here in the morning.
Once that idea was planted in her sluggish mind, she locked onto it. Pieck, previously on the verge of sleep, could no longer bring herself to blink, to close her eyes for even a second. She needed to leave.
When she was sure he was sleeping deeply enough to not stir, she slipped from his arms and onto the floor beside the bed. Pieck redressed without a sound, foregoing her underwear seeing as she had no idea where they were. Where he’d put them.
The walk home was grueling. Pieck’s thighs and hips ached with every shift of her legs, and by the time she reached her front door she was whimpering in pain despite the short distance.
The large windows in the front of her house revealed her father was sitting there with a book, the oil lamp burning low next to him. He didn’t look tired, just expectant.
Pieck hadn’t been expecting to get home so late, and thus didn’t bring a key when she’d left. Mentally preparing herself to be berated for what had obviously happened, Pieck took a breath in, a breath out, and rapped her knuckles against the wood.
Instantly she heard thumping footsteps within, followed by the front door retching open.
“Pieck, thank god,” her father pulled her into his arms, his relief filling the space between them, “What happened?” He didn’t pull away to let her answer, swaying her side to side. He smelled safe, like home. The familiar scent of soap, leather polish, and oil that always wrapped around her whenever Pieck needed comfort.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Pieck finally managed to wheeze out after a few seconds. Her voice sounded younger, less sure. Broken from pleading and crying for Zeke to stop for so long.
Her father finally loosened his grip at that, pulling her into the house and locking the door behind them. He considered her appearance carefully, scrutinizing every detail in a way that made Pieck want to shrink into her skin. She watched his jaw clench as his gaze trailed over her face, her neck, her wrists, putting together the pieces of what had happened far faster than he should’ve been able too. Than she wanted him to be able to.
“Did he do this to you?” He asked finally.
Pieck thought about his question, and about her answer. She didn’t want to talk about this now, didn’t want to deal with police officers and questioning and her higher ups in the military. Zeke would probably get court martialed, if she was believed at all, and she wasn’t sure if he deserved that. Neither of them would make it out of a trial unscathed. Zeke would lose his titan, and Pieck would be ineligible to inherit. With an incident like this written across their records, it would speak to Zeke’s inability to be trusted, and Pieck’s inability to keep her mouth shut when faced with mistreatment.
“No,” Pieck whispered. “Please, Daddy. I’m tired,” She murmured. She could tell he didn’t believe her, but he was a smart man. A smart, patient man who loved his daughter.
“Okay, Piku,” her dad wrapped an arm around her, and bent down to kiss her head. “Let’s get you upstairs and to bed.”
Notes:
I'm suffering through a terrible migraine at present, yet here I am, formatting this chapter for your reading pleasure. Suffering is art, dear reader.
Also, still a writer not a coder. If there's a mistake leave a POLITE comment <3
Chapter 3: Foreign Body
Notes:
Dear god this week has been a clusterfuck.
Firstly, I had to work three 15+ hour days out in the 40 degrees Fahrenheit weather (not including wind chill) with no breaks or options to go inside last weekend. Then I had to share a hotel room with this woman I HATE and while on the first night it was passable cause there was two beds and I could mostly ignore her, our boss fucked up the reservation and the second night we were moved to a single and we had to share a bed. The housekeepers (lovely people btw) had to move all my things, and I detest people (all people) touching my things, so I was in a foul mood from that.Oh! But that's not it! On Wednesday we had to put down my childhood cat whom I had for over half of my life, so I've been handling that poorly to say the least. Aside from editing this chapter, I've gotten barely any writing done this week cause I've been horribly depressed over my baby kitty :(
But alas, I'm still not done. Yesterday my power was out for over 11 hours during the day, so I had to spend all day in town with my chronically ill ass. I'm in so much pain right now, and the only reason this chapter is on time-ish is because spite, routine, and pain medication is driving me straight into an early grave.
Enjoy! Or don't. Hate comments will be deleted so very fast. Thanks for reading my vent if you made it this far.
Chapter Text
September 17th, 843
Pieck had been sure they were being intentionally obscure about the inheritance rituals. She hadn’t thought this was why.
It was actually rather insane to her, the way they waited until the day after her birthday and had soldiers come to her home in the middle of the night to escort her to the facility. More insane, that all she did in the facility for a month and a half was simply the same things she did outside of it, but with the caveat she wasn’t allowed to leave.
They kept her well in stock with books at least, and Annie was good company even if she was quiet. That was fine, Pieck wasn’t the chattiest either. Not like the boys.
The building they were holding them in in anticipation for the ritual was ugly as shit, in her professional opinion, but Pieck supposed it didn’t need to be pretty. It was meant to contain warrior candidates, the rituals themselves, and whatever the shifters did when they weren’t forcing some far flung nation to heel. Pieck wasn’t actually sure, Liesl had refused to divulge anything no matter how many times Pieck asked.
The building in question was overwhelmingly gray. Smooth-cut gray stones made up the walls, previously cream tiling composed the flooring, although frequent foot traffic and a lacking janitorial staff left them a permanent muddy gray-brown color. The iron bars of her bed frame, her window, and composing the doors were all gray, alongside the sterile stainless steel of everything else.
She had a dark wood desk she liked to drag her eyes over when her mind got tired of reading or imagining what her father and neighbors were doing. The linens, white, the tiny bit of visible sky, blue when it wasn’t gray with raincloud and thunder. Annie’s straw blonde hair and shimmering blue eyes. The small bites of color were what kept her sane, in this arbitrarily enforced solitary confinement.
Nurses came every few days for various kinds of tests. Blood tests, physical stress tests, mathematical reasoning, and moral quandaries. Most of the time she’d stay in her small room for them, but sometimes she’d get to wander. Pieck had a pretty good map of the place, if she did say so herself.
So when a soldier, not a nurse, came to fetch her one day, she was perplexed. She led Pieck through the halls with a commendable sense of direction, considering the gray walls blurred together and the layout was downright labyrinthine.
Pieck didn’t bother to ask questions. It felt redundant. She already knew why she was here, so anything she endured up until that would be in pursuit of that goal. Admittedly, she didn’t know how it was going to happen, the inheritance, but if she was supposed to know ahead of time they would have told her.
The soldier, a tall woman with curly strawberry blonde hair, took a small triangular key from a pocket inside of her jacket as they approached yet another plain gray door. This one didn’t have a window like hers did, but most of them didn’t. The number above it, 492, the only thing separating it from the ones next to it, told Pieck nothing about what it contained; after so many attempts to glean something from her surroundings, Pieck was starting to get annoyed with her own brain. She didn’t know anything, and she wasn’t going to know anything. Stop trying.
The door unlocked with a turn of the soldier’s wrist and the sound of many unseen pistons sliding out of place. It was thicker than Pieck had expected, half a foot at least.
“This way,” the soldier ordered. Her voice lacked the bite of a commander ordering a subordinate, but it instead was soft with something else. Pity maybe? Pieck hadn’t spied an armband, so she wasn’t going to count on that inborn camaraderie helping her.
Pieck stepped past the soldier into the small but brightly lit antechamber. The door swung shut under its own weight, and Pieck watched as it locked behind the two of them. Following her into an unlocked blue door (blue!) Pieck was immediately shown to a large, steaming bathtub, along with several female nurses.
The soldier left once she was inside, and Pieck was approached by one of the older brunette Nurses. Evans, if her name tag was correct.
“Hello, Miss Pieck. I hope you slept well last night?” Nurse Evans asked with a large, maternal smile.
Pieck was cautious. She couldn’t help it. She was an Eldian first, a soldier second, and a skeptic third. The Marleyan nurse smiling at her wouldn’t change any of those things.
“Yes, thank you,” Pieck responded, as polite as she could manage.
“Wonderful. What’s going to happen is that we’re going to help you take a bath so you’re sterile for the procedure, and then we’ll administer you a few medications. Then you’ll move on. Is that alright with you?”
Pieck mentally rolled her eyes. If it wasn’t okay with her and she voiced such a dissenting opinion, she would most likely be disposed of in the way Eldians always were. Gracelessly and without human consideration.
“Yes. That’s perfect,” Pieck cringed a little at her own fake-sounding saccharine tone, but Evans paid her no mind, walking to grab a stainless-steel surgical tray and a towel.
“Petersmark, can you come undress her?” Evans addressed a nurse out of Pieck’s view, and immediately she began to steady herself. It was okay. They weren’t going to hurt her. They were all women, and they needed to do this. This was her job.
All of the preparing herself in the world couldn’t stop Pieck from flinching when she felt someone’s light touch graze against her back. The linen scrubs she and Annie had been wearing during their extended stay in the facility were bleach white, with a number of ties up the back holding them together for modesty purposes. She and Annie had gotten used to dressing and undressing one another during their month and a half long stay, but the nurse standing in her blind spot was no Annie.
The ties loosened easily when pulled, and Pieck swallowed thickly when her torso was exposed to the admittedly quite warm air of the bathing room. She didn’t move to cover herself, her dark hair was long enough to cover a decent amount of her upper torso. She figured it would only be childish to try and hide the rest.
Evans wrapped the towel she’d been holding around Pieck as soon as the other nurse, Petersmark, was finished with her clothing. While she was walking towards the large tub, Pieck finally registered what the look in Evans’ eyes had been earlier. Patronization.
Petersmark took Pieck’s hand and helped her into the tub. Pieck couldn’t crane her neck far enough to read the attached thermometer on the tub, but she could barely stand the heat of the water she was laid in.
The nurses didn’t say a word to her as they picked up the surgical soap. They scrubbed at her skin hard enough to turn every inch of flesh she had red, while they discussed their own lives like she wasn’t there. The soap stank of antiseptic, the bath of iodine, and when combined with her nervousness, Pieck’s head started to lull as if she might faint.
“Oh, none of that,” Pieck heard somewhere outside of herself. Her mind was swimming, right up until some kind of glass bottle was shoved under her nose. She inhaled, and she didn’t think the scent was so bad, not until the full strength of it was realized and she threw her head back in order to get away from the scent. She coughed until her lungs were sore and her eyes watered.
“There. All better.”
The outfit they helped her into after her back was pretty similar to what she had been wearing before. In the place of hard-wearing linen, though, the scrubs were instead made of a soft satiny material. One of the nurses took it upon herself to braid Pieck’s hair out of her face, and Pieck was appreciative of that considering she was still feeling woozy from her earlier bout in the bath.
The head nurse, Evans, led her into the next room in the series, and instructed her to sit.
It was simple, plain white walls with low luminosity and two chairs facing one another. One for Pieck, and one for the nurse. Pieck was handed a paper cup with five pills and was instructed to swallow, but besides that, no words were exchanged between the two.
Pieck was soon taken into a cavernous room two floors tall. Gray, which she expected, with various high ranking officials stood to the side behind a protective barrier, a floor above Pieck and with no clear way to enter the space, Magath among them. The only one who wasn’t in full uniform (unless their white ceremonial garb counted as such) was Liesl Goodwin herself, hanging by her wrists unconscious upon a ledge.
Her blonde hair, usually beautiful and shiny, was limp and mildly damp. Her shoulders, which held most of her weight, twisted at angles that seemed unnatural to Pieck. It disgusted Pieck, but no one else reacted to the horrific scene in front of them.
Pieck swallowed- her mind was starting to race, and she was quickly beginning to realize the medications she’d been given earlier were sedatives. It made sense, she figured they wouldn’t want her to fight. But she couldn’t stand. She was on the floor faster than she processed herself falling, the dizziness and disorientation from the medications too much to bear. Her ears were rushing with blood, and she couldn’t hear what the Private approaching her kneeling position on the floor was saying. She did notice a small brown case in his hand, and the terrified look in his eyes.
Pieck could assume the reasoning for all of these choices, but she had to wonder. A soldier, and not a nurse? And one of such negligible rank? It wouldn’t matter, she supposed, when he was slipping a needle into her arm and running back from her position-
When Pieck awoke an indeterminable amount of time later, the sun was beginning to set. A heavy ring made of cast iron formed around her neck, holding her down to the hospital bed she lay upon, so she could only contort her neck so far to see out of the thickly paned window.
Burdening hues of dark orange suffocated the room, giving everything a dreamlike quality. It would’ve lulled Pieck back into her long dream, if she hadn’t been fighting so hard to stay awake. Pieck shifted to try and turn onto her side, to maybe see out of her small window like that, but the jingle of cuffs prevented her from doing so.
Pieck looked down at her hands, suddenly aware of the fact that she was more than just eyes and the errant hairs that covered them. Her hands were wrapped in thick gauze. It looped between her fingers and pinned them down to her palm, creating awkward mitten-type wrappings that went down to her mid forearm, under her handcuffs.
Giving her feet a few testing wiggles, she realized that those two were encased in bandaging and affixed to the bed. Pieck opened her mouth to try and call for help, or just any kind of explanation, but she found her teeth were covered in some kind of rubbery paste. Her mouth was filled with it actually, a melted gum-like substance that prevented all but the most basic of jaw and mouth movements.
Did they think Pieck was going to kill herself? She had just achieved everything she had strived for, her and her father would get their red armbands and he’d be able to be healthy. It was asinine to think she’d give that up.
The machine connected to the tube running down Pieck’s nose began to beep, a loud and obnoxious sound she wished she could cover her ears to avoid. Instead she closed her eyes, as any method of avoidance felt comforting in place of the one she preferred.
A male nurse was fast to enter the room and click off the alarm. He pulled a needleless syringe from his pocket and screws it into her IV bag, and Pieck wondered why they’re pumping medications into her stomach and not her veins.
“Mmpf?” Pieck chokes a little on her gag and attempts to swallow down her excess saliva despite the odd intrusion in her mouth making it hard.
The nurse, an apathetic late-20-something year old who seems annoyed by the fact that Pieck is alive and exerting her autonomy as an alive creature and not just a statue for them to pump medication into, sighs. If you asked Pieck, that’s what she’d say that scathing expression on his face was, at least.
He gave her a curious glance, looking into her eyes as if searching for something before he picked up the clipboard at the end of her bed and wrote something down. She kept her eyes pinned to him like a hawk, like a hunter faced with prey despite the vulnerable and rather harmless position she found herself in. Pieck wasn’t sure where the instinct to watch, to observe came from, but she found it a tidy second skin for her to reside in.
She didn’t look away from him, or even blink, until the door leading into her prison cell/hospital room was pulled to latch upon his exit. She blinked repetitiously, getting rid of the tight, burning feeling in them from holding them open for so long.
It wasn’t a five minute wait before Commander Magath, the man in charge of the warrior unit, entered her room. He was in full dress uniform, neatly pressed creases and folds, awards and badges pinned to his chest. Awards for murder, for taking advantage of children, a dark place in her mind supplied helpfully.
“Good morning, Pieck. I hope you aren’t in too much discomfort,” Magath said in way of greeting, standing down at the foot of her bed. Pieck’s eyes involuntarily flicked to her window. She was sure it wasn’t morning, if the dulling orange light coming through her window was any indication.
“I’m sorry about the kit, we’re just trying to prevent any accidents,” Magath began to explain, pulling out the chair from the desk in the hospital room and sitting down, “Once you have your first transformation, you’ll be allowed to go without it, but for now we don’t want you biting your tongue and crushing yourself to death.” Magath laughed like what he said was lighthearted or reassuring, when truly his words were anything but.
Pieck’s breathing slowly picked up speed, and she did her best not to cry. Usually she was able to play it straighter than this, to stay calm and serene even in the face of unsettling situations. Today was an exception, though. The chemical intervention given before the inheritance, the fact her dearest mentor was dead at her hand, and the elephant in the room all made it hard to keep composure. The date of her death was set in stone, and there’s not a thing she or anyone else could do to stop it. She still wouldn’t cry, though. Not like this, and not in front of her Commander.
“I offered to do your transfer questionnaire myself; I figured it would be reassuring to have a familiar face,” Magath smiled at her, and Pieck realized he’d been talking to her throughout her thinly veiled panic. “Let me just unwrap your hand–don’t try anything though.”
Magath reached out and took her left hand in his own, the large size of which made her hand look dainty by comparison. He unraveled the layer of gauze holding her hand in position carefully, rolling it up and setting it on her side table for, presumably, later use.
Pieck stretched her hand and winced at the tightness in her finger joints, but she was relieved to at least have some kind of movement, even if it was the bare minimum.
“Now that that’s done, my questions. Thumbs up for yes, thumbs down for no, and sideways if you aren’t sure or would like to elaborate,” Magath explained, paper in hand.
“Are you in pain?” Pieck thought for a second, and moved her thumb down.
“Are you sore?” Thumbs up
“Do you remember what happened?” Pieck locked her eyes onto Magath’s, and made a so-so motion with her hand. She somewhat remembered, but not in a real way.
“You remember some?” He prompted, and she agreed, figuring it was easier than trying to mime.
“How do you feel?” Magath asked, and Pieck frowned. That wasn’t exactly a yes-or-no question, but she gave a yes regardless. She was fine.
“Are you having any thoughts, feelings, or memories that aren’t your own?” Magath seemed hesitant on that question, and Pieck frowned. As best she could around her odd sensory nightmare of a gag. She figured no was a safe bet for now, it was an answer that could always change later.
His questions went on for a few more minutes, and Pieck was sure to answer carefully, even when it didn’t seem necessary. When Magath left and the male nurse returned, he didn’t seem as cautious of Pieck as he had been before, but she had no clue as to why that could be. Her hand was still unwrapped, out of either neglect or intention on Magath’s part, but the nurse didn’t seem bothered.
September 19th 843
It was humiliating, being forcibly bedbound like this. The first few hours weren’t so bad, Pieck mostly slept because she was exhausted, and there wasn’t anything else to do. But then her normal human (if she could be called that) bodily functions caught up with her, and apparently she couldn’t be trusted to do so much as chew on her own. The tube down her throat kept her hydrated, sustained, and medicated. A nurse or orderly came in every so often to help her relieve herself, and it mortified Pieck to no end. She wasn’t good at accepting help when she needed it, but when she was under arbitrary conditions that forced her to accept help when she could easily do such things on her own? That was worse.
The morning two days after her inheritance, she was taken from her prison cell/hospital room. She wasn’t unstrapped and made to walk, though. Pieck remained chained to her bed, and was rolled out into a massive courtyard, complete with chain link fence and viewing towers. In her silky two day old glorified pajamas, Pieck felt naked in front of the various onlookers she was sure occupied the three towers. Her blanket remained tucked around her, and her gauze paws had yet to be removed though. The only hint of color to differentiate her from the sea of white was her inky black hair, and the heavy iron chains holding her down.
The man of unclear determination approaching her with a pair of shears did so out of the corner of her vision, and Pieck, despite knowing all too well that she was not stronger in this form than the chains that held her (what form would she be stronger than them in?), her survival instincts still puppeted her and demanded she thrash against her chains in a singular attempt to avoid whatever he’d do to her.
Pieck never said she wasn't paranoid, though. The man (she hated not having some kind of classification, some social script to follow) wasn’t hostile. He cut away at her gauze paws and her gauze socks, peeling away the sweat soaked cotton and balling it up to put in his pocket.
“Open,” he ordered with a gentle voice, gesturing to her mouth expectantly. She did so without much fuss, although the gum substance made it hard for her teeth to separate more than an inch or two.
Him reaching into her mouth and beginning to peel away the stuff coating her mouth was enough to make her gag, but when she did he was kind enough to pause before continuing.
He proceeded as such until all of the stuff was removed, and she could finally move her tongue freely and speak freely again.
“Thank you,” Pieck smiled, her voice raspy and high from disuse over the past day and a half.
“Yeah. I’ll unlock you and then be out of your way,” The man assured, oddly respectful considering who she was. She wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth though, and she held still while he walked around the bed, using various keys to unlock Pieck’s pinned down limbs.
He walked away quickly the second the last shackle was loosened, slipping past the fence Pieck had been brought in through and climbing into one of the observation towers.
Pieck couldn’t give a shit about that though. She stretched like a cat, her arms reaching for the cool gray sky, and listened to her back pop satisfyingly. Standing was a bit more difficult than sitting up had been, her stiff knees and hips protesting the weight she was putting onto them like she hadn’t been running around freely and easily only days prior.
Pieck was able to get to her feet soon afterwards regardless, holding onto the steel railed headboard for support.
She had barely composed herself, and decided she was able to take a few steps when the yelling came from one of the towers.
“Pick up the blade and pierce the inside of your left arm,” A commanding voice instructed her. Pieck almost yelled back to ask what blade he was talking about, but turning her head she noticed the small standard issue utility knife sitting on the blankets gathered at the end of the bed. Oh. Well.
Pieck picked the knife up and was quickly assaulted by the onset of a headache, the throbbing of pain in her eyes leaving her vision distorted. She imagined different hands, tanner, with more slender fingers. She forced herself to push that from her mind so she could open the little knife, listening until she heard the telltale click of the components snapping into the unsheathed position.
She had to take a second to consider her actions. She had never been inclined towards self-harm, not when she had been so focused on achieving warrior status, but she still put the blade to the side of her wrist, the memory of doing so potent despite this definitely being a new experience.
The first thing she felt upon splitting her epidermis and dermis layers was the wet feeling of blood dripping off of her and onto the sandy ground she was standing on. The second was the pure agony of four hundred thousand amps of electricity striking into her nervous system, causing every muscle in her body to seize up like a coiled spring.
Pieck thought she could hear a scream, but she was sure it wasn’t hers. Her throat felt as if she had swallowed a beehive and was getting her retribution for doing so in thousands of stings against the usually soft, wet flesh of her trachea.
Pieck was sure her heart stopped beating for just a second, and while she closed her eyes to pray for the agony to stop in that split second, when they opened again, she was massive. Her eyes weren’t her eyes, not the way they were before at least.
She was warm, but not uncomfortably so. Her body-well, part of it– felt safe, encapsulated in pulsing and damp flesh that wrapped around her in a way that felt like armor. But her skin, her real skin, felt cool in the late autumn air. It was exposed, this new skin she had made, but Pieck wasn’t concerned about everyone viewing the meters and meters of uncovered flesh.
Standing there staring at her own front feet, or hands if they could be called that, surely wasn’t what she had been brought to do, so hesitantly she lifted one of her front paws(?) and took a step.
The effect was immediate. Her center of gravity wasn’t what she had been expecting, moved from low in her hips to up in her shoulders due to her new body’s odd proportions. The support of her front leg being removed was enough to send Pieck crashing down onto her side, sand billowing up around her body.
Pieck made a sound of frustration, and was surprised to hear her own voice reflected via a gravelly, androgynous growl instead of her usual sleepy, flowery alto. She was mildly horrified, and she thought she sounded a bit like a 30 year smoker.
With the gait and grace of a newborn deer, Pieck got her four feet beneath herself. Standing took a special amount of focusing, but Pieck was managing it well enough. Her limbs shook under her weight, and she stared down her snout to the ground to try and balance more elegantly.
When she managed to stand without difficulty for several minutes, Pieck was made aware of the stimulus existing more than a foot or two outside of her body; the breathing of soldiers in their towers was deafening, the chattering and their heartbeats mixing into the rhythmic inhale and exhale of air.
She ran, knees buckling with every other step, towards one of the guard towers. Each was equipped with massive machine guns that stayed silent even as Pieck’s height reached out to paw and scratch at the stone of them. Yelling, followed by a superior’s commands filled the air.
In truth, even as she acted on harmless impulse and the morbid curiosity to see another human in this form, to play like an excited puppy, Pieck was well aware that she was scaring whoever quaked in the tower above her. It made her heart race. It made her tongue salivate in anticipation.
“That’s enough for now! Split your nape and abandon your Titan, Finger!” The same voice from before commanded her, this time more frantic and persistent.
Pieck thought for a second. Her being a titan would make sense, but she wasn’t quite sure about splitting her nape. And she worked hard to make this titan.
Still, Pieck considered it. She was beginning to get a horrible feeling in her stomach from the whole two-body thing. Like muscle memory, Pieck leaned back, feeling skin yield and wind hit her back. She shivered violently, already having gotten used to the heat of her second body as her own heat, and exposure to the autumnal breeze wasn’t helping her adjustment. She was still in fucking pajamas, after all.
Chapter 4: Dreadfully Woefully Underprepared
Notes:
I always tell myself "Hmm, I'll post twice this week just so this story doesn't take forever to finish coming out" but then I get tired or like this week I can't stop writing, and then it just doesn't happen.
I'm a big fan of this chapter, but editing it was like pulling teeth so it's mostly unchanged.
It's shorter than average (4.5kish) but the next chapter is a lot longer than average, so it'll make up for it.
Thanks for reading, AbyssalBread this one's 4 u
Chapter Text
October 1st, 843
Pieck had been aware that the Cart Titan hadn’t been designed primarily with combat in mind, but she hadn’t expected her fellow warriors’ first transformations to be so much more… violent and capricious, compared to her own.
She had sat with Annie when she came back from her own inheritance, and listened attentively while Annie told her of how her mind was full of thoughts that weren’t hers. It was a rare moment of vulnerability from the blonde warrior, but Pieck took her words in confidence, and understood the silent promise that was demanded of her to not speak a word of this to anyone else.
Returning to her father a week ago had been a welcome return to routine for Pieck. She flinched when she spotted the red armband now adorning his left arm in place of the yellow, but he pulled her into a hug before she could ask him anything. As it went on, she didn’t ask him what he did while she was gone, and he didn’t ask what she did.
Pieck assumed consuming another human being was always going to be a sore spot, but she didn’t really remember being a pure titan. Maybe she remembered being consumed, instead.
Sporting an armband of her own, she was retrieved to return to the Titan Testing Facility only six days after she returned home. She promised her father it wouldn’t be as long as last time even if she had no way to know that, and got into the unmarked truck that came for her.
Apparently she was considered less of a security risk now, because she was allowed to observe the route out of Liberio, both the internment zone and the city itself, without so much as a word from the driver or her escorting party.
The facility, she learned, was miles from civilization. It was just as gray and drab on the outside as it was on the inside, but from the outside she could spot a large mock town, already partially destroyed but surrounded by surveying equipment and tanks and various other things Pieck couldn’t identify. Including a large metal welding mask?
Today on the first, she thanked Ymir for another month and left it at that. She had been assigned Liesl’s old quarters once she successfully inherited, and they were much nicer than the standard cells they’d had Pieck in for over a month, more spacious although clearly still customized to Liesl’s tastes.
The walls were painted a calming, cool pink, and the back wall with the two windows on it featured gold leafed flowery wallpaper (really Liesl?)
In a letter the former Cart Titan left Pieck, she explained that these quarters were her ‘home away from home’ and ‘a hotel room with sentries and self-locking doors.’ Liesl had detailed a lot more than that in her letters, but Pieck was hesitant to read more than a paragraph or two at a time.
Knowing her old mentor was dead, even if she was never going to survive to begin with, hurt in an odd way. Pieck hoped her pure titan was merciful, and quick. She hoped whoever inherited the cart titan from her in thirteen years gave her that same courtesy.
Since training wasn’t scheduled until 8pm, Pieck didn’t get out of bed until 7. She laid there and read until she had to shower, silently cursing whoever was in charge of scheduling.
Standing under the steaming water was bliss to Pieck’s muscles. She noticed pretty quickly that she didn’t get sore in the same way as before, her body repairing itself efficiently and without much complaint.
Looking down at herself while the conditioner soaked into her hair and she procrastinated getting out, Pieck considered herself more carefully than she usually did. She didn’t look obviously any different, not to people who didn’t spend every second of every day inside her body, but Pieck had noticed a few things.
Stretch marks that had previously patterned her hips and burgeoning chest were now absent. The thin silvery marks weren’t the most noticeable to begin with, but the absence of them in the mirror was disconcerting to say the least.
While her stretch marks were uncomfortable to have lost, she didn’t necessarily miss them, not like she did her scars. The permanent discoloration of her knees from repeated scrapes and cuts had been smoothed over, leaving them the same milky white as the rest of her.
The pink cut on the back of her calf from where she’d been too friendly with a neighborhood cat as a small and overzealous child and had quickly been taught a lesson about boundaries was missing too, and that had hurt as well. They were symbols of a childhood that maybe wasn’t perfect, but she’d been happy to live through.
The white scar beneath her left ring finger was the worst to see gone, though. She silently cursed Ymir’s name for that, for taking that little imperfection from her. She had gotten it as a wiggly toddler who couldn’t sit still for a nail trim, and had paid the price with a pretty nasty nick. Her mother had been horrified, her father told her every time he recounted the story. She’d apologized and clutched Pieck to her chest the entire way to the hospital, crying long after Pieck herself had graduated to quiet sniffles and toddler babbles.
She’d been tough even then, her dad would say. Pieck had so little left of her mother, that the scar she’d inflicted on her own daughter, even on accident, was a fond memory that Pieck clung to as a way to remember the woman. She debated taking a pair of clippers and putting the wound back, but she knew it wouldn’t scar, and if by some miracle it did it wouldn’t be the same.
Pieck had to drag herself from the comforting hot water before she became too lost in rumination and made herself late. Magath wouldn’t accept melancholy over a woman 12 years dead as an excuse to why she showed up later than she should’ve.
Call her a fashion nerd, or downright frivolous, but thus far her favorite part of being a warrior was the uniform change. Gone were the ugly coveralls or standard field whites. Instead she got variation, jackets and skirts and various neck pieces that made her resemble an officer more so than a run of the mill soldier.
Which, considering she could now form a massive war machine from thin air that she could control with naught but her mind, she couldn’t really be called a run of the mill soldier anyways.
She hadn’t been blessed with considerable height like her predecessor, and while she was still holding out hope that she’d take after Liesl in that regard, for now it meant she couldn’t make much use of her inherited collection without modifications being made.
For now she’d have to wear what was issued to her personally, tailored riding pants along with the same button up and fitted uniform jacket that stayed the same regardless of sex.
Commander Magath seemed pleased to see her despite the late hour, the corner of his mouth quirking upward when she arrived at the training ground first and planted herself next to him.
“Evening, Pieck,” Magath greeted, looking ahead to make sure the training crew set things up in a satisfactory manner. Pieck was confused as to how she was the first of her peers to arrive considering she spent half an hour being dramatic under the shower spray. But she had punctuality bred and beaten into her, so maybe she was just incapable of showing up less than ten minutes early.
“Good evening, Commander. Did you have a pleasant day?” Pieck asked, smiling openly at her superior. She wasn’t a teacher’s pet, nor did she have delusions of grandeur about what a working friendship between an Eldian and a Marleyan could look like, but she did know she was the favorite. Or at least she’d put money on her being the favorite.
“As good as it could be. Once the others show up we’re going to drill until twenty-four hundred, or until I’m satisfied with your performance.”
Pieck nodded at that, figuring it sounded reasonable. “May I ask why we’re training so late?”
“You may not,” Magath answered without any bite, “You’ll see once we start.”
Pieck nodded once again, and decided to stay silent, waiting impatiently for the others.
Pieck quickly realized why this was being done at night when she saw the regiment of Eldian soldiers. She realized pretty quickly that they’d be killing today, and Pieck wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Magath walked down the line of the six of them standing at attention, handing them each a utility knife while he lectured about the purpose of today’s training exercise.
Standing at attention meant they were in order, Pieck placed between Reiner and Marcel. Marcel she wasn’t worried about, he could handle his own shit without a second thought. But Reiner? Their shoulders were a few inches apart, and Pieck could still feel him shaking.
Reiner hid his anxiety well, but Pieck wasn’t sure he was even breathing, his throat was clamped down so hard. She couldn’t turn her head to look at him, or move from where she was standing. She had the urge to comfort him so deeply in her bones, but it would have to wait.
“-Pieck,” Magath said and she perked up at the sound of her own name, “You will be tunneling beneath this wall, and depositing Braun next to this gate,” Magath drew on his big chalkboard that someone definitely had to haul out here. Not that she could see much of his diagram in the poor lighting. “You’ll provide cover for him while he transforms, and then help escort him to this rendezvous point here.” Magath drew a path through the map, finishing it with an X near the center.
“Braun, the name of your game is destruction. I want the gate torn down by whatever means necessary, this central road you’ll be following needs to be untraversable, and these large buildings lining this road should be destroyed to ensure there isn’t adequate cover for hostiles. And I want it all done as quickly as possible, while still providing partial cover to Finger.” Magath spoke more harshly to Reiner, and Pieck wasn’t blind to the tendon popping out in Reiner’s clenched jaw. She was sure it wasn’t defiance, though. More likely to be determination, and desire to impress the head of his unit.
Magath moved on to address the last of their unit, and once she was sure he wouldn’t see, Pieck moved her hand from her side slowly, grazing her hand against his knuckles. She caught his eye when his head turned to track the commander, and she spied a little smile on his lips. Good, he deserved to not worry so much.
Pieck was sure Reiner didn’t have any unwelcome feelings for her, not like Zeke’s obsessive and creepy crush on her. It’s why she didn’t mind the little touches to his hand, ones she usually only spared for Annie or her father. Besides, Pieck had a certain feeling that Reiner wasn’t too persuaded towards women, or girls at his age. Not with the way he clung to Bertolt like a child’s safety blanket.
“Okay, Warriors. You have five minutes to get into position. Go!” Magath shouted, his face inches from Zeke’s. Yeah Pieck was sure she would win a popularity contest if Zeke was her competition.
Pieck pocketed her blade and began to jog, head already on a swivel for potential conflict. She trusted Reiner was behind her, just as he needed to trust her to scope out their starting marks and get them there.
“Hey!” Reiner’s breathless whisper called behind her, “Pieck, are you okay?” He caught up and paced himself with her.
“Yeah, you?” Pieck whispered back, glancing between the fencing they were passing, and the rough ground they were running over.
“Oh, yeah. Do you think we can do this?” Reiner looked at her with those innocent eyes, and Pieck melted a little. She wasn’t worried about this practice mission because she thought any of them incapable, she was worried because of the potential loss of life, of the fact that they’d probably kill their fellow man today for nothing more than a dry run of a hypothetical future mission where they’d kill in droves.
Still, she nodded. Pieck didn’t need to worry him with her own angry internal conflict. He’d feel enough of it in a couple years when he was her age anyways. “We’ll do fine. You’re a tank, Reiner.”
Reiner listened, and seemed to consider her words a little more deeply than she’d intended them to be taken.
When they got to the intersecting pair of houses, Reiner was the first to crouch down in the alley Pieck would be digging from.
“Okay, how should we do this?”
Pieck thought, and then she took the compass she had been given from her pocket and put it into Reiner’s hand, “Once I transform, climb onto my back and give me directions to make sure we emerge in the right place.”
They couldn’t plan any further, though, because a loud siren went off to indicate their five minute prep time was over, and four bolts of lightning touched down at once, including Pieck herself.
Feeling bones form out of thin air around her lithe form, along with sinew and muscle connecting directly into her nervous system, never stopped being an odd experience. Pieck was getting used to it, the unusualness of it all.
Reiner climbed onto her nape like one would a horse, holding her hair like reigns, and oh that was such a weird feeling. Her nape was, as to be expected, the most sensitive part of her Titan body, along with the location of her true body, so him sitting astride it was nearly painful. She didn’t comment though, because it wasn’t unbearable, and they had a task to do.
Her hands dug into the soil beneath her easily, nails gliding through the still-wet surface. Dry roots of plants long deceased wove through clods of brittle dirt, which Pieck had to toss away until she could get a nice tunnel started, but once she was deep enough she was able to crush and tunnel with the best of the groundhogs.
Emerging from underground wasn’t as easy as starting the tunnel in the first place had been, because if they popped up in the wrong spot, they’d be colossally fucked (ha), but if she made too big of a cavern rooting around trying to find the right spot, they risked getting buried by a collapsed ceiling.
“Listen, Reiner. What’s above us?” Pieck asked him half to try and help him, and half because even she herself was having trouble separating gunfire from any indication of where they were.
Reiner stilled himself as best as possible, his hands bordering on painful with their steel grip in her hair.
Pieck stayed silent, still as a statue even with her very quickly thinning patience.
Finally, Reiner announced to her with a smirk evident in his voice, “Tires, I hear tires, right above us.”
That was good enough for Pieck, and after taking a breath she started to break through the ceiling of dirt and concrete.
It was a bloodbath. The entire 2000 soldier Eldian regiment had been lost in their training exercise. A pointless, wasteful loss of life, and despite that Pieck was stood here back in line being praised for it.
A crew had already come to begin to clean up the doom town, spraying blood and viscera from the walls and pavement until it soaked into the soil beneath.
Pieck was unmoving between Reiner and Marcel, her face smudged with dirt and her gaze looking appropriately ahead but a thousand yards away.
“Command has learned very valuable information about the utilization of each of your individual skills. You all performed beyond expectation, you should be proud,” Magath said with a tight sense behind his warm disposition, “Seeing as it is late, you will return to the training facility for the night and tomorrow morning you will be returned to your families. Dismissed!”
Pieck fell out of line immediately, relieved and looking forward to a hot bath and her familiarly scented sheets. She didn’t make it two steps, though, before a hand placed itself between her shoulder blades.
“Pieck,” Zeke greeted her with one of those stupid pretty boy smiles, “You did a good job today. You and Reiner were a good team.” His eyes crinkled at the corner as he spoke, although it was nearly concealed by the stupid glasses he’d taken to wearing after his inheritance. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“Thank you,” Pieck said, continuing to walk away from him. The blood caked into her hair and clothes was starting to get to her, and she really wanted to wash his touch off of her now in addition to the grime.
“Have you noticed?” Zeke asked, jogging a bit to catch up and then keep pace with her.
Pieck sighed, “Noticed what?”
“You smell different. After eating the old Cart Titan. Sweeter.” Zeke purred the last bit like he wanted to flirt with her, and a shiver of disgust ran up Pieck’s back.
“Zeke, I do mean this politely, but don’t smell me. Please.” Pieck’s troubled face must have put him off at least a little seeing as his cocksure grin dropped down into a look of disappointment, but that didn’t stop him from holding the door inside open for her.
“It’s just an observation,” Zeke defended, “I know you’re a lady and all, but you still have a working olfactory system.”
Fuck that made Pieck shiver, and not in a way that would make Zeke excited. He was disgusting, and Pieck made a mental note to buy Annie a rape whistle. Or bear spray. It probably worked on Beast Titans as well as bears.
“Yes, I am a lady, thank you for noticing.” Pieck continued to walk away from him, speeding up a little. She had to climb some stairs to get up to her floor, but her door bolted, thankfully, “I’ll wear perfume next time.”
“I didn’t say it was an unpleasant scent.”
Pieck had her hand on the metal door to the stairwell, but she turned her body to look at Zeke after that particular comment. “Goodnight, Zeke. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Pieck stated firmly. She didn’t want to give him any kind of false hope about whatever tomorrow would entail, but she was scared to death that if she didn't, he'd follow her to her room and take what he felt he was entitled to.
Zeke looked disappointed. He took a few steps back, finally taking the hint much to her relief, “Fine, I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodnight, Pieck.”
Pieck couldn’t get up those stairs fast enough once she was dismissed from his company. She was a fast little thing, so she practically flew once the door shut behind her and he wouldn’t be able to see just how much fear she had of him.
She didn’t take a single breath it felt until her allotted room’s door clicked shut behind her and the locks slid into place. Sagging against the door in relief, and to hold off whatever monsters her irrational brain was cooking up, Pieck finally got the chance to take inventory of her own disheveled appearance.
She was still soaked, to no one’s surprise, in the blood of her fellow Eldians, but this time she felt dirty in a way that water and soap wouldn’t take off of her.
Chapter 5: Steam
Notes:
I've read recently that apparently em dash usage is an indication of AI usage? I love em dashes, because I'm a grammar nerd, and I'm also an AI hater. So this is my official proclamation that I don't and will never use AI, I'm just ~like this~
Also, this is the end of the first act! I might Take a break next week and post again the following week, catch up on some other stuff I've been neglecting, but who knows. Don't think I've abandoned this fic EVER. And if you notice that I like writing winter scenes, it is because I grew up above the 50th parallel N, and I've got a northern attitude.
Enjoy, see you when I see you!!!
Chapter Text
March 29th, 845
A small part of Pieck had been terribly upset, not having been chosen for the Paradis mission. She realized she shouldn’t be, that it was irrational, but she couldn’t help it. Pieck didn’t want to be amongst the island devils for an indeterminate amount of time, fighting and scared for her life, no doubt killing many. Her titan was far better suited for things here, rather than espionage. Combat where she could face the enemy and the enemy could face her as she was, a nightmare on four legs with guns to match her monstrous size.
But it was easier to hide, in a crowd of six, rather than a crowd of two.
Being stuck in a wretched pair with Zeke during their current campaign in Southern Marley was an exercise in patience. The two of them shared a fairly spacious officer’s dugout, which, while it was better than any other Eldian soldier got, allotted Pieck no privacy at all. She would’ve preferred Commander Magath as a bunkmate. At least then she would have been spared all of the disrespectful comments.
They were here to squash a rebellion that had been brewing, literally and figuratively. Unfortunately though, the heat this close to the equator was oppressive, and the only saving graces were the impossible to keep clean white uniforms they wore, and the fact that it almost never rained. Trench foot would kill better than a bullet, and painfully.
Early that morning Pieck dressed in appreciated silence. She sat on her bed across from Zeke’s, keeping her eyes to herself. A month ago when they started this dreadful massacre, Pieck had tried to have some modesty from him, but she slowly realized it was a losing battle, and that he was intent on catching glances of her fair skin wherever he could grab them. Pervert.
Like this morning, she sat still in her pajamas on the bed, preparing her clothing which included wrapping a cloth pad around her underwear. She fastened the metal snaps into place and set them aside, picking up her uniform shirt to start undoing the buttons, but was interrupted by Zeke clearing his throat.
“So… womanly issues?” Zeke asked, fidgeting like a teenage boy confronted with the concept of blood not born from violence for the first time in his life.
Pieck sighed, which was becoming a habit for her where he was involved, and ignored his obviously goading question.
“Can’t you just… steam that away?” Zeke asked, pushing past the awkward silence Pieck was intentionally creating.
Oh for the sake of the nine.
“No, Zeke,” Pieck spoke as if to a child, gentle and mildly condescending, “It isn’t a wound, it’s a bodily process. It’d be like trying to use Titan healing to stop your liver from filtering toxins.” She explained, figuring if she didn’t he’d ask someone less tactful. Which might be what he needs, in hindsight.
“Oh.” Zeke nodded, his young face looking very serious with thought, “And it hurts?”
Call it hormones, or call it Zeke raping Pieck when she was fourteen, but she snapped at him in a way that was disproportionate to his question, “Zeke, there is blood and tissue coming out of a pin sized hole in my cervix, of course it hurts, you imbecile.” She nearly growled.
He took a deep inhale, smirking. Pieck’s skin crawled, imagining what was going through his head.
“Can I see?”
“What?”
“Can I see it? The blood?” Zeke repeated his disgusting question like the creep he was.
“Get out.” Pieck breathed, patience a thin line threatening to snap.
“This is my dugout too, you can’t-”
“Get the fuck out you goddamn-” Pieck picked her hairbrush up from her side table, hurling it at him hard enough to likely leave a bruise where it connected with his shoulder.
“Fine! It was an honest question! Nothing I haven’t seen before,” Zeke muttered. Despite clearly trying to play it cool, he scurried from the dugout with a noticeable urgency, leaving Pieck in a blissful silence.
“God, what is wrong with him…” Pieck whispered to herself, standing so she could dress by herself for the first time in weeks.
Reporting to Commander Magath on time, at 4:30am, there was a tension between the two Warriors that he picked up on pretty immediately. Anger on Pieck’s behalf, and Zeke bitter for being refused something for once in his charmed life.
Still, Magath didn’t address the obvious unease, and probably wouldn’t unless it threatened their performance on the battlefield.
“Pieck, Jaeger,” Magath greeted each of them, staring down at his little planning clipboard. He looked like a football coach planning out plays, and it made Pieck smile.
“Commander,” She returned.
“We’re going to attack today,” Magath announced just to the two of them, his words a horrifying reality. Pieck didn’t worry about her own life, nearly impossible to lose, but others…
“We’ve found a large quarry of boulders nearby. Pieck, you’re going to work to transport them nearby, and when we have an adequate amount, Jaeger will work to launch them into and nearby the enemy trench.”
Pieck considered the plan. It wasn’t a horrible start.
Zeke cut the resulting silence, which annoyed Pieck for no apparent reason. “Okay. Is this to kill or thwart?”
“Wait for me to finish,” Magath directed, “I want Pieck to go into the front line’s trench and clean it out. Take out hostiles and equipment that isn’t handled by the boulders. Jaeger, you’ll continue the barrage until both the front lines and support trenches are clear.”
Pieck swallowed, glancing down at her boots to avoid Magath’s eyeline. More killing, it’s what was to be expected.
“Jaeger, you’re only to approach once the enemy trenches are compromised, or if Pieck needs support. Your height is a disadvantage in this situation.” Pieck could feel Magath’s eyes on her, even if she was busy tracing her eyes over her laces. Call her perceptive, or maybe paranoid. “We cut off their supply chain again in the night as we’ve been doing, so they shouldn’t be expecting an attack. They’ll be vulnerable and isolated. Once you’re done, we’ll lay siege to the reserves on foot, and move into the city. We’ll be able to crush this rebellion within the week if we do this right.”
“Underfoot,” Zeke mumbled, his arms crossed over his chest as he shifted side to side.
“What?” Magath leaned in, glaring at Zeke. Pieck raised an eyebrow and tilted her head enough to watch.
“Underfoot, sir,” Zeke corrected.
“Do you think this is funny, soldier?” Magath grabbed Zeke’s arm and shoved it down, forcibly uncrossing them. “Pieck, go get into the truck, it’s parked out by barrel storage in the trees. Jaeger, let’s talk.”
Oh yeah, Pieck practically ran out of there. She left Zeke standing there, looking angry that his commanding officer could dare speak down to him.
The truck wasn’t hard to find, not if you knew where to look. The Cart Titan’s crew was already standing behind it, sharing cigarettes and clearly waiting. They each held a metal mess kit cup, steaming with black sludge, one of them holding two with his cigarette awkwardly balanced along with one of the handles in a way that made Pieck worry when he took his next sip.
“Hey, guys. I hope you weren’t waiting too long for me.” Pieck called as she approached. The sun hadn’t risen yet, and the only light guiding her was a dim lantern and the burning cherries that let her count the five of them stood there.
“No worries,” The one with two mugs, Eric, reassured, “I got this for you. It’s still hot.” He smiled as he handed it to her, excited like a child sharing candy with a friend.
“Thanks,” Pieck smiled and took the coffee from him, standing in the semicircle at the end. “Have you all been waiting long?”
Another of her men, Isaiah, shook his head, “Only about ten minutes. Had to go deliver the transport vehicles, and we only got back long enough to make drinks.” He checked his watch, and Pieck had no idea how he made out the small numbers in such low light, “We have a bit before we gotta leave, so no rush.”
Pieck brought her mug to her lips, and drank slowly, grimacing at the bitter and burnt taste. Field coffee was always disgusting, and caffeine rarely affected her. The camaraderie was worth it, though.
“What were you talking about, before I interrupted?” Pieck inquired.
“The commander’s plan. He’s putting you at risk, throwing you into the fire,” The tallest and most cynical of her riders, Vince, rolled his eyes. He’d never admit it as a Marleyan, but Pieck suspected he was soft on her.
“I don’t mind, if it means going home sooner,” Pieck grinned, “Magath was berating Zeke, before I came here.” She indulged.
“He deserved it,” Eric decided, not having heard the reason.
“That’s so stupid, Er, let her finish the story,” William, the shiny blond in charge of the small unit’s command, reprimanded.
“Anyways,” Pieck snickered, “He made another of his inane crush jokes while Magath was explaining our orders, and he didn’t take it well.” She took another long swig of coffee, filling her mouth and swallowing it down. The heat in her stomach was helping to wake her up quite nicely.
“What was it?” Eric asked, putting his cigarette butt out on the metal side of the truck, and dropping it into his presumably empty mug.
“Magath said we’d be able to ‘crush the rebellion’ and Zeke responded, ‘underfoot’,” Pieck couldn’t help but roll her eyes, “He even doubled down when prompted.”
The five men groaned and gave various disappointed gestures, head shakes and eye rolls of their own.
“I think I preferred the one about steamrollers,” Isaiah announced, also putting out his cigarette, “He’s getting lazy.”
Eric made a noise of agreement, and popped the passenger side door so he could climb in, “He’ll need to get a new joke soon. I’ll pray it’s actually funny.”
“Settle, settle,” William said through a grin. He pulled the truck’s keys from his pocket, and held them up, “Who’s driving?”
The ride over was quite entertaining, filled with laughs and teasing. Pieck giggled the whole way, high on the lighthearted energy between the four of them in the back. She usually traveled via her titan in such situations, but considering subtlety was crucial during this task, this was a rare treat.
Arriving at the quarry, if it could be called that, Pieck could see her work was cut out for her. There were many large pieces of stone, but they were obscured in the dirt and shadow of the overhead cliff. No wonder this was originally overlooked.
Despite the light and joking dynamic between the five of them, Pieck noticed that once they were parked, it was like a flip was switched. William started to bark orders, receiving automatic responses while they jumped out of the truck and began pulling equipment from under the seats.
The plan was simple, Pieck’s titan would do the digging, pulling boulders from the ground and setting them into the trucks. The boys would then secure them into place, and keep watch.
Pieck waited beside the truck they’d arrived in, watching in nervous silence as they set things up. Wooden wedges, ropes, rifles, and various other equipment meant for securing large and oddly sized objects, or for transporting large amounts of earth with only manpower. Pieck’s eyes flickered back and forth over the five of them, watching every bit of progress carefully.
She had transformed a few dozen times by now, and while being a titan itself wasn’t so bad, fun at times even, that didn’t mean the process of getting there was easy on her. It would get there, she’d been assured, but she didn’t believe that.
Pieck, out of the way of her unit, took deep breaths with her index finger trapped between her molars. Her teeth whistled at the odd position, but she couldn’t hear it. Only the rush of blood in her ears, and the inevitable sounds of what she was going to do.
Closing her eyes, Pieck was almost ready. She could feel at least one pair of eyes on her, and she tensed her jaw in preparation.
“Pieck, are you-” A well meaning voice began to ask something Pieck never heard the end of. She cut him off with a large crack, the middle phalange of her finger snapped back in an unnatural position. Hot, sticky blood pooled in her mouth, coagulating quickly in the cool morning air and causing Pieck to wrinkle her nose in disgust. But the wound was already billowing with steam, more than enough to do the job.
Lightning touched down. The burning of a new, bigger nervous system knitting itself into what already existed within her was overwhelming. Lengthy, strong limbs pushed her from the ground, and her nightmarish head was large, but not attached to her neck–not her real one, anyways.
Shaking off the odd sensations with a gesture reminiscent of a wet dog, Pieck opened her larger, better eyes to see her unit golf-clapping in a truly unserious manner. She did forget they were just boys sometimes, and not some infallible form of protection that surrounded her.
“Well done. Get started digging whenever you’re ready, Pieck,” Will called from under her nose. Her long snout made it somewhat difficult to see him, but she knew him well enough to imagine whatever unfittingly serious look was on his boyish face.
“Understood,” the Cart Titan’s gravelly deep voice responded. She turned to the buried stone before she could see any of them cringe. Titan voices were, as a rule, unsettling. She and Zeke were the only ones who could speak, but it seemed everyone wished they couldn’t.
Walking to her mark, Pieck nosed her face against the soil, testing its firmness. Satisfied at the brittle and dry texture, she sank a paw into the topsoil, digging quickly even if she kicked up a decent bit of dust in the process.
The process of uncovering a piece of rock, wrenching it free with the absurd strength of her neck muscles, and carrying it over to be placed gently in the bed of one of the trucks was repetitive, but oddly calming. There was barely a word spoken between the six of them, two keeping watch while the other three secured each boulder into place with her. It was the understanding, Pieck assumed, of what today was going to entail. They were loading boulders that would crush people, and the means with which they’d defend themselves. It was quiet now, because when they returned they likely wouldn’t get another moment of silence until their enemy was subjugated.
Rolling the last rock into the back of the final truck carried more weight with it than what the suspension of the vehicle betrayed.
Once that was done and William gave the order to start loading up again, Pieck split her nape and began to pull herself free of the suspending tendons connecting to various parts of her body and face.
The youngest of her riders, Kenneth, was quick to climb atop her titan to assist her with his pocket knife. She was immensely grateful for the help, finding it a bit difficult to free herself with so little practice.
Kenneth was only 18, recruited straight out of training to her specialized unit for his remarkable sharpshooting skills, and his ability to think logically in tough situations. Pieck was glad for the younger company, as all the other guys were in their 20’s, and had a hard time relating to her as a teenage girl.
“Thank you,” Pieck spared him a gentle smile, knowing he was notoriously shy. She didn’t need to embarrass him.
“No problem,” Kenneth played off, sheathing his knife once she was cut free and slipping it into his pocket, “Are you okay, Pieck?”
Pieck’s brows furrowed, “Don’t worry about me, I’m alright,” She assured, without knowing if that was necessarily true.
The ride back was missing the joy of the ride to, each of her boys driving their own truck, with Pieck in the passenger seat of William’s. There was barely a word exchanged between the two of them, and by the time they were nearing camp, Pieck had settled into a light sleep.
She wouldn’t be needed for a while, and she wasn’t impeding anything here, so she let the sounds of slamming doors and shouting act as white noise to her half-dreamlike state.
Her doze was interrupted when the door her head was leaned against was yanked open. Her eyes immediately shot open, her arms unfolding from over her chest should she need to defend herself–oh. It was Commander Magath, with a neutrally serious look on his face.
“Commander,” Pieck yawned, stretching her arms out in front of her until she heard her shoulders pop.
She saw the corner of Magath’s mouth twitch, his jaw flexing as he put extra effort into not smiling, she figured. “I could have killed you, if I wanted to,” he said flatly. Ah, so he was still upset over Zeke’s earlier flippancy.
“I appreciate your restraint, sir,” Pieck joked. She unbuckled her seatbelt and moved her knees to be facing his, leaving them at chest height considering the excessive height of the transport trucks. “Would you help me down?”
Magath gave her a discontented little grunt, but he still held out a hand and helped her slide from the seat, landing with only a little discomfort.
“Come to the third artillery mount, over by my dugout. That’s where we’ll launch from,” Magath turned and left, leaving that information hanging in the air as Pieck struggled to take it in. Right. She was going to kill people today. She didn’t know why she kept forgetting that.
Pieck discovered quickly that hearing another shifter transform while she stayed human triggered an odd, primal part of her brain. A prey instinct, fight or flight. The ground shook with the force of the Beast Titan growing to his 17 meter height behind the trench. Pieck, within the trench, was accosted by loose dust and dirt spilling in, knocked loose by Zeke.
And he was an ugly thing if you asked her. He had no grace or elegance like the Female Titan or the Armored. She wasn’t one to talk, she knew, but god, she had nightmares about that furry fuck and not for the usual reasons.
He received all of his orders while still human, so not a word was exchanged before he bent down to one of the nearby trucks and lifted a boulder into his hand. Zeke moved it around in his hand carefully, testing the weight in a way that made Pieck anxious. If he dropped it, they were screwed. She didn’t think he would but Zeke was nothing if not cocky.
Satisfied, Zeke wound his hand back. He slung his arm forward, putting the weight of his massive body behind the stone and sending it catapulting directly to where their intel had said the enemy’s command center was.
He wasted no time, picking another up and sending it flying in much the same way, crushing a mounted machine gun and the soldier who was manning it in one brutal throw. Pieck wasn’t sure, but she thought she could feel his eyes on her.
The assault was brutal, the screaming audible even from 200 meters away. If Pieck knew Zeke less, if she hadn’t grown up with him, she would’ve interpreted the look on his titan’s face as a grimace. But she did know him, and she saw it for what it was. A smile.
She received the order to advance with one truckload left. Briefly, she wondered what she could even do, the front and support trenches were filled with smoke and splattered with a grisly amount of blood. Regardless, she followed orders, climbing from the trench with considerable cover and nothing to defend herself with but a utility knife. Or so they thought.
The second transformation of the day was easier, her body more open to the devil living inside her blood after already spending so much time in this form performing labor that made her muscles sing with pleasure.
Embracing the change, Pieck shook out her new limbs, stretching them so she was ready. She lied down next to her armament, ignoring the slightly increased although still meek gunfire, so that her unit could quickly get her equipped and ready.
The metal plate they fastened to her face, reminiscent of a welder’s mask, wasn’t something she was fond of. It obscured her vision slightly, making her more reliant on her team, but she supposed it was worth it when it came to the slightly squishier nature of the Cart Titan.
Pieck still hadn’t gotten used to the concept of people riding her into battle, right behind her head. It felt weird, hearing William talk to her from the gun that sat to her right, when usually she stood a foot shorter than him even in her uniform boots. Their weight wasn’t noticeable, not amongst the heavy metal equipment, but having more than just her own life in her hands was unbearable.
Breathing deeply in a set rhythm inside of her titan’s nape helped to calm her down some, but not much. She glanced up at where Zeke stood a few meters away, and steeled herself.
“Whenever you’re ready,” William soothed, voice echoing throughout his cabin.
If Pieck wasn’t ready now, she was sure she’d psyche herself out before she could do what she needed to do. And she wasn’t of use to the Marleyan military if she couldn’t do her one job.
Pieck turned her head to face no man’s land, mentally charting a course over the rocks Zeke had laid for her. Once she had that, she gave herself no time to hesitate, pushing off of her back legs to launch herself over the trench and towards the enemy.
Her quadrupedal balance had improved significantly since she’d first transformed, making the adjustment of weight second nature. Pieck barely noticed the added load on her back now that she was racing across the adverse terrain, taking only a few seconds to add extra power into her back legs, and extra effort into her front.
The wind breezing against her sides as she ran was so nice, that she allowed herself to become unfocused, and before she knew it she was looming over the decimated trench as the shadow of death herself.
Gunfire broke out above her almost as soon as she was on steady footing, but she wasn’t still long. She couldn’t think of them as what they were as she grabbed soldier after soldier and crushed them in her forceful grip.
“Pieck to your left-” She heard one of her boys call, but she was already turning. She grabbed the man, a sergeant by the looks of him, and tore him limb from limb with her teeth to hold him in place.
She spat his head from behind her back molars, and picked her gaze up long enough to notice the rock sailing just to the left of her as well. As soon as it landed the loud crash of displaced air shuddered through her bones, but she forced herself to persevere.
Pieck’s hands were slick, and then sticky with the blood drying on them. There would be no use in wiping them off, not when she’d only be in this form as long as it suited, but her grip was beginning to become mercurial.
Her hands wrapped around a stability beam within the trench, the grain of the wood quickly staining red, and yanked. The crash of another boulder flinging through the air made Pieck twitch instinctively, but she put it out of her mind.
Her right hip was suddenly still despite her commanding it to move, and then the pain set in. Her roar was nothing that could be considered close to human, and she twisted to try and free herself and her shattered pelvic bone.
But she slipped. Maybe it was the viscera surrounding her, or the unstable surface, or the weight she’d forgotten to accommodate still alive and breathing and strapped to her back. Her right hand was buried in the dirt of the trench, her shoulder pinned to the wall. Her nape was shoved underneath a gun cabin, and so Pieck could make no move to escape. Her boys were vulnerable, and likely wouldn’t be able to free or protect themselves at such a disadvantage. They couldn’t wait for her shattered hip to heal, or her crushed forearm and elbow to knit themselves together. Pieck briefly wondered if she would now have five more lives on her conscience.
“Pieck!” Zeke’s horrifying Beast voice called from the other side of the trench field, followed in short order by footsteps that shook the ground. Pieck felt betrayed by the loud part of her brain that was relieved, reassured by his promised presence. She didn’t trust anyone else to save her, but she didn’t trust him at all.
A split-second decision occurred in her brain, and she opened her maw to call back to him desperately, “Zeke!”
The footsteps increased in volume, and soon Pieck was looking at an odd, disproportionate leg in front of her. His shadow enveloped her, skewing her visibility in the low morning light down even further, but she’d already accepted she couldn’t do much in her current state.
Zeke’s height left him at a disadvantage, as he had to crouch down considerably to destroy the guns (and soldiers manning them) that were attacking Pieck. She didn’t see the short, practically a child, soldier who crawled from beyond him, several delayed detonation bombs the size of his forearm stashed on his person. She didn’t see him, until he was throwing what looked to be a tar covered cement block onto Zeke.
Its detonation shook Zeke where he was standing, and while part of his left arm was limp and useless, his right was already attempting to grab the small boy.
But the boy wasn’t deterred. He plugged countdowns into more of his sticky creations and threw them aimlessly towards Zeke, caring less for accuracy and more general damage. He slid into the trench just as Zeke’s shoulder exploded, followed by a small part of his chest. Pieck would’ve been impressed at the soldier’s ability to launch such weight with efficacy, if it wasn’t at her saving grace.
The boy seemed mesmerized by the damage he was doing, that he didn’t seem to notice that the bomb in his arm was live. It was only a second’s difference, but chunks of what was just a moment ago a thinking, breathing human, splattered across Pieck’s visor, blinding her completely. The front of her lip was burnt off in addition, which would only slow her healing elsewhere.
Hearing the same trademark muttering that she usually associated with the boyish asshole she was stuck with instead come out of a monster 17 meters high was jarring. He seemed to be plotting something, but his hand–the other not quite responsive yet– dug under Pieck and lifted her from the trench, placing her beside him in the mud of war.
“Thank you,” Pieck’s voice rattled out. Her shoulder and hip were both still reforming, so she couldn’t remove herself yet from the situation, but at least she wasn’t prone, and her unit could defend themselves.
A prisoner, stuck useless in her own body for the moment being, Pieck thought of the Beast Titan whose presence was still above her. He was putting himself at risk, staying here to defend her when she technically was more than safe with her overqualified panzer unit.
Pieck was too lit up on adrenaline and the panic of the gone-to-hell situation to think rationally about anything emotional. She was sure she was going to get hell from Magath for her careless mistakes, and that mattered more to her than any emotions Zeke may or may not be feeling.
While she was ruminating on her near future, her right limbs gently pushed up under her, looking as if nothing had happened. She was level now, sparing barely a second to clean her visor so she could bound towards the Marleyan trench, with Zeke providing cover to do so.
She didn’t slow her sprint for a second as she approached the trench. Pieck cleared it easily with a jump, and angled herself sideways to come to a stop, skidding hard enough to leave a plume of dry dirt in her wake. The last view Pieck had before she was cut from her titan and dragged to Magath was Zeke lumbering back towards them, a permanent frown etched on his angled teeth.
Pieck had been right in the end, catching the diatribe she expected from her concerned commander once it was ensured she’d established no sustained damage with her stupidity. She was sure his screaming didn’t affect her much at this point in their working relationship, so she was confused why her hands, extended out from her body as if holding something, shook whenever she looked down at them.
Staring at her hands as she walked, Pieck didn’t notice herself going past the medic’s area, reserved for the critically wounded. She never got a spot there, regardless of her wounds, and thus hadn’t really known where it’d been.
“-bullet shattered his femur, I don’t think he’ll be able to keep the limb,” Pieck caught the smooth, deep voice of the field doctor speaking. Pieck paused by the wooden beam composing the doorway, tucking her small body behind it so she could eavesdrop on whatever conversation she’d accidentally interrupted.
“Will you recommend him for discharge?” A man spoke, his voice one Pieck immediately recognized as William. Crap, was one of her boys injured, and she hadn’t even noticed?
“Honorable, of course. Regardless of if he needs amputation or not, he’ll never walk again,” The doctor confided, “Kenneth is a credit to Marley.”
Fuck.
Pieck was so fucking stupid. She was so focused on her own life, on self preservation, that she couldn’t look past her own bullshit to even check on the five of them. She was going to be sick.
She couldn’t listen to any more of this. She turned from the infirmary, and headed back to her dugout, hands steady. Pieck just prayed that Zeke wouldn’t be there, she wouldn’t be able to stomach his presence or be nonreactive to his bullshit.
The Founder Ymir was smiling down on her, for that evening her blond menace of a dugout mate was nowhere to be found. Pieck had been able to have a washcloth bath and to change from her dirt and bloodstained clothing in only blissful silence.
As the sun set on a truly damnable day, the air chilled in a way only spring could manage. Pieck pulled on a sweater out of necessity, and crawled from her pooly insulated hole, going to find heat wherever she could find it.
It seemed the day’s progress after weeks of stagnation was a boost to the trenches morale, because no one was still or asleep unless they had to be. They’d be out of here soon, whether it was to lay siege to the city, or to go home to Marley proper.
Walking past groups of smoking soldiers, card games, and barrel fires, Pieck assessed each one before moving on. She kept her arms crossed over her chest, hoping to shield herself from being recognized and dragged into a situation of empty pleasantries.
She noticed an open fire dug into one of the nearby open top storage areas, empty and converted into a recreation area. It was almost empty save for two soldiers, and recognizing each of them, Pieck elected to join them.
Prepared for rejection after what she’d done, Pieck walked up to the small cooking fire. She realized quickly that Kenneth and Isaiah were drinking and laughing, clearly in a good mood. Kenneth had a large bandage with gauze going from his hip to his knee, thigh splinted, one boot on, with a blanket covering his lap. He was in his civvies as well, and Pieck realized he was out of the woods, but not safe from complications. She’d no idea how he convinced the doctor to let him out of her sight.
“Should you be out here?” She asked, a quirk of amusement in her voice.
Kenneth raised a finger to his lips along with his open beer, shushing her before he took a sip.
Pieck rolled her eyes but came to sit beside him on the turned over log. “I’m surprised you’re still at camp. I heard you’re going to lose the leg,” Pieck said and immediately regretted it. It was surely a sore topic, and she had just dug her finger into the wound without a care.
“Yeah, well I can’t get transport until tomorrow when you guys move out, so I’ve got one more night here,” Kenneth grinned, seemingly unoffended by her blunt words.
Pieck slid a bit closer, taking his hand in her own. “Thank you,” she whispered, but it sounded more like ‘goodbye’.
“Hey, it’s fine. We’ll see each other again when we get back,” he reassured her. Kenneth laced his fingers with hers and squeezed gently.
“Yeah, we’ll both be in Liberio and…” Pieck glanced down, the idea of the internment zone hanging heavy between them. He was Marleyan, and she wasn’t, no matter what her armband said. They could be friends, sure, but even that would be a lot of work for two very busy people who society didn’t want to see together.
“Pieck?” Kenneth whispered, looking straight at her.
She picked her head up, staring at him in return, “Hm?”
He leaned in, slow and careful, and pressed his lips to hers. He was cold, but her body heat was hard to match considering the titan her body housed. She didn’t mind it, the gentle, considerate feeling of his soft lips yielding under her own.
He didn’t press any further than that, pulling away after a few seconds. There was no hand on her thigh, or tug at her bra, nothing. “Was that okay? He asked, so, so soft.
Pieck nodded. She was disappointed, she thought. Not at him, but she didn’t want to do it again. He was kind, sweeter than he let on despite his aloof nature, and none of it was for her. She had a horrible monster that lived inside of her that dreamed of bruising hands and tearing teeth, and that wasn’t including her titan. Gentle hands were a promise bound to be broken, and they made Pieck shiver. She needed violence, his softness was wasted on her.
“Yes, Ken. It’s alright,” Pieck grinned, and it was another lie. But after she crippled him for life today, she could spare his feelings and give him what he wanted.
Returning to her bed after nearly an hour with Kenneth was a kind of relief she didn’t realize she would need. Somehow, playing at puppy love with him while he swayed under the effect of painkillers and drink was more draining than battle ever was, and she stumbled down the stupid dirt step into her dugout like she’d imbibed when she hadn’t. Child soldiering and signing yourself on to a 13-year expiration date was fine, but underage drinking would be unforgivable if Magath caught her.
Pieck paused when she realized Zeke was here. It wasn’t early, but he didn’t often return in order to sleep until he had to. He didn’t need the hours of social recharge like Pieck did and so seeing him lying in bed was jarring.
She almost thought him asleep until she caught the white of his eyes in the light of the single candle on his side table, and she realized he was staring at her. It wasn’t a look like she’d seen on him before, there wasn’t anything predatory to it. He was looking right through her.
Electing to ignore it, Pieck moved to sit on her bed, untying her heavy boots and sliding them under her bed. His eyes stayed pinned to the doorway, and she felt a little worried. There were no dirty, harassing comments, or ploys to get her undressed.
She sat there staring at him, for a good while. Rolling the choice around in her mind, Pieck swallowed and uttered out a word, “Zeke?”
Only then did his eyes flick to her, recognition late to settle in. “What?”
“I don’t want to hear anything about this,” Pieck asserted, standing up despite the dirt that would get on her white socks.
Crossing the short distance, Pieck drew the blanket from his body, sighing in relief when she saw the gray military issue sweatpants adorning his lower half. “Can I sleep in your bed tonight?” she dropped her voice to a whisper.
Instead of a dirty joke, Zeke’s eyes trailed to her hand still resting on his blanket. This was more courtesy that he ever afforded her, and Pieck thought the clenching of his jaw said he realized this too.
“Yes.”
She didn’t say anything else; she didn’t need to. Pieck knelt on the creaky wooden frame with one knee and turned her body to lay her shoulders against his chest. He pulled the blanket over her without her having to ask, and he settled his arm around her waist over the blanket.
Even through the blanket, he was hot. Hot in a way no one had been since she inherited the Cart Titan. Another thing she hadn’t felt since she inherited the Cart Titan was quickly burgeoning beneath her skin, and it was almost enough to make her tear herself from the bed and demand the infirmary give her a bed for the night. But his strong arm, the feverish heat of a titan shifter; it made Pieck feel safe.
Zeke had protected her, and he would do it again. Pieck didn’t know why she was sure, she definitely shouldn’t have been after the years of torment and mistreatment. He understood, and the only others who understood were hundreds of kilometers away and years younger than her, on an island that knew nothing of their true selves.
“Goodnight,” Pieck whispered; Zeke was already asleep.
End of Act One
Chapter 6: A Different Sort of Game
Notes:
Okay yeah this is only a day late instead of a week like I'd implied.
Whoops?Anyways, this is only the set up for it but Act 2 is both chalk full of experimentation scenes and nearly twice as long as Act 1. This is your third and final warning! And I promise it all has narrative purpose; I'm not a sadist.
This act also has its fair share of recurrent OCs, they aren't endgame, self inserts, or long-term, which is why I didn't particularly see a point tagging them.See you next Sunday<3
Chapter Text
April 2nd, 845
Magath paced the space in front of Pieck. His hands tucked behind his back in the usual way self-important men did when they wanted to feel intimidating.
“Cowardice,” Magath broke the fragile silence hanging between them, “We shoot normal soldiers for cowardice. Do you think your status as an honorary Marleyan makes you better than your comrades?” Magath demanded of Pieck.
Pieck stared into Magath’s eyes, not with teenage defiance but instead with understanding. “No, sir.”
“Are you sure? Because after so many drills, I had expected you to be able to maneuver your titan with some level of capability,” Magath’s eyes bored into her, even as she avoided eye contact.
Pieck mumbled, but she knew it was a weak defense, “I slipped.”
“Marley has no use for shifters who cannot perform their duties.”
“I know.”
“If you stray from orders, whether it be through incompetence or unwillingness, you will be replaced, Pieck,” Magath’s eyes pleaded with Pieck.
“I understand, sir.”
“I know you’re smart, Finger. Act like it. Don’t give me a reason to be unsatisfied with your performance.”
“I won’t, Commander,” she promised him.
“Good,” Magath sighed. He sat down at his paper laden desk and leaned forward onto his elbows. “You’re dismissed, soldier. Don’t let us meet here again.”
“I won’t, sir,” Pieck repeated, standing up from the uncomfortable chair and letting herself out of the commander’s formal office.
***
It hadn’t been one day after returning to Marley proper that Pieck was mildly kidnapped from her home; forced to pack a bag, and shoved in the back of a car, not told when she would be returned. She wasn’t scared then, and wasn’t scared now, of her accelerated inheritance. If they intended on feeding her to Porco she wouldn’t have been told to pack a go-bag. Corpses didn’t need clothes.
After her meeting with the Commander, Pieck had been locked into the shifters’ wing by her accompanying escort. The set up took her a few days to figure out, seeing as the shifters’ wing was big enough that they didn’t need to leave it on a usual basis. They didn’t eat in the Marleyan staff’s cafeteria, they had a complete bathroom for each sex, and obviously they had their own bedrooms.
Pieck didn’t even mind this quarantine type set up originally. She wasn’t the most sociable and she had more than enough books to keep her company. That was until she realized that she was locked in here with Zeke, and he was far less competent at minding his business and staying in his own space than she was.
As far as Pieck was aware, the Marleyan military wasn’t aware of Pieck and Zeke’s intimate history. If they were, she’d seen no indication, and since she hadn’t, she was struggling to understand why this was a punishment.
Pieck received a summons down to a wing of the building she’d never been to, to a room she had never visited before a week into her extended stay. Set on edge and with only an hour to pace between when the paper was delivered and when she was supposed to get there, she made quick work of scurrying from her room, if not only because she was excited to finally be able to do more walking than back-and-forth down her hallway allowed.
Pieck made her way down the stairs and into the prescribed wing of the hospital, dread sinking deeper into her with every step. The medical wing of the center was more reminiscent of an office than a military facility, in a way that was purposefully disarming.
Room 984B, where she’d been told to report, had its door lazily open. Sunlight mixed with lamplight and spilled into the dim hallway, the warm gleam more inviting than Pieck figured the room would be.
“Miss Pieck? Is that you?” A deep and feminine voice called the shifter from her thoughts, the origin of which was inside of the office, “Come inside, please.”
Pieck stepped in, not knowing quite how he was expected to behave in this situation. She knew she was being punished, Magath made that much clear when he’d dressed her down upon their return to Liberio, but what that punishment would entail was beyond her.
“Good morning,” A tall woman stood on the other side of the heavy seeming desk, a customer service smile plastered on her perfect mouth. Her hair was long and dark, but poorly cared for, and wire-rimmed glasses barely kept it from falling in her face. A few strands escaped and sprung out haphazardly, but Pieck doubted this woman had seen a mirror in days. She gestured at one of the two chairs positioned across from her, “Please, have a seat.”
Suspicious of this polite Marleyan, Pieck sat, her thumb nail digging into her opposite hand’s palm in an attempt to ground herself. She squirmed in her seat whenever she tried to make eye contact with the intimidating woman, and Pieck instead settled her gaze on her shoes.
“I already know who you are, of course, but you don’t know who I am,” the doctor grinned and sat in her rolling desk chair, taking a package of cigarettes from her desk’s top drawer. Pieck was unsettled by the constant flash of pearly white teeth, even if this Marleyan wasn’t an obvious physical threat to her. Yet.
The doctor lit one of the cigarettes and left it between her painted red lips. She took a second one from the package, and held it out to Pieck, her face carefully neutral. Pieck furrowed her brow, confused. Technically, the age to consent in mood altering substances like liquor and tobacco was 18, as she liked to remind Zeke whenever he tried to offer her one of his own cigarettes. Pieck didn’t know if this was a test, or a show of friendship, but either way Pieck took the cigarette and held it hesitantly.
The doctor, who still hadn’t introduced herself, noticed her obvious apprehension. She tapped her cigarette off on a well-loved crystal ashtray, and let it rest there a moment, “You don’t have to worry about it. Your lungs will make up the damage,” the doctor picked up her lighter and struck it, holding the flame out for Pieck expectantly.
One wouldn’t hurt. Pieck put it between her lips and leaned in, allowing the doctor to light it for her. The flash of something in the doctor’s eyes was unmistakable, but Pieck wasn’t able to place what it was.
“Good girl,” She praised, resuming her own smoking now that Pieck was mirroring it back at her. “I’m Dr. Kosar, I’m the head of the Titan Biomedical Sciences department. We’ve met before, but it was when you were sedated for your inheritance ceremony.” Dr. Kosar smirked at the knowledge of their exchange, one Pieck had no recollection of.
“Lovely to meet you, Dr. Kosar,” Pieck responded reflexively, taking another inhale off of the filter between her fingers. She wasn’t going to let it burn out, even if she was unsettled by the way she was being spoken to.
“You as well, Miss Pieck,” Dr. Kosar pulled her wire rimmed glasses down from her hair and pushed them up her nose into place. She reached for a file off of a nearby stack, and flipped it open. Her unruly hair obscured her face from Pieck the moment she looked down, leaving Pieck in the dark when it came to the doctor’s nearly silent ramblings.
Pieck drifted off into her thoughts while the doctor read, never sparing a word for the shifter sat across from her. Pieck was so bored she was becoming more and more sure that this was the punishment, sentenced to die of boredom.
“You’re sixteen?” Kosar’s voice cut through her thoughts, making Pieck perk up.
“Yes, ma’am. My birthday is in August.”
“Ma’am,” Dr. Kosar snorted, “Makes me feel old…” her gaze glinted with something distinct once again, and Pieck struggled with how to respond.
“I’m sorry, Doctor.”
“Mmm.”
The doctor went back to her reading, and Pieck had to hold back an eye roll now. Pieck was sure whatever file she was going through wasn’t that interesting, and that this was dragging for the both of them.
It took nearly fifteen minutes for the doctor to speak again. Long enough for Pieck’s cigarette to burn out, and for Dr. Kosar to make her way through a second. Pieck’s legs ached in the chair she sat in, no room to stretch her knees out with how close the chair was to the backside of Dr. Kosar’s desk.
“I think I’ve read all I can about you,” Kosar stood up abruptly, closing what was apparently Pieck’s file, and rounding the desk. “Would you accompany me to my exam room?”
Pieck might have just been in a poor mood, but it grated on her the way Dr. Kosar phrased her demand as a question, when they both knew disobeying would invite further retribution.
“Sure, Doctor.”
That dreadful smile found its way back onto the taller woman’s face, and Pieck wondered if Dr. Kosar shouldn’t have been a secretary instead of a researcher. It would’ve saved her time, certainly.
The walk to the lab was short, thank the founder. Pieck stared at the back of the doctor as they walked. Her cornflower blue blouse was almost completely hidden from view by her hair from this perspective. They looped around behind the office, and Pieck waited as Dr. Kosar unlocked a steel door.
The lab was simple. Sage green walls, with waist tall windows looking into the hallway. There were windows to the facility’s courtyard on the opposite wall, but the panes were frosted and the view ruined. Cabinets with glass doors lined the wall perpendicular to the door and hallway, filled with various brown glass bottles and metal equipment pieces. There was a desk with a filing cabinet under the windows to the outside, and in the center of the room there was a standard seeming exam table. The kind of uncomfortable bed that was in every hospital room – firm, sturdy mattress, scratchy sheets. Sometimes crinkly paper if sanitation required it.
Dr. Kosar pointed at the exam table in question as she walked to the desk, “Please, make yourself comfortable.”
Pieck wasn’t sure she’d be comfortable with any of today’s proceedings, but that was just her bad mood talking. Pieck stood beside the table and untied her leather shoes, leaving them neatly beside the leg, and climbed carefully up onto the uncomfortable sheets made onto the bed.
Dr. Kosar didn’t make her wait this time, approaching her quickly with a clipboard in hand.
“I’m going to ask you some questions, please try to answer as honestly as possible. If you don’t want to answer, that's perfectly fine.”
Pieck nodded. Her legs began to sway lightly of their own accord in the face of her anxiety, and she was worried she seemed childish to the doctor.
“Height?”
“One hundred and fifty-five centimeters,” Pieck recited.
“Good… Weight?”
“One hundred thirty-seven pounds, give or take,” Pieck was small, but she was greatly athletic, as one would expect.
“Mm.” Dr. Kosar’s pencil scratched down the information, though Pieck was sure her file would have detailed that much at least, “Start date of your last menstrual period?”
Pieck grimaced, uncomfortable immediately but already resigned to answering everything, “March 27th.”
“And are you sexually active?” The doctor looked up from her clipboard and made eye contact with Pieck, staring directly into her soul with piercing green eyes.
“Uh… no? I don’t think so?” Pieck’s voice cracked, and she swallowed to clear her throat.
“You don’t think so?” Dr. Kosar raised a brow, but recorded Pieck’s answer nonetheless. “What is your exercise routine and diet like?”
Pieck answered of course, and continued to answer probing and invasive questions until she was sure this doctor knew more about her than her own father did. The subject of Zeke came out of left field, and caught Pieck out.
“So, what is your relationship with Mr. Jaeger like?”
Pieck coughed and sputtered, clutching at her throat to ease the burning from inhaling her own saliva.
“Uh-”
“Sensitive topic?” The doctor snickered. She set her clipboard to the side and relaxed in her chair, trying to make herself seem more approachable to the teen. Pieck saw through it in an instant.
“No!” Pieck interjected, eyes wide, “We uh, grew up together, but we’ve had spats. We’re not tremendously close but-” but Pieck had taken to crawling into his bed whenever her memories came for their pound of flesh, “-yeah…”
“I’ll just put ambivalent,” Dr. Kosar decided, ignoring Pieck’s discomfort. Pieck appreciated not having attention drawn to her dramatics, but she had been expecting more judgement.
“Open,” In Pieck’s haze she hadn’t noticed Dr. Kosar standing and retrieving a tray of tools. She held a thermometer in front of Pieck’s face, waving it slightly. Pieck frowned, but abided by the request, lifting her tongue and parting her teeth for the doctor. “Close.” Kosar ordered, and Pieck did, wrapping her lips around the cold glass to hold it in place.
Rendered silent by the intrusion, Pieck watched the doctor pick up a blood pressure cuff and strap it around Pieck’s bicep. Dr. Kosar forcibly uncrossed Pieck’s legs instead of asking her to do it herself, eliciting a small gasp of surprise.
The doctor remained unbothered, though, taking Pieck’s blood pressure with quiet efficiency. “One-oh-one over seventy-three,” Dr. Kosar announced to herself. Tilting the thermometer in Pieck’s mouth, she read the number for that aloud as well, “One hundred point four. A bit low for a shifter–do you feel cold, Miss Pieck?”
The doctor dropped the soiled instrument onto its own tray, along with the blood pressure cuff, so she could write her findings on her clipboard.
“No, not particularly,” Pieck murmured. While Kosar rustled through papers casually, Pieck recrossed her legs, lacing her hands together and tucking them between her knees. The pressure twisted her wrists awkwardly, but the mild ache grounded her in the moment.
“Ah, found it,” With a satisfied smirk, Kosar pulled a stapled set of papers from the mess. She reoriented them, and cleared her throat, “Right, where were we?”
Pieck’s lips pressed into a thin line, “Me, being not cold,” Pieck offered, avoiding eye contact.
“Oh yes, yes yes,” Dr. Kosar picked up a pen and opened her packet of papers, “Do you consider yourself a logical and rational person, Pieck?”
“Um,” Pieck hesitated, her cheeks warming slightly, “I try my best.”
“Alright. Do you enjoy the fine arts? Music and literature and the like?” Dr. Kosar jotted down something on her page, but looked back up to Pieck’s face as quickly as possible.
“I don’t get out much,” Pieck admitted, turning her face away from Dr. Kosar and towards the door. Her foot shook gently, and she wondered how long it would be until she was given leave from this increasingly odd situation.
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Pieck grimaced, but figured it had been a non-answer, “I do, whenever I can participate.”
“Good. Thank you,” Dr. Kosar set the packet down, and picked up her cigarettes again, “I think I’ve kept you long enough. Surely you have other things to do,” The doctor waved a dismissive hand at Pieck, like a lazy lord would dismiss an obedient maid. Pieck’s brow crinkled at the comparison, but she wouldn’t miss the opportunity to untangle her limbs and speed walk from the room.
For an alleged punishment, the nearly 2 hours she spent with the odd doctor weren’t so bad. As she approached the elevator to head up to her own floor, she had the itch in her hand to knock on wood after the thought, and so she searched the wall until she spotted the wood frame of the stairwell door. She gave it two quick knocks, and returned to her spot waiting for the elevator.
Seeing as Zeke and herself were the only two shifters on the continent, besides the Tybur family, Pieck found the quiet of their wing maddening. Growing up in the internment zone meant never truly having silence, not with late night drunkards stumbling about, crying babies, or barking dogs. But the concrete walls were deafening, every noise seemed swallowed by the large and mostly empty space of the facility.
Pieck had needled her thumb nail into her forearm pretty good by the time she was standing in front of her door, sparks making her shiver and steam licking the wound shut.
She shook the dark thoughts off, shutting her bedroom door behind her in order to enjoy some relative privacy. Pieck was convinced the place had cameras, but there wasn’t anything she could do to remedy that, and she had long since come to terms with it.
Grabbing her mat from under her bed, Pieck set up her little bit of floorspace in order to exercise. Lying on the cushioned ground brought a certain calm over her, helping her to breathe and push the outside world from her mind as she bridged up and rolled her weight up through her body and into her shoulders.
She looked as far as she could to one side and smiled at the satisfying pop that rang out in response. Collapsing her hips down slowly onto the mat, Pieck straightened each of her legs out in turn, rolling her ankle out and listening for the tell-tale crackling of her knees. She sighed. Pieck knew she wasn’t getting old, so she just assumed that this kind of work on her body was long overdue, and she’d been neglecting herself.
Pieck did that for a while, balancing and contorting in silence until she felt loose, and her joints were warm. She was brimming with energy, and rolled over onto her stomach to do push ups. Her titan was a lot of upper body balance anyways, and being down like this put a strange feeling in the back of her mind. One that she liked.
Exhausted, panting and sweating, Pieck dragged herself from the floor. She didn’t want to sully her carefully maintained bed-nest-deal with her sweat, so Pieck made her way across the hallway, walking into the women’s bathroom. Previously, she’d shared it with Annie in the few months they were both on the shifters’ ward. With the young, aloof blonde gone and amongst their enemies, Pieck was left to use the too-spacious facilities with no one to mind.
Pieck spied a bit of grime caked into the grout lines of the shower’s wall tiling when she stepped under the hot stream. That would be her next time-killing project, she decided as she soaked her hair. She’d borrow a brush and some soap and go to town on the bathroom. If she didn't, who would?
Stepping out of the shower no less than fifteen minutes later, Pieck wrapped her thin and scratchy hospital towel around her figure. Her muscles had relaxed under the needles of hot water, and despite the less-than-ideal conditions, she had a spring in her step crossing the hall back into the relative safety of her bedroom.
***
A few days later found Pieck awake at seven in the morning, cold and grumpy. Her ass was beginning to go numb at the hard wood of the chair she was sitting in, and her unnaturally high body temperature was a curse when only a flimsy paper gown stood between her skin and the hallway’s drafty chill.
She had a clear view into the exam room she’d been in prior with the head doctor. Pieck watched with gritted teeth as Dr. Kosar and two assistants (nurses, perhaps?) prepared the room.
Sheets were adjusted and folded. Probes and instruments laid out in meticulous order. Papers straightened, words exchanged in hushed tones. Pieck’s eyes darted back and forth, tracking each one of them as they crossed in front of where she sat, quietly searching for any indication of what the near future would hold.
Dr. Kosar seemed more composed today, but Pieck didn’t have a large sample group of behavior to go off of. Her hair was in a neat military bun at the back of her head, and her clothes were more suited to a medical environment this time around. Less silk blouses and more easy to clean cotton.
The doctor opened the door into the exam room, startling Pieck from her surveillance, and walked towards the sat girl with long strides.
“Good morning, Miss Pieck. Up bright and early aren’t we?” Dr. Kosar’s perfect teeth were yet again smiling at Pieck. A showy smile that didn’t reach the eyes. Pieck wishes she’d spare herself the effort.
“Yes. I went to sleep early last night,” It was Dr. Kosar herself who had ordered Pieck here at this hour, and pretending like it was happenstance that they were both here grated on Pieck’s nerves. Pieck returned a slight smile out of propriety, but didn’t expose her teeth. That felt threatening for some reason, and Pieck didn’t want the doctor to view her as a threat.
“Thinking ahead, very smart,” Kosar teased. She leaned down slightly, trying to catch Pieck’s eye, but the shifter continued to stare past her and through the window at the exam table with its bleach white sheets.
“...Right,” Dr. Kosar coughed when Pieck didn’t respond after a while, “If you’re ready would you please follow me?”
As if a lamb readied itself for a wolf, Pieck’s teenage angst helpfully mused regardless of how unnecessary that was. She got sick of herself sometimes, and often.
Pieck stood and followed Dr. Kosar in. She held the back of her gown closed so as to not reveal the infinitesimally small shorts that were barely covering anything.
Her eyes shifted quickly once she stepped in. There weren’t any blades visible, but that didn’t mean they weren’t going to come out later. It was warmer in here than in the hallway, which was appreciated, but it wasn’t enough to stave off the chill running up Pieck’s spine. The assistants were both short, thin things that Pieck was sure she could fight off, but Dr. Kosar herself had a swimmer’s build that was sure to pack a lot of strength should Pieck need to be held down.
Her thumb nail rubbing against her third finger, Pieck approached the bed slowly, turning around and sitting on it with a gingerly sort of care. She looked to the doctor, preparing for the worst.
“Don’t look as if you’re going to your execution,” Dr. Kosar joked, a razor’s edge hidden under her lighthearted tone. “We’re just doing preliminary exams today. Getting your baselines, so we have something to compare to later on.”
Pieck nodded once, slowly. She figured Dr. Kosar had no reason to lie to her, not while she already had Pieck where she needed her.
“Good girl. Now, sit back, and we’ll start with your vital signs.”
Pieck did as told, her back meeting the hard cushioning of the bed. She was half sitting, and despite what should have been a relaxing position, she had to force herself to untense.
A hand came from her blind spot and grabbed her shoulder. The second gloved fingers brushed her skin, Pieck jolted, her muscles stiffening and her warrior’s instincts urging her to strike.
She pushed down the instinct, Dr. Kosar was quickly rounding the table and coming into her full view; she didn’t need a fist to the face.
“Open,” Dr. Kosar ordered, holding a thermometer poised in front of Pieck’s pursed lips.
Pieck flexed her jaw, but complied, opening her mouth and allowing Dr. Kosar to slip the glass beneath her tongue. She closed her lips around it as expected, and waited.
The doctor chugged on, though, grabbing the set aside blood pressure cuff and applying it to Pieck’s arm wordlessly, beginning to pump it up with a stethoscope pressed to Pieck’s brachial artery.
“Iliana, ninety-one over sixty-four,” Dr. Kosar called out past Pieck and to the nurse standing by with a clipboard. Pieck internally groaned at the amount of paper clipped onto that board, knowing that all of this would be taking a while.
The doctor snatched the thermometer from Pieck’s mouth, reading it carefully. “One-oh-two even. Very satisfying, and better than her last reading,” Dr. Kosar commented, slipping the thermometer into her pocket.
“So what’s-” Pieck began.
“Sarah, give me the light, please,” Dr. Kosar held her hand out expectantly across the table, towards the two nurses.
Pieck sighed, not attempting to finish her statement as Dr. Kosar held her forehead and tilted her head away from her, looking into Pieck’s ear with a small light. She rounded the bed and did the same on the other side, before clicking the light off and turning back to the nurses.
“Eardrum changes and muscle thickening consistent with other shifters,” Kosar informed, moving to request another instrument.
***
Pieck tolerated the various exams, her eyes, mouth, nose, and hands all getting exams of varying thoroughness over the course of an hour. They were uncomfortable at times, but not painful. Her boredom was more of a threat than Dr. Kosar at the moment.
“Turn over,” Dr. Kosar’s voice cut through her daydreams. She didn’t wait for Pieck to comply, dropping the head of the bed down to be level with the foot. Dr. Kosar quickly stood back and glared at Pieck, as she was clearly quite inconvenienced by the few seconds it was taking Pieck to register and follow through on the request.
Pieck settled flat on her stomach, feet pointed out, with her arms crossed under her head to remedy the lack of padding for her nose or chin. The ties at the back of Pieck’s gown were pulled unceremoniously, exposing Pieck’s unmarred skin to anyone who might happen to walk by.
Pieck focuses on a certain bottle in the cabinet she was facing, straining her eyes to try and read the labels across the room. She didn’t feel the hands palpating her spine, hips, and shoulder blades, and she didn’t want to.
Because that’s what it always was, hands grabbing and touching with no thought for her. It was a shame she couldn’t remove this Marleyan’s hands. She considered asking Zeke if she could take his off, just for old times sake.
“Good muscle tone in the dorsum, the spinal column is in line with previous data. We’ll get a tap next time we see her,” Dr. Kosar hummed, her fingers pressing into a knot beside Pieck’s spine carelessly. Pieck didn’t hold in the little whine the discomfort drove from her, and she caught a curious expression across the doctor’s face in the reflective glass of the cabinet.
It left as soon as it arrived, and the mask of professionalism slid back into place.
“Right, well. Sarah is going to get some blood from you, and then you’re free to return to your quarters,” Dr. Kosar hesitated, but pulled her gloves off and left the room in a rush.
When the nurse approached with a needle, Pieck couldn’t suppress the eye roll.
***
Walking from the exam room, feeling like a dog fresh from a vet visit and still in her paper gown to boot, Pieck hadn’t been expecting to walk straight into Zeke. He was sitting in the same chair she had been in, with all of the sobriety of a man at his own funeral.
He looked up when she stepped into the hallway, eyes softening when he registered who she was. “Pieck,” he greeted, “How was it?”
He reached out with his ridiculous, long, monkey arm span and took her hand in his own, pulling her carefully towards him. When she took more than half a second to consider his appearance, she realized he was in the same bluish-gray paper gown she was. The same color as his eyes.
“I know how doctors can be to shifters. I was worried when I saw you on your stomach,” Zeke admitted.
Pieck grimaced. Her cheeks warmed and she looked away from his piercing eyes, suddenly feeling far too seen by The Beast.
“I’m fine, Zeke.”
“What did they do before I got here?”
Pieck bit her bottom lip, and looked back to his face, trying not to squirm. “Just an exam. It won’t hurt.” Unfortunately.
Zeke’s expression grew brighter at that, relief flooding his features, “Thank you, Pieck-”
The door to the exam room swung open, and Dr. Kosar stepped out into the hall.
Zeke stood immediately. He sidestepped Pieck, dropping her hand in the process, but the damage was already done. Pieck was sure the doctor had seen it.
“...Mr. Jaeger,” Dr. Kosar hesitated, “Join me, if you would.”
Pieck couldn’t see much of her expression from where she stood behind Zeke’s shoulder, but what she did catch was quite imperceptible. He obeyed with the same obedience she had, sparing no attention for The Cart whose hand he’d been holding a moment prior. Seeing as Pieck now stood alone in the hallway, she saw no reason to stick around to watch Zeke’s exam as he had hers.
The trek back to her room was blissfully lonesome, with no words or touch to cloud her brain. Pieck bathed quickly once she was in the falsely perceived safety of her wing. She needed to scrub the surface cells from her body, the damage wouldn’t last anyways, no matter how red she made herself, and the titan steam clouded together with that from the heat of the shower.
The lingering warmth from the shower, her softest childhood pajamas, and an early morning should have made sleep come easy to Pieck. Her morning hadn’t been strenuous, but she was still heavy with fatigue and the urge to rest.
But her eyes wouldn’t shut, her body wouldn’t lay still even if she willed it to. Her eyes burned from staring at the books on the shelf, and after hearing the ticking sound of her inherited wall clock for so long, she decided this wasn’t productive.
Unfortunately, Pieck had a stupid, hateful, loathsome creature living in her stomach. One separate from her brain. She came into it when she came into her Titan, and it hadn’t gone away since. It clawed into her when she tried to sleep, tried to eat, and told her she hated herself. It made her eyes pulse, and filled her with the overwhelming urge to yank her own teeth out with her hands. It needed attention, pain to quiet it, but Pieck hated giving into the impulses,
The other shifters’ rooms were mostly locked, it was a given for security reasons. But one wasn’t. Pieck’s nails found her thigh. She wouldn’t draw blood this time, she promised herself, but blood was all she craved.
But the dreadful creature living in her stomach and making her nauseous had its own cravings, separate from Pieck’s. That was how she justified it to herself.
Crawling from her bed with limbs of lead, Pieck made the short walk down the hall in her bare feet. The overfamiliarity with this facility she resided in, unable to leave, disturbed her sometimes, but that was a problem for another day.
His doorknob yielded easily under her touch. It hadn’t even been latched.
Stupid, she thought. Did he leave his house in Liberio’s front door so unguarded, or did he experience the same sickening overfamiliarity?
His bedsheets were a paradise undescribed in any book. The warm scent of musk and sweat and his soap made the mangy creature inside of her cease its torment, and she was left bundled up in blankets that weren’t hers, inhaling the scent of a beast.
She was practically purring.
Pieck wasn’t sure when she fell asleep, but she was sure when she woke up.
She hadn’t moved an inch from her cocoon in what could have been hours, and her joints were making sure to complain about it. The door creaked open behind her, spilling the hallway’s light into the inky darkness of Zeke’s bedroom.
“Pieck?” His voice questioned warily, followed by footsteps approaching the bed, “Are you awake?”
“Am now,” She croaked, vocal cords still thick with sleep.
“Why are you here?”
“I could leave,” she offered as a way to dodge the question.
“No!” Zeke startled at the end of the bed, in turn spooking Pieck, “You can stay–please stay, I mean. I was curious if there was a reason, that’s all.”
Pieck yawned, “I was tired, and I couldn’t sleep.”
“You seemed to be sleeping fine when I walked in.”
Pieck groaned. Loudly, and intentionally. Zeke was always easier to stomach when he wasn’t talking.
“Are you going to question why I’m here or are you going to lie down?” Pieck challenged.
That seemed to be the right thing to say, because Zeke was quick to tear his awful paper gown off and get into bed beside her. She would have condemned him for such a scandalous state of undress–only his boxers–but she could sympathize with the concept of getting far too warm in one’s sleep.
Unfortunately, Pieck’s own odd sleeping habits left him blanket-less, lying on his side and staring at her through those wire rimmed frames. He didn’t say a word about any discomfort though, which was a shock.
“Would you like to hold me?” Pieck whispered. Her breath tickled his nose, she could tell by the way he scrunched his face up.
“Sure.”
She sat up slowly, her spine popping as she went. Pieck shrugged off a few off her layers, tossing one over to Zeke, just so he didn’t freeze to death or whatever titan shifters did,
Once she was satisfied with the patchwork of blankets, Pieck lied down on her side with her back to him.
“Come here,” She directed.
No sooner had the words left her mouth was Zeke wrapping around her. His strong arms encircled her waist and pulled her hips against his. His nose buried into her loose hair. He went as far as to tangle their legs together and lace his fingers in hers, their bodies comfortably twisted together.
She was blushing deeply. The intimacy, both the intensity and the show he was making of it to her, was shocking. Pieck was sure she was red down her chest and to her elbows, albeit it didn’t matter in the pitch black of the windowless room.
Pieck wasn’t naive to his feelings, she just elected to ignore them. But this? She couldn’t ignore this. The echoing of his heartbeat through her own chest was too loud for that. Sleep was her only option now, and she’d do it gladly in his arms.
Chapter 7: Aisthēsis
Notes:
Welcome back folks, strap in, this one's a doozy. Also, I couldn't figure out a place to break this into two smaller chapters that I was satisfied with, so it is indeed 8.3k words.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
April 12th, 845
Pieck’s skin popped under the scalpel’s pressure, sinking into the fascia beside her spine. Pieck tried to whimper to little avail.
It didn’t stop with that initial one inch incision. The blade slipped through her flesh with little effort needing to be expended. Pieck couldn’t buck the invasive touch of the nurses above her, the leather straps across her hips and neck kept her firmly in place.
“Initial incision completed–running from the mid-shoulder blade to the pelvis, parallel laterally to the spine, right side,” Dr. Kosar described to her assistant, out of view.
Pieck had been administered a strong dose of benzodiazepines to inhibit her titan healing, which was usually her only saving grace in situations such as this one. She bit down into her lip until she tasted blood, but even that little bit of movement was difficult. Drool mixed with blood and dripped off of her lip to the sterile floor, a throbbing punishment for her effort.
Her mind was a tar pit, something to drag herself through in order to form the simplest coherent thought. The scalpel continued to cut, and the voice attached to it described everything happening in cold, clinical words to the onlookers. The witnesses to Pieck’s shame.
Something icy slipped beneath Pieck’s skin, and slowly it worked the organ free of the thin fat layer hiding beneath.
Dr. Kosar’s touch was exceedingly delicate, Pieck could tell with each searing pain prodding at her every nerve. She worked with the hands of a fine chef, rather than a butcher.
Feeling her skin laying open and bare, limp against her pinned arm, Pieck’s breathing picked up slightly. She was working against her sedation with every move, with every blink. Keeping her eyes open was a losing battle, but the ability to focus on the green linoleum dappled with blood instead of the hands stroking her exposed nerves themselves was a blessing worth fighting for.
Her eyelids fluttered. Only pieces of sentences would register in Pieck’s mind as she traced the glue lines of the floor with her eyes.
“-little fat, normal for-” or “shifters tend to-”
It didn’t matter. Pieck’s entire existence was nausea at this point. She felt the suffocation of her nervous system more strongly than anything, but it was difficult to tell if it was voluntary, or the work of drugs. Her knees were cramping from being held down in such an unnatural position for so long… and how long had it been?
Pieck blinked to clear her mind. Each one took hours or seconds. She focused back into her body, and immediately regretted it.
The skin that had been peeled from her back was accompanied by fat, and certain muscles, cut not in big sections like the rest, but trimmed out carefully around the delicate connections of one muscle to another.
A small, strangled noise sprang from her throat, the first noise she’d managed to make in hours, and it surprised the room as much as it surprised the girl trying desperately not to cry. The blade scraping against her rib stilled.
“Pieck? Are you alright?” The overly sweet voice of Dr. Kosar spoke to her. Pieck couldn’t speak, couldn’t give any indication that the doctor had been heard. A sticky, gloved hand reached up to pet Pieck’s head, but the drag of congealing blood against her dry hair made Pieck cringe.
“We’re almost done.”
The scalpel returned to her rib bone, the sound of careful scratching filling the room as the sample was collected.
Bile burned in the back of Pieck’s throat. She was sure she’d vomit sooner than later.
Pieck tried to blink away tears, tried to swallow away the saliva filling her mouth to protect her teeth. All that happened was a miserable gag, and more saliva hit the linoleum beneath her.
Fingers brushed against her lungs. Pieck itched deep into her chest. Something cool slid under her rib, and with the crack of it biting down, Pieck blacked out.
***
Pieck startled awake, and with much more control in her somatic nervous system. She struggled, better than she could while sedated. She wasn’t strong enough in such an awkward position to break her binds, and she wouldn’t use her titan for a task that would likely be done for her eventually anyways.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
The door into the exam room’s attached storage closet swung open, and one of the nurses from her initial evaluation stepped out.
“Good morning,” she greeted, “Glad to see you’ve joined the land of the living again.”
“Please, unstrap me,” Pieck’s sore throat rasped, her eyes pleading.
“I’ll get the doctor.”
The nurse crossed the room in long, purposeful strides, and left Pieck alone again. Excellent.
Dr. Kosar entered the room minutes later. Thanks to the lack of sensory stimulation in the room, it felt like half an hour, easily. Pieck could tell it was her within milliseconds, heels clicking and the familiar scent of pen ink wafting in.
“Hello, Miss Pieck,” Kosar greeted her in a remarkably casual way. Her hands were fast to find the buckle holding Pieck’s ankle to the table, lazily pulling the slack up and through.
“Hi,” Pieck managed.
“You gave us a scare, falling asleep like that,” Dr. Kosar chuckled, and moved to her other ankle, “We had to pull out the retractors and clamps, you know? You’re going to be awfully sore.”
Pieck was already sore, fuck you very much. It wasn’t productive to antagonize the doctor, her mind reminded her, so she bit her tongue.
“We put tape on your back to hold your skin together while you healed, but it won’t be hard to get off. Ask Zeke to help you,” sneered the doctor. She moved to the buckles on Pieck’s thighs, and suddenly the shifter was very aware of her undressed state, and how close the doctor’s hands were to the junction of her hip.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Pieck quavered.
“You’re welcome.”
The process of fully unhooking Pieck from the table, removing her IV, and redressing her took close to ten minutes. Her joints were stiff from immobility, and she had nearly fallen flat when she’d tried to stand. She didn’t want to ask for help doing something as mundane as dressing, but it ended up being necessary.
Simply being allowed to walk from the medical wing, with the help of a crutch, was a surprising let down.
Pieck wasn’t expecting a hero’s escort or a jailer or anything, but being told to simply return to her wing and finish putting herself together was uncomfortably casual to be hearing from someone’s mouth.
Tucked in the pocket of her skirt was a small packet of pills. Only three, not enough to kill her, but apparently they thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep after this.
The sun was already setting when Pieck arrived at her room, so she didn’t hesitate to stick two pills beneath her tongue and wait for them to melt. Pieck leaned the borrowed crutch beside her bed, and climbed into it. She lied down on her back and began to wiggle from her clothes so she’d be able to sleep with her still recovering body.
The heat curling off of her skin, combined with her own unnatural body temperature were too much. Pieck was already beginning to sweat beneath her usual blankets, so she kicked them off in favor of just her thin white top sheet.
Her mind was a cement block, and sleep was the open sea.
That was to say, she drowned in it.
Pieck was unnaturally still in her sleep. She did not dream. Did not roll over or adjust her sheet or stretch out.
While usually every person walking through their restricted wing would wake her, her reflexes overactive and her mind looking for threats, she didn’t stir even once in this medicated sleep.
Eight hours came and passed, then twelve, and soon she neared 24 hours of silent rest. Her wounds long recovered, and her stomach screamed to be filled but its demands went unheeded.
Pieck was half aware of her own dazed sleep. Her eyelids fluttered as her irises flicked from side to side and up and down at a speed she couldn’t do intentionally, she’s sure.
Her door was miles away, an impossible trek. The only change in the imprisonment was when her eyelids would jump a bit farther from her waterline, and she’d catch the still view of her closed curtains and bookshelf.
Pieck couldn’t twitch a finger, or breathe any deeper than what her body was doing autonomously. But she didn’t care. She was so calm, so content to lay here and feel her eyes’ curious motion.
She didn’t care either about her bedroom door creaking open.
Pieck was sure she would have panicked if she was awake, but she couldn’t now. A reaction demanded too much energy.
The door shut slowly behind her, and with the central air from the hallway silenced, she was able to make out a few hurried sniffs behind her.
Why she didn’t connect the opening door with the entrance of a person into her space, she didn’t know. She detested how fast she identified who it was, standing behind her.
The blankets shifted behind Pieck, and the mattress sank down.
“Pieck? Are you awake?” Zeke asked. His voice cracked, probably from crying.
His hand reached out across the small space between them and shook her shoulder gently, and then harder when she didn’t respond.
“You’re really out then. Take another pill?” Zeke asked, but he wasn’t expecting an answer. Whether he knew of her awareness, he gave no indication, but Pieck wasn’t sure if it would matter.
His hand returned to her shoulder, his grip more firm this time. Zeke pulled her onto her back, her view shifted to the blank ceiling above her bed.
He could easily spread her legs and take her there, she realized. Pieck rolled the thought over in her mind and it ruined the content cloud she’d been drifting in. Happy fogginess switched to shuddering fear, and she waited with stupid, autonomic breath.
A grip around her wrist pulled her arm around his shoulders, allowing Zeke to lie on her bare chest. Zeke arranged her body to his liking with all of the care of a doll. His hand slid down. Zeke’s touch settled on her opposite hip, holding her gently.
“Pieck, it was awful,” he whispered, “It felt like being burned alive. I kept-” Zeke cuts himself off with a nasally whine, and then Pieck felt dampness on her chest.
“Did you go through this? Yesterday? They wouldn’t let me watch, I tried,” Zeke murmured, “I don’t know how you stood it. You’re strong, sweetheart.”
Zeke leaned up, and kissed Pieck’s neck despite his tears. Pieck could have gagged.
“Here,” Zeke took her by the chin and placed one of the tablets beneath her tongue. It had the same chalky fruit taste as her own, and Pieck prepared to be miserable upon her awakening in an indeterminate amount of time.
He pressed her jaw shut gently once the tablet was fixated in her mouth, the bitter taste of his fingers unpleasant at best. Zeke leaned down and gave her a chaste kiss, settling to lay his head on her chest.
Pieck trusted him enough that he wouldn’t do anything right now, but once she was more deeply asleep, Pieck was terrified that he’d touch her and she’d have no way to stop him.
But she couldn’t fight sleep, not when she was still coming off of the last dose. Her head spun down into the abyss, and this time it claimed her with tooth and nail instead of welcoming arms.
***
Pieck was given the next few days off to recover after her procedure, and although she slept straight through the first two of them, she was determined to make the rest of her free days count.
Her third day post-op started with her kicking Zeke out of her room while screaming expletives at him. He retreated to his own space like a kicked puppy, and already Pieck felt better.
The next order of business had been pissing like a racehorse and eating everything still passable in the small kitchenette in their lounge room. Pieck knelt on the floor in front of the open refrigerator door, shoving leftover bits into her mouth and tossing moldy pieces aside while she chewed.
Her eyes glossed over while she mechanically went through the process of chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing, her appetite insatiable for the moment being. Pieck’s gaze settled on the dirty shelves of the fridge, and absently she figured she should wipe those down. Zeke sure wouldn’t. She’d be tossing the unsuitable food out anyways.
So that’s how Pieck found herself in a worn out dress with a bucket of hot sudsy water. Because once she’d cleaned the fridge to be spotless, she’d wanted to empty the cabinets of expired food, and then those would need to be wiped off, and if she was doing those then the counters weren’t a stretch. She’d knocked dust and crumbs onto the floor so sweeping and mopping was the natural next step–and then eventually Zeke was walking in on her kneeling by the wall, scrubbing the stubbornly dirty baseboards with a rag.
“Pieck?” he hesitantly approached, assessing the odd situation. Spying the full garbage can, Zeke asked, “Did you throw away my pasta?”
“It was green,” Pieck answered, not looking up from the weird red stain on the trim.
“Food is food. It isn’t like I’ll get sick,” Zeke scoffed and crossed his arms over his chest while he watched her work. He didn’t offer to help, she noticed, despite this being their shared space.
Pieck made a noise of distaste, and turned to grimace at him, “That’s disgusting. It doesn’t matter if you can, it matters if you should.” a lesson she figured he was never taught as a child, or at least one he never learned.
“I don’t want to cook. You’re being wasteful, dear,” Zeke purred at her.
“You’re right, but I’d rather be wasteful than whatever you are,” Pieck quipped in return, going back to the red stain that was finally lifting under her skilled touch.
“Dashing? Handsome? Tall?” he listed, going to pick up the full garbage can and holding it in his arm.
“A walking mold colony, for starters,” Pieck said. She didn’t look at him when she heard him shuffle about, lest he see the smile that was starting to form on her face. “Maybe you should’ve been a dog instead of a monkey. Do you think it’s a side effect?”
“Ha-ha. I’ll take this out for you,” Zeke said, with such bravado that it was clear he viewed this as a great undertaking and favor for her, instead of just walking to the stairs and tossing it down the trash chute.
Once he left, she stood to pour her dirty water into the sink. It was nearing lunch time, and while usually she wasn’t one to skip meals, Pieck was still comfortably full from her earlier binge.
Zeke entered again moments later, because again, right down the hall. He leaned against the doorframe and stared at her, not hiding his admiration. “Would you take a break and come to my room? I have some things I found for you.”
Well that was an uncomfortable sentence from him if she ever heard one. “Yeah, fine.” She agreed less out of a desire to receive gifts, and more to avoid however he’d react if she refused.
Zeke’s boyish smile immediately appeared, “Great. I really think you’ll like it.”
“Let me change, and then I’ll be there.” Pieck walked past him and into the hallway, feeling grimy in her suds-and-dirt covered cleaning dress.
She changed quickly, putting on a nicer but still plain dress. She didn’t need to look nice for him, Pieck reminded herself.
Her steps were silent down the hallway, and she quickly noticed his door was left open, with him sitting in plain view. The ugly creature in her stomach said he left the door open because he cared about her, but her brain knew that it was likely because he was too lazy to shut it. Likelier still, it was that he wanted to see her coming, and not that he wanted Pieck to be able to see him.
Pieck stepped over the threshold and made her way to his bed, the only place to sit other than the stiff desk chair.
“What did you have for me, then?” Pieck crawled up next to him and settled in, leaving a safe few inches of space between them for propriety’s sake.
“A few books, from Ksaver’s old collection,” Zeke got up from beside her, seeming distracted. He shut the door she’d passed through without a second thought.
Pieck’s brow furrowed, and she looked at him more closely. He seemed skittish, and Pieck wasn’t sure as to why.
“Alright. Anything good?” Pieck asked. She opened the front cover of the first off the pile, reading through the titlepage and dedication while he returned to his spot at her side. No one she knew, but she hadn’t expected that.
A look of conflict flashed over his face, but it disappeared nearly instantaneously. “I’m not sure. Give it a glance and tell me what you think.”
With his eyes over her shoulder, Pieck started to turn pages. It was weathered, clearly old. Pieck barely recognized the script, but she pushed through and read, albeit slowly.
It was the story of Ymir, but different from how most Marleyan storybooks told it. It wasn’t a children’s story, or the government produced telling, or even one of the foreign editions that condemned the girl and cursed her descendants.
The language was soft, flowery, speaking of how the Ymir was blessed by the gods. It spoke nothing of titan shifters, Ymir or otherwise, and named pure titans as a scourge sent from the devil.
Well. This was a controversial and inconsistent telling, that was for sure. Pieck continued on through the telling of Ymir’s ‘good deeds’, increasingly aware that Zeke was no longer reading the book, but was instead looking at her.
“It’s… interesting, Zeke.”
“Do you dislike it?” Zeke asked, a tinge of hope creeping into his question.
“I-” she bit her lip, “It’s definitely original. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it,” Pieck confessed to him.
He leaned into her without warning, soft lips attaching to her neck. She jolted with surprise, gasping when he began to suck at a spot in the crook of her shoulder.
She opened her mouth to try and de-escalate, but he beat her to it with his lips to her ear.
“It’s from the island. Paradise.”
Pieck moved her head away from his mouth, turning her neck at an uncomfortable angle so she could look at him to try and gauge if he was fucking with her or not. Her face was awfully serious, but he seemed undeterred, still staring at her with an analyzing gaze.
“I-” Pieck’s voice cracked, and she shut her mouth again while she considered what to say. “Zeke, don’t mess around,” she decided to whisper.
“I’m not,” Zeke’s eyes locked onto hers, but she wouldn’t be the first to look away, “I think it warrants considering.”
A million thoughts raced through her mind. Was his room bugged like hers? If it was, were they listening to them right now? Was this a test? What was Zeke’s goal with this? Pieck didn’t know and she sure as hell didn’t want to find out. Not if it was her and her father’s heads on the block.
Pieck got up and crossed the room, turning only when she heard him call her name.
“I don’t want to talk about this again. Drop it,” She ordered, glaring daggers.
Zeke’s surprise looked genuine, to his credit. He stammered for a moment, but quickly sputtered out, “Would you meet me in the gym tomorrow? I won’t bring any books.”
Pieck’s hand rested on the knob, and she hesitated, “W- Sure, yeah.” She didn’t give him the opportunity to speak again, opening the door and darting from the room and towards the safety of her own space. Fuck, he was grating sometimes.
***
Meeting Zeke downstairs at the gym was something Pieck regretted agreeing to remarkably fast. But, sparring drills or spotting one another would beat training with the security detail assigned to the compound, with their thinly veiled insults and bigoted glares.
He got there before her, and was already doing bicep curls when she pushed open the door to the large mirrored room.
Pieck rolled her eyes and walked straight into the locker room, ignoring whatever greeting he called out in favor of changing quickly.
Zeke lost his t-shirt by the time Pieck emerged. Her mouth pulled into a straight line, but she didn’t comment as she approached. Clearly, he wanted to show off his amazing, glorious, Ymir’s gift-to-the-earth, abs and pectoral muscles, and Pieck was too simple minded to appreciate the view.
Pieck wore a high-necked tank top and sweatpants, trying not to draw attention to her figure, along with loosely braided hair. She didn’t think they’d end up sparring today, but if they did she wanted to be ready.
“Hey, peek-a-boo,” Zeke grinned and stood up. He set his dumbbell back on the rack and came to stand in front of her.
“Don’t call me that,” Pieck deadpanned.
“You know, you pretend to dislike me, but I know you’re soft and gooey in your heart of hearts,” Zeke practically purred, and leaned closer into her personal space.
Pieck scoffed, but didn’t lean away. Because that would be letting him think he got to her. “I don’t pretend to dislike you, Zeke, I do dislike you.”
“Aw, you’re adorable.”
Pieck walked away. Violence wasn’t the answer despite their line of work, and Zeke unfortunately possessed a very punchable face. She approached one of the leg press machines and racked up 330 pounds, ignoring him and getting onto the machine in order to start her workout. She’d stretched before she came down, and she needed a little pain to get her head right.
She said nothing as she settled her feet correctly against the board, and got her hips and legs lined up. Pieck heard the only other occupant of the gym come up and settle himself against the nearby pole to watch, but she could not be bothered to deal with him.
Zeke waited for her to bear down and start doing repetitions with the weight to start talking.
“I guess the nickname was a swing and a miss?” He asked mirthfully.
Pieck smirked a little at the baseball reference, but didn’t let it distract her from the soothing rhythm of slowly going down, settling the weight, and pushing back up until her knees locked into place.
“Come on, don’t ignore me,” Zeke demanded but tried to hide it behind a soft tone.
“You’re batting a thousand today, Zeke,” Pieck murmured, zoned into her exercise.
Zeke lit up, she could tell even if he wasn’t in view. He wandered away after her sarcastic comment, and Pieck heard metal plates being racked across the room. Well, if playing his game, both literally and metaphorically, was all it took, maybe she would play more often.
They exercised in dead silence for about an hour, switching machines and avoiding each other’s gaze as they moved about the room. Pieck’s muscles delightfully burned, and she was sweating after such efforts.
She took a break to drink some water, sitting on a bench near the locker rooms and staring into space while she took small sips from her water bottle. The other shifter wasn’t anywhere in view, and she wasn’t sure if that meant he left, or if he was in the bathroom. Pieck found she didn’t care much, in her calm and relaxed headspace.
A few minutes later her curiosity was answered, when Zeke emerged from the bathroom with slicked back hair and his glasses suspiciously absent.
“Hey.”
Pieck swallowed her mouthful of water, “Hey, Monkey.”
“Spar?”
Pieck shrugged, “Why not.”
The walk to the mats was quietly tense, and Pieck, who was following behind Zeke, had zero clue as to why. They both toed off their shoes, leaving them on the cold concrete, and walked onto the firm mat with socked feet.
With no referee, the match started the second both of them were in the circle painted beneath them. The mat was soft, and slowly they danced in a circle around each other, watching the other for openings so the struggle to win could start. Pieck kept her hands up, and her fists clenched. She’d stopped wrapping her hands to fight after inheriting her titan, and she could see the white of her knuckles straining against her skin, just over which her eyes settled on Zeke.
His eyes drilled into her, looking right into her face, and it gave Pieck pause. Pieck didn’t let it catch her off guard for too long, though, because she caught him readjusting his weight during a sidestep. She wasn’t Annie, of course, hand-to-hand wasn’t what she did primarily in either human or titan form, but she wasn’t stupid either. Pieck watched as Zeke’s hip twisted, and he brought his leg up with unexpected speed to take a swipe towards her center mass.
She was disadvantaged. She was drastically faster than Zeke, always had been, but he was constantly putting on muscle and slowly creeping up in height ever since hitting puberty. Pieck didn’t mind being small, but it wasn’t doing her many favors here.
Pieck leaned back, light enough on her toes that she managed to miss the hit entirely. Taking the obvious opening, Pieck pulled back and jabbed her fist up into his kidney. Usually, she wouldn’t consider a cheap shot like that, but Zeke and herself were walking Ships of Theseus, freaky little starfish who didn’t have to worry about permanent damage unless it was fatal. Pieck figured he could take it.
It seemed Zeke was of the same mind, because while he was off balance and groaning in pain, he still grabbed Pieck by the braid and dragged her around to his front, where he connected his fist with her jaw with remarkable force. He dropped her hair just in time for the force of the punch to send her sailing to the ground, her foot twisting unnaturally beneath her.
Blood dripped out of Pieck’s mouth from where her cheek caught on her molars, but she didn’t dare let her body repair the damage yet. The pinching pain in the bone felt good, and the blood was the only thing keeping her warm.
They weren’t sparring. Not really. Zeke was standing and waiting for her to get up, because instead of sparring for any practical reason, they were just causing one another pain for the enjoyment of feeling it. Pieck blinked away a tear and stood up, her chin sticky and red.
“Ready?” Zeke asked, a grimace evident across his face. He wasn’t healing either it seemed, of the same mind Pieck was.
Pieck nodded and put her hands back up, though her vision was slightly obscured by the hair that was loosened from its braid.
They took a few minutes, aiming half-assed swings at one another and blocking with equal unenthusiasm. She couldn’t read his mind, but Pieck was waiting for the moment she could rip him open and see his blood on the nice blue mat beneath them.
One of them, Pieck couldn’t remember which one, stepped too close to the other, and then it was on. They were grasping at one another and tumbling towards the ground. Landing on her hip didn’t deter Pieck, she was already trying to get atop Zeke, and he was doing the same.
Her nails bit into his skin and came back red. They both attempted to get hands or arms around their opponent’s throats. Pieck’s sure the disgusting crack she heard halfway through is the sound of Zeke’s shoulder dislocating. They both fight through it, panting and bleeding. They look like a horror show by now, her blood caking his wounds and his drying into hers.
Every forceful grip of his hands on her body felt like love. He grabbed her because he needed her and couldn’t risk her getting loose. Save for her father, love had always been tinged with blood, and today Zeke sang her a sonnet.
He pushed her leg back forcibly and pinned her down, one of his strong thighs right in between her legs while his arms worked to hold down her torso and arms.
She’s suddenly thirteen again, her tongue sour with a drink she doesn’t like, and her mind scrambled with the confusion of what was happening. Pieck swallowed, and like this she could see just how purple his shoulder was. Her red party dress from that night doesn’t fit her anymore, but she felt the fabric against her skin while he stared at her. His thigh pressed harder until she could feel the top of his femur against her pelvic bone. It was uncomfortable, but every attempt to shift into a kinder position had her gasping.
Zeke rolled Pieck onto her stomach, using his weight to pin her down with his chest to her shoulders. His right hand held her wrists in a bruising grip up above her head. Despite her kicking and flailing, thoroughly outmatched at this point, Zeke pushed it further.
He wrapped his left arm around her throat, picking her head up off of the mat in an awkward and uncomfortable angle.
Pieck gasped, and felt the moment she couldn’t get air in anymore.
She blinked, and wasn’t sure when tears had welled up in her eyes. The pressure in her head built up quickly, and Pieck stopped flailing. It was a waste of oxygen, and with how fuzzy her brain was quickly getting, she was concerned with passing out.
“You’re beautiful, Pieck,” Zeke whispered despite her gagging and crying, “Always pretty when you’re under me.”
Instead of being put off, Pieck’s disgusting, perverted, and primal baser instincts hummed at the approval from the large male. She couldn’t unpack that at the moment, or what it meant, because Pieck was limp in his grasp, her vision spotting and her eardrums thundering with tension.
Right as Pieck was sure she was going to pass out, leaving herself unconscious at the mercy of Zeke Jaeger, he released his grip. He dropped her upper body against the mat and let go of her hands in the same motion, sitting up with his hips to her ass, her lower body still pinned beneath him.
Pieck wheezed in, clawing at her throat. The tears were flowing in earnest now, trailing down her face and dripping onto the mat and mixing with her snot freely.
She couldn’t be bothered with him still on top of her. Pieck gasped for air, taking mouthful after mouthful into her burning lungs and only breathing out long enough to allow more air to take its place. She could feel his eyes on her throughout the pitiful display, intense and cataloging every microexpression.
Once she regulated her breathing and had gotten the foggy feeling purged from her mind, Pieck lied down against the mat. It was soaked with her various bodily fluids, but that was a welcome sensation with how warm she’d become in her struggle.
She closed her eyes, enjoying the euphoric repetitive fill of oxygen in her abused lungs. Pieck almost didn’t answer Zeke when he spoke.
“Are you alright?”
“Mmmm…”
“Ok. We’re finished,” Zeke decided. As if she was going to get up and demand a round two.
Zeke finally got off of her, walking towards the male locker room and leaving her prone on the mat.
Pieck dragged herself up after a few minutes, once she allowed the healing factor to kick in. Looking in the mirror above the locker room sink, she could see the large bruise already forming from his elbow locked around her neck. It was a pretty purple and red thing. Pretty if you were fucked in the head like Pieck was.
She cleaned up only enough to not scare anyone she came across. Pieck folded a washcloth and ran it under hot water, using that to wipe the mix of blood from her skin.
Feeling better with every step as she headed back to her room, Pieck realized that she was too wired on adrenaline to go back to the numbing quiet of her room. She was jittery, her hands shaking uncontrollably. Pieck didn’t know if she'd be able to sit still, she could hardly stand still.
She’d noticed Zeke’s door ajar with light spilling from within, and misery loves company. Not that she was miserable, but she would be if she had to stare at the wallpaper and do nothing for hours by herself.
Figuring looking nice would earn her some points, Pieck changed into something more appropriate. A well worn sweater and an ankle length skirt, both dark and dull in color with overuse. It would have to do. Besides, she didn’t have money to waste on new, flashy clothes when these ones still did the trick.
Tiptoeing to Zeke’s doorway in socked feet, Pieck didn’t make a sound. The thought in the back of her mind that she was getting too familiar with him creeped in and made an unwelcome home, but Pieck had to ignore it for now.
She clung to the side of the doorway, peaking into his room. Zeke was shirtless and on the floor, his feet towards her and doing pushups with furious speed. Seeing him exercising more after earlier annoyed Pieck, but at least the view was decent. She felt like a peeping tom, watching him without his knowledge, but a bit of turnabout was fair play, wasn’t it?
Zeke collapsed to the side after a moment, breathing heavily. Pieck admired the view of his front just as shamelessly as she did the back, especially when he sat up and startled, apparently spotting her.
“Pieck, what a surprise. Come in?” Zeke wheezed through his words, clearly still trying to sound gentlemanly. Pieck figured hiding herself wasn’t of use anymore, so she stepped into his room and shut the door behind her, locking it.
“I could’ve killed you,” Pieck smirked, claiming the comfortable armchair in the corner for herself and curling up in it like she would in her Cart Titan.
“You don’t want to kill me,” Zeke grabbed his towel and stood up. He began to wipe off his chest and neck, and Pieck grimaced. Boys were so sweaty. Pieck never needed a towel to dry herself after exercise. Women were clean like that, she figured. Superior.
“You know what they say about assumptions,” Pieck purred out, her eyes still sliding over his chest.
Zeke rolled his eyes in response, and picked up his glasses to put back on. “Give me five minutes to shower, and then we can lay down.”
“No!” Pieck picked her head up from the armrest with surprising speed, “I, uh, I don’t mind.”
He narrowed his eyes but set his towel to the side. “Okay…”
Mentally cursing whatever hormones she was letting rule her actions, Pieck moved from the chair to the bed, crawling up to the headboard and sitting against it. She couldn’t bring her eyes to his, but she could get close. Her gaze locked onto his throat in some weak mockery of eye contact.
Pieck held an arm up to beckon him to her side, words failing her at the moment and his body heat being the remedy, she hoped.
Zeke didn’t make her wait. He walked around to the unoccupied side of his bed and climbed in slowly to avoid spooking her, lying on his back. She caught him staring at her bruised neck as he walked up, even if she knew he was trying to be subtle. His breathing was even now, and his eyes shut once his head hit the pillow. She knew he wasn’t sleeping, so was this his version of trust? Zeke trying to put himself in her hands?
She pushed the thought from her mind, and curled into his side instead. His chest was soft, and once Pieck laid against his side his arm came to wrap around her.
The lingering anxiety that had been living inside of her all day smoothed itself over once she was settled. The world shrunk down to just this room whenever Pieck paid him a visit, and the relief from her body’s scream for companionship was euphoric.
“Do you want kids, Pieck?” Zeke asked without reopening his eyes.
“With you?”
Zeke shrugged, looking remarkably calm, “In general.”
“I think… I wouldn’t want to leave them, not while they were still children,” Pieck decided, “But the idea isn’t repulsive. I could adopt teenagers.”
“I don’t want kids. They’re disgusting, and I don’t think I could put up with anyone long enough to raise them,” Zeke grimaced, shaking his head.
“Mm. Good thing you won’t have to worry about it,” Pieck teased. She leaned up just slightly from her position laying on his chest in order to give his collarbone a few delicate pecks. Inhaling incidentally, the strong smell of an athletic, virile ‘man’ made her brain sing. A part of her brain that had only been getting progressively louder and more assertive since her inheritance.
“Pieck…” Zeke warned, finally opening his eyes to look at what she was doing.
“Zeke,” She returned, her voice muffled due to his skin being pulled between her teeth. She sucked a pretty good bruise into the flesh, and let go, the aggressive and bitey part of her only beginning to be sated.
Instead of speaking, Pieck moved her hips over to straddle his, her skirt pooling over him. If she’d been drowning in the oversized articles of clothing, then him beneath her looked like he would suffocate if she wasn’t careful.
“Pieck,” He repeated, but he didn’t sound particularly chastising. Zeke’s hands found their way to Pieck’s hips instinctively, holding her there with mild force.
“You just smell… really good,” Pieck complained, her nose tucked beneath his ear.
Zeke snickered. His hand came up and pulled at her braid. It was already loose and trying to fall out of its tenuous hold, he just helped it along. “Did you take something?”
“Does it matter?” Pieck countered, her hips giving an experimental roll down against his.
Zeke hissed out in surprise and tossed her from on top of him onto the empty bed space next to him. He followed the motion, though, settling himself into the vee between her legs.
“Didn’t get enough wrestling with me earlier?” Zeke teased, clearly enamored with her. His eyes traced her hair splayed out on the pillow, along with her arms lazily laid beside her head.
“Stop talking,” Pieck rasped out. She pawed at the zipper on the hip of her skirt, fumbling until she got ahold of the pull. Tugging it down, she saw Zeke’s eyebrows shoot up in her peripheral vision.
“Fuck,” Zeke muttered, moving back so that he could work on his own pants. He knew when he needed to shut up, apparently, and this was one of those moments. He tossed his shorts onto the floor to join the rest of the laundry there, but he hesitated when it came to his boxers.
Pieck had no such shyness. Her cheeks were swollen with heat and arousal, and she pulled off her sweater without a second thought to try and alleviate some of the burning within her. Left naked under his scrutinizing gaze, Pieck used Zeke’s temporary daze to her advantage, shoving him onto his back with his head at the footboard.
She climbed onto him like she had earlier, this time with less fabric to bother her. Before she did anything, though, she leaned into Zeke’s ear, “Is this okay?”
“God, yes, Pieck,” Zeke breathlessly confirmed.
Pieck gave the shell of his ear a chaste peck. Her nose traced across his cheek until it met his own, and his lips pressed up to meet hers.
She was used to soft kisses from him, ones she let happen because she wanted to keep the peace, but today she was insatiable. Pieck tugged at Zeke’s bottom lip, nudging her mouth into his a few times before she got a frustrated noise out of him.
His hands, which had been hovering unhelpfully previously, grabbed onto her trim waist and squeezed. Pieck made a noise of surprise, his grip strength uncomfortably arousing. She nipped at his top lip, and he didn’t hesitate to let his mouth fall open for her.
Pieck wasn’t going to lie and say she was in love, that he was just her type and she couldn’t live without him, but she understood how some people made such sweeping statements when she felt his tongue press to hers.
Pieck was more sensitive now that her nerves lived closer to the surface of her skin, but she didn’t mind the near-painful sensitivity of his touch. She reveled in the constant pain Titanhood brought her.
His tongue was so soft, and he was uncharacteristically gentle, lapping her mouth open and pressing his tongue behind her front teeth.
Pieck whimpered, her head lulling behind her actions when the taste of him and his pheromones hit her brain. She felt Zeke’s head pick up to chase her mouth, but he seemed to get tired of that quickly. His hand let go of her waist and tangled into her mess of black hair, gripping at the root.
He held her head to his so he could continue licking into her mouth. The sound of smacking lips and soft whines filled the room. Pieck moaned openly into his mouth, the burn in her scalp and the slide of wet mouths getting her soaked.
Zeke’s mouth left hers and she whimpered at the loss, earning her a chuckle from him. His mouth latched onto her shoulder, and she was expecting kisses. So when he sunk his teeth in uninhibited, she couldn’t help her reaction.
“Ah- Zeke!” Pieck moaned out, his teeth egging on the unbearable arousal. Pieck glanced to the side to check the bitemark he had left. Sure enough, a red ring of his teeth marks was imprinted in her skin, angry and steaming slightly.
“You sound so pretty, you know?” Zeke’s hand left her hair and came down to her breast, squeezing with indelicate fingernails that bit into her skin with delicious sensation. With his touch encouraging her, and only a thin layer of fabric between her slick core and his cock, Pieck rolled her hips down against him to chase more. The sound of him groaning met her ears, and when she focused on the source of it, Pieck saw Zeke’s eyes lazily shut and his mouth hung open with pleasure.
Pieck reached down beneath herself and used his inattention to her advantage. She tugged down the waistband of his underwear, and watched as his erection sprung out eagerly. The tip of it was slick, catching the light in a way that would have had Pieck taking him in her mouth if it wasn’t for her own utter need. But she was desperate, and she wasn’t going to wait.
Pieck leaned up onto her knees and lined herself up with his dick, and a second later started to sink herself onto it. Her cunt dripped with arousal, so much so that despite the considerable size of his cock, it was easy to seat herself down onto it.
Zeke babbled uselessly beneath her, begging for her to go faster, but just as soon as Pieck felt her thighs press to his she stopped.
“What the fuck are you-”
“Beg me,” Pieck cut him off, wigging her hips slightly.
He cursed up at her, “No- Pieck, stop it.” His masculinity battled with his want, his eyes flicking over her while he tried to make his mind up.
“We’re staying like this ‘til you do. I don’t care if you go soft.”
“Please, Pieck. I need you, so bad,” Zeke’s voice broke and his hands climbed her side, squeezing at her soft side, her ample breasts, “Fuck me, Pieck. Please, please please-”
Pieck cut him off, leaning forward into his grip and back down. Settling into a firm rhythm, her thighs connected with his harshly and filled the room with panting and the sound of skin hitting skin. Pieck wasn’t as vocal, but listening to him groan her name and declare his undying devotion had her cunt twitching wickedly.
“I love you, Pieck, I love you,” Zeke breathed. His hands found their way into her hair, and he tugged her face down to his, connecting their lips once more. His hips bucked up and fucked into her own once her weight wasn’t pinning them down, and when she gasped into his mouth he took the opportunity and slipped his tongue in, his hand in her hair ensuring that she couldn’t pull away.
While the rhythm Zeke fucked her with was harsh, planting his feet and grinding up into her so that Pieck had to hold onto him in order to keep her balance, his kisses were sweet.
The vibrations of his moans filled her skull. Pieck couldn’t stop herself from imagining that same mouth on her clit, sucking and making her finish just because Zeke got off to pleasuring her. She dove in harder, chasing the pheromone rush his lips provided, but Zeke held her firm. He didn’t let her take what she wanted, and it frustrated her to no end.
Zeke flipped their weight over unexpectedly, pushing her back into his pillows and planting himself between her already wide stretched hips. She made a noise of pain, from his weight pressing her hip flexors open and back, but Pieck didn’t want him to stop, far from it.
“Pieck,” Zeke broke the kiss, but hovered over her, “You feel phenomenal, I could die happy in your perfect, pretty cunt-” he punctuated his sentence with particularly firm thrusts, making Pieck squeak. It hurt, the way he used her, but the ache was perfect. It shut her brain off in a way only he could, and whatever wounds he inflicted would (un)fortunately be licked away soon enough.
“Pieck, Pieck, P-” Zeke grunted and shoved her knees up to her ribcage. He hovered over her, and thrusted once, twice more before burying himself to the hilt. Heat spread within her, along with a twitching feeling up against her womb.
He let go moments later, lying down gently atop her. Pieck’s hips complained from the abuse, and she whimpered right into his ear.
“Oh, fuck,” Zeke murmured, “Do you want me to get you off too?”
“You, uh, don’t have to,” Pieck responded, voice small. The confidence she’d had before was slowly evacuating her body, and leaving in its place a tired and fragile little girl. Pieck cursed herself, told herself to keep it together just a bit longer.
Zeke was unceremonious, retching his softening erection free of her. He was quick moving down, attaching his lips to where his fluids were beginning to leak out of her. Pieck groaned, and decided to get payback for his treatment of her own scalp.
***
Zeke laid down beside Pieck, a pack of cigarettes clutched in his hand. Pieck hadn’t moved to cover herself up after they finished, she was boiling alive and if a stitch of fabric covered her body she would throw up.
The sun had started to go down during their tryst, and the room was heavy with gold light seeping into the crevasses, drawing shadows out of hiding. Zeke lit a cigarette and offered it to her in a silent gesture, and Pieck surprised herself by taking it.
Pieck inhaled, and let the smoke curl lazily from her mouth instead of blowing it out. Her eyes hadn’t moved from the ceiling, and she worked through her cigarette slowly while she continued to stare.
“Why do you come to my room so often?” Zeke asked her, quietly so he didn’t break the spell between them.
Pieck thought about it, and took another drag. Right when she was sure it had been too long to answer him, she decided to do so anyway. “It feels better. You get it.”
Zeke’s eyebrows creased, and he opened his mouth again, “Get what?”
“The whole titan thing. The side effects and stuff.”
“I… guess so,” Zeke looked away from her and towards the window. Zeke made a noise, one Pieck couldn’t identify, but continued to finish his after-sex cigarette.
A few more beats of silence passed. Zeke lied down alongside her but didn’t touch her. He spoke, “I’m more beast than man, now. I find myself asking why the rules of polite society should be abided anymore.”
“I don’t know if our society could be considered polite. And you never followed those rules to begin with.”
Zeke snorted. He reached a hand out and trailed the back of his index finger along her cheek. Pieck found herself leaning into his touch, and she hated herself.
“Have you noticed the smells and the tastes?” Zeke asked, his voice still low and warm.
“Mhmm.”
“It’s odd,” Zeke tried to prompt her, though she wouldn’t be rising to the bait.
“It is.”
Zeke sighed, and looked away from her. The light was quickly fading, but Pieck’s eyes had no trouble adjusting. Not when she had the power of gods in her veins.
“May I stay here tonight?” Pieck inquired.
“I don’t see why not.”
Notes:
Haha please don't kill me I promise I have a plan.
Come yell at me on tumblr, my blog name is @AstralAbberant
Plz leave a comment and kudos, they're what keep me fed and motivated <3
Chapter Text
April 24th, 845
Pieck woke up with a needle in her arm, soft restraints already holding her to a hospital bed. The taste of metal in her mouth made her cringe, and the clinking of the cuffs around her arms was grating.
She groaned, sniffling as she blinked away the grogginess of sleep and looked around. It was one of the standard rooms, and to her left Zeke was similarly drugged and restrained. As far as Pieck could tell in her flat-lying position, his consciousness was limited.
“Zeke? Zeke,” Pieck whispered, trying to gauge his wakefulness. He didn’t so much as stir, to Pieck’s dismay. She struggled against her restraints to try and get free, and then stopped when she remembered she had nowhere to go if she did slip the hold leather and steel had on her.
Interrupting her brief lapse of judgement, the door to the small room they were in swung open. Pieck strained to lift her head so she could see who it was. The man who entered the room wasn’t anyone Pieck recognized from her brief forays into the surgical wing, but she spend most of the time asleep anyways. He wore the standard blue surgical scrubs and a cap, and said nothing as he kicked up the breaks on Pieck’s bed and maneuvered her out of the room.
The creaking of wheels beneath her was the only noise to keep her company, while she tried to steady her rising panic and breath with a degree of regularity.
Pieck was pushed into the same surgical suite as before, set up with doctors and nurses and various equipment. The light over the bed was blindingly bright, and Pieck shut her eyes to both block out some of the light, and to avoid seeing what was happening.
There was a person sitting on a stool to Pieck’s right, the only one not standing amongst all of the medical staff. Pieck couldn’t make out the hushed whispers between the doctors standing above her, not with the air circulating and the sound of her own heart rate picking up in her ears. But she could hear this person, talking directly to her.
“I’m going to give you something to relax, and so you don’t feel pain, honey,” The sitting person explained in a gentle voice, taking her right arm and screwing a syringe into the IV port left there.
Almost as soon as the person began to sink down the plunger on the syringe, Pieck started to feel nice. Her head swam, and she made no sound of protest or comment when they tightened her restraints or put a mask over her face that blew air into her mouth and nose.
Pieck moaned in contentment. The ties on the front of her hospital gown were loosened and pulled apart by ghost hands, exposing her torso to the cold air of the crowded room. Pieck whimpered a bit, but she didn’t tug or struggle. She couldn’t feel her skin or contract any given muscle, and she didn't care much about being exposed.
They left her hips and legs covered with the blanket she came in with. The gown that hung open covered her arms, providing a modicum of warmth whereas the rest of her skin pimpled under the chill. It was her chest, ribs, and naval that were open to scrutiny, and Pieck squirmed beneath the attention. She was never so seen before.
A sponge soaked in a cool, sticky fluid connected with her sternum, causing Pieck to jump. Her vision was blurred to hell, any attempt at opening her eyes met her with fuzzy shapes and bright colors that overwhelmed, until she had to shut them again. Even though her eyes watered with the chill and the attempted glance, the rhythmic feeling of the sponge rushing back and forth was still sharp on her skin.
Gloved fingers brushed against her breastbone, and braced down so that a scalpel could pierce into her milky white flesh. The touch of a warm human was more jarring than the blade, something she'd come to expect.
There was a mild squelching sound, and the heat of blood quickly broke the surface. Pieck didn’t feel any pain. The only thing she could think right now was damn, these drugs were doing their job. She’d need to thank the stool-person later.
The scalpel dragged lower through her skin, until it reached the top of her pubic bone. The scalpel clattered when it was dropped into some kind of dish. Two incisions above her breasts connected with the one through her torso, but she bled much better than a corpse. Her eyes already pulsed with the discomfort of blood loss.
Several sets of agile hands began to place clamps on the raw edges of her torso. Pieck already knew not to try and heal herself, but clearly they didn’t want to make the same mistake twice and end up having to do this in a rush job later on.
Pieck floated throughout the entire procedure. As it went on, cutting and cauterizing and stitching, she thought to herself in a surprisingly clear manner. She was sure they gave her something to keep her calm, to stop her from panicking like last time.
Her breathing wavered on a slow inhale, and she cracked her eyes open to try and gauge why. The light is still unbearably bright above her, but it isn't what she's focused on as the assisting doctors lift her left lung from her body, and she realizes then why she can’t breathe. Pieck still couldn’t panic though, not when her breath was stuck in her throat and she couldn’t seem to breathe deep enough.
They pull her apart in pieces. The doctors clamp off her pancreas and gallbladder, and take each of them to hurriedly put on ice. Pieck’s head spins when she sees her own organs leaving her body. They’re careful bisecting her liver, making sure their sample is usable and intact. She hears them theorizing how best to remove it from her body, right before the stool-person pushes in another dose of whatever medication is keeping her limp and compliant.
They’re slower when it comes to her kidney. Major veins and arteries connect there, and they don’t want to disturb those while her body is still handling the brunt of the other losses. Shifters weren’t immune to shock, someone mentioned, just extremely resilient to it.
An unfamiliar nausea sets over her when she feels hands pushing around in her abdominal cavity, placing in pieces of metal that will accommodate the removal of one of her kidneys. The squish of smooth hands nudging her intestines to the side makes her shiver, and her skin still laid open with no privacy left for herself. Her forehead felt tight with a building headache, and she’s worried that when she regains autonomy that she’ll lose her stomach full of bile almost immediately, if they didn't take that too.
The removal of her uterus was unexpected, and inelegant. It’s a rough uncaring blade that cuts the connective tissue from the delicate organ, and a quick needle that stitches through her vaginal canal to allow them to take out the uterus, ovaries, and cervix in one complete piece.
They don’t bother stitching her up. Pieck feels one of the nurses use some kind of glue to replace the clamps after the doctors leave along with their shiny new specimens. It only needed to hold long enough for her body to recover itself, she said. It’s just in case Pieck’s body can’t keep up with the healing.
Before the nurse was even done pasting her together like a child’s arts and crafts project, the stool-person gave her one last med push, and Pieck passed out.
***
The ceiling blurred into view, monochrome linoleum overwhelming Pieck's dry, burning eyes. Steam hanging heavy by the ceiling gave everything a dreamy quality, tinged with the scent of burning flesh knitting itself back together.
The shades over the single sad window were drawn tightly shut, but the thin fabric cast a certain glow over the room that she could see by anyways. Pieck dragged her eyes across the room while she got her bearings. She checked for threats not out of genuine concern, but a compulsive habit.
Her sights settled on Zeke lying in a bed beside her own. While her own abdomen had recovered in the time spent in a sedated sleep, it seemed he was still working on it. The seam running from his mid-sternum down to his hip billowed out heat in worrying quantities.
Pieck felt that any attempt to wake him would be fruitless, and thus didn't she give it any effort. She did, however, tenderly unscrew the IV line connected to the cannula in her arm. Standing was a great challenge, and her head throbbed after the great effort her body had expended reforming her organs. But, she moved to sit on the end of Zeke’s bed regardless of her own discomfort, the urge to soothe his suffering overwhelming.
After making sure she wouldn’t be irritating any concealed wounds in doing so, Pieck began to gently stroke his hand. The skin covering his knuckles was rough with callouses and discoloration, but she rubbed her thumb over it anyways. Her own knuckles frequently split due to either force or the environment, like she assumed his did, but she made sure to take care of her skin in a way he clearly did not. Pieck would have to talk with him about that.
It took another half an hour for him to stir. Pieck held his hand all the while, gripping it tight while she watched him continue to heal. Zeke wasn’t wearing his secondhand glasses, so she saw the exact moment his eyes shot open, panic painted across his features.
His gasps for air were messy and discordant, rhythm missing. Mouth bobbing open and closed like a fish while he readjusted to wakefulness, and presumably to a normal respiratory system, Pieck was patient. She didn’t make any sudden moves. The room was dim, and she knew her dark hair could shroud her sometimes.
Zeke’s hand tightened around hers, holding her like something precious. His gaze caught on her own during his violent shaking, and he relaxed visibly, exhaling and shutting his eyes again.
Pieck took a breath, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”
She had been expecting a smile or an off-color remark, something to assure her that he was okay. Instead, he turned his face from her and sniffled.
"Hey," he rasped with a clearly irritated throat. Considering shifters didn't get sick, Pieck knew there had to be something else that left his throat dry. Crying, screaming, trauma.
Pieck’s words stuck in her throat, as she looked over Zeke. His eyes stayed locked on where they’d first met hers, even as she shifted and broke eye contact.
“Hey,” Pieck gave his hand a little shake, but it was limp. He gave her no indication that he heard her, and he didn’t move.
“Zeke, come on. It’s just me,” Pieck lowered her voice, lest someone overhear her, “It’s over, Zeke.” He still didn’t answer. He took breaths in, breaths out, and blinked periodically.
Pieck frowned. It was a tight squeeze on the single-person hospital bed, but she picked up his arm and crawled to lay against his side. She manually put his arm around her back, and she was careful not to graze her arm over anything recently healed.
He was, as usual, warm in a way no one else was. Feverish on a normal person, comforting to her. Titans always ran hot.
It was a difficult angle, but Pieck picked her head up every so often to check if his eyes were still open. Her ear rested right next to his heart, she could hear every breath in, and every beat of his heart, but whether or not he slept was another thing.
Not long into this little routine Pieck made for herself, a nurse let himself into their shared room. He didn’t brighten the lights, thank Ymir, but he did come to Zeke’s bedside. The nurse didn’t seem shocked to see them in the same bed.
The nurse removed both of their IV ports with little fuss. He taped on gauze, and left the door open on the way out. It was on Pieck, still in her blood stained hospital gown, to get Zeke to his feet and start him walking at her side down the hall. Mental insufficiencies wouldn’t be tolerated in their unit, and Pieck would make sure he wouldn’t be marked for it.
Zeke’s eyes brightened a fraction more when she set him on his bed. She wasn’t far behind sitting at his side, her ankles sore from dragging her feet. The extra weight was a drag; one she wasn't used to maneuvering in this small human body.
She dug the pad of her thumb behind her ankle bone, sighing in relief at the tense muscles yielding under force. Pieck paid Zeke no mind, behind this locked door of his. That was her mistake this time, complacency. She worked through each of her sore muscles while they sat in silence. It was a meditative practice, and while she was indecently dressed, the eyes that lingered on her didn't trouble her in the slightest.
“C’mere,” Zeke murmured. His words slurred, where he usually had clean diction. Pieck didn’t hesitate to cling onto his toned bicep, shushing like a mother to her baby.
“Are you feeling any better?” Pieck smiled, her hand grasping onto his. Any effort to soothe her own discomfort was forgotten. There wasn’t any more steam curling off of them, so she assumed any pain he was in was residual, but she still asked to be sure.
“Yea,” Zeke reached his free hand up to his chest, and started to pull at the knots. The previously white piping that composed the ties lining the gown were now soaked a sickly brown, coagulated blood cells and sticky plasma ruining the fabric forever, most likely.
His hands shook, likely with an adrenaline crash if Pieck was assessing things correctly, and he had trouble gripping the soiled ties. Pieck took pity on him. She stood up from his side, and moved in front of him to face him. Zeke didn’t try to stop her when her steady touch overtook his own, working on the knots he’d been pulling at uselessly.
It was difficult, the fabric stuck to itself and wet knots were always harder than dry ones, but she got the first and second loosened after only a minute or two.
When she turned her attention down to his thighs to work on the third, Pieck’s stomach dropped. His external genitalia sat only hardly obscured by his closed gown. She’d been half-expecting as much, he didn’t have womanly modesty to protect and Marley was intent on stripping you of every bit of dignity they felt entitled to. That wasn’t the issue besides the general discomfort nudity usually brought in non-family and non-lovers.
The skin had a waxy, artificial quality to it. It wasn’t something the average person would pick up on, if Pieck had to guess. Only shifters and the doctors who ‘served’ them. The appendage hadn’t yet been marred by sweat or dirt, and was too new for cell turnover to have started yet. No hair had grown yet beneath the shaft, which could’ve meant he chose to be especially hygienic that day, but in conjunction with the other factors, Pieck was all but dragged to the obvious and singular conclusion of what they’d done to him.
Did they really-
Pieck shoved the rising bile in her throat back down with a forced swallow. She couldn't think about her actions, she just pulled Zeke into a tight hug. He made a sound of surprise into her chest, since he was about a head shorter than her when sitting down. She didn’t care if he was surprised, Pieck squeezed him tighter.
“I’m so sorry. I’m here,” she reassured, speaking straight into his ruffle of wavy blond hair.
His arms only now came up to wrap around her. The reciprocated affection wasn’t necessary, but she did appreciate it, his arms overlapping behind her back low on her hips.
“They-” Zeke’s voice broke, and he didn’t finish his sentence. Pieck didn’t press him to. Her own brown stained gown couldn't have made a comfortable pillow. His grip was tight though, and the damp seeping through the fabric to her skin told her that he'd prefer this to anything else.
She held him until her knees started to ache from being locked, her already abused ankles protesting the additional weight yet again. She told them to fuck off, and didn’t move a muscle. Pieck knew the moment she picked up a foot to try and roll out the strain, the spell would be broken and he’d be back to near catatonia.
Relief came in the form of Zeke’s stomach rumbling. He picked his head up and looked down, disbelief at his own human needs etched clearly across his face.
Pieck was able to stop herself from laughing, but not from smiling. “Hungry? I can cook for us,” Pieck offered gently, hoping that it would be enough to break him from his daze.
“We should wash up first,” Zeke suggested. That was enough for Pieck to breathe out in relief, him speaking and suggesting a course of action.
“Of course. God, I didn’t even notice I’m still covered-” Pieck clamped her mouth shut. Blood, or blood in excess, was really not the thing to mention right now.
Zeke noticed her hesitance, and looked back up at her, his light eyes soft. “I’m okay, Pieck. Let’s finish undressing, and then we can share a shower, alright?”
Pieck nodded and got down onto her knees in front of him, making quick work of the final tie of his hospital gown. She prayed to whoever was listening that this was a one-time deal, because she wasn’t sure if she could do this for him again, over and over.
His eyes followed her down and she felt self-conscious in a way she didn’t often feel. The way a woman often felt, when a man looked at her. Wanted her. Pieck didn’t mind the lingering discomfort. She knew Zeke felt something for her, even if that something wasn’t anymore than surface level lust. If he was even in a place to take it from her, she deserved it for being so naive about the nature of things.
She climbed to stand again with the composure of a nun, and pushed the now loose hanging gown off of his shoulders. He seemed to take her lead, and his hands came up to her gown as well. His gaze darkened with every blood soaked knot he undid, and by the time he pulled the ruined garment from her shoulders, he looked desperate.
Zeke’s thumbs slipped under the elastic waistband of her shorts, but she caught his wrists before he could tug them out of place. “Let’s go get in the shower, yeah?” she prompted.
Zeke grunted in dissatisfaction, and for a brief moment as he stood Pieck was worried that he intended to have his way with her regardless of what she wanted. Scared, not worried, she amended.
With pupils shot so large his eyes looked black, Pieck’s fears were resolved when Zeke crouched briefly and gripped her by the thighs, lifting her up to straddle his waist. Pieck held onto his shoulders to avoid falling backwards, but he didn’t seem concerned.
Zeke carried her weight effortlessly towards his bedroom door, shifting her to the side only so he could grip his door’s handle and pull it open.
“Z-Zeke, wait, you’re naked,” Pieck protested, but it fell on deaf ears. He crossed the hallway and entered the men’s washroom, despite the possibility that anyone with authorization could be walking down the hallway. Magath, any nurse, Kosar, to name a few.
He set her down onto the cool tile once the door swung shut on its loaded hinges. Pieck found herself eager to cover her exposed breasts, but she refrained. If he could stand comfortable in his own body in front of her, then she wouldn’t be a coward and not offer the same level of confidence.
“How hot do you like your water?” Zeke asked as he approached the shower faucet, and Pieck’s eyes immediately dropped to his muscular behind.
“Uh… Oh, um, like good tea water,” Pieck tried to joke.
Zeke looked back at her, unamused, “I drink coffee.”
“Oh. Right. Close to boiling, I meant,” Pieck fiddled with a piece of her hair, because while standing topless in front of Zeke wasn’t something she felt self conscious about, her shitty joke not landing was.
“Clever,” Zeke nodded, and he sounded almost genuine about that assessment.
He walked over to her and knelt, mirroring her own position a short while earlier. His hands slipped under her shorts, and this time she didn’t stop him from sliding them off of her hips and down to her feet, rendering her as naked as he was. Zeke put a hand behind each of her ankles in turn and guided her to step out of them, allowing her to grab his shoulders to balance as she did.
“There. Beautiful,” Zeke left a quick peck to her thigh and stood, turning to walk back to the shower stall he’d left running.
An unsteady feeling was seating itself in Pieck’s stomach. She followed him hesitantly, stepping under the steaming water and melting when the water touched her aching muscles. The sounds she made echoed her relief, but she couldn’t care to be aware of them. She was too busy basking in the comforting heat.
While the stall was plenty comfortable for a single person, wide enough for Pieck to stretch her arms out completely, it was a bit snug with the two of them. Not cramped, per se, but she was aware every time he brushed against her in the curtain-enclosed space.
Once she was drenched and her hair was pushed back from her face, she turned to the dispensers mounted on the wall. Every stall had these two canisters mounted on the wall, one filled with shampoo and the other with body soap. The body soap was the same standard antibacterial stuff that she used before procedures, and the shampoo left her hair feeling stripped and dry. While both issues were usually resolved by how greasy Pieck’s skin and scalp both were, there was no doubt she preferred her own stuff from home. And conditioner. But this would do in a pinch.
Zeke’s face was visibly disgusted when Pieck’s hand approached the push-lever beneath the shampoo canister, and he spoke up to stop her before she could put that accursed blue smear in her hair. “Just use mine,” he picked up a sage green bottle and thrust it towards her, “It should work, our hair is similar enough.”
Pieck was not aware Zeke spent enough time looking at her hair to know that, but she accepted the offer eagerly, “Thank you. Do you have conditioner?”
He scoffed, “I’m not Porco,” Pieck wasn’t sure quite how that was relevant, until he gestured at a second slightly darker green bottle in the same short, cylindrical shape as the first.
“Well, Thanks,” Pieck repeated. When she tried to take the outstretched shampoo bottle, Zeke held it up above her reach, a smug grin pulling at his face.
“Can I wash your hair?”
Pieck deadpanned up at him, and already her neck was beginning to hurt. She made a mental note never to stand this close to him and try to look him in the eye for this long again. Not that being eye-to-eye with his toned pectorals was an issue any other day. “Fine. Just the scalp, though.”
“Obviously.”
There was something so fundamentally wrong, to Pieck, in turning her back to Zeke, but she didn’t allow her discomfort to stop him from showing her this softness. His fingers were hesitant in slipping against her head. Massaging the tips of his fingers into her scalp, he gained confidence slowly until there was a nice lather. Pieck’s eyes slipped shut, and she was sure he was doing beyond what was necessary to work the oil and blood from her hair.
“Alright, rinse,” ordered Zeke, his hands already held beneath the spray.
Pieck tilted her head back and rinsed the soap from her hair, fully aware of Zeke’s gaze never leaving her. She took the conditioner for herself, applying it evenly over her hands so she could massage it into her ends.
“Thanks, Zeke. That felt nice,” She smiled at him while she combed her fingers through her hair, “Would you like me to do yours?”
Zeke shook his head, damp curls swaying as he did, “No, it would be awkward to have to bend down for you.”
Pieck thought that sounded shallow, but she wouldn’t complain. She went about her usual shower routine, his smell, of which she was strikingly familiar, surrounding her as she doused herself in them. Amber and citrus, which usually combined with the warm, rich scent Zeke’s skin carried naturally, were an overwhelming combination. Especially as Zeke himself cleaned up, the fragranced steam clouded her every sense in a pleasant manner.
Zeke’s nose hovered above Pieck’s hair, and she could hear him inhaling. Pieck felt hot under such close scrutiny. He crowded her against the shower wall, his nose moving down to her exposed neck.
“You smell like me,” Zeke mumbled, voice low, “like you’re mine.”
Oh fuck him. Pieck shivered under his attention. Her stomach pressed into the warm tile wall before she noticed it was there, and Zeke was right behind her, his body dwarfing hers. His soft lips pressed to the crease of her neck, leaving chaste kisses in their wake. He wasn’t pinning her hard, Pieck could most likely escape, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
Pieck’s knees shook when Zeke’s teeth grazed against her collarbone, a ticklish drag that made her cunt ache viciously.
“Zeke…” she whispered, leaning her head back against him without a care.
“Can I?” Zeke asked. Pieck was confused for a split second until she felt his newly reformed cock, hard and pressing against her ass.
He needed this, she realized. They’d gutted him like a fish and torn him apart, and he wasn’t handling it well at all. The least she could do is provide a distraction for him. His discomfort, what he'd experienced hadn't earned him this from her. She didn't owe him. Why she allowed at all this eluded her.
“Yes. You can have me,” Pieck whispered her hesitant consent. His response was quick, grabbing her by the shoulders and flipping her around with her back to the wall now. Her head connected softly with the tile, but this wasn't something he cared about, so in the moment she didn't either. He didn’t look her in the eye, barely looked her in the face as he picked her up and held her against the tiles, her legs wrapped around his toned midsection.
His erection grinded up against her core, but he didn’t slide home just yet. Zeke sniffed and nipped at her collarbone, leaving a constellation of red marks behind in his wake. Pieck knew he had a thing for marking, but he was especially into it today. Pieck couldn’t find it in her to care if she was being treated like a prized possession. He was sweet and not hurting her, and that’s what mattered to Pieck.
“Pieck, my god, Pieck,” Zeke groaned against her pink shoulder, still grinding, “I love you, so much.” His voice was desperate, and it was jarring for Pieck to hear from his usually cocky and confident voice.
“I know, love,” Pieck purred against his ear, hesitant to return the incredibly intimate sentiment. She mimicked his need though, tried to make him get on with it faster so she could leave, eat, and sleep. “I’m aching for you, Zeke.”
Zeke sighed. He balanced her weight precariously, and reached down to line the tip of his cock with her cunt. Despite the fact that she was soaked in more ways than one, he was slow easing into her.
“Mm- ngh,” Pieck tightened her arms around him. The stretch of him pressing up against her womb was delicious, and the added soreness of her earlier recovery only added to the masochistic pleasure.
He hadn’t bothered fingering her open, which she didn’t mind, but he wasn’t a small man. The first few thrusts of his hips pushed the air from her lungs, her cunt trying fruitlessly to tighten around the intrusion.
“Zeke, Zeke, please,” Pieck whimpered. He pulled out slowly until only the head of his hard-on lingered inside of her, and pushed in once again just as slow.
Zeke rolled his hips up repeatedly, getting faster and meaner with every go. Pieck’s smaller body shook under the force of his thrusts, but she didn’t tell him to stop or slow down. He abused her cervix mercilessly, slamming into it with every push in once he got his confidence in fucking her.
Pieck wasn’t looking for her own pleasure, more intent on letting him use her so he felt better. She laid her cheek against his shoulder as he continued to use her as a wet, warm hole. The steam was beginning to make her lightheaded, and she shut her eyes to try and counter the spinning. She trusted him to not drop her, if nothing else.
It was over fast, thankfully, with him crushing her into the wall and filling her to the brink with his spend. Pieck’s head was a black hole at that point, and she was very pleased to be set on the floor of the shower stall with the water turned off.
Zeke didn’t try to get her off, and she didn’t want him to. He didn’t check on her either, and while it would be excessive considering who they were, she still would’ve appreciated it. Zeke stepped back into the stall a moment later, a folded white towel in his hand.
“Towel?” he held it out to her in offering, an identical towel already hanging on his hips.
“In a moment,” Pieck nodded, “I’m gonna recondition my hair, it got a bit rinsed out,” she groaned sitting up, and reached up above her head to turn the water on after he took the step out. She didn’t put it back to the steaming heat she usually enjoyed, instead setting it at a cool stream that would hopefully knock the heat off her skin and help her to regulate. And besides wanting to clean herself up from his finish, she really did need to reapply the oils necessary to her hair.
Zeke wasn’t lingering in the bathroom when Pieck emerged, but she hadn’t been expecting that. There were two neatly folded towels waiting on the sink vanity, and Pieck picked them up to wrap around her body and hair without question. She retreated to her room almost immediately; Pieck was tired, worn down, and still sickly feeling from both the organ retrieval and the shower. Sleep and a big meal were what she was looking forward to.
Notes:
"I said, like a fucking liar"
lol anyways Pieck is hilarious to me. I deleted the phrase "which could mean nothing" from like three places throughout this chapter, because I do be making jokes in the rough draft. Also, acts 2-3 are far less anthological than the first. The latter even follows coherent plot threads all the way through. Dw in the sequel I drop the whole dating thing since it's no longer back story/expanded canon at that point.
Come bother me @astralabberant on Tumblr
See ya next week
Chapter 9: The Fall
Notes:
This chapter was the culmination of me banging my head against the wall and also lots of hyperpop. Comments and Kudos are my fuel, don't let me die.
See ya next week, fam.
Also the draft for this monster has officially reached 100k words, someone shut me up lol.
Chapter Text
April 26th, 845
The jeering people of Shiganshina hadn’t been wrong. It was a massacre. Every Scout was saddle-sore and pushed to their limit over the past few days, and that’s if they came back at all.
Hange wasn’t bothered by the thrown insults from the townspeople, they had developed the necessary thick skin to survive being a Scout a long time ago, before their enlistment in the Cadet Corps., even. Hange wasn’t heartless, though. Surrounded by the dismembered corpses of friends, the moaning voices of the injured, it pulled at something in their chest. It would pull at anyone.
As someone with intimate knowledge of anatomy and physiology, Hange was already assessing the injuries of those lying in the horse drawn carts. They studied what they could from textbooks and deduced the rest for the purpose of titan research, but considering the similar musculature makeup, Hange knew enough to be of use in the infirmary. It would be all hands on deck when they arrived at HQ, even if they just ended up doing sutures and playing nurse alongside those who were more educated and better trained.
Hange’s gaze had been downward cast as they rode through the streets of Shiganshina, not out of shame but because they were staring at the mangled leg of a friend riding supine nearby. They were trying to determine whether the limb could be saved, and if their friend would be able to return to service.
Hence, they hadn’t been paying attention. Walnut was a good horse, well trained, and Hange didn’t need to steer him to walk side by side with his herd mates. But Walnut came to a sudden stop, and Hange’s head picked up, worried about their horse trying to cause an ill-timed crash.
Unexpectedly, the entire procession had come to a halt. Hange’s eyes glanced between Levi and Erwin riding beside them, trying to gauge what was going on, but both of them looked straight onwards, not giving them an inch. Alright, Hange could keep up, their gaze followed theirs until it fell on their Commander, dismounted from his horse and speaking with a silver haired woman.
Oh, she looked familiar. Hange wracked their brain while they waited, not focusing in the least on what Shadis was saying.
Until it was presented, literally, before their eyes. Moses’ arm, one of their classmates, was brought from the wagon of the deceased and handed to his mother. Hange frowned, and tore their gaze from the situation. Commander Shadis’ self-flagellation didn’t need more witnesses than it had, and Hange didn’t need to watch the man come to tears in front of the entire district.
***
In the end, Hange was right. They ended up in the coldest wing of the Trost HQ, the infirmary, suturing gashes. They pulled needles through wounds until their vision blurred, and applied so many bandages they were sure they could have covered an entire body. And not a small one. Like, Erwin’s body.
When they’d first arrived, the head honcho, a sweet charge nurse named Elizabeth, had offered for Hange to take off their ODM harness before they came to help, but Hange had foolishly insisted they would be fine. Now, the tight leather holding limb and muscle in place was leaving Hange intensely sore. It had been days of wear at this point, sleeping in it even, and every time Hange moved against it their thighs and shoulders complained about the pull.
Hange yawned while walking upstairs to their quarters. It was late at that point, and yet the light under Levi’s door still burnt bright. Of course.
They unbuckled their chest strap the moment they walked through their bedroom door. Getting their own room had been a heaven send, because the barracks were obnoxious and Hange couldn’t be bothered to ensure their own clothedness when sleeping. Or lounging. Or writing notes at their desk, for that matter.
They had this shit down to a science. Shimmying out of the full body harness took them under a minute at this point, boots included, and standing there in bare feet with skin unburdened by weight-distributing straps was fucking orgasmic.
Next up was the green button up they’d chosen for the expedition. It was freaking ripe after three days of wear, and Hange tossed it in the general direction of the laundry basket once it was off. That was good enough. White bandages still tight around their breasts, and uniform pants and sash still on, Hange flopped onto their stomach on their unmade bed. The feel of their own bed and blankets were more than welcome, bedrolls just didn’t feel the same.
They could have fallen asleep like this, face down in a tangled-up blanket and starfished sideways on the mattress. Could’ve, but someone was very insistently pounding their fist on Hange’s door. They tried to sleep through it, but that was proving nigh impossible.
“Cominggggg,” Hange called out, groaning and pulling themself from bed. They adored Elizabeth, respected what she did, but if she wanted Hange to come down to do more aid work, she was out of her goddamn mind.
Hange didn’t bother with a shirt before wrenching the door open. Instead of a petite blonde, it was a scowling black haired beast looking back at Hange. “Well hello, officer, no those aren’t drugs in my pocket,” Hange slumped against the doorframe when they realized it wasn’t their superior or someone who they didn’t care about. Their eyes clamped shut again, just for a moment.
“Sit down, something happened,” Levi shoved Hange into their own room, pulling the door shut behind him as he entered.
Hange stumbled for a moment, but caught their footing in time to avoid falling on their ass. They pushed the pile of laundry from their desk chair and sat in it, leaning back. Levi wasn’t fucking around, so Hange refrained from making another joke.
“Wall Maria. It fell.” Levi crossed his arms over his chest, staring at them with a terribly worried expression.
“What do you mean fall? It’s a wall–it doesn’t just fall, Levi,” Hange chuckled, albeit nervously. Levi didn’t make jokes, at least not ones like this, but the alternative was impossible.
Levi shook his head, “A titan taller than the wall appeared from nowhere and kicked a hole through the gate. It’s gone– and a second charged the inner gate. I saw the report myself.”
Hange sat up at that, and grabbed their ODM goggles from where they sat abandoned on the desk. They blinked a few times to wake themselves up more, with mild success. “Report?”
“Shadis called Erwin and the other Section Commanders into a briefing. They’re keeping it quiet for now, which is fucking ridiculous considering hundreds of thousands of people live in that territory,” Levi growled.
Hange shook their head, but turned long enough to look out of the window. Sure enough, the torches atop Trost’s wall were blazing bright, and what seemed like the entire Garrison posting in Trost was standing up there, at attention.
“How could this hap–” No, that didn’t matter, “What are we going to do?”
Levi sighed, his eyes following theirs to examine the Garrison as they did, "I don't know what we can do. There isn't enough soldiers between the MP and the Garrison to take down the thousands of titans pouring into Wall Maria. Even if you added the Scouts, it's-"
"Shit," Hange pressed their face into their hands, completely overwhelmed.
April 28th, 845
Things were going well. For Pieck, at least. She’d had a few more blood draws over the past couple days, but besides that she was left remarkably alone by the medical staff and brass alike.
The sinking feeling that this caused wouldn’t purge itself from her stomach. She tried distraction, she did all of her own and Zeke’s laundry and scrubbed the common quarters of their wing until they shined. Pieck dusted her own room, organized Liesl’s books, even took out the worn rug that sat beneath her bed and beat the dust from it.
But unease, paranoia, and dread stayed firm. Pieck had no clue where such intensity came from, but it refused to be resolved.
To try and combat the distress, Pieck scrubbed at the concrete flooring of her bedroom. It was a nightmare to keep clean, and while she usually swept it, she was tired of dirt that hid between the thin grooves of the stone clinging to her feet. She’d tied her hair up to avoid dunking it in her suds bucket, because splitting her nailbeds open with her efforts was enough frustration for her, thank you.
That’s how she answered her door, when someone knocked. She was expecting Zeke, Magath, or maybe a nurse at this evening hour. Not Dr. Kosar.
“Afternoon, Pieck,” Kosar greeted, a painted smile plastered on her face.
Pieck paused, surprised. The doctor wasn’t in her usual lab coat and nice business clothing, or in surgical scrubs. Her brown hair hung loose, her clothes were casual. Her lips were painted burgundy.
“Good evening,” Pieck cautiously responded.
“It is! Could I interest you in a trip?” Kosar cut to the chase. Her head poked past Pieck and looked around at her bedroom, drinking in details even before Pieck could invite her in to begin with.
“A trip?”
“Mm-hm. Get dressed, I’ll wait,” she gestured vaguely at Pieck’s soap-stained cleaning attire, unimpressed. The doctor walked to the opposite wall of the hallway and slid down, crossing her legs.
Pieck was confused, and she was sure her face showed it. Still, she hesitantly turned her back to the odd doctor and shut her door, going to her closet. Seeing as she had zero indication what they were going to be doing, Pieck didn’t bother going fancy. A plain skirt, a uniform shirt, and an armband. She didn’t even bother taking her hair down from its precarious hold on the back of her head.
Walking through the hallways at such a late hour was interesting, if not mildly uncomfortable. The doctor led them without any discomfort at all, navigating the twists and turns of the hallways effortlessly. There wasn’t any day staff walking through the halls, and they only passed the occasional guard. The cold concrete walls were suffocating, and by the time they walked through the front doors of the facility, Pieck’s head was on a swivel to look for danger. She was pretty sure nothing was going to happen, but you know what they say about assuming.
The unusual pair made it to the internment zone without incident. The drive was silent and simultaneously far too loud with the rumbling combustion engine moving them forward at speeds Pieck usually only experienced within her Titan.
The rumbling of the engine cut out in front of Pieck’s family home, a two story old construction with shitty cooling and Pieck’s entire childhood stuffed into its few rooms.
Dr. Kosar got out first, leaving Pieck in her fancy car. For a brief moment, Pieck considered sliding across the bench and stealing the car for herself, driving off into the sunset where nobody knew her. It would be a nice idea, but Pieck knew her father would pay the price for such a childish pipe dream.
Emerging from the vehicle, she approached her own house, underdressed for the cool night air and unprepared for the humiliation she was about to face.
Pieck knocked carefully with a single finger. The sound was negligible in the white noise of the street, but she was hoping he wouldn’t answer at all. She didn’t want him to see her like this, paranoid and so clearly at a Marleyan’s mercy.
Her prayers to a higher power went unfulfilled though, and her father unlatched the door only seconds later.
“Pieck,” Her father gasped and took a step over the threshold, pulling her much smaller frame into his warm arms. Pieck melted into her father’s grasp. He wrapped around her so completely, and made her feel safe, like she was his little girl again. She hadn’t seen him in almost a month, and while Pieck had already gone for much longer away from her dad at only 16, the heavy events of the past few weeks had made it feel so much longer.
Her father let go of her just as the hug began to be uncomfortable, and the cool spring air began to be unbearable.
“I’m sorry, where are my manners,” Mr. Finger adjusted his clothing, and held a hand out past Pieck to the tall woman still lingering behind her, “I’m Gerard Finger, Pieck's father.”
Dr. Kosar took it without thought, shaking his hand with noticeable vigor, “Charmed. I’m Dr. Kosar, head of the Titan Biology department for the Marleyan government. But you can call me Ella, Mr. Finger.”
Pieck’s father smiled, “Impressive. Would you like to come inside, Ella?”
The doctor hummed in agreement and stepped past Gerard carelessly, stepping into the entryway in her soaked boots. Gerard and Pieck shared a look at that, at the woman claiming their familial space as her own, but neither dared to comment.
Ella’s boots left wet imprints on the hardwood of the living room, leading up to where she perched upon Pieck’s father’s armchair. The child that still lived inside of Pieck’s mind panicked at seeing their traditional seating arrangements upset, but she knew it wasn’t worth the argument to correct.
Pieck took off her red armband and joined her father and Ella in the living room, where they were already chatting and drinking coffee. Pieck didn’t drink that crap, and her father knew better than to offer, but it seemed Dr. Kosar noticed.
“Pieck, would you like a cup? There’s plenty left,” Ella gestured at the tray set on the coffee table. Pieck had been raised never to deny a Marleyan anything, especially not if they were offering you something, but this was Pieck’s house, and she hated the taste of bitter and burnt bean juice.
“No, thank you,” Pieck sat beside her father on the couch.
“Pieck,” Her father turned and glared, “Do not be rude–yes, she’ll have some.”
So, Pieck ended up with a warm mug clasped in her small hands, poured for her by her father while the doctor watched on in blatant fascination. Even if she didn’t like the taste, she couldn’t deny the smell of the sludge was pleasant. She held the cup up to her nose and took long breaths of the rising steam, appreciating the smell. She wouldn’t take a sip though, not for all of the social superiors in the world.
“Anyways, you were saying about your research?” Mr. Finger prompted the doctor, taking a large drink of his black coffee. Animal.
“Yes,” Ella perked up, face brightening while she set her mug to the wayside, “I can’t divulge much for obvious reasons, but your daughter has been a big asset. Between herself and Mr. Jaeger, we’re learning a lot about cell function and organ structures,” Ella rambled on, clearly excited to share about her work. Her father worked in a textile mill. She was being a dick, by Pieck’s admittedly unfair assessment.
But her dad did a good job pretending, nodding along. He wasn’t a stupid man, just a disadvantaged one. His hand found Pieck’s the moment he realized why she was helpful with these specific subjects. She squeezed his hand once it grasped hers, the familial affection soothing something raw inside of her.
“I’m so pleased she’s been of such help to your work, Ella,” her father expressed.
“Quite,” Ella’s lips smacked as she took another sip, “Thank you for allowing her to stay at the facility for so long.”
Pieck felt her father’s hand tighten, so she laid her head against his shoulder to try and soothe him. Her extended absence was a punishment for both of them, and she was getting quickly tired of this empty conversation.
“It isn’t an issue, just as long as she’s keeping up on her studies.”
Their conversation faded to background noise, for Pieck had stood up to clear away the dirty dishes sitting between them. Housekeeping was hard on her father, and when she brought the mugs and teapot to the sink, she saw the evidence of that.
Pieck got to scrubbing the washing up as soon as she realized it was there. Simply existing uninterrupted in her own home was a blessing that she would be taking advantage of. Her ear twitched every time Zeke’s name was mentioned, but other than that she made herself willfully ignorant of their conversation.
Her father came up behind her just as she slotted the last wet plate into the dish strainer, slow and loud to avoid spooking her. “Pieck? It’s time to go,” he relayed, upset.
Pieck begrudgingly grabbed the kitchen towel off of the oven’s handle. “I’ll be over in a moment,” Pieck whispered, drying her hands methodically.
After returning the towel to its rightful place, Pieck found the two adults waiting for her by her front door. Her father had her red armband clasped in his hand, his gaze unable to leave his shoes. She took the band quietly and slipped it up her left arm.
Her father pulling her into a hug was a surprise. They were an affectionate and loving family, of course, but usually not in front of near strangers. Pieck sniffled and bit her tongue to stop herself from crying. His grasp was warm and reassuring, but brief, letting go of her before Pieck could return the embrace.
“Please take care of yourself, my love,” Gerard Finger caressed the cheek of his only daughter, his worried eyes imparting all of the sincerity necessary.
“I will, dad,” Pieck faltered. She’d never seen her father so close to tears, and over what? Her absence for three weeks? Regardless, she wanted to reassure him.
“I hate to interrupt,” Dr. Kosar spoke up, interrupting, “But we must be on our way. I promise her extended stay won’t be so long next time, Mr. Finger.”
Pieck knew appeasements when she heard them, but she wasn’t going to burst anyone’s bubble regarding when Pieck would or wouldn’t be allowed to return to her home.
She followed the doctor out to her car silently, a step behind and to the right. Dr. Kosar rounded the car to climb into the driver’s seat while Pieck got into the passenger seat. Eldians weren’t supposed to ride in the front seats of cars, but of course this stupid red armband made the rules Pieck had always lived by cloudier than ever.
As the engine turned over and they pulled onto the empty cobblestone, the doctor cleared her throat and spoke to Pieck, “The drive back to headquarters is quite a ways, and I’m tired. We’re going to spend the night in town if you have no objections.”
Pieck stiffened. Her eyes stayed locked on her clasped hands in her lap. “At a hotel, Doctor?” god please say a hotel and not anywhere else.
“No,” Ella shared, “My home. I live in downtown Liberio, only a few minutes away.”
Fuck- “Okay, that’s fine.”
Pieck was gripped with motion sickness for the rest of the short trip. Ella wasn’t a bad driver, and she eventually pulled onto a dark city street full of small houses and shops with limited yard space. She parked in front of one with red brick and got out, not waiting for Pieck to follow her up to the small porch the bungalow boasted.
She took a moment to compose herself and emerged from the car, coming up behind Dr. Kosar while she was still fiddling with the lock on the door.
“Sorry, I-” she shoved the key in with much more force than necessary and turned the damn thing like the mechanism had never seen a drop of grease, “There!”
The door shoved open and revealed a small entryway, a very blue kitchen to the left, and a small dining room and living room to the right. Notably to Pieck, there was a cat tree, featuring a short haired, spotted kitty, napping in the stray beams of moonlight.
Ella toed off her shoes and gestured vaguely, “Make yourself comfortable, I’ll make some quick dinner after I change,” she said. The taller woman fumbled with her keyring for a moment, until she got ahold of a certain brass key, which she used to engage a lock about three-fourths of the way up the door.
She made herself scarce after that, walking into a room off of the kitchen and locking that too behind her.
Pieck found herself alone in the house of a woman who often did surgery on her. She took off her own shoes, albeit with less rush than the owner of the house did, and set them neatly on a near-empty shoe rack. She didn’t bother correcting the doctor’s haphazard shoes, because that was not her damn job.
The first order of business was the cat. Pieck approached the cat slowly, making sure she didn’t spook the precious thing. The cat perked up when Pieck stepped closer, revealing beautiful yellow eyes that bore deeply into Pieck’s soul. She offered a hand up to the kitty, holding it very still a few inches out from where the cat’s chin rested on the edge of the cat tree, and waited.
The cat was cautious but stuck its nose out slowly. Pieck felt a few small puffs of air on her warm skin, and she had to bite back a laugh. Scaring the cat wouldn’t be good. Its wet nose pressed in between Pieck’s fingers, and it twisted its head to try and solicit scratches from the newcomer, apparently having given Pieck the stamp of approval and already demanding penance.
“So for dinner I was thinking that we-”
Pieck’s head whipped around, just fast enough to catch Dr. Kosar tugging her t-shirt the rest of the way down her stomach. The cat ceased its wanton solicitations of Pieck and instead let out a full bodied ‘meow’ at the sight of its owner lingering in their common space.
“Well, he warmed up quickly,” Dr. Kosar commented. She pushed past Pieck in order to lift the cat, a boy allegedly, up from its perch. Dr Kosar cradled the cat in the crook of her arm, and while Pieck half expected her to catch a claw to the face, the cat only nuzzled into his owner, purring audibly.
Pieck groped around in her socially inept mind, trying to find something to say. “He’s cute,” she complimented. Yep, nailed it.
“His name is Boble, usually he isn’t so friendly to strangers,” Dr Kosar swayed back and forth like she was comforting a baby, which Boble did not seem to mind at all, “I was going to say, is chicken and fettuccine alfredo alright with you, for dinner?”
Pieck couldn’t look back at the Marleyan, eye contact famously hard for the shorter girl. “Mhm,” she confirmed, voice slight.
It was already getting late, past when Pieck would usually go to sleep, but the drive into Liberio proper from the country had been a couple hours. She supposed for that reason she didn’t think this was a ploy, and Ella really hadn’t wanted to drive back in the cold and the dark.
Dr. Kosar unceremoniously dropped the cat in order to retreat to the kitchen, which was only to Pieck’s benefit. The black-spotted gray kitty quickly padded over to Pieck’s feet, rubbing against her ankles warmly.
“Hi, friend,” Pieck cooed. She crouched down and offered her hand back out to her small buddy, “My name is Pieck. I like what you’re doing with your whole,” Pieck gestured vaguely at the cat’s four legs, finding them very favorable.
She moved to sit on the small couch, and her lap was immediately claimed by the fluffy critter. She knew she was toasty and that the little guy was most likely drawn to that–thanks Liesl–but this level of attention was flattering.
While she babied the friendly feline, cooking went on relatively quickly in the background. It was odd, being provided for by a Marleyan like this. But when in Marley do as the Marleyans, the saying went.
Pieck’s head picked up at the sound of glass clinking, and she saw the doctor setting dishes onto the two-person dining table. A bottle of red wine and two glasses sitting in plain view didn’t escape Pieck’s notice. She came to sit across from Ella before she was told.
The doctor picked up the glass sat in front Pieck, and poured without question.
“Oh–I’m not eighteen,” Pieck objected. She didn’t drink, not after what had happened the first and only time she had.
“I know,” Ella set the wine glass back down in front of Pieck, filled with a heavy pour, “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.” She winked at the shifter, and quickly Pieck’s throat tightened.
They ate in silence. Pieck didn’t ask questions about Ella’s work, because she was the main subject of it, and Ella thankfully didn’t ask questions about her. If that was because she already thought she knew everything there was to know or not, it was unclear.
At one point, Ella tucked her loose strands of hair behind her ear, revealing heavily pierced lobes and helixes.
“I didn’t know you had piercings,” Pieck gushed, her eyes pinned wide, “I’ve never noticed them before.”
Dr. Kosar laughed openly at Pieck, dampening the young girl’s excitement, “It’d be odd if you did, I usually wear retainers when I’m at work,” she indulged Pieck, “But I wanted to look nice today.”
“Did they hurt?” Pieck inquired.
“Not really. The healing was worse than the needle.” As an afterthought, Ella added, “You wouldn’t have that problem.”
Pieck quirked her head, not unlike a puppy, “I didn’t think shifters could get body modifications.”
“It’s complicated. For scarification or tattoos, your body will obviously just make up for the injury before you can finish getting them, but if it’s a piercing or gauges or something, your body will heal around it like a normal person’s.” she explained to Pieck, “Did your mother not pierce your ears as a child?”
Pieck paused for a moment at the mention of her late mother, but she soldiered on, “Um, no. She passed early on, before I was old enough.”
“Oh,” Ella frowned, “That’s unfortunate. I can give you the card for my piercer if you’d like.”
“I’d like that,” Pieck agreed.
Dr. Kosar set Pieck up on the couch as promised. As Pieck came to learn, the house was a single bedroom, but the couch pulled out. She cracked several windows for airflow, but all of them hit a hard stop before Ella could get them more than an inch open. Curious. It didn’t help Pieck’s feeling of being trapped in.
“Don’t be afraid to let me know if you need anything,” Kosar offered, leaning against her bedroom door’s frame, “The walls are paper thin, so I’ll hear if you shout.”
Not reassuring, Pieck decided. She could turn into a titan, why would she be yelling for the assistance of her doctor, of all people?
“Thank you. I'll keep that in mind.” She would not.
Ella shut her door and locked it audibly behind her, leaving Pieck alone in the dark, unfamiliar, and cold living room. At least she had Boble, who cuddled up with Pieck eagerly when he realized she was here to stay for the night. Good kitty.
Chapter 10: Familiar
Notes:
Hi y'all. I know I'm a day late, but I've been so busy.
Please don't worry about me abandoning this, the draft is over 100k words long, and I'll at least get that published if some god curses me to not finish this. But considering I've been working on it for nearly half a year, that's unlikely.
For the month of September, I'm going to take a break from publishing. I might put up a oneshot or two, but I'm taking a 'vacation' and I won't be focusing on writing or editing this at all. Come visit me at @astralabberant on tumblr if you'd like to badger me, I promise it's welcome.
Chapter Text
May 1st, 845
The sinking feeling, ultimately, never went away. So, Pieck learned to live with it. The anxiety that something was going to come and rip her apart, that she was going to have to fight at a moment’s notice. It would never relent.
Distraction helped for a while. Training, reading, and making 'love' until she was too exhausted to stay awake to even be nervous in the first place. But the terror didn’t leave her when sleep came.
Giving into her fears and trying to soothe herself through other means was next. Rational was out the window, cleaning was leaving her hands cracked and dry, and she could only anxiously go over escape plans, battle tactics, and historical war strategies for so long until it bored her to death. And when she had tried to stay awake for days, Zeke put that shit to bed really quick (no pun intended) by slipping one of his leftover sleeping tabs under her tongue and holding her mouth shut until it was too dissolved for her to have a chance of staying awake.
Since harvesting both Zeke and Pieck of what non-fatal organs they could, Pieck hadn’t stepped foot in the medical wing. After her brief visit to her father and the admittedly mildly awkward night over at Dr. Kosar’s house, she hadn’t seen hide or hair of the elusive doctor. Worse yet, Zeke was spending hours down in the exam room everyday, doing god knows what. He wouldn’t tell her, that was for sure.
On the morning of the first, Pieck was slow waking up. Zeke had already told her that he wouldn’t be available to shoot the shit today, and Pieck would just have to deal with her anxiety like an adult. Which was mighty presumptive, but also rich coming from him of all people.
Pieck’s debate between going back to sleep, staring at the ceiling, and actually fucking killing herself was rudely interrupted by someone pounding the side of their fist on the outside of her door.
She dragged herself from bed, still in pajamas, and grabbed the cold doorknob. Retching the heavy thing open, she saw who dared interrupt her deep and valuable contemplation.
A guard stood there, middle ranking with a rifle slung over his back. Pieck straightened up quickly. “Finger, pack your shit, you’re going home,” he gruffly commanded. He held a piece of paper signed by Magath out at her, and nodded towards her room, as if to telling her to ‘get on with it’.
“Uh, yes. Sir,” Pieck added quickly. She didn’t know if this man was her superior, but she wouldn’t find out by insulting him. She shut the door and made quick work of the task. She shoved herself into her uniform, starched and stale from hanging in the back of her closet. Then, she grabbed her military-issue duffel bags from under her bed, and stuffed anything she couldn’t live without in. Her numerous sweaters, her regulation-length skirts, two pairs of uniform shoes, some sneakers, and a pair of slippers and sandals each, along with various bullshit she needed to get by day-to-day.
She was trained well, and the whole endeavor lasted less than ten minutes. She had to take a brief foray across the hall to fetch her shower products and pads, but besides that she was ready to go.
Once she stepped into the hallway and began to follow the guard assigned to escort her, Pieck’s head was on a swivel for Zeke. While she couldn’t pay as much attention as she liked while managing two oversized bags, she still noticed his absence. His door was shut firmly, and she didn’t hear anything in the brief seconds it took to stroll past it.
Pieck didn’t get the chance to look at the release permit until she was seated in the back of a town car, with her red armband firmly secured in place and a disgruntled Marleyan driving her back towards Liberio proper.
“By Petition of Dr. Ella C. Kosar, Due to Tasks Fulfilled” it read, “Released to the Custody of Her Father by The Marleyan Government, for the Purposes of Rest and Relaxation. Detainment for Scientific and Disciplinary Function No Longer Required.”
Well. Alright then. But that didn’t explain why Zeke wasn’t being granted the same. Pieck knew she wouldn’t be able to investigate or to know anything really until she was outright told.
The entire drive over was another exercise in boredom, but instead of it being a pointless waiting, Pieck was instead slowly building with excited energy. She’d sleep in her own bed tonight. She’d cook dinner in her own kitchen, at a reasonable time instead of at midnight under harsh white light when she couldn’t sleep.
Pieck hadn’t realized she’d dozed off, stretched across the back seat, until the car jolted to a stop in front of her house.
The chauffeur helped her with her bags, and left her standing on her curb after making sure she would be okay on her own. And that was it. She stood on the warm stone of the sideway and breathed in the fresh, smoggy internment zone air. Pieck took a second, and let it sink in.
Her dad wouldn’t be home until lunch, but that was fine. It meant she had three hours to unpack, to do her laundry and to clean the house back up to her liking. Her father, for all of his virtues, wasn’t able to keep a clean house with his condition. That’s okay though, that was her job.
Pieck wasn’t embarrassed in the slightest to be found near 1pm, on her knees in the kitchen, scrubbing the tile in methodical circles while she sang shamelessly.
“Piku?” her father called out from the front door. Apprehension lingered heavy in the air, but Pieck smiled in the face of seeing her dad again.
“Dad?” Pieck called back, sitting back on her heels so he could find her semi-presentable. Maybe the handkerchief around her hair ruined any chance of that, though.
He filed in soon enough, shoeless and smiling despite the exhaustion pulling his eyes down at the corners. “Hello, my love. Welcome home. Did you just get here?”
Pieck shook her head, and suddenly she felt like a little girl home from a half day of training, instead of a woman nearly grown. The stolen secret of time off, like they were getting away with something. “I’ve been here for a couple hours. I’ve already unpacked, so don’t worry about it.”
Mr. Finger snorted, “You’re too old for me to be unpacking your bags anyway, Piku.”
She grinned, “I know.”
Pieck stood up with an “umpf” of effort, pulling her dad into a gentle embrace as soon as she was in his space, “Mmm, what should I make for coming-home dinner?”
Her dad didn’t let go of her to answer, but swayed and kissed her hair like when she was a girl, “I promised Mr. and Mrs. Galliard I’d visit them for dinner, love. I’m sure they’d love for you to tag along, though. Porco would too.”
Pieck pulled her head away from his chest and looked up at him with a frown, “You can’t cancel? I was thinking steak. With my fancy warrior money.”
Gerard shook his head, giving her forehead one last kiss before he let go of her, “Mrs. Galliard is making short ribs and potato dumplings, and I don’t love you more than I love that woman’s cooking,” he teased.
Pieck gasped in faux-offense, “It really is your own family,” she claimed, a common joke between her and her father during her teenage angst years, stemming from a time when Pieck joked about her father selling her to the Marleyan government for a sausage and a new pair of socks. Besides, that woman had thirty years more experience cooking. Pieck didn’t have a chance in hell competing.
“Mhm. Call the milliners, I’ll be coming into a lot of money once I sell you,” Gerard groaned while he sat down on their family couch.
“Absurd. You’ll get two coins.” Pieck shook her head in mock disapproval, stepping back into the kitchen so she could fix her dad a couple sandwiches for lunch.
After the campaign in Southern Marley, and her extended hospital stay, Pieck had been missing in action for a decently long time. She’d barely seen her father before she was whisked away to the facility in the mountains, let alone her or her father’s friends.
Pieck, despite her father’s insistence it was unnecessary, made herself look pretty for their dinner with the Galliards. She wore a long sleeved front-buttoning red dress that matched the red of her armband, and found an old tin of rouge in order to warm up her usually colorless cheeks. Wrangling her mane of black hair by herself was always a challenge, but she worked the strands into a loose braid that fell over her left shoulder.
Her father took her arm once she descended the stairs, mumbling something about her dressing up too much for a dinner between friends. The walk over to the Galliards’ was nice. It took half of an hour, but the wind blowing through the zone was warm, and her dad chatted all the way over to stave off any potential boredom. She wondered what Zeke was doing right now.
Unable to contain her excitement, Pieck bounced on the balls of her feet while her father knocked on the door. Expecting him, it swung open moments later, but not expecting Pieck, Mrs. Galliard’s voice filled the night air with surprise.
“Pieck! Darling!” the older woman gasped. She grabbed Pieck by the shoulders and embraced her tenderly. The smell of powder filled her senses, but Pieck hugged back regardless. Motherly hugs were few and far between in her life, and she wouldn’t squander the opportunity.
“Did you say Pieck?” A masculine voice came from behind Mrs. Galliard. The auburn Vanessa Galliard stood only a few inches taller than Pieck, but her husband Lukas? Towered over the little brunette. Cleared her by a foot, easily.
Vanessa let go of Pieck and pulled her past the threshold of the house in order to show Pieck to her husband, “I did.”
Mr. Galliard offered an open palm and a friendly smile instead of a hug, his eyes crinkling easily at the corners, “Your father didn’t tell us you’d be joining us. Porco will be thrilled.”
The handshake was firm, and the moment she dropped his hand, Mr. Galliard made his way to the stairwell leading up, “Porco! You’ve got a surprise!”
Pieck listened with a smug grin to the thumping footsteps above her head. Porco, in her biased opinion, was hitting that special age where all he wanted to do was be contrarian, and make an unreasonable amount of noise in the pursuit.
Someone must have been chasing him by the way Porco crashed down the stairs, keeping his footing by a miracle of Ymir alone. He let out an inhumane screech when he saw Pieck, and suddenly she was receiving her third (third!) hug of the day.
“Pieck!!!” he yelled mere inches from her ear, squeezing the crap out of her.
“Pock!” She returned, albeit quieter.
“You didn’t visit when you got back!” he yelled, immediately angry. A feisty little shit, he was.
“I know, I’m sorry,” Pieck stepped back to try and save her eardrums. The adults had vacated the entryway the moment he hit the landing, leaving the two of them alone. “I’m here now, though.”
“Duh,” Porco rolled his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest, “Where’ve you been?” he demanded.
“I-” Pieck debated the truth for a moment, before deciding he didn’t need to hear that, “Warrior business. I can’t really tell you.”
Porco narrowed his eyes at her, and for a moment she was sure she’d been seen through. But he was never that perceptive, and his next words relieved her of suspicion. “Are you gonna go gossip with the grown-ups and leave me alone now that you’re important and stuff?”
Pieck grinned, “Never.”
Porco’s bedroom was just as dirty as Pieck had remembered. Despite Marcel’s best efforts, the auburn boy could never clean enough to counter the ball of energy that was Porco Galliard. And now that Marcel’s top bunk was abandoned for the Paradis mission, the endeavor of keeping it clean was completely abandoned.
Neither of the two standing in the space minded though, and Porco slammed his door shut without ceremony.
“So what can ya tell me, about warrior stuff?” Porco pulled no punches, and sat down with his various toys and books ‘borrowed’ from his away brother.
Pieck sighed, and joined him on the floor. She picked up a model battleship, and started to fidget with the smokestacks. “It isn’t that exciting. A lot of tests, and training to make sure I stay in shape. I get to wear giant guns sometimes, though, and that’s pretty cool,” Pieck offered up, figuring he’d find that interesting at least.
“Really? What kinds?” Porco’s eyes lit up, and he leaned in to listen better. Mentally she rolled her eyes. Of course one mention of guns and he was enchanted.
“They’re special fit for the Cart Titan. Light enough to carry four, but mounted down to the cabs for stability. I’ll ask my sub-unit head next time I see him,” Pieck suggested. She was watching him set up several small wooden houses in order, creating a little city on the ground of his room.
Porco sniffed, but nodded, “The Jaw Titan doesn’t wear guns, does he?”
Pieck creased her eyebrows, “Marcel? No, he doesn’t need them,” she explained.
“How does Marcel fight, then, when he’s a titan?” Porco’s voice got smaller, when he asked, and Pieck was pretty sure she knew what was up with him.
“He’s got claws, as hard as diamond. And teeth that can break through anything,” Pieck grinned, leaning in towards Porco, “He’s okay, Pock. Him, Reiner, Annie, and Bert are the best. I’m sure nothing’s happened to them.”
“Do you promise?” Porco asked, tone harsh.
“Um,” Pieck hesitated, “I can’t promise, because I haven’t seen any reports, but Marcel is talented. I don’t doubt he’s fine.”
Porco stared at the toy in his hand, instead of looking at Pieck as she spoke. That’s fine, she didn’t need eye contact, but Porco was so much all of the time that the sudden timidness caught her off guard.
Reaching a hand out, Pieck grasped Porco’s shoulder in order to reassure him, “It’s okay. He’ll be back before you know it,” Pieck mumbled.
Porco scooted closer to Pieck in clumsy, uncoordinated movements, and pressed his hip to hers. He wasn’t graceful with his added centimeters of height, and it showed when his head came crashing into Pieck’s collarbone. She began to ask if he was alright, but thought better of it when she heard him crying.
“I miss him so much, Pieck,” Porco lamented into the fabric of her dress, voice dry with incoming tears, “I talk about him all the time, but Mom and Dad always say he’s serving Marley, and we should be proud.” Porco spits the word out, disgusted with the idea of pride in his 15 year old brother fighting.
“I understand how you feel. I miss them all, everyday,” Pieck comforted, and pushed away the clawing feeling in her gut. “We can talk about it, if they won’t listen,” Pieck offered.
Porco mutely nodded, and his blond hair tickled Pieck’s chin.
Pieck heard something, somewhere, with a gravelly voice that she usually only heard when Zeke was on top of her, whispering that she was using him. That she should be ashamed and disgusted with herself for letting Porco confide in her in this manner. What if command found out? Magath? His parents? She might as well just hold him down and force him to conform to her whims now, save herself the anguish.
Fuck. That was dizzying. No, she was a friend taking care of a friend. She wasn’t a freak or a pervert, for fuck’s sake. Those disgusting thoughts needed to go back to where they came from, and not return. This wasn’t scandalous.
Porco shifted and wrapped his arm fully around her waist, embracing her in a childlike manner. She wasn’t better than Zeke. She was a failure. She should submit herself for early inheritance, if only to get herself away from Porco. Useless. Awful. Disgusting. Zeke was right–
Though her throat had clamped down so much she could barely breathe, Pieck didn’t break from her thoughts until Mrs. Galliard knocked on the bedroom door a few feet away.
“Porco, Pieck, come downstairs please. Dinner is ready,” Her gentle and feminine voice was muffled through the door, but it was enough for Pieck to blink the burning sensation from her eyes and stand up, leaving Porco sitting on the floor by himself.
Pieck brushed off her skirt compulsively, avoiding eye contact. God forbid he saw the tears threatening to pour over her waterline and questioned it. “C’mon. Before it gets cold.”
The dinner was loud, and filled with banter between its five attendees. Pieck nearly ate herself sick on tender meat and soft dumplings, and walking home that night was laborious with such a heavy stomach. She promised Porco and Mrs. Galliard alike to not be a stranger, that she’ll visit if she can, and it’s only then that they begrudgingly allow her to leave. Not without lots of hugs and maybe a few tears. Though Porco would be adamant if asked that it was just his mom, not him crying. No way.
Pieck felt the drained energy hanging in the air the moment she stepped past her front door. Her father had work the following morning so after exhausted wishes goodnight, he retreated to his own bedroom.
Which left Pieck by herself on the couch downstairs. Despite her physical tiredness, she brimmed with anxious energy. She could barely shut her eyes before they popped back open again. Getting comfortable on the couch was impossible, and something repelled her from her room in an unexplainable way.
So she left. She changed from her dinner dress into pants and a sweater, and slipped out of her front door.
Wandering the streets of the internment zone was risky. There were vagabonds eager to slip a knife between her ribs, or guards wanting to extort bribe money, but considering she was an actual fucking titan Pieck didn’t worry about either of those things too much.
It finally got cold a handful of hours after sunset, but Pieck was undeterred. Her skin steamed with excess heat coming off of her in the sweet smelling night air, but no one was around to see it. She approached the commercial area of the internment zone after nearly an hour of stray wandering, and by then her surface temperature had calmed down enough that she wasn’t suspicious. Not that people wouldn’t know who she was, considering she carried one of the nine inside of her alongside the sins of her ancestors.
The selection of shops open was a crack-shot. Taverns and pubs were still lit with their evening crowd, but the lights of a few cafes and bakeries were on too, getting ready for the morning rush in a couple hours. The butcher and garden store were both dark, but the bookstore had a few candles going. Not a surprise. As a reader herself, Pieck knew those freaks’ sleep schedules were chaotic at best.
The deli, dark. The tailor’s downstairs shop was dark, but the upstairs apartment was bright. Pieck continued walking and evaluating shops as her own form of entertainment, until she stumbled across one she’d never given an inkling of attention before.
Kneedle’s Tattoos and Piercing Shop. Pieck snorted at the overly fitting name of the shop owner, until it registered that this was the same place the titan doctor had recommended to her during their dinner a few days ago. It was owned by Eldians? Well that was a turn of events.
There was an oil lamp burning bright near the back, and a young woman sporting a gray armband sketching by its light visible though the big front windows. Pieck stared shamelessly while she debated going in, and by the time she’d almost made a decision, the blonde head of hair picked up and waved to Pieck, making her decision for her.
Pieck stepped into the shop, and found it smelled faintly of tea tree and eucalyptus. It was delightful.
“Hi! Welcome to Kneedle’s.” The chipper young woman hopped down from her stool and approached Pieck, her smile genuine and stretching the corners of her lips.
“Hi,” breathed Pieck.
“Little late to be out, isn’t it? What brings you in?” asked the woman. She turned her back to Pieck and picked up a box of matches, striking one against the side in order to light another oil lamp sitting cold nearby.
“Oh, uh,” Pieck hesitated, “A… colleague recommended me. I guess I want some piercings?”
“You guess? You don’t sound awfully sure, and it’s a big commitment, stranger.”
“Not really,” Pieck mumbled, glancing away from the now burning bright lamp and towards the walls of drawings framed on the wall. Conveniently turning her left arm towards the artist.
The blonde was smarter than Pieck had assumed, and she made a small sound of surprise, “No way!” she squealed, "I've never met a titan before! Which one do you have? Female? Beast?”
Pieck snickered and leaned in to look at a drawing of a mermaid wrapped around an anchor, “Neither,” she said.
“Hmm…” The blonde girl, who Pieck was quickly realizing was much older than her, stroked her chin as she thought, “You’re too short to be anything colossal, if you don’t mind my saying so, and you’re a bit thin to carry armor.” Pieck thought those were completely conjectural arguments, but she didn’t argue.
“You’re well proportioned though. Cart, then? Or–I suppose jaw, if you’re hiding some serious chompers.”
Pieck didn’t hold her laughter back, because while her reasoning was bullshit, she landed right in the end. “Cart, yes. I’m Pieck.”
“That’s so cool,” the blonde fawned, “I’m Juliet, nice to meet you.”
Pieck didn’t offer a hand, and she was thankful Juliet didn’t either. “Juliet Kneedles?” she asked with a tinge of humor.
“Kneedles is my mentor, It’s Juliet Smith, actually,” giggled the apprentice.
“I suppose we both guessed something wrong then, Juliet Smith,” Pieck turned away from the wall of drawings, and turned back to the blonde only to be met by the most charming set of chocolate brown eyes. Whatever Pieck had been planning to say was knocked from her mind, instead her brain locking onto those pretty doe eyes that were looking at her with far more fascination than she deserved.
Thankfully Juliet picked the conversation up from there, and Pieck felt less conscious of the silence. “Well since it isn’t such a commitment, what sort of piercings can I offer you, Ms. Cart Titan Lady?”
“Do you have a list of examples, perhaps?”
Juliet nodded, and turned away to go rifling through a stack of papers on a nearby desk. Pieck was sad at the loss of those darling brown eyes, but they were soon turned back to the shifter and offering her a piece of paper with all sorts of pictures on it.
An ear, with various hoops and balls and bars. A nose, an eyebrow, and surprisingly a cheek. There was some beyond the face, too. An obviously female navel with a few different options, the column of someone’s throat, and– oh, my. Pieck ignored those lower three images, because frankly that was scary.
“I didn’t realize they’d figured out so many places to shove metal,” Pieck confessed.
“Mhm,” Juliet agreed. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, revealing no less than ten piercings littering the skin in stainless steel. Oh, Pieck’s eyes surely had sparkles in them now.
“How many can I get at one time?” Pieck queried.
Juliet thought for a moment, “Usually five, but if you are a titan shifter as you say you are, then I imagine they’d heal almost instantly, so… I guess as many as you can pay for?” Juliet shrugged, and then added, “And maybe a few more after that, cause I think it’s just so cool.”
Pieck nodded, “Alright. Sign me up.”
Juliet sat Pieck in a nice reclining leather chair near the back of the small shop, and gave her a few pieces of paper to sign. Saying that she understood what she was doing, that Pieck wouldn’t hold them responsible for any infection, scarring, or rejections, etc. Things that didn’t really apply to her, but she was half sure the paper with Pieck’s signature was going to go on Juliet’s wall anyways if she was half as enthusiastic about titan shifters as she seemed to be.
She intended to let the excited young woman go wild with needles, knowing that if she got sick of them she could just take the metal out, or cut her ear off in a more extreme measure.
While Pieck read disclaimers, conditions, and care instructions (superfluous, if you asked her) Juliet scrubbed her hands nearby. “So is this your first time?” she asked from where she was hunched over the wash basin.
“Mhm,” Pieck set the stack of papers on a nearby table, and folded her hands in her lap, “Is it obvious?”
“Oh I don’t know. There isn’t really a certain type of person who gets piercings in excess, contrary to what you hear,” Juliet came over to where Pieck was lounging. The blonde reached down and grabbed a lever out of Pieck’s sight-line, causing the chair to lean back. “I’ll just lay you back–people can get a little lightheaded at the sight of their own blood, especially if it’s their first time.”
She turned away to start making up a tray from the nearby cupboards, and Pieck took the time to internally laugh. She was certainly not precious about the sight of her own blood, but it was nice to be handled with kid gloves sometimes.
“Ohhhh-kay,” Juliet sat on a rolling stool and rolled up to Pieck’s side, a tray sitting on a metal stand just to her side. “You ready?”
Pieck hummed in agreement, and watched Juliet put on a pair of dark stretchy gloves beside her.
“So we’ll go slow, and if you need a break just let me know,” Juliet instructed, looking very serious despite the baby fat still lingering on her cheeks.
Pieck closed her eyes, and listened to some quiet shuffling. The sound of tearing paper reached her ears, along with sloshing liquid.
“This will be cold-” Juliet warned with an absent voice, routine clearly setting in. Something wet pressed to her earlobe, massaging in soft circles and pulling away after seconds. Air was fanned onto the damp skin probably by Juliet’s hand.
“Little prick…” Delicate fingers grasped Pieck’s skin, and something sharp forced through the flesh of her earlobe. Immediately, Pieck heard a gasp, and felt Juliet pull away from her side despite the needle lingering in the shifter’s ear.
Pieck opened her eyes, and noticed a small billow of steam carrying up from her ear towards the ceiling. Lazily she re-closed her eyes, not concerned in the slightest at the development. “It’ll go away in a second.”
“You really weren’t kidding,” Juliet chuckled nervously, and slid back up to Pieck’s chair side to watch the quickly healing wound. The steam was already dissolving.
“I don’t know why anyone would kid about that,” Pieck admitted.
“People are weird,” Juliet supposed, getting her shit together enough to slip the silver stud into place through the hollow needle.
Once Juliet figured out that Pieck was not in fact lying about her accelerated healing ability, the damn piquerist had the time of her life slipping needles through cartilage and flesh alike. She stopped warning Pieck about the pain and let herself have fun, and Pieck enjoyed it.
She ended up with no less than 20 holes punched in her between both of her ears, and by the end the smile Juliet was sporting was downright manic.
“I think this is the most fun I’ve ever had,” Juliet confessed, just finishing washing her hands of blood and rubbing alcohol.
“I’m glad,” Pieck responded, munching on a cookie Juliet had handed to her once she was done.
“If you need any of it redone for one reason or another, just stop by, mkay? I’d love to hook you up.”
“I will,” Pieck agreed. She stood up and walked towards the blonde, who had a curious look on her face.
“Can I give you a hug?” Pieck asked, tilting her head to the side not unlike a dog.
“Oh,” Juliet blushed, “Sure.” She walked into Pieck’s open arms, and let the shifter squeeze her to her heart’s content.
In the end, Pieck walked away feeling much better, with a little paper bag of piercing needles and retainer piercings, and perhaps a new friend. Strange how some metal could resolve such feelings of sadness so easily.
Chapter 11: You're My Last Bone of Contention
Notes:
Title from Hypocrates by Marina
I'm back! I didn't die on vacation as was expected, I do have a kidney infection though. Send flowers (digital ofc)
Dove hasn't been resurrected, read with discretion
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
June 2nd, 845
Ultimately, Pieck was naive for thinking rest and relaxation could last forever. Her summons came on a nice afternoon, while her father and her had been trying to enjoy some ice cream in the rapidly growing summer heat.
The soldier, an Eldian, had walked right up to Pieck on her front lawn and put the letter in her hand. One telling her that the next day a car would come for her, and she’d be required to return to the facility for work.
Despite the short notice, Pieck was neither surprised nor unprepared. Her military-issue duffel bags stayed packed with her sturdy and drab work clothes, clean and folded neatly the week after she’d returned home. Dressing to uniform standards when she didn’t have to was a burden, and the bags made a nice home for themselves under her bed.
Her father was inconsolable the morning of her departure. She told him repeatedly that she wasn’t going to battle, there was no war for her to fight in. That she would be safe, and he didn’t need to worry about her. But she was his baby, and she had to walk away from her blubbering father at the insistence of a couple of unnecessarily brawny soldiers.
***
Walking into the facility was anticlimactic. Her muscle memory kicked in the moment the auto-locking door clicked shut behind her, and she was quietly pushed in the direction of her wing without any fanfare.
Zeke’s smell lingered throughout the corridors in a haunting manner, and as Pieck made her way up the stairs and down hallways, her head inexorably turned to look in every open door, searching for that shiny blond hair. She didn’t catch sight of him by the time she pushed open the door to her room, and set her bags down on her bed, though.
The smell of dust was heavy in Pieck’s abandoned quarters, and the first thing lingering on her mind was laundry. Her clothes were clean, of course, but the bed linens and quilt that lived here at the facility were both in desperate need of a wash. Now that she was thinking about it, Pieck considered the pink and yellow flowered quilt more closely.
How many Cart Titans has this blanket seen? Which one made it–if any?
Pieck abandoned her thoughts at the sound of a door opening and closing not far from her. Existential dwellings would need to wait.
Now unencumbered by the weight of her bags, Pieck moved silently towards her bedroom door and cracked it open, peaking into the hallway. The heavy smell of amber and warm citrus, fresher than when she had come down the hall originally, dominated the space.
She knew who it was, and what had happened before she spotted him. “Zeke?” Pieck called into the silent hallway, unsure of his presence despite the clear signs.
He didn’t share the same apprehension, and pushed her door the rest of the way open. Pieck’s breath hitched in surprise, and she was scooped up into the enthusiastic arms of the Beast Titan’s holder. Somehow, she didn’t mind it.
“Pieck, you’re back,” Zeke whined into her neck, his voice muffled by her thick hair.
“Of course, why wouldn’t I be?” Pieck asked. He knew as well as she did that neither of them had much choice in being here, but she figured he wouldn’t want to argue right now.
“I missed you,” Zeke confessed. He pulled away from her neck and looked into her eyes, searching deep for something although Pieck knew not what.
“I missed you,” she echoed, unsure.
His knees buckled unintentionally and he tugged Pieck onto the carpet, pinning her down onto it with a certain fire his mournful expression didn’t have before, “Do you mean it?” Zeke asked her, his mouth lingering an inch from hers.
With him pressed so close, Zeke was forcing himself into every sense Pieck had. She felt how deliciously warm he was, and could hear the rapid but excited breaths he was exhaling from his nose. His hallmark smell was so thick in her nose it was dizzying, and Pieck could taste it in the back of her mouth.
“Of course I mean it,” Pieck whispered, not knowing herself if she was telling him the truth.
It seemed to be the answer he wanted. Zeke’s lips pressed to Pieck’s in an uncharacteristically tender gesture, tasting her carefully. Zeke didn’t force his mouth down so she had no chance of escape, on the contrary, Zeke gradually pulled his head further from hers so Pieck had to strain her neck up in order to chase his mouth.
Pieck growled in frustration. She grabbed him by the neck and tugged him back down so that she wouldn’t have to stretch anymore. It spurred him on, and his tongue pushed between her lips in order to lap at her tongue lying in her mouth.
She wasn’t passive though, and she pushed back just as much. Her tongue met his and it turned into a fight quickly. Just like on the sparring mat, Pieck was quick and aggressive to try and overwhelm him. He seemed more than ready to meet the challenge, and didn’t use his strength advantage to strong-arm her into where he wanted her. He seemed eager to let himself be forced around, with her teeth knocking against his and her groans filling his mouth.
Long, messy, and aggressive, they chased each others’ mouths on the floor until their jaws ached and their lips swelled red.
Zeke didn’t let his own exhaustion be the end of their intimacy, though. After falling onto the rug beside her, Zeke pulled Pieck by her hips into his torso. She made a timid noise of protest, but once her back was pressed to his chest and his arms encased her, Pieck calmed down pretty quickly.
“Please don’t-” Zeke began, before cutting himself off.
Pieck glanced back as much as she could in the boa constrictor hold Zeke had her in. “Don’t what?”
“Nevermind.”
June 4th, 845
Zeke wakes up fucking exhausted. He was not expecting Pieck’s absence to affect him as much as it did, but now that she’s back, Zeke can’t seem to pry his mind away from her enough to think logically.
As far as he’s aware, he doesn’t have a spinal fluid extraction on the schedule today, thank god. The doctors never sedate him for it, and lumbar punctures make his head hurt awfully. He contemplates going back to bed, definitely desperate for sleep, but he hears Pieck humming as she moves through the hallway.
Seeing as the only thing past his room in their wing is the common room with the kitchen, and she hadn’t stopped at his room when she walked past, Zeke can only assume she’s going to make breakfast. Glancing at his wall clock he notices the hour is half past seven am, cementing his theory. If he’s clever, he’ll be able to scam some off of her.
Getting out of bed is awful. The blackout curtains Ksaver had put in his room save him from the morning light, but Zeke won’t be so lucky when he steps into the hallway and its unbearable and artificial white lights.
Zeke picks his smudged glasses up and slides them on, along with a bathrobe from off of the floor. He catches sight of himself in the mirror by his bedroom door and cringes at the resemblance he has to his late-night-studying father but tries not to dwell on it too much as he steps into the hall.
He’s right. The double doors of the common room are flung open, and he takes half a step towards it before he smells chocolate and pancakes. Already a smile begins to creep onto Zeke’s face, both at the prospect of food, and at the prospect of seeing Pieck.
“Good morning, dear,” Zeke calls out as soon as he’s barely through the door. He tries his hand at the pet name just to gauge her mood, because if she isn’t too bitchy about it he’ll take it a little further.
He catches an eye roll, just as sure as a grin. “Morning, Zeke. Sleep well?” Pieck asks him. She’s standing in front of the stove in a terribly nice nightgown, flipping chocolate chip pancakes to her heart’s content. Maybe if they weren’t Eldian, Pieck would have flipped pancakes for their children. But alas, simpler times.
“No,” Zeke answers honestly, “Had some odd dreams.”
Pieck makes a vague gesture with her spatula, like she’s telling him to go on.
“I was a dog, and I was tearing apart trains. But I wasn’t a titan, just a massive dog,” It sounds stupid as Zeke says it aloud, and he blushes when he realizes Pieck is silently laughing at him.
“Does the Beast Titan need more enrichment time?” Pieck teases him, taking one pancake off the heat and using a ladle to pour another one.
“Apparently,” he shrugs.
“Mm.”
“So,” Zeke begins, “May I have some breakfast too, my love?”
Pieck stiffens, and glances away from where Zeke is sitting at their dining table. “You can make yourself breakfast. I don’t have a monopoly on breakfast-making, you know.”
Zeke squints and starts to count how many she’s made already. “Are you planning on eating fifteen pancakes?”
Pieck huffs at him, and in an instant Zeke knows he’s won. “No, but—fine, yea. Have some, I don’t care.”
“Thank you, love.”
Pieck makes a ‘tsk’ noise at him, and sits down with her own plate. Zeke isn’t so naive as to assume that she’ll fix him a plate like a good wife, so he makes his own and joins her. They eat in companionable silence, the scratching of metal utensils on ceramic plates the only noise lingering between the two of them.
Zeke would have done dishes for the two of them, but before he could finish his meal in the first place, one of the Frankenstein’s lackeys came to fetch him and dragged him downstairs to the medical wing.
The bitch herself doesn’t stand to greet Zeke. She cuts through rare steak, and takes a bite, sparing Zeke no glances.
Zeke should know better than to presume to sit, but he doesn’t and thus claims one of the comfortable chairs across from Frankenstein for his own purposes.
“Morning, Jaeger,” Dr. Kosar greets while she still mashes meat behind her back molars. Disgusting, by Zeke’s uncharitable assessment.
“Morning.”
“I assume you’re wondering why I have invited you here this morning,” the doctor cuts through a barely fried egg, and rich yellow yolk spills all over her plate. It’s the kind of carelessness Zeke picked up on many sessions ago. Ella is a woman of excess, and Zeke knows it.
“No, Ella, I’m not,” Zeke folds his arms over his chest, and watches with smug satisfaction as the corner of the doctor’s mouth twitches in irritation.
“As much as we’ve enjoyed your company, your stay here is going to come to an end soon, Zeke. Does that please you?”
Zeke doesn’t imagine she actually cares.
“Yes. When?”
“I need you to do me a favor.”
Zeke’s throat tightens. He knows what a favor really is, a demand that he provide something he isn’t willing to give up. Zeke forfeits his right to a response by sitting in the silence, and Ella proceeds with her explanation.
“I need you to couple with her,” Ella orders, staring at Zeke over the desk. Her gaze strips him bare, and he has to look away.
“What?” Zeke asks his shoes. Ella’s face is thankfully obscured by his blond waves, but she doesn’t let a lack of propriety deter her.
“Intimately. With Pieck.”
Zeke hesitates. He’s certain she’s kidding, or testing him, but when she doesn’t falter, his stomach twists for the worst. “She’s sixteen. I’m not going to sully her virtue like that,” Zeke attempts to defend. A flash of Pieck’s soft thighs and her warm smile cross Zeke’s mind. He has to dig his thumb into his eye socket to dull the throbbing that’s beginning to build behind it.
“Mr. Jaeger,” Ella begins with a smirk, “I’m not stupid. I know everything you do and when you do it, what kind of scientist would I be if I didn’t?”
“I won’t do it.”
“If you don’t, there are those who will,” Ella stares ahead, her gaze drilling into the top of his scalp.
Those who would take his titan. Porco, probably, but any well-to-do Eldian soldier isn’t out of the question. They would compromise the mission, end his life, touch Pieck-
“Fine.”
Ella smiles at him. Her pencil scratches onto the open file placed in front of her, “I’m glad we could come to an agreement. You’re dismissed.”
Pieck, frighteningly enough, is not in her room when Zeke looks for her. The women’s bathroom is free of occupants, and just for the sake of it Zeke searches both his own room and bathroom to no avail.
Resigning himself to the fact that they got to her first, Zeke gives up and goes about his evening routine. It’s always the same, granted he doesn’t have company. He washes his face, brushes his teeth, changes, journals a bit, and reads until he inevitably falls asleep. Whether his nose is buried in a fantasy novel filled with knights, princesses, and creatures of old myth, or a philosophical thesis from the east, it’s always words that draw Zeke into his slumber. He considers himself to be a bit of a bibliophile.
In this awful fucking excuse of a hospital (and Zeke knew a thing or two about subpar medical care), the ‘nurses’ they employ have little respect for Zeke’s delicate sleeping schedule. At an hour prior to sunrise, a nurse let themself into Zeke’s room, ripping wax paper packaging open and setting instruments onto Zeke’s mildly cluttered bedside table.
Zeke isn’t sure that they know he’s awake. His eyes see just as clearly in the pitch black of his room as they do in broad daylight, and he tracks every overly careful movement of the nurse as they attempt not to make unneeded noise. They slip a syringe's needle into a glass vial, drawing about two milligrams out. Zeke’s breathing picks up, but he doesn’t want to shift in case it causes the needle to find its way into the wrong part of his flesh.
The nurse is delicate when they turn his hand over. They palpate the thick veins running along the back with their gloved hand, settling on a large one running into his ring finger. He holds his breath, but hardly feels the butterfly needle poke into his skin. No wonder they’re the one who was sent into his room to drug him in the early hours of the morning.
He’s given little time to contemplate the pain, the throbbing in his hand quelled by a kindly appreciated but ultimately superfluous bandage, because whatever he was stuck with works quickly. Zeke’s barely aware of it, but he blinks once, twice, and then like a wool blanket over his consciousness he’s dragged back down into dreamland, with little awareness that it’s happening at all.
Zeke doesn’t ’come to’ in the traditional sense. His head throbs like it had been earlier, and when he blinks to try to alleviate the pain, he realizes the room he’s in.
It’s not his bedroom; he sits in a wooden chair in a room dimly lit by some sort of unseen light source. His head swims with the after effects of whatever the hell they gave him — a nervous system suppressant if he had to guess, something his titan healing would take longer to chew on.
He sniffs in. It’s embarrassing, but since inheriting the Beast, he relies less on his eyes to assess a situation and more on his nose, and his ears if necessary. Every smell was so sharp and telling, and he could hear a pin drop. It was overstimulating at the best of times. He was getting good at picking out his closest companions by smell alone, and tried to ignore the societal implications of a man who nosed the hair of his grandparents, sniffed at his coworker’s neck.
He catches the soft, powdery smell of Pieck before he sees her, splayed out and unmoving. Zeke grimaces; the Titan Doctor had made it very clear what comes next.
Standing to approach, she’s still as a corpse. The mattress she lays on is decorated with nothing but a white sheet, and with her ivory skin, lacy nightgown, and milky sweet scent, the only contrast of her purity is the mess of inky black hair spilling over the back end of the bed. She’s his perfect sleeping angel. Knowing that behind the nearby two way mirror was most likely a team of “scientists” and “doctors” ruins the entire thing. Those goddamn perverts.
Zeke swallows, and closes his eyes briefly to steady himself. He still sways a little, but he’s quickly recovering himself. Pieck is still out like a light, and Zeke wonders why either of them were sedated at all. What did they do to him between his room and here that they couldn’t have done while he was conscious?
Reaching a hand out, he grazes the pads of his fingertips over her exposed knee, testing her wakefulness.
“Nngh…” Pieck moans, twitching, but in no position to fight Zeke.
“Hey, doll,” Zeke grins at his own fitting nickname. He keeps his voice low as he addresses her, “It’s only me. I’m not going to hurt you,” he promises, moving onto his knees between her limply splayed open legs.
The mattress creaks accommodating his weight, and Pieck’s eyes crack open a sliver. Zeke ignores it.
He fits himself between her legs, doing his best to leave her modesty undisturbed. He leans down and presses his lips to her cheek, whispering things that won’t be picked up by the best microphones in the world.
“I’ve got you. Don’t worry about them, I’ll take care of you, my little love.”
“Okay,” she barely answers back.
He’s slow. He’s gentle. He’s mechanical. Zeke is fulfilling an order. They aren’t making love or fucking. He’s doing his job and trying not to hurt her in the process.
Pieck doesn’t react, and Zeke doesn’t either. He’s a bee pollinating a flower, and nothing more.
Moments after Zeke grits his teeth and spends himself within her, the door alongside the mirror opens and reveals a short man. Pieck grabs onto Zeke’s arm as the ultrasound tech grabs the equipment nearby, and he grabs her right back.
“Mr. Jaeger, thank you for your contribution, you may go,” the tech says to him, wheeling a large and frankly intimidating machine to the bedside.
Zeke’s still softening within her, and Pieck’s zoned out on either whatever fucked up drugs they gave her or the overwhelm of the situation. He leans forward and covers her body with his own, careful not to put weight on her, and speaks to him. “Just give her a few, can she have some water first?”
“Nothing until after the procedure,” the man deadpans.
“Procedure?” Zeke asks. He’s sure his own smell is panicked and Pieck’s answers in kind, the powdery milk smell souring in distress. “What procedure?”
“Mr. Jaeger, you’re free to leave, or stay as a passive observer. But if you are going to interfere with our work I will have you removed.” The tech speaks to him with little respect, almost glaring at the Beast Titan in question.
Zeke’s hesitant. He moves from in front of Pieck, tucking himself away as he goes, and settles himself at her side instead. He has to push her cloud of hair away, and as he does her lethargic hand reaches out, groping around until it grasps his own in an ironclad grip.
Her hand is weak, but it holds him back faintly. He keeps his eyes on her face as her gown is lifted, and her stomach scanned. Pieck’s eyes struggle to stay open, and her distress at this fact is evident across her face.
Zeke wants to comfort her, but what can he say? He’s violated her trust before, and now sitting with a front row seat to her autonomy being ripped from her like it has numerous times before, what can he say that isn’t hypocritical, masculine fronting? He’s sorry? He’ll protect her? Zeke’s never protected her from anything he didn’t have to, and seeing her trapped in her own body being treated like a specimen, maybe he’s wishing he had.
The ultrasound tech uses a coarse towel to wipe the gel from her stomach, and stands to leave. Zeke’s chest relaxes in relief when they’re again alone in the room, and he’s quick in standing up and covering her up again.
“Hey, I’ll take you back to my room, and I’ll fix you a bath okay? I’ll grab you a book out of my collection too- one of the cool sci-fi ones,” Zeke knows his smile is fake, but all he wants is to cover her legs up and take her back to the relative safety of their rooms.
“Zeke, back up,” Dr Kosar’s voice is jarring behind him, and Zeke jumps in response.
“What are you talkin’ about?” Zeke asks, pulling Pieck forward and wrapping her half limp arms around his torso. She was done, they don’t need anything else from her. Ksaver save him if they try to do anything else, because he couldn’t afford to jeopardize his mission.
Strong hands grab Zeke’s biceps and yank him back from Pieck, shaking his balance. The sudden and unpredictable movement makes his head swim, but he still reaches for her, still tries to fight against the sedation heavy in his veins and the soldiers dragging him towards the door.
“Wait! Wait- please! Pieck!” Zeke pleads. His voice cracks with the flaws of youth, but he cannot bother being embarrassed. The flash of a scalpel catches his eye. Zeke slams into the door just as it closes, and the soldiers let him go to allow him to scratch at the steel, splitting his nails and leaving blood in his wake.
“Jaeger,” one of the soldiers interrupts his tears once the steam dissipates, voice soft, “let’s go.”
Zeke’s slow rising, but he’s also pathetic pawing at the door trying to stop a girl who doesn’t belong to him from being tormented in a way she’s surely used to. He needs to get over himself.
A few days later, Zeke finds himself back in the doctor’s office. He hadn’t found the opportunity to speak to Pieck, to apologize, or comfort her, or swear vengeance, or whatever else his primal mind could convince him he needs to do to appease her. He pushes his glasses into his hair and presses his palms into his eyes until he sees static.
“-ger? Did you listen to what I said?” Ella’s voice cuts through his thoughts, and he opens his eyes to see the unimpressed look on her face.
“No. Sorry.”
“Right,” Ella sighs, “I said you had an allergic reaction to the diazepam doses, so we’re going to give you something different next time.”
Right. An allergic reaction. If that’s what you call the gross display of bonding instincts and the borderline insubordinate reaction he gave. He’d be allergic if it meant not receiving a formal reprimand.
But it sunk in, then. Next time. What the fuck did they mean next time? Why did they have to do that again- they’d gotten their data, whatever the hell that was, and Zeke wasn’t sure he wanted to risk another allergic reaction.
“What do you mean next time,” Zeke asks, before tacking on a, “Ma’am.”
“Surely you didn’t think this was a one time thing. We need a varied sample size of data, Zeke.”
“I don’t know what I thought.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow. You’re dismissed.”
Zeke hesitates. He knows he’ll be visited again by the nurse in the night, and he isn’t sure if he can handle seeing Pieck panicked out of her mind on sedatives again. He can’t say anything against a Marleyan superior, and he struggles to think of a valid excuse.
“Did I stutter?” Ella asks, voice sharpening into a point.
His jaw clenches, and he makes his way out of the office and towards his wing. Pieck’s room has stayed firmly locked since last time, but he’s not sure pawing at her door like a lovelorn child is past him.
He naps early, and is awake for hours before the nurse slips into his bedroom. It’s the same one as last time, with a patterned bandana holding their hair back.
Zeke makes no effort to hide his glare, but he’s looked right past. His owl eye vision watches vigilantly as the nurse goes about the routine the exact same way as last time, with a different vial this time. They seem impervious to Zeke’s glare, and it’s only then that he realizes that the nurse’s eyes are a dull blue, edged with an irritated red. They’re blind. Those clever bastards in command. Fuck them.
He doesn’t move, and is stuck with a needle like before. They get him in the forearm rather than the hand this time, and as the plunger sinks down, a burning feeling fills him. Zeke’s had worse, he’s sure, but the surprise has him gritting his teeth until his head lulls back in a nauseating and restless sleep.
He’s asleep one second, and breathing himself awake the next. A burn pulses through his arm, but all of his effort is going towards taking deep breaths. Inflating his lungs meaningfully is an uphill battle, and his heart throbs in his chest like a tired and coarse machine.
Swallowing back his breathlessness, Zeke manages to peak an eye open. The first thing he notices is that his glasses don’t sit upon his nose. But he can’t ruminate over that particular fact because the second thing he notices is that Pieck lies beside him, as unmoving and stiff as a mannequin.
Her chest barely moves to accommodate breathing, and she’s clearly been taken straight from her bed to be here. Her hair is still braided back, and she’s in the too large pajamas she sleeps in, instead of one of the nightgowns she lounges in to feel pretty.
They drugged him heavy on purpose, Zeke is sure of it. Lifting his hand and reaching it out to touch Pieck’s face is a Herculean task, but when he feels the soft plush of her skin, he thinks it’s worth it. He can’t get her to stir, and he has to drop his hand back down when holding it up becomes too much effort.
He stares for a while, slowly feeling the effects of whatever medication wear off in real time, with occasional shivers down his spine.
The room is warm, but no amount of heating is ever enough to comfort their Titan-hot flesh. Zeke gathers himself, moving closer to Pieck so he can settle himself on top of her, shielding her figure from view. She’s colder than she should be, he notices when he presses his nose to her neck’s pulse point.
He’s tired of watching her get pulled in a thousand different directions, by a thousand different people. He knows he isn’t special and that he is one such party, exerting his will over her while giving her no say in the matter, but he can’t help himself from doing so. The month where she returned home, leaving Zeke by himself, he despaired like he’d lost a limb. Internally he smacked himself, because he often lost limbs, and it was nowhere near as upsetting as Pieck abandoning him.
Wetness slicks down off of her jaw and clings to the side of his nose. Zeke pulls his face out of her neck and looks at her, and sees that her barely open eyes are filling with tears.
“I’m sorry,” Zeke presses his lips to her cheeks, speaking his gentle words directly into her skin, “I wish I didn’t have to do this. Close your eyes, it’ll be over before you know it.”
Pieck’s eyes blink shut, and the tears that had barely been held back pour over the edge, wetting her temples and the hair below them.
The second time around is harder. He has to fight the heavy burning in his limbs telling him to sleep while he undresses her. Whether it be through dissociation or sedation, she isn’t inhabiting her body, and the dead weight is impossible to maneuver with any elegance. Going through the motions of fucking her is just exhausting. His head throbs with dehydration, and he’s miserable trying to get through the entire ordeal as quickly as possible so they can leave. She’s asleep, he’s sure of it, and he feels weird essentially using her sleeping body to masturbate. But masturbation would be too generous of a term for it, this is a burdensome, unpleasant endeavor that isn’t bringing either of them pleasure.
Like before, the same ultrasound technician comes in right when he finishes. Zeke falls off of her to the side, unashamed of his indecency and ready to take a nap right here if he’s allowed.
He drifts off, half-aware of the situation around him. Pieck’s thin fingers tangle into his hair, and his vocal cords make a strange sound of pleasure against his will that he doesn’t want to think about.
The ultrasound tech does his job and leaves without fuss. Behind him, though, the same medical staff as before filter into the room, and a low whine starts to filter out of Pieck’s throat.
“Zeke,” she whimpers to him, voice nearly covered by the rattle of metal equipment and shuffling of feet, “Zeke, please.”
Zeke rouses then. His nap is put off for later and he sits up, casting an intimidating shadow over Pieck.
“Mr. Jaeger,” Ella greets him, “please return to your room, don’t make this difficult.” The warning is evident in her stiff posture, but it isn’t her he’d fight. Following her eyes, there are two massive guards already waiting to escort him away.
“Ella, she’s scared.” Zeke stands, his own indecency the furthest thing from his mind as he sized up the guards.
“Why do you think she’s sedated? She won’t remember this tomorrow.”
“I will.”
The guard on Ella’s left doesn’t take kindly to Zeke’s stalling, but Zeke is prepared for that. He swings a left hook towards Zeke’s face, his weight behind the throw. He tenses, taking the hit and using it to catch the guard’s wrist in his hand. His cheekbone throbs, but steam is already whisking away the damage. The pain is far from his mind, instead he focuses on twisting the large and uncoordinated man’s arm behind him, forcing him off balance and to the floor.
The other guard isn’t amused. He grabs Zeke by the scalp and drags him back off of his coworker, saying expletives Zeke doesn’t want to hear. The back of his head hits the floor and the crack of pain travels down his spine. He flails his legs up and catches the guard. He isn’t fighting with strategy, or with any desire to win. Most brawls he gets into are with the intent to kill, but right now he just needs to give Pieck time.
He knows he got the guard (or maybe both) good when they call for the hallway guards to come in. They drag Zeke out and across the floor, like a corpse. Blood, his blood, smears behind him, his cracked skull a leaky faucet that the janitors are unfortunately going to have to deal with. Steam clouds his vision, and his arm burns from the way it drags on the ground. He hopes he did well enough, and that Pieck got what she needed from him.
The next time is the time Zeke really fucks up. There is no nurse in the night tasked with making Zeke easier to deal with, and instead they try to restrain Zeke on threats alone. He’s already agitated when he’s sent in, and Pieck bears the brunt of his anger, bruises littering her thighs.
He doesn’t realize what he’s done until they pull him off of the body. He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to remember. He knows he had been shielding a crying Pieck, trying to drown himself in the way she smelled when she was scared. It made something in his head flutter, and she wasn’t putting up a fight.
When they tried to remove him, he snapped. He grabbed the man by the arms, he wasn’t sure if he was medical staff or security and it didn’t matter, and shoved him down. He didn’t stop hitting him, his fists connecting with bone and then soft tissue, until the man’s face was destroyed. Shattered and unrecognizable, his face doesn’t move to accommodate breathing, but Zeke already knew he’d killed the man. No one lives through that. He hadn’t even put up that much of a fight to defend himself.
There's a sharp prick and Zeke drops like a stone into water, all over the warm body of his victim beneath him. His blood isn’t yet cold with decay, and Zeke doesn’t mind this so much. He thinks he’s made a comfortable nest for himself in the body of this man, coming to hurt his girl. He isn’t awake for long enough to think of the implications of such a thing.
Notes:
Next chapter will come out when my kidneys get it together. I'm only 4 sections away from finishing the story, So... I'm about to be such a menace.
Chapter 12: Frostbite
Notes:
Christmas Special! (Yeah Ik it's October)
There's ~3 lines of dialogue that are inspired by @sarajamss on Tiktok, and while I'm sure they are common enough anyone could've come up with them, I still feel like pointing it out just in case anyone wants to play where's waldo.I finally recovered from my UTI turned kidney infection exacerbated by a foreign body in a different organ, so September is cursed and we don't talk about it lol.
And to the person who definitely isn't reading this who left a ten paragraph (and change) hate comment on chapter two insulting me both personally as a writer and the fic itself, you're hilarious, pretentious, wrong in many ways, and also committed to the wrong bit. Had me dying though reading your criticisms of a story you didn't even bother to halfway finish reading.
As always, to my readers who have faith in me as someone with half a brain, enjoy and I'll see you whenever school lightens up enough for me to edit the next chapter.
Chapter Text
June 12th, 845
After the fall of Wall Maria, Hange’s life changes in ways they never expected it to. Firstly, the village they grew up in is one of the initial few lost to the titan onslaught. Hange isn’t glad to hear it. The knowledge that their parents were torn apart isn’t comforting despite their lackluster childhood, but the mournful gazes and words of consolation don’t feel earned either.
Secondly, they spend less time fighting titans now, not more. Humans were going through a mass extinction event, half of their remaining lands stolen and hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes. It didn’t make sense to send humans into titan country (which had not long ago been their country) when humans were becoming more of a limited resource than they already were. Funding for the Scouts' expeditions had been abysmal before the fall, and now with the Survey Corps acting as an extension of the Garrison for the time being, it was all but non-existent.
Specifically, authorization for Hange’s experiments had been revoked, with no sign of re-authorization on the horizon. They argued to any higher up who'd listened that it didn’t make sense. To defeat one’s enemy you needed to know one’s enemy, but it fell on deaf ears. Hange was stuck in the infirmary from sun up til sun down attending to soldier and civilian alike, sewing lacerations, cauterizing infections, administering medications, and helping with other treatments until their own fingers bled.
At least they still got to sleep in their own bed, Hange reminds themself. So many are without accommodations, let alone the ones they’d had their entire lives.
They don’t see Erwin anymore. Upon their return to Trost, Shadis surrendered command to Erwin, and fucked off to the Training Corps., leaving Erwin in charge of a penniless regiment and picking up the pieces of Shadis’ mistakes. It makes Hange fume when they think about it under normal circumstances, but this morning lying in bed they were drained.
Hange is static on their side, red and tender hands stretched out in front of them and the only parts of their body, besides their greasy mop of hair, to emerge from under the blanket they’d bundled up in. Originally when they had woken up they had intended to get up and find food, maybe bother Levi out on the training fields. They couldn’t go back to work until their hands healed, but that didn’t bother them.
They're well aware that they're staring. That they haven’t blinked in several minutes. At some point their eyes unfocused and Hange hasn’t put in the mountain of effort necessary to focus them back in. What is there to look at? The mess on their floor they still haven’t cleaned up after Levi had chastised them the last time he’d been here. The wallpaper peeling at the ceiling that Hange needs to get the supplies to fix. What is worth staring at? What isn’t?
They’ve never thought of themself as someone prone to big swings of melancholia. Usually they were able to persist despite The Horrors, and their mind ran a mile a minute towards so many different topics that Hange never had the ability or time to dwell. They don’t have the time to dwell now.
But they can’t rouse from their bed, too hot but unwilling to shed their protective covering. Something burns in their rib cage and aches around their pericardium like the worst heartbreak of their life, and it's all consuming in its weight. Their stomach churns with how empty it is, but it was nothing compared to the empty chambers of their chest. Blood pumps dutifully through their arteries, but it isn’t their heart’s doing. That cursed organ is so hung up on a missing part of Hange’s soul that it's tearing through them with no remorse for how miserable it makes them feel.
They scrape together enough energy and are able to blink. It's a colossal achievement, and with their dry eyes compensating for the lack of fluid it meant the slight motion sent stray tears cascading down Hange’s nose and temple, respectively.
“Damnit,” they whisper to nothing and no one. They aren’t sure they had been breathing this past hour. They sniff to clear their airways of tears and dust, and a similar sandpapery feeling like that behind their eyelids is discovered at the back of their sinuses.
“God damnit,” Hange repeats, nose burning with repressed sobs. They've never felt this awful before, and considering they're safe and warm behind one of the still standing walls of their world, they don’t think they have much right. Some people are trapped outside of Rose, running from titans and starving in cellars.
Maybe those people are the lucky ones. To have it over with quickly instead of having to consider what the hell they are going to do in the face of Humanity’s Greatest Foe. Hange's glad they aren’t Erwin right now, but it's the only thing they are glad about.
December 20th, 845
Pieck didn’t sleep well on trains, she was learning quickly. The rattling of the glass pane in her window, the stiff and too-small mattress; none of it was conducive to sleep.
Marley was going to war again. The why’s and how’s didn’t matter, all that mattered was that one of their allies was asking for support in a diplomatic dispute gone wrong, and that support called for warm bodies in the field. The Marleyan war machine must be fed.
The train crawling south along its tracks meant that when they landed to aid in what was little more than a cock-measuring contest, it would be significantly warmer than it was in Liberio.
Back home it was winter. Tomorrow when she woke up, it would be the solstice. Back home, friends and family would sit huddled by hearths, trading stories and delicacies to stave off the freeze of the longest night of the year. Strangers were welcomed in from the streets, chores abandoned, businesses closed.
In four more days when Pieck woke up again, it would be Christmas. Feasts and presents, parties and everyone’s finest clothes, and Pieck was missing it all in order to shiver in a tent. Or, if she was lucky, sweat to death alone in her Cart Titan, used as an all-terrain self-driving pack mule.
While she lay awake being self pitying, time continued to crawl on. The sun wouldn’t come up until late morning no matter how close she got to the equator, and so if she was lucky and fell asleep now she would have ample cover of dark in order to sleep.
Pieck rolled over in bed and dug in her temporary side table, until her hands clutched around the paper package of cigarettes she carried with her. She hasn't smoked much ever since Zeke and Kosar got her started, but every once in a while she got the craving and she’d rather have them when she did than have to bum one off of Zeke.
The first pull of the burning bundle in her mouth was divine. The scent of lavender and tobacco met her nose at the same moment it met her tongue, licking into her mouth with burning heat like an old lover.
She stayed on her stomach, curled up nude under nothing but a thin sheet, tapping ash into an old coffee can she had stolen from the kitchens for this exact purpose. It helped that it still smelled strongly of coffee. Her dark hair curtained around her and shielded her from the outside world while she thought to herself about everything from battle tactics to her favorite Christmas dish.
It took another hour and another cigarette, but she did get to sleep that night thankfully. Without any accompanying dreams.
December 21st, 845
The train’s breaks had been squealing for miles, but it wasn’t until the thousands and thousands of pounds of steel came to a final jolting halt did Pieck finally wake up.
She barely cracked an eye, and then remembered to push the sheet off of her head.
“Ugh…” Pieck sat up, tense in places she didn't know she could be. The side of a mountain looked back at her through her finally silent window, dusted with just enough snow to cover the harsh rock with a white cap.
No sooner had her eyes adjusted to the daylight, a knock came at Pieck’s door. She pulled the sheet up enough to cover her breasts and collarbone area, and called for whomever it was to enter.
Magath’s paternal visage poked his head in the crack of her door, and his body followed soon after. His eyes didn’t wander to her body. He instead picked up her dressing gown from the floor and handed it to her. “Here.”
“Thank you, Commander,” Pieck said. She brushed black strands back from her face, and struggled the gown around her shoulders one handed, the other still holding the sheet in place.
Magath stared past her through the window, speaking while she worked on covering herself. “Now that we’ve arrived, I wanted to come check on you. Are you okay to fight today?”
Pieck swallowed down the feeling of broken glass. “Yes, sir. I’ll be fine. I've been training.”
Magath nodded, accepting her response, “Good. Get dressed and come to command, we’ll explain the plan and set you up with your adjusted team.”
After pulling on her uniform, Pieck made her way to the large tent. The ground here wasn’t soft nor warm enough for trench digging, so they hid behind the tree line in sturdy canvas tents right beside the train tracks.
Magath was waiting for her as he said he would be, a young soldier standing at his side.
“Pieck,” Magath greeted, looking up from his map of the local layout, “Good, you’re here. This is Carlo.” Magath gestured to the man standing beside the table.
“Lovely to meet you,” Pieck held a hand out to the soldier, seeing if he’d take it despite her dirty blood.
He didn’t seem to have any trouble with her lineage, grasping her hand and giving it a firm shake once up, then down. “Pleasure to meet you, too. You’re the Cart?”
Pieck hummed her affirmation. She turned her attention to the map, tracing her eyes over the mountain, the enemy military base, and the marked civilian areas. Magath’s voice was white noise in her ears, explaining how she was their only titan support, and that she would be in charge of positioning her crew in an advantageous way, in order to take out as much enemy personnel as possible, while limiting civilian casualties.
The military base nearby the coastal city of Sulpicia, some kind of religious capital, looked deserted. Smoke didn’t escape the chimneys of the large stone fortress, and there was no hustle and bustle of those who would need to go about daily chores despite the cold.
Pieck transformed without argument. Zeke wasn’t here to save her, so she’d need to be smart about this, she told herself while her five-man crew worked to affix her armor.
Encountering the first obstacles, a scouting party, was a non-issue. The soldiers were flattened beneath Pieck’s front feet before they’d registered the ambush.
Getting closer to the base, Pieck hesitated. It’s not that she didn’t know what to do–she had more experience climbing walls in her titan than any of her compatriots. But the walls were deserted. Ancient times’ cannons unmanned and towers unlit with lantern light.
Maybe someone warned them of the attack, a mole in Marley’s military, and they’d been able to evacuate. But if that was the case, then why had she come across the patrol? There’s no use protecting an empty castle.
Stretching up to balance on her back legs, aided by the stone brick walls of the castle, Pieck was able to grasp the top of the wall with her front feet, and hoist her weight up. Perched, and able to look down into the courtyard, she finally saw a weak billow of smoke coming from one of the basement’s chimneys. Gotcha.
Pieck was delicate with her steps, slowly creeping towards the offending chimney. The closer she got, the more Pieck inhaled the smells of cooking. Soft meats, and some kind of apple pastry to be sure. She missed her father. All the more reason to get this over with.
Thinking for a spell, Pieck came up with a quick plan. She assumed most of, if not all of the occupants of the fort were in the underground hold. With this assumption, Pieck lifted a massive hand, and placed her thumb over the hole allowing smoke to escape.
Nothing immediately happened, and Pieck was worried she’d been wrong. That was until a nearby set of doors creaked open. The sound of coughing was first to escape, followed by numerous folks standing in their pajamas, with nothing to separate soldier from civilian.
She didn’t have to give the word. Gunfire filled the air, mowing down the people coming to investigate the blocked passage faster than they’d know what’d happened. Bullet casings dropped around her, and as soon as movement ceased in the pile of fresh corpses, she advanced.
Leaving the chimney with a crate balanced over it, Pieck creeped towards the doors. Nowhere else had people begun to emerge, and without an alarm to confirm her suspicions, she had to assume the people below knew of her presence and had a plan to counter her. She needed to act quickly.
Unable to go down to the basement, and unsure if they would pop out elsewhere, Pieck went with the most direct option: ripping the chimney from the ground and sinking her front foot in, grasping whatever squishy warm bodies she could get ahold of.
The screams that followed the merciless clench of Pieck’s fist were wheezy and weak. This wasn’t a fair fight; these people were already dead.
More and more of the fortress' inhabitants sprung forth from the doors, climbing over corpses in a desperate bid for freedom, not knowing that their executioner was lying there in wait.
Between Pieck crushing bodies in her oversized hands, and the endless shots rounding off, the ‘fight’ was over in less than half an hour. Fight was certainly a generous word for it.
She didn’t stay to confirm victory, she didn’t need to. Pieck pushed down the wooden gate, and walked straight out, beelining for camp. If any of those people lived, they deserved it. She could already see the headlines now.
December 25th, 845
Starting at 10pm on Christmas Eve, and until the early morning on Christmas Day, it snowed in Trost. Hard. A blizzard that cuts invisibility down to nothing, and traps people in their homes and barracks. Sticky snowflakes cling to the Walls and create massive snowbanks against the stone, much to the children’s delight. As the new frontlines of the titan defensive, Trost had a somber tone cast over the district. They had been well-to-do before the fall, or as well as Wall Rose could get, offering trade throughout Maria, but with a surge of refugees and more mouths to feed than space to put them, it was easy to say things had been tense.
The city, as all cities did, gained a certain eerie quality around the holidays. Transplants emptied out and ventured towards small towns and villages to visit relatives, and businessmen and nobles traveled to the capital for schmoozing and backdoor dealings. All that remained was the locals, the wayward, and the soldiers who only ever had this posting to call home.
Hange Zoë is one such soldier, and they are just fine staying in the massive castle the Survey Corps calls home for Christmas. Their family owned a farmstead out in eastern mid-nowhere in Wall Maria. That farm hadn’t been home before Titans uprooted hundreds of thousands of lives, making orphans out of soldiers and taking countless parents’ children. It was all rubble now, most towns in Maria were. Titans didn’t have the same respect for the weight of stone as humans did.
They had bundled up in too many blankets last night and took tea heavy with vodka to try and cope with their new reality. Captain Levi had joined them in the officer's lounge area, and as expected this is where they wake up Christmas morning.
Opening their eyes, Hange is greeted by white light filtering through the lounge windows, and a distinct feeling that maybe that tea was a little too heavily spiked with booze. The pinching, exploding feeling behind their eyes is one for the history books, and putting on their glasses feels impossible at present so they leave them off.
Hange groans and pulls a blanket back over their head to hide from the evil rays of snow light, and only barely catches the sound of air being exhaled acutely through someone's nose.
“Hey,” Levi greets them from another of the large couches.
Hange makes a noise of discomfort, his voice a needle in their eardrum. Something shifts, and the door creaks and shuts. Hange doesn’t care about it, if it’s an assassin come to finish them off, then so be it, because the throbbing in their stomach and head was unbearable.
20 minutes and a cat-nap later, Hange is awoken again by the clink of ceramic and the sound of pouring liquid. They could make an educated guess now as to what was happening, but frankly their brain only existed right now to tell their organs not to let them die.
“Here,” Levi’s voice cuts through the silence, and the smell of warm tea indicates he’s holding a teacup in front of their exposed nose, the only part of their body that isn’t hidden behind a blanket.
Sitting up is an uncomfortable affair, dizzy and nauseous, but Hange gets there slowly. Uncovering their face tentatively, they discover that the curtains are drawn, and a small fire works to fight the chill in the room. The HQ staff are on leave this week, along with most of the scouts, so Hange realizes that Levi must have built this fire himself while they slept.
Hange picks up the teacup set in front of them on the sitting room table and lifts it to their nose. The smell of mint and green tea are delightful, and the first little sip is a balm on their wrecked stomach. “Thank you,” Hange whispers in the silence.
“Yeah. You look like shit,” Levi mumbles. He looks to the side to avoid their gaze, his own teacup held tentatively between the tips of his fingers in a way that always makes Hange just a tad nervous.
“I bet,” Hange grins, “Happy birthday, freak.”
“Merry Christmas,” Levi’s voice echoes into his cup as he takes a sip, still not looking Hange straight in the face. Considering how gross they felt and probably looked, this seemed about right.
“Merry Christmas. Are we doing anything today?” Hange asked, taking another sip. The tea was slowly helping their throat to un-stick, voice becoming smoother with every taste, though they still didn’t feel like their usual self, and hadn’t the past few days. Blame it on the holidays, they had.
Levi shook his head, “We’re snowed in. It’s up to the second floor, almost,” he explains with a carefully neutral expression. They doubt he cares too much anyways.
“And? We have ODM gear,” Hange points out. Sure they were in civvies right now but the entire castle should be accessible through internal passages.
Levi scoffs, “You’re not wasting resources just so you can escape HQ. Nothing’s open in this weather anyways.”
“Levi”
“What-”
“Levi,” Hange cuts him off, grin growing exponentially, “Do you wanna build a snowman, Levi?”
“No.”
Hange is undeterred by his rejection, only leaning closer to him over the arm of their couch, “We could go downstairs and make breakfast-”
“You mean I’d make breakfast.”
“-Well, yes but, then we could go see Erwin,”
Levi cut them off again, “Commander Smith.”
“Erwin, yes I just said that, and bring him breakfast, and then we could jump off of the roof and go play in the snow. We wouldn’t even need ODM gear, the snow would cushion our fall!”
“You’ll break your legs.” Levi deadpans across the table at them, seeming unamused. But Hange knows better.
“And then you can nurse me back to health, and we’ll see snowman Erwin and snowman Levi, and-”
“Okay stop, I’m done with the weird roleplay shit,” Levi interjected for the final time, finishing his cup off and setting it down with a bit less grace than usual. “You’re not going outside in this weather, you’ll freeze your ass off and die. Don’t saddle me with that paperwork.”
“Heh, saddle,” Hange snickered, “Y’know Moblit would play with me. Spoilsport.”
“Then go ask Moblit. You don’t “play” anyhow, you child,” Levi made another sound of disapproval, but his words didn’t hold real heat. Hange could tell.
“I would, he’s nicer than you, but he’s not here is he?” Hange remarked.
“Okay smartass, fine. How about it’s my birthday?” Levi shot back. Despite hating his birthday, he seems content to use it to advantage in their lighthearted spat.
“How about it’s my Christmas, asshole,” Hange quips, leaning forward and pouring themself another teacup full of the green-peppermint brew, “What are you gonna do instead, then? Go yearn over Erwin? Paw at his office door?”
“Oh get fucked,” Levi stands up, and lifts the tray from the table. Hange’s only just quick enough to pull their teacup away, avoiding having it taken prematurely or spilled all over their front.
Hange stands up when they realize Levi is leaving. Dragging blankets along behind them like a Lord's plush robes, they follow along, opening the lounge door for him and exiting into the hallway. They walk in companionable silence, and the snow-stained light is more than enough to move through the halls with.
Going down the stairs, Hange is forced to lift the blankets near their feet like a proper noble lady to avoid tripping. They don’t have Levi’s grace, as he moves with near silence, the gentle adjusting of the tea set on the tray the only audible indication of his existence.
Descending means darkness, as the windows on the ground floor of HQ are blotted out with thick ice. A few torches that Hange presumes Levi put there himself light the way, into the mess hall with its attached kitchen.
It’s uncomfortable seeing it so empty. Even outside of mealtimes, cadets and other lower ranked soldiers gather here for miscellaneous reasons, reading or card playing or just general enjoyment of human company. But this morning at the usual time breakfast would be served, it’s deserted save for the two of them, and a couple of 99th Cadet Corps soldiers lingering in the back, clearly tired and aiming to leave for their quarters just as soon as they finish their food.
Hange doesn’t bother them, and they don’t rise to greet their superiors. Christmas is a strange, liminal time that casts them into an alternate dimension of rank-disregardment and empty common rooms. It’s almost enough to make Hange uncomfortable. Almost.
Snapping out of their thoughts, Hange enters the kitchens behind Levi. He sets the tray down wordlessly beside the sink, but curiously makes no motion to wash it like usual.
“Descended to anarchy–even our great and wise Levi Zoë has gone mad and abandoned himself to the rules of-beasts!” The last word ends up being yawned, Hange is still far more tired than they realized.
“That is not my last name,” Levi glares at them, opening a cabinet to begin his search for breakfast.
“Yeah,” Hange huffs, “But you don’t have one, and I needed one for the bit.”
“So you chose your own?”
“Well, yeah. What would you have preferred? Smith?” Hange purrs like a smug bastard, poking their head into Levi’s personal space.
Levi turns to look at them, the tip of his nose brushing against Hange’s, “No. Your bit is stupid if it can’t work without a last name. And why would I want Erwin’s last name?”
Hange grins, and makes no move to pull away despite what they figure was an attempt at intimidation, “Well I never said Erwin Smith,” they teased, “We have a lot of Smiths. Fine Smith, Terra Smith, Marcus Smith over in resources– It’s funny that that’s where your mind went, though.”
“Yea because I would marry a couple of cadets or a resource staffer,” Levi rolls his eyes.
Hange’s eyes shoot wide, and they have to lean away, “Woah woah woah,” Hange whispers.
“Wait,” realization is obvious in Levi’s eyes, “Not that I’d marry Erwin either.”
“I–” Hange has known about Levi’s crush on the Commander for a while now, or at least strongly suspected it. They didn’t expect evidence to just fall into their lap though. “I won’t say anything.”
Levi swallows, and moves away from Hange completely to continue his search for breakfast. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Yeah,” Hange agrees, “Okay.”
“Scrambled or fried?” Levi asks, his head poked into the bread cabinet to see what remained.
“Would you make me an omelet?” Hange inquires, voice gentle. They, with little skill, pull themself up backwards to sit on the counter, half strangling themself with their blanket.
Levi glances back at them when he hears them gagging. He tugs a loaf of bread from the cabinet and stands up, ignoring Hange’s flailing. “No. You’re getting scrambled.”
Hange has to get back down to untangle themself from the blankets, sitting back on the countertop with the blankets over their lap instead, “Okay. Are you doing toast too?” they ask with a grin.
Levi rolls his eyes and grabs a skillet, washing it and putting it onto the stove.
Breakfast is finished quickly, and as simple as it is, Hange’s stomach aches for comfort food. They don't take up a spot in the mess hall, following Levi upstairs with their warm plate in their cold hands.
Levi hadn’t allowed Hange to help with the two plates and tray he was managing, but he isn't fast enough when weighed down to stop Hange from racing forward and grabbing the handle to the Commander’s office, turning it and pushing it in to reveal the tall blond man sitting at his desk, as expected.
“Merry Christmas, Commander!” Hange cheers, quick to claim their favorite chair by Erwin’s fireplace, noticeably cold and empty.
The Commander sits tall behind his desk, and barely shifts in acknowledgment when two of his closest companions come barging in. He’s in uniform, and his right hand scribbles across the bottom line of various pieces of paper like the two of them hadn’t come in at all.
“Hey,” Levi kicks the door in from the hallway shut, “Breakfast. Take a break, Commander.”
That catches Erwin’s attention, and he looks up from his papers at the short Captain standing in the middle of the room still burdened with dishes. “Good morning, Captain, Section Commander. How are you two?”
“Hungry. Come sit down with us,” Levi directs. He places the goods down on the sitting table in front of Hange’s chair, even though they’re already wolfing down big fluffy pieces of egg.
Erwin sighs, but stands to comply, taking a spot on the wide couch across from Hange. “Thank you,” he barely murmurs, picking up his plate and a fork.
Levi seems satisfied, and sits next to Erwin on the couch mere inches away.
Hange clears their throat, “So we’re going to go play in the snow-”
“Hange!” Levi glares at them, “I did not agree to that.”
“Right but you didn’t reject the offer either,” Hange grins, pointing at him with their fork.
“Well, I’m saying no to it now. Don’t drag me into your juvenile bullshit.”
Erwin has an amused smile on his lips, though he avoids looking either of them in the face, “Did you have a question for me, Hange?” he asks to cut off their squabble.
“Oh, yeah. Do you wanna come play with us? We’re gonna build snowmen, and a snow fort if I can convince Levi.”
“I’m not building snowmen, Hange.”
Erwin shakes his head, “I have too much paperwork to catch up on, as lovely as that sounds. Don’t let my absence stop you two, though, please.” Erwin lifts his fork to his mouth and takes a bite to punctuate his sentence.
“See? Give it up,” Levi glances at Hange, “It’s too cold for that.”
“Commander, can we use our ODM gear to jump out of the window?” Hange spits out, filling with the joy of childhood and shit despite the raging hangover that still dug into their eyes.
“I don’t see why not, as long as you’re careful,” Erwin agrees with a shrug.
“Uh, because it’s a waste? Because it’s unnecessary? Because I didn’t agree to it?” Levi lists, clearly agitated at both of his best friends now.
“Lighten up, Captain, it’s Christmas. Consider it my gift.” Erwin gives a nonchalant little nod, and Hange is sure he was taking the piss now. They love it.
“I’m not going to freeze my dick off just because you gifted it to me. I’m going to work through the cadets’ dormitory, it’s disgusting in there,” Levi declares, setting his now empty plate on the sitting table and exchanging it for his teacup.
“Go make snowmen with Hange, Captain,” Erwin orders, “I’ll join you if I can get through this in time.”
“Oooo, dad voice,” Hange whispers. They finished eating quickly as well, and had since knelt in front of the empty fireplace, stacking logs together and using kindling to build a spark in the hearth. The room with its chill needs it, and they wonder if Erwin just doesn’t feel cold.
They have to separate to put on enough of their uniforms to accommodate ODM gear, but agree to meet up on the roof. Hange trades their tan uniform jacket for a knitted cardigan from Nanaba, putting the woolen wings of freedom cloak overtop with a hat, gloves, and scarf. Sue them, they got cold easy.
Making their way up, it seems Levi went simpler. He wears a large, dark blue men’s sweater overtop his ODM harness, and it bunches unseemly over the rig. It’s too large to be something he bought for himself, as he wears it with the sleeves folded several times to allow his petite hands to poke out. He has on the same thick wool slacks that he did earlier, along with the leather uniform boots that Hange themself wore. Practical.
“Hello, Handsome,” Hange is able to see Levi’s expressions much more clearly now with their uniform goggles on, and the disgusted scrunch of his nose is unmistakable.
Getting off of the roof is easy, Hange spiraling down until they’re able to freefall safely into one of the big mounds of ice and powder. Levi’s more delicate, jumping from windowsill to windowsill, and eventually sitting atop of a large rock nearby HQ, like a fairy or whatever the hell.
Convincing Levi to help them roll massive snowballs together for Hange’s army of snowmen isn’t as difficult as they thought it would be. Reminding him that the quicker they get done the quicker they can go inside is enough, and he’s efficient in clumping snow together and rolling it around in the fresh powder until it gets started.
Soon they have a little trio standing in front of them, a big, medium, and little snowman with sticks for arms and rocks for features.
“Okay, I’m going inside. It’s frigid out here,” Levi announces to nobody but them, picking up his bladeless ODM handles in preparation to launch off,
“Wait!” Hange shouts, a few meters away from him and not yet ready to finish their magical morning of childhood whimsy fulfilled.
“What?” Levi looks up, at his limit.
“Catch,” Hange reels back and launches a snowball they had been hiding at Levi’s face. They hadn’t expected it to connect, but watching him catch it midair with a look of exhausted anger is something they didn’t want to see.
“The fuck?” Levi throws the snowball right back at them, but Hange’s already off the ground, situating themself on a random windowsill all scrunched up like a cat.
“Ha!” Hange calls, tongue stuck out at Levi mockingly, “Missed!”
They aren’t so stupid to stay in one place, as they already see Levi getting together another snowball with intent to connect it with Hange’s face. And they have a plan.
“ERWIIIIIN!” Hange screams, catching a ball to the shoulder and wincing in pain. The next sill they situate on is Erwin’s office windowsill itself, and they glance past the glass to see if he’s taken the bait.
“He’s not going to save you!” Levi growls from his place still at ground level. He closes an eye and aims, but Hange moves at just the last second. He should have known they were planning something, perching on Erwin’s windowsill as suspiciously as they did, but watching the clumps of snow break across that perfect aquiline nose of the Commander’s wasn’t what Levi was expecting. Ah fuck.
Hange breaks into cackles, and soon is sobbing in amusement. The Commander, though, is not amused, and his nose is already red from the packed ice his Captain had aimed at it.
“Would either of you care to explain?” Erwin’s smooth baritone breaks the silence, and it’s all Hange can do not to wheeze. Whatever reprimand is coming their way is worth it to see the furious look on their Commander’s face.
Dinner between the three of them that evening is a simple affair. Livestock is harder and harder to come by, and the cost is exorbitant, but somehow Erwin still presents ham steaks for them to indulge in from his stash.
Not looking for a repeat of the night before, they refrain from any liquor this time around, instead having herbal tea at Levi’s behest. It’s nice, and even if the energy is low, Hange still finds themself smiling often and glad to have such charmed company.
Their bed is a welcome sight at the end of the day. They call it quits early after helping with dishes and burrow into the permanent nest of blankets that greets them. The cold that settled into the castle after days with so little habitation and only the bare necessity’s worth of fires is brutal. Drafts slip through the floorboards and the stone brick of the walls, radiating a unforgiving chill.
The cold had soaked into their bones despite their constant moving about. The moment their head connects with their pillow, Hange feels ready to doze off, but a knock stops them from passing out completely.
They don’t stand to answer it, because leaving the slowly warming bed they lie in sounds akin to torture. But whoever it is calls out first, “Oi, open up.”
Hange grins into their pillowcase, able to identify that voice anywhere. “It isn’t locked,” they yell back as best as they can, throat pinching with pain.
Despite his brusque front, Levi is graceful and silent, letting himself into Hange’s dorm. Hange barely lifts their head to see it, but he has a pillow and a folded blanket tucked beneath his arm. “Room for one more?” Levi asks, closing their door behind him.
Hange scoots aside to allow Levi to lay his pillow down, and to settle into Hange’s bed with them.
“Hey,” Hange whispers, on their side facing Levi head on.
“Hey.”
“You good?”
Levi exhales slowly, avoiding Hange’s eye. “Yeah. Erwin wants to sleep alone tonight,” Levi explains, voice strained and his limbs drawn close to his body, making himself look smaller than he already is.
“Oh,” Hange’s brow furrows, “And you’re alright with that?”
“Yeah. If he doesn’t want my protection, I can’t force it on him,” Levi mutters.
Hange reaches out, pulling Levi into their chest. He burns like a furnace despite his petite frame. “It’s okay to be upset. I won’t tell anyone.”
Levi’s forehead presses into Hange’s collarbone, and they’re sure they notice him grimace before shoving his reluctance aside. “I’m not upset, four-eyes,” he claims.
“Okay. I believe you,” Hange comforts. They lie in bed still for a half an hour. Hange's nearly asleep, and if they hadn’t known him they would’ve thought the same of Levi. It's then that he speaks up.
“We got into a row, and he asked for some space,” Levi explains. Hange stays silent, seeing if he’ll continue on, and he does, “I just- he doesn’t understand, how difficult it is to watch him ignore his own safety.”
“He’s the Commander, Levi. They rarely live safe lives. Or long ones,” Hange attempts to reason. Their eyes track across Levi’s loose black hair, but they refrain from tangling their fingers in it even if they wanted to.
“I know that. I’m not stupid.”
“No one’s ever accused you of being stupid.”
“You don’t know that,” Levi sighs, rolling onto his back.
“You’re right, I don’t,” Hange grins and looks down at him, wide awake now, “I bet Erwin thinks you’re smart, though.”
“Erwin doesn’t think of me at all,” Levi huffs.
“Well that’s blatantly untrue. He adores you, it’s disgusting the way he looks at you during strategy meetings,” Hange teases.
“Like a soldier that he wants to use to eliminate the titans?”
“Like you hung the stars, and he wants to ravage you behind closed doors,” Hange’s voice lilts, their face twisting into a shit-eating grin.
“Are we really doing this? Are we slinging hash like a couple of brothel broads?” Levi asks with a dry expression on his face. That rarely varied, though.
A bout of laughter bursts out of Hange uncontrollably, “That is not how I would’ve phrased it, but yeah sure, let’s ‘sling hash’.” Hange agrees.
“Alright. Tell me all about how the Commander yearns for me.”
“Oh, Levi,” Hange purrs, voice dropping low, “He stares at you, while we walk in the halls, and he asks me how you are if he hasn’t seen you that day, and he always drinks the tea you make him, even if he’s complained about being shaky from the caffeine.”
Levi’s eyes widen, like he wasn’t expecting real examples, or such intimate and gentle ones, “Hange, I-” he swallows down his own embarrassment, “What about you? How’s Moblit?”
“Mobs?” Hange’s brow twists in confusion, “We aren’t together, we’re friends. And science buddies!” Hange chirps; they refuse to give in to the dour mood Levi brought in, and by the Walls if they aren't going to try to make it better.
“Okay,” Levi says skeptically, “If not Moblit, is there anyone else?”
“Why so interested in my love life, Captain? Are you gunning for the starring role? In my heart, that is.” Hange gives Levi a teasing squeeze across his shoulders, which only earns them a smack in the face from his far hand.
“The day I’m anything more than a passive observer in your love life is the day I take a nose dive off of Wall Maria,” Levi assures Hange, with only a mild undercurrent of sarcasm.
Hange snickers, “There isn’t anyone else, don’t worry.”
“You don’t sound thrilled.”
“I-” Hange hesitates, and pulls their lip into their mouth to worry it between their teeth, “Sometimes,” they begin, careful, “I feel a weird… hollowness in my chest.”
“Like a heart attack?” Levi asks with a smirk.
“Shut up!” Hange grabs a stray pillow from nearby and swings it down at Levi’s face. Of course he grabs it and tosses it aside before it can connect, but it’s the thought that counts. “I just feel like maybe I’m missing someone I haven’t met yet. It’s weird I know, and-”
“It’s not weird,” Levi cuts them off firmly, his face softened from the teasing smirk he wore earlier. “I think I’ve felt like that. It’s been less often recently but… I do understand.” Levi reassures.
Hange nods, voice failing them in the face of Levi’s small bit of vulnerability. They wonder, quietly to themself, the reason why Levi trusted them with such childish thoughts of love, even if Hange shared their own first.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Levi whispers into the silence, “You’re still weird as fuck. Don’t forget it.”
Hange’s laugh springs out of their body, and they decide to smother Levi in the best birthday hug they can manage even as he protests.
Chapter 13: Successor - a Lament
Notes:
Yeah maybe the chapter title is a little melodramatic, but I'm feeling melodramatic so
Hiiiii yes I'm okay, yes I'm still working on this fic (my baby) it's just slow going. School, sickness, depression, and good ole fashioned writer's block have been taking their turns fucking me. Pardon the colorful imagery.Thanks for reading! Can't believe we're at the final act (3) already! it's about the length of the first two combined, but it's the thought that counts. Slowly we're getting to where Zeke and Pieck are in canon (relationship wise), and Act 3 is my favorite by far.
Enough rambling, enjoy the show. I'll see you in Chapter 14
Chapter Text
September 9th, 846
On a crisp autumn morning with the smell of night still staining the air, Pieck prepared herself to answer the summons delivered late the night before. Business within the internment zone was rare, business she wasn't escorted to via vehicle rarer, but the opportunity to reminisce at the training camp she'd grown up in wasn't one she'd try and avoid.
Despite the years, Pieck’s feet still remembered the walk like she'd last made it yesterday. She suspected this specific route would be ingrained in her until the day she died, for all the practice she had walking it. Before, she’d make her way down side streets, meeting one by one with each of her companions until they got to their final destination. Now, Pieck walked alone. Zeke, who's presence had been promised by the delivery man, was nowhere to be found when she strolled past his grandparents' house, so Pieck stalked down alleyways by herself with nothing but the rats and strays to keep her company.
The sun barely peaked over the horizon by the time she reached the gate of the grand brick building and the guards seemed remarkably uninterested to see her. Considering shift change was coming up, she assumed the reason was fatigue and tried not to take it personally.
Gravel crunched beneath her boots with every step. No one came out to greet her when she completed the long walk up the drive. She grabbed the door to the central building and let herself in.
Whereas the titan facility she’d been spending most of her time in was cold, sterile, and secure, the training facility was clearly designed to accommodate a large number of candidates at a variety of ages. Pieck walked past classrooms, gyms, various storage room, and numerous other skill building rooms as she made her way to the administration wing.
The floors here were polished wood and they announced her presence with every step. It shouldn’t have surprised her when Zeke’s head popped out of a doorway, stopping Pieck dead in her tracks.
“Hey, Pieck. How’ve you been?” he asked with a saccharine grin across his whiskery face.
“Fine, thank you,” Pieck came to stand alongside him in the doorway, and was more intimately aware of how he’d grown upwards during their time apart whereas she hadn’t. “Glad to see you’re back.”
“Mhm,” Zeke leaned into her space, his hand bracing on the frame above her head, “Not as glad as I am.”
“Was it too bad, being over there?”
Zeke’s other hand came up to graze her cheek. His eyes traced her face, taking note of every detail in a way that had Pieck squirming. “I missed being here, it’s not that being there was so bad.”
“Well, War Chief,” Pieck ducked out of Zeke’s cornering, back into the hallway with its loud hardwood floors, “Welcome back. We’re pleased to have you.”
He frowned and stood up straight, his soldier's posture only exaggerating the near foot of height he had on her now. “Yeah. May I walk you down to the yard? We’re expected,” Zeke offered his elbow out to Pieck. She was sure that he only offered to be polite instead of as a genuine offer in consideration of her needs. Even as she got faster and more agile with the Cart, her human body lagged behind, the toll showing faster than she could hide it amongst those who knew her best.
The walk down was slow going. They didn’t speak any further to one another, no trading war stories or catching up on how home’s been. Pieck had to jog every other step to keep up with his long strides. Zeke scratched often at his cheek where it met the beginnings of a beard he was growing. It seemed to Pieck like young adulthood wasn’t suiting either of them, despite their best efforts.
Commander Magath was already standing in front of a crowd of what couldn’t be called anything other than children, speaking sternly. Pieck felt her feet freeze beneath her, when she spotted the yellow armbands numbering in the dozens, but Zeke dragged her along regardless, pulling her to stand with him at Magath’s side.
“-you are exceedingly lucky, to be in the presence of two of the nine. These two fight our enemies overseas relentlessly for the honor of mother Marley, and are true examples of what an honorary Marleyan should be,” Magath gestured to the side at Zeke, with his winning smile, and Pieck, whose face didn't twitch a muscle.
“You may all be filth-blooded Eldians, atoning for the sins of hundreds of years of treachery, but one day you may be able to make up for the mistakes of your ancestors by inheriting one of the nine, and bringing glory to your country, is that understood?” Magath’s rhetoric climbed in volume as he spouted off the same bullshit that Pieck heard throughout her own near-decade of training. The children answered back in the affirmative, their salutes sloppy but heartfelt, the most you could expect from a group ranging in age from six to fifteen. Pieck glanced sideways, and caught a frown on Zeke’s face.
“Good. Jaeger, introduce yourself,” Magath ordered.
“Yes sir,” Zeke took half a step forward towards the crowd, obscuring his face from Pieck’s view. “My name is Zeke Jaeger, I-” he hesitated, “I’m a Warrior. You’ll see me occasionally, if I’m not on missions.” he stepped back in line with Pieck, hands behind his back and gaze forward, clearing over the heads of all of the kids.
“I’m Pieck,” she spoke up next, “I don’t go on missions as much, so you’ll see me more often. Training to receive one of the nine is incredibly difficult, but it’s worth it. If you have questions, or need help, don’t hesitate to seek me out.” Pieck gave her warmest smile despite the unwell feeling in her stomach.
As Magath continued on, Pieck’s eyes wandered. Most of the children had an intense determination on their faces, one that would burn out and have them booted from the program before they could be earnestly considered. The ones Pieck paid closer attention to were the children who looked calm. There were a few who were listening, really taking in every word and its meaning, the subtext.
Near the back, a pair of identical blond boys clung to one another. Pieck frowned. Brothers? Uncommon but not banned. Usually families put their best foot forward for consideration, not both feet. If one sibling failed, they didn't want the shame spreading to touch their family member. Too much could go wrong for a single family, and children were expensive to raise. Pieck made up her mind then, noticing the tearful pair, that she’d go through the candidate files tonight. Realistically, there wasn’t anything Pieck could do to help any of them excel, but maybe if she knew them she could prevent any more little soldiers from ending up dead. Her own training group had been littered with overenthusiastic corpses, doomed to small boxes with plain graves.
After hours of supervising training drills out in the autumn chill, they finally broke for lunch. Pieck and Zeke weren’t welcome to follow the crowd of primary schoolers into their cafeteria, so instead they claimed their old picnic table outside for themselves. No food sat between them and each exhale curled into one the other's with a special sort of heat.
“Can’t believe they’re already looking at our replacements,” Zeke tapped off the end of a cigarette he'd been working on. The air around the table was thick with smell of tobacco smoke. The taste clogged Pieck's throat and made her giddy with lightheadedness.
Pieck laid her cheek down against the wood of the table, inhaling slowly, “Yeah. It’s weird being on the other side of it.”
“Mmhm."
They sat in silence, appetites dead in the water.
“They’re kids.” Pieck whispered.
“So? We were kids– you were a kid, until about a month ago," Zeke's voice carried a heavy undercurrent of derision, his own amusement at her sympathy only barely visible past the annoyance he hid behind.
Pieck remembered her eighteenth birthday party well. She'd refused a party; there was no joy in celebrating her impending death in less than a decade. Instead she had dinner with Zeke and his family, drinking and smoking so much her brain fell silent and she could enjoy him fucking her without the guilt—or the flashbacks.
“I know that. I didn’t realize how small we were, and, I…” Pieck bit at her lip. She focused on the pain of her incisors going through the soft flesh, instead of the broken glass scratching in her throat.
“It’s fucked,” Zeke struck his lighter and held it to the subsequent cigarette he had put between his lips, “Nothin’ we can do bout it now, though.”
Pieck shot him a look. She sat up and held her hand out expectantly, closing two parted fingers around the cigarette he placed into it. The first inhale of bliss was enough to quell the tears that were welling up. She closed her eyes in order to savor the burning feeling in her lungs.
"It's only seven of them. Seven every thirteen years—what's that math?" Pieck asked. The hand that wasn't managing the burning bundle drifted to her ear. Her piercings spun well in place, having healed instantly and holding no possibility for infection. Her dirty fingernails wouldn't be the thing to kill her.
"Six. I don't know what math you're asking me to do, but don't worry. We're already going to hell." Zeke teased.
She peaked her eyes open and glared at him, "You've such a way with words," she sneered with a grin. The borrowed cigarette burned down to the filter, crackling and causing Pieck quite a bit of discomfort in the process.
Zeke smiled at her not-compliment, and gently takes the smoldering bit of paper from her before she could hurt herself any further.
End of Act Two
Chapter 14: Spiced Apple Cider
Notes:
Five days later??? A new chapter??? Yessiree I am procrastinating via writing, and this chapter was an easy edit. It's also kinda filler (but one of my favorites) cause it sets the tone for all of act 3. It doesn't move the plot along too much, and yes, this story, no matter how nonsequential (for lack of a better word) it is, does have a plot.
See you in either five days or five weeks. Apparently there's no in between.
Chapter Text
November 11th, 846
The winter of 846 was kind to the people of Liberio. Snow carried down from the heavens and stuck to any surface it could, muffling the noises of the city and narrowing the streets with large banks of dirt-tainted ice. People shuffled closer together than usual, brushing shoulders and hips in the stinging cold. It was a special kind of intimacy, the way people clung to the warmth of doorways and hurried through the streets.
But the breezes were warm. The autumn harvests were more than enough and in a rare turn of events, the country remained at peace. Soldiers stayed in their homes wearing embroidered sweaters. Doctors only had to deal with the common cold and broken bones from children trying to slide on the ice fields that formed over heavily treaded and under salted areas.
On the eleventh of November, Pieck Finger made sure to leave her house early, a variety of tasks in front of her before her appointment at the Galliard home. Her eyes stayed glued to the ground as she dodged ice and snow, planting her feet on the patches of rock and salt to prevent slipping.
On this special occasion, Pieck resolved herself to spend her stipend on something meaningful. Acquiring a bag of peaches that were actually good at this time of year would cost her a pretty penny, but she didn’t mind the extra expense.
Heat lifted off of her skin in the bitter morning air. Her nose burned red, and walking left curling wisps of steam behind her. She made a few more purchases, a baggy jacket with a soft collar, a bottle of Riesling, and a paper bag of tea for personal use. The last passing of bills from her hand to the store clerk's was a relief, able to now tuck herself away and out of view of curious and disgusted onlookers.
Her feet started to ache by the time she approached the Galliard home, and climbing the few steps to get to the door was exhausting. Pieck didn’t knock, Mrs. Galliard had made it abundantly clear that Pieck was welcome any time, and knocking was wasting both of their time.
The smell of firewood was the first thing she registered, stepping over the threshold into the house. Already, it was too warm for a sweater and scarf, and she shed them along with her bags onto the strategically placed bench by the door.
“Pieck? Is that you, dear?” the warm voice of the household's matriarch, Vanessa, rang through the narrow rooms and immediately put a smile onto Pieck’s face.
“Yes, I’m in the entry, Mom,” Pieck called back. She bent down in half, struggling with her wet, laced up boots, and as footsteps approached she was made very aware of the embarrassing position she was in.
A snort came from behind her and a blue skirt came into her line of sight, “Do you need help?” Vanessa asked, sounding all too amused.
“No,” Pieck tugged at a slick lace with a bit too much aggression, making it pull through its eyelet with a horrible ripping sound, “see? Got it.”
“If you say so,” The woman in the skirt left Pieck to her own devices, struggling with her leather boots until finally she threw them into the bench cubby with an aggravated huff.
Picking her bags back up, Pieck stood and followed where Vanessa had returned to the kitchen. The room was a mess. The oven was running hot and the counters were covered in dishes, ingredients, and finished plates. Pieck didn’t have a place to set her things, so she left them in the corner where they'd hopefully be out of the way.
“Do you need any help?” she offered to Vanessa, already rifling through the kitchen hooks for a small enough apron.
“No, no, you’re a guest, go sit down with the boys,”
“Uh-huh,” Pieck tied the apron on and started stacking up dishes, carrying them over to the sink, “Is Porco excited?”
Vanessa sighed, her hand stirring a bowl of frosting stilling, “He’s sad. He wishes Marcel was here.” She hesitated, and her cheek hollowed from where she chewed on it.
“They say no news is good news,” Pieck said. She turned the sink on and waited for the water to heat up, Vanessa standing still behind her.
“That isn’t necessarily true.”
Pieck couldn’t argue that and she didn’t try. Going about washing dishes was therapeutic, the hot sudsy water soaking into her skin and making her pruny in record time. Since their tense conversation, Vanessa turned on the bulky and old fashioned radio that lived in the kitchen smooth singing filling the silence that lingered between the sounds their tasks created.
The sun hadn’t been up when Pieck had arrived, the winter already stealing what little light they had here up north, but after an hour of quiet contemplation, day began to break and light spilled past the blinds.
Pieck finished with the dishes and left Vanessa to her own devices while wandered the house. She came across Mr. Galliard, but neither of them exchanged more than kind, knowing looks with one another. After scouring the bottom floor of the house, she concluded Porco wasn’t there yet, so she headed upstairs to search further.
The obvious answer was his bedroom. Pieck rapped her knuckles gently against the wood. When there was no answer she elected to let herself in anyways, just in case.
The room was dark. The window was pried completely open despite the weather, but the overhead light and Porco's bedside lamp stayed unlit, leaving the room dim with only morning light to brighten it.
Pieck climbed through the window and onto the slanted face of the roof. The smell of cigarette smoke burnt through the air and into Pieck’s nose before she even saw Porco, and she was already frowning when he turned to make eye contact with her.
“Hey,” Porco pulled the cigarette stub, half burnt, from where it hung between his lips, straightening his back from his previously hunched-over position.
“Hey. Happy birthday,” Pieck crawled over next to him, “You hiding?” She sat against his side. He was getting bigger than her, slowly but surely, and his arm wrapped around her when she pressed into him.
“No,” Porco sighed out, smoke curling in the freezing air, “Yes.”
Pieck frowned and rubbed her head into his chest. Slowly, she reached up with her arm opposite him and took the cigarette from his lips. She stubbed it out on the ice beneath them, and flicked it away. “What’s wrong?”
“The usual shit.”
He didn’t protest her actions, but Pieck spied a full pack hiding on one of the wooden beams when she’d come out.
“Yeah.”
They sat in silence for a while. Porco’s window faced east, and the sunrise colored the sky shades of honey and sapphire, in equal and contrasting amounts. He’d only worn a t-shirt, planning for a short excursion onto the roof, but now that Pieck had extended his stay she could feel him clinging to her, trying to sap her of her unnatural body heat.
Pieck decided to speak up, right as she felt him shifting in discomfort from the cold. “Those things will kill you, Porco. You need to take better care of yourself,” Pieck mumbled.
“You smoke. So does Zeke. I can smell it,” Porco looked conflicted, but he didn’t bring up anything further. He wouldn’t look Pieck in the eye, either.
“I have lungs that can grow back from stumps, don’t you dare use me as your role model,” Pieck grimaced in shock. She’d only really taken up smoking because Zeke had encouraged it, because she could get away with it, and the novelty of it had never worn off.
“Fine.” Porco shut down, disengaging with what she was telling him. “Can we go inside yet? My ass is numb.”
Pieck nodded and removed herself from his arm, moving past the window with the assumption that he’d follow behind, though she didn’t stay upstairs long enough to confirm.
***
As guests trickled into the Galliard House, so too did the little privacy vanish. The upstairs rooms were locked, save for Porco’s own bedroom, but otherwise every room had at least a few occupants. This wasn’t a house made for hosting and it showed when the family’s living room became nigh impassable after the addition of a few dining chairs. The difficulty didn’t stop them from having fun, swapping stories and listening to whatever played on the radio when Mr. Galliard saw fit to turn the thing on.
Pieck ended up playing second-fiddle to Vanessa in the kitchen. While Porco stayed upstairs with his neighborhood friends and the adults day-drank downstairs, she rushed between the door and the kitchen, playing interim hostess to keep herself too distracted to think of anything else.
People stopped appearing near five-thirty p.m., the late arrivals trickling in after work to enjoy the festivities. At seven-fifteen, while people sat around with plates filled and conversations animated, a final knock roused Pieck from her blissful dissociative state.
Mrs. Galliard was slumped into the family’s sofa, sipping spiked hot chocolate along with the other adults. “Love, would you-”
“Got it,” Pieck cut her off, waving her hand as she stood to approach the door.
The air in the house had become thick and warm, poor ventilation and so many people eliminating the need for artificial heat. The blast of cold that hit Pieck the moment the door broke from its frame caught her off guard, almost as much as the storm blue eyes that locked into hers from the other side of the threshold.
“Zeke, hi,” Pieck said.
“Hey. I know I’m late, may I come in?”
Pieck moved out of his way, still holding the door open to allow some of the hot air to drift out.
“Where’s the birthday boy? I’d like to convey my congratulations,” Zeke said, breathless as he was bent in half working on the laces of his military boots.
“Upstairs, playing penny poker with his friends. We already did the cake and presents,” Pieck shut the door as carefully as she could, but the sound of it clicking into place still alerted Mrs. Galliard to their existence.
“Pieck, who is it?” She hollered from the other room.
“Nobody!” Pieck called back. “Can I get you something to drink? You aren’t missing anything by not going in there,” her voice lowered to almost a whisper, swallowed by the white noise of the party in the next room.
Zeke tugged his tan work coat off and hung it up, “Lead the way.”
Pieck’s socked feet were silent on the hardwood as the two of them crept through the house, into the since-abandoned kitchen with its pots of kirsch hot chocolate and warm spiced cider.
“Pick your poison,” Pieck said. She picked one of the recently washed mugs up from the drying rack and ladled hot chocolate into it for herself, sipping at it with a happy crinkle of her nose.
Zeke didn’t force her to play maid, and got his own, cradling it in his massive hands. The contrast of the tiny mug in his grasp made her snicker. “Do they have a yard? It’s boiling in here,” He pointed out to her.
“Yes. Not a porch, though.” Pieck started to lead their way to the back door, and she welcomed him to sit beside her on the steps leading down from the back door. A foul sort of smoke drifted down from Porco’s window above them, obscured by the roof but not hiding the fact that it definitely wasn’t tobacco.
The combined heat of her wool sweater and the drink clutched in her hands were more than enough to make up for the chill, but Pieck didn’t find herself pushing Zeke away from where they sat with their biceps pressed against one another. She curled her socked feet under herself to avoid the ice of the bottom step, but Zeke didn’t exercise such caution.
It seemed Zeke caught up with what was happening above them, because he grinned and quietly said to Pieck, “Kid’s a firecracker, isn’t he?” He looked to Pieck for approval.
“You’re a bad influence on him.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
They sat out there for a while. No one came looking, and they were careful, taking turns refilling each other’s mugs inside. They tried to start conversations a few times, but each attempt fell through after a couple sentences each. Small talk didn’t suit them, and the real topics that could keep them going for hours were never going to get laid out between them. Pieck never brought them up, and she knew that Zeke wouldn’t either. Silence was fine instead.
Pieck’s cheeks gradually reddened with each consecutive mug and Zeke’s posture became less and less rigid until he was practically lying down on the stairs, his long body folded awkwardly on the varied surface.
She contemplated another sip, her eyes barely shut. Zeke cleared his throat beside her and she jolted reflexively, eyes pinning him in place where he lay.
“I was thinkin’,” Zeke started, his diction fucked to hell and back.
“Oh no.”
“Hush, it isn’t that bad. Are you gonna move out of your dad’s place now that you can?”
“What?” Pieck blinked slowly, trying to clear her mind so she could follow him, “No, probably not. I’ll live with him until my term ends.”
“We could get a place, I make enough money,” Zeke suggested.
“What, like as roommates?” Pieck made a questioning look in his general direction, but was unsure if he was sober enough to see it.
“No, like, we could get married and get a place. It’d be like our old facility days,” Zeke frowned, “without the scalpels and weird… stuff,” he added.
Pieck’s mouth dropped open, “Wh…”
“For benefits,” Zeke mumbled, "extra leave and… smaller taxes and stuff…"
“I’m gonna go inside,” Pieck carefully enunciated, standing with great effort and trying to get back up the few steps, “Don’t freeze.”
“Yep, my bad.”
Zeke didn't move from his lounging position. Pieck had to manage her skirt, soaked from the snow, her sweat, and the condensation of far too many mugs, over both his muscle and bulky clothes and the rough boards and nails of the steps.
She swayed back on the smooth tile of the kitchen. Her mug, nearly empty, she placed down on the counter with a little too much force and cringed at the loud noise the pottery made. But there were no cracks or shards, so it'd be fine.
With the dizziness she was experiencing, Pieck wasn't sure that sitting up on a chair would be a good idea. She'd fight to stay upright, but once she fell she'd crack her skull open on the floor and leave behind an awful mess for Vanessa Galliard.
The wall beside the downstairs powder room's door was bare and blessedly close. Pieck rocked on her feet but managed to put her hip into the stone and slide down to sit against the wall.
The act of her head going from five feat in the air to barely two with her slouch brought a special kind of brain stem deep, multi-generational nausea into her system. She closed her eyes to breathe and then opened them again because the lack of visual stimuli only made her other senses much more intense.
Finally settling with her eyes watered over and her hip beginning to throb with the beginnings of a bruise, Pieck thought back. Zeke. Marriage. Tax benefits. A sharp bark of laugh escaped her against her will, and after that endless giggling shook her entire body as she imagined it.
Her in a white dress (she'd be a liar in white), Zeke shaking hands with her father. It was all so outlandish to consider. That's if they had a wedding at all. The two of them could walk down to the courthouse and sign some paperwork and become Mr. and Mrs. Zeke-and-Pieck Jaeger, easy as pie.
She blinked and tears rolled down her cheeks just as her laughter intensified. Just on the basis of their names sounding stupid alone, she'd never accept his proposal.
Chapter 15: Campfires
Notes:
This is kinda filler, but it moves the timeline along and frankly it's too cute for me to get rid of.
It also isn't edited very much because of its length and lack of narrative importance. You should enjoy it regardless.
Yesterday I slayed my demons and finished the rough draft of this story! It ofc needs edited but now I can work on the sequel (no timeline promised) and have more fun
Love y'all see y'all later <3
Chapter Text
January 1st, 847
New Year’s Day.
Pieck set her bag down on the step overlooking the canal and sat beside it. The bag was heavy and thumped on the stone, but Pieck herself barely made a noise.
She took a sip of her paper cupped breakfast tea. Over-steeped.
A made up holiday to celebrate a made up occurrence with flimsy at best implications. The new beginnings thing was lost on Pieck — if she made resolutions, they were hardly ever because it was January.
Parties weren’t for her either. It wasn’t uncommon for people in the internment zone to avoid parties, you could throw a stone and hit a veteran, and Pieck wasn’t an exception. The bustle of purposeless crowds overwhelmed her, and she had never been good at making friends after she’d become more than human. People didn’t understand that she wasn’t a social step. She was a diseased, disgusting thing unfit for living.
She took a sip.
Most of her friends were on an island of ignorant fools miles away on a mission to save humanity, while the Cart and Beast Titans stayed here to guard the mainland. She didn’t know the details of their mission, but she liked to imagine the four of them had found odd jobs to do while they shared an apartment and planned. Marcel would try and teach the others life skills, while the younger boys dicked around but still climbed into bed together at night. Annie would be awkward, but Marcel would know when to give her space and when to sit and listen to her with understanding and a few well timed nods.
Pieck shook her head, trying to shake the thought itself away. She came here with a purpose and she would be late to work if she delayed any longer.
She slipped her hand into her canvas bag and took out a tall, bottled beer. It was meant to be shared. Pieck twisted off the cap.
She sipped it, wrinkling her nose at the sour taste. “Annie, Bertolt, Marcel, Reiner,” she listed off as she began to pour the bottle into the canal, “Come home safe, come home happy. We all miss you, some of us more than others. Porco isn’t himself, and I think he’d get better if you’d finish your mission. Magath gets nervous sometimes that you’re dead, and I have to promise him you aren’t,” Pieck paused, the bottle running dry, “Please, I hope you aren’t. I love you guys.”
She contemplated her next words, stepping outside of the note she'd had planned to inform the waves of how things had changed.
“Zeke is as obnoxious as ever. He asked me to marry him, which is inane as it is predictable. He hasn’t gotten any better at living outside of his own bubble,” Pieck snickered quietly to herself, “They’re already training new warrior candidates. It’s just as exhausting to watch as it was to do, but they’re all sweet kids. You’d like them.” She went silent, she was unsure of how to make conversation with something that didn’t talk back.
Pieck didn’t move from her spot. She finished her tea, and enjoyed the serene sounds of the water rushing past the stones underneath her. If she could extend the time before she had to leave, she would.
But time ticked on, and Pieck begrudgingly had to lift herself from the step.
She made her way across town to the training center. She had gone out of her way to find the canal that flowed into the ocean directly instead of connecting or draining into the sewers, and she paid the price in the form of sore feet in her snow boots.
The front desk at the training center was permanently unmanned, and Pieck was glad she wasn’t greeted upon her entry into the building. The candidates were lined up in the cold of the yard, and they all seemed to vibrate with excitement facing their superior officer.
Pieck was aware that the day before was another round of cuts, and the kids seemed marveled that they made it. About one and a half dozen kids remained, and there were only six titans to go between them, but still their eyes remained bright.
Pieck stood next to Magath while he explained their next year of qualifying tests and training. It was boring to hear, but she did her job sending the kids reassuring smiles since she knew Magath likely had that stern dad look on his own face.
Magath peeled away from the group after giving them instructions, taking Pieck along with him.
“So, what do you think?” Magath asked.
“Of… the kids?”
“The candidates. Soldiers,” Magath clarified, glancing back at where the lot of them were working together to make a campfire.
“They seem nice. Not quite up to par yet, but they’ve got time,” Pieck said. She honestly wasn’t sure how to evaluate the group, she didn’t spend time with them beyond what she was required to do, and answering his question concisely was a difficult feat.
Magath looked unimpressed, and he squinted down at Pieck, “You need to make more time for this. You’re the only warrior I have right now who isn’t too busy, and the kids need something to look up to.” Magath said with his imposing brow line.
“Right,” Pieck mumbled. She glanced over and noticed the kids managed to get a decent sized fire going, and were now working on setting up camp. The younger ones were mostly just playing fetch, but the older ones, a tall blond boy and a pretty brunette girl, were doing damn well at getting shit done.
“We’re going camping this weekend up in the mountains. You and I, along with a bunch of sub-sixteens,” Magath snickered to himself, “Sound fun?”
“Sounds like the worst thing I could imagine. And more like babysitting than a training exercise,” Pieck said with a grin.
“They aren’t any better at trusting each other than you were. Maybe you can teach them something.”
“I’ll teach them how to make actually decent food over a campfire in the dead of winter, that’s more valuable than whatever team building exercises you have planned,” Pieck nodded resolutely, glancing at the kids.
“Sure, kid. Pack a bag, be out front by five a.m. on Friday. We’ll be gone about a week,” Magath ordered.
“I thought you said a weekend?”
“I’m not sure. Teaching cooking skills must take more than two days.”
Pieck groaned but gave a thumbs up as she walked away. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted a group of four kids about seven or eight years of age fiddling with a bunch of rope and sticks, trying to build… something. It was cute. Pieck resolved to have a nice time on this weekend plus some.
On Friday, cold winds came to lick at their faces and draw shivers from even the most steadfast of the candidates. At five am in January the sun wasn't even a rumor. Pieck couldn't move from how they clustered around her, trying to sap off her unnatural body heat.
"Soldiers!"
Magath shouted as he approached on foot, and while each of the children jolted, they could not be bothered to abandon their heater. Pieck giggled and waved to Magath as best she could, her hand stuck around a young girl named Zofia with shiny platinum blonde hair.
"I realize the cold snap isn't what we were expecting this weekend, but keeping in line with the schedule we'll be going out for our exercise anyways. Cold doesn't stop the enemy." Magath's bag was leaned against Pieck's leg, and when he lifted it from her to throw over his shoulder, another kid took its place.
Wrangling a bunch of kids into trucks was hard. Doing it in the freezing cold that early in the day was hell. A few of the youngest broke out in tears by the time Pieck was buckling their seatbelts, and it didn't pass Pieck by the way Magath never looked these kids in the face.
A handful of hours in the warm trucks changed the general mood of things, so by the time they were parking up on the side of the mountain, the kids were back to full energy and standard resiliency. Pieck had to give it to them, kids were sturdy in a way adults weren't. They ran around and threw snow like tomorrow didn't matter, and they happily carried out any task given to them.
The two oldest candidates were put in charge of teams and set to competing. This meant Pieck and Magath could sit off to the side and watch as each team raced to assemble tents and build fires, eager to win their approval.
Right around noon Magath offered her his flask full of hot cider, and she smiled when he said to her, "So how about those cooking skills?"
Chapter 16: Bite Drive
Notes:
Heyyy
So this one is a little different. Consensual sexual content - what surprise (not that theres such a thing as non-consensual sex, that's just rape.)
Hope you enjoy. My gf had to proofread this one for me cuz I'm not very good at writing smut. I think it isn't half bad though.
Chapter Text
August 5th, 847
The cake in front of her was dripping frosting. The candles, of which there were five, were mismatched and dripping wax onto the top of the cake. It was ugly, collapsed under its own weight despite being a single tier. It was the best cake Pieck had ever received.
Her dad had been all too proud setting it in front of her. Her grin was dazzling with excitement and gratefulness in the face of such a treasure.
“I know it’s not-”
“It’s perfect, dad,” Pieck assured. Her father kissed her cheek, and took his seat at their quaint dining table. She blew out the candles with a single strong breath, and his clapping filled the room immediately.
It was only the two of them in their shared home for Pieck’s nineteenth birthday, but she had never been a social butterfly. The kids at the training center asked to come along when they discovered it was her birthday, but Pieck had vehemently declined and told them it would be no fun.
Her dad’s hand shook when he raised the knife to cut her cake. Pieck stood and gently slid the knife from his hand into her own before he could injure himself.
Pieck slipped easily into the role of caretaker. Worrying about him was easier than worrying about herself. She cut each of them a slice and paired his with one of his prescription sleeping medications, citing that if he was shaking like that he had probably overexerted himself at work.
Her dad put up a protest, claiming to want to spend time with his daughter, but she shut him down gently and guided him upstairs to his room.
He slept easily after that, and once he wasn’t awake to hear what she got up to, getting dressed and ready for a birthday celebration of her own was much easier.
***
The tavern glittered with light — stained glass panels above everyone’s head let moonlight paint the room in blues, pinks, and greens. Candles lined the walls, but the two measly sources weren’t enough to light the room beyond what was strictly necessary to safely move around.
The Founder's gift in Pieck’s blood relaxed her pupils open enough to allow what light that did exist to spill into her eye. Looking around and percieving her surroundings with detail wasn’t hard, and seeing what people thought was hidden by the dark was quite amusing to Pieck.
She bought herself a drink and claimed a table as her own. Drinking wasn’t something she did often–her liver recovered obscenely fast, and drinking at her own expense under those circumstances was pricey. She needed to figure out how to isolate her liver and still its function without cutting it out of her abdomen before she’d try to get drunk like that, otherwise she was just racing against the clock trying to get herself wasted for a fleeting second. People-watching the drunk patrons was far, far more amusing, after all.
They stumbled about, got into arguments saying things they didn’t mean, and the dumb pickup lines they attempted often had Pieck folded at the center. She tried not to step in unless it was necessary, but sometimes her own laughter got her into trouble when people didn’t take as kindly to eavesdropping as she did to doing it.
Pieck’s eyes traced the bar, identifying each person where they sat. The old cods and their war stories were always fun, but Pieck would have to strain her already top-of-the-line hearing to understand them from this distance. The young singles trying to pair off were a certainty for drama, but the married folk looking for extramarital dalliances were Pieck’s real bread and butter. Soap operas, if there ever were any.
Her eyes caught on the blue dress of a woman walking in. She sat herself down at the bar, and ordering something strong, if the clear and simple composition was any indicator.
The first thing Pieck noticed about the girl she’d inevitably take home that night was her hair. It was an ashy brow, dark and only barely clinging to color. A shade too warm to be gray, a shade too light to be black. Boring, compared to the flowing chestnuts or rich chocolates people with brown hair usually had, but with the pallid color of her skin (that’s what Pieck noticed next) anything else would make her look downright sickly.
Her complexion was as colorless as her hair, the shadows under her cheekbones and eyes were a worn-in gray as opposed to brown or purple with blood flow. A corpse’s skin. An exsanguinated, cold look. Pieck had seen it on the battlefield a million times, on dead bodies she herself made. Seeing that sort of skin on a living person was eerie.
Pieck took a breath to settle the scores of butterflies in her stomach and stood from her corner to go approach her treasured find. Her feet shook with every uncertain step, and the barely touched drink she carried across the bar was unstable in her hand. Still, she succeeded in slotting herself into the seat beside the girl and set her glass down with a loud thud.
The girl’s eyes flickered across, her gaze settling on the drink Pieck had held to her lips.
“Is that any good?”
Pieck spared her a glance, “Sure, if you don’t mind the taste of engine fuel.”
The brunette grinned and looked back at her own glass of spirits, taking a small sip of something that smelled too highly proofed for anyone to be sipping. Pieck’s eyes traced the movement, her gaze clinging to the plush pinch of her lips around the rim of the glass.
“Do you have a name, stranger?” the brunette’s honeyed voice cut through the noise, and Pieck swallowed at her catlike demeanor.
“Most people do. What’s yours?”
“Antoinette.”
“Occitanian,” Pieck commented, “Is that where you’re from?” She glanced down, double checking that the civilians' armband she’d spied on the woman’s arm hadn’t disappeared in the past few minutes.
Antoinette sighed, turning her eyes away from the well-meaning warrior. “My mother was,” she admitted, “Now. Fair’s fair.”
“I suppose it is. I’m-” the idea flashed through Pieck’s mind to give a fake name, but she didn’t follow through, “Pieck.”
Antoinette’s eyebrow raised, and she lifted her glass again for another teasing sip of hellfire, “I don’t hear that one much, your parents are odd ducks.”
Pieck’s eye tracked every movement the woman sat beside her made, and every slight twitch made by her sent Pieck’s heart bounding after the chase.
Pieck’s discerning gaze didn’t roam long. Her gaze locked into Antoinette’s, and the air was sucked from her lungs. “Yeah…” Pieck murmured, breathless.
The final cherry on the ghoulish sundae that was the woman beside Pieck was her eyes. They were pools of moonlight, an icy lake of silver looking back at her with equal interest. They reminded Pieck of her own eyes, whenever she had the time anymore to look into a mirror. Dull, uninteresting gray. Just another shade of death in this ghost of a woman. The only color natural to her was the red rimming her eyes and her blood-flushed lips.
Yes, she’d do nicely. Pieck wasn’t a necrophile, but fucking this living dead girl would make some of the guilt over her pile of corpses feel a little better, she hoped.
The thought of her own countless murders soured the lustful yearning in her hindbrain. As punishment, Pieck downed the rest of her own drink, no small feat, and sacrificed the glass from her personal space so she could request another. She wouldn’t get drunk, but she could punish herself in a different way instead.
Antoinette made a noise of sympathy from beside her, and Pieck was suddenly pulled from her head and made aware of the fact that she wasn’t alone in this bar, and had chosen to entertain company.
“Hard day?” She asked the warrior, sympathy and amusement mixing in her tone.
“Something like that. I’m not the best with crowds,” Pieck said. It was true, but it wasn’t completely true.
“I could accompany you outside, if you’d like. I’d bet you it’s quieter,” Antoinette smiled, and Pieck already knew how everything else would play out from here.
Pieck stood and tipped for both herself and her evening’s company. It seemed fair, since the brunette was going through the trouble of finding the gaps in the tavern’s increasingly full room, guiding Pieck through it with sure feet uninhibited by liquor.
When they left through the door and Autumn’s breeze made itself known, Pieck finally felt like she could breathe again. Antoinette rubbed her bare hands together, breathing hot air onto them, and it seemed only natural for Pieck to offer her warm hand up to her companion in order to remedy the situation.
So that’s how Pieck found herself strolling down one of the alleyways of Eldian Liberio, the cold hand of a blue-dressed ghost intertwined in her own during their aimless walk. If either of them had designations as to where they were headed, they didn’t share it.
The silence was nice, Pieck’s eyes wandered over the cobblestone and brick of the part of town she’d never been in before, and she trusted Antoinette to not let her come to harm as she did. The spell of silence cast over the two of them broke suddenly when the brunette stopped beside Pieck, in front of a tall apartment building.
“This is me,” said Antoinette, gesturing shyly at the front door, “I’m sorry we couldn’t walk for longer.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Pieck shook her head.
“Interested in a nightcap?” she asked, a glimmer of mischief in her eye.
Against her own better judgment, Pieck followed her evening’s company into the small but well maintained apartment she called home. The smell of lavender was strong almost to the point of being unpleasant, but the undercurrent of another sour, acrid smell didn’t slide under Pieck’s radar.
She tried to hide a cough behind a strategic clearing of her throat, but based on the amused look on the brunette’s face, she’d say she was unsuccessful.
“Having fun, there?” Antoinette asked with a sly smile. She moved a glass vase aside on her coffee table and sat on the couch, gesturing for Pieck to join her.
“Sure,” Pieck snickered. She sat beside the pretty lady and settled into the plush cushions, reveling in the comfort. It was nicer than the couch her father and her had, the damn thing older than Pieck.
While Pieck was considering thread counts and fabric types, her pretty company had leaned over and grabbed a leather cigarette case from her side table, opening it up to reveal several neat little rows. The acrid smell from earlier only intensified, though.
“Do you smoke?” Antoinette asked, lifting one to her lips.
“Occasionally,” Pieck shrugged, “I don’t have any on me right now, though.”
“Figures. Here,” Antoinette pulled another from the perfectly even case, and held it out to Pieck between delicate fingers with nicely varnished nails.
Pieck, not thinking anything of it, accepted and placed it between her lips, leaning in to allow the brunette to light it for her.
Immediately, she knew something was different. The first inhale she took was thick, and the smoke clung to the walls of her lungs with a sappy, heavy texture. She blew out the smoke faster than maybe she was supposed to, but the sweet taste of whatever this was, when she’d been expecting the awful and punishing taste of tobacco, was jarring.
Beside Pieck, Antoinette giggled. She sat with her back to the armrest, and watched with rapt attention while Pieck sniffed the burning end like a dog to try and decipher what she had.
“Not a big weed person?” asked Antoinette mirthfully.
Oh. Well. Pieck was in for it, in that case. “I didn’t say that.” Pieck mumbled, taking another drag and holding it in her lungs for a considerably longer time. While the first igniting drag had felt like it was scorching Pieck’s lungs, this second one filled her with a pleasant, heady feeling. The burn of her lungs’ muscles still lingered where they tried to make up for the lack of oxygen, but Pieck didn’t complain.
Slowly, as she made her way through the first joint, and a second when it was offered. Pieck actually felt her lungs relaxing open and allowing her to get high, and the novelty of it meant she didn’t care if she woke up missing an organ. She’d just regrow it anyway.
This would’ve definitely been far too much to smoke for her first time if she didn’t have her own brain working to resolve the intoxication as soon as it started. Pieck could hardly pry her eyes open, and her head had found a comfortable spot on Antoinette’s shoulder to stay for now.
Speaking of the pretty brunette, she was slowly sliding her armband off and undoing the buttons of her blue dress’ bodice. Pieck couldn’t tell if she thought Pieck was asleep, or if she was too uncoordinated due to the drugs, but Pieck still slipped her eyes open every now and again to spy on the efforts.
“Do you wanna come… to bed with me?” Antoinette slurred out. Alright, so she knew Pieck wasn’t asleep, good to know.
“Mhmm,” Pieck slid her hand over and interlaced it with the brunettes, enjoying the cold feeling of her skin where Pieck felt like she was somehow a million degrees hotter than usual, “Lead the way.”
Getting the two of them into bed was a production, their limbs slow to obey commands and giggles filled the small rooms of the apartment.
How they ended up with their lips pressed together was another question, one Pieck didn’t have an answer for. The brunette hovered over her, and Pieck clung on, doing her best to stop Antoinette from pulling away.
Antoinette’s lips moved against her with a slow rhythm and Pieck was desperate for more. Her blood thrummed through her body with an embarrassing intensity, but it didn’t stop Pieck from sucking Antoinette’s bottom lip into her mouth, trying to elicit more attention from her.
The moan that greeted her was more than worth it, a sweet sound that filled the room and Pieck’s own ears effortlessly. Pieck’s fingers tangled into the cool brown locks above her and she stole kiss after kiss from the stranger. Antoinette's lip swelled with irritation, and the novelty of the heat in her flesh from the immune response made Pieck giggle into the kiss.
Antoinette’s own hips came to push up between Pieck’s, and the Cart Titan couldn't stop the pathetic whine that escaped her lips. Her cunt ached with need, with the overwhelm from the drug amplifying every touch, every sound. She’d barely been touched, but her clit twitched in interest with every grinding movement.
“Keep making pretty sounds like that, darling,” Antoinette sneered. Her mouth pulled from Pieck’s own and attached to her collarbone, left exposed after all of the risqué shifting of clothing. She throbbed, she needed it, the teeth pressing into her skin threatening to draw blood didn’t even cross her mind as a concern when getting fucked senseless into this unfamiliar mattress was on the table.
“Please- please,” Pieck groaned out after a particularly rough bite, “An- oh, please,” she rambled on, unable to stop.
“Keep talking, gorgeous,” she said, voice muffled by Pieck’s hair and bruising skin. Antoinette’s hands wandered down, foregoing stripping the Cart Titan properly in favor of pushing her skirt up and fiddling with the panties that laid beneath, ruined from how slick she was.
“Already?” Antoinette’s voice teased, but Pieck was too blissed out to consider her words, “Poor thing, I’m sorry.”
She pushed Pieck’s underwear to the side, exposing her to the cold, and ran a finger up her slit. Pieck gasped, and clamped her legs shut around Antoinette’s forearm.
“Sensitive,” Pieck managed to force out, her lips heavy and hard to move. “Can I touch you instead?”
Something like disappointment flashed through Antoinette’s eyes, but she relented. She was unashamed and undressed fully in full view of Pieck. Her skin prickled quickly in the stagnant autumn chill of the apartment, but she herself didn’t seem bothered.
The supple plains of flawless skin laid before Pieck made her teeth ache in the way usually reserved for Zeke. She longed to sink her canines into spread-wide thighs.
Pieck trailed her touch down Antoinette’s stomach, and when she reached her pubic bone, she curled her fingers into the wet heat of Antoinette’s cunt. The beauty squirmed and whimpered aloud, her hole tightening up around Pieck’s hand.
It was probably the drugs that made her ignore decorum and submit to the itchy, instinctive feeling in the back of her mind. Teeth wrapped around the inner thigh’s flesh, holding it there and sucking gently.
When there wasn’t any protest she deepened her bite. The gritty feeling of skin splitting under her teeth was addictive, and if the heat flowing to the area was any indication, it would bruise beautifully in minutes.
Something between a pained gasp and a whimper left Antoinette’s mouth when Pieck released her jaw. The agitated wound was exposed to air, and was probably unpleasant to her.
Pieck pushed her fingers fully in, curling them against that spongy sweet spot. Her thumb found the swollen clit just above and gave it gentle affection, nudging and circling it.
It was merely a distraction. While her healing factor was non-transferable except by death, she did want to soothe the woman she’d hurt with her urges.
Pieck lapped her tongue over the imprints of her teeth, coating them in saliva and hopefully lessening the burn.
“More,” she heard from above her in a broken voice.
Pieck lapsed. Her movements became unsure, and she gave the bite wound a cursory kiss.
“Pieck,” Antoinette panted, “bite me, please.”
Abiding the request, she nosed her way down Antoinette’s thigh and found the thick pad of fat and muscle at the junction of her ass and leg. The smell filling the room was clouding Pieck’s head, a rich scent filled with pheromones. A mindless act, her fingers kept curling inside the other woman, though she was so wet that there was hardly any friction to work against.
A preparatory kiss was pressed to the spot she’d found. Then, Pieck dug her teeth into Antoinette’s skin again. She was desperate for those delicious sounds and it didn't matter that the plush of Antoinette's thigh stopped her from breathing.
And oh, she delivered. Antoinette squealed and wrapped her legs around Pieck’s head, preventing her from pulling her bite back when the blood welled up in her mouth. Fortunately, the air deprivation and soft heat around her ears suited Pieck just fine.
“P-Pieck! Fuck, oh god, I’m gonna-”
Pieck unlatched her jaw and exposed the wound just like before, and that seemed to be enough to send Antoinette over the edge.
Her cunt pulsed and clamped down around Pieck’s hand, becoming impossibly wet and paradoxically tight at the same time. The hot muscles pushing against the shifter almost matched her own core temperature, and it was riling up the baser instincts telling her to seek out a partner of similar strength.
Antoinette fell limp after her orgasm finished, legs splayed open with little regard for how she was perceived.
Pieck withdrew her touch, drying it off on a stray towel scattered on the bedroom floor. Once she felt dry enough she lied down next to her lover for the night.
Pieck lingered in her high, but soon enough it started to wane. When it did she began picking her clothing up from the floor.
“Leaving?” Antoinette asked behind her.
“Yes.”
“Oh,” discontent lingered in her voice, “That’s unfortunate. You can stay for the night if you’d like.”
“No, it’s better if I don’t.” Pieck muttered.
Antoinette moved to sit up, bed creaking beneath her. Pieck hated to imagine what kind of noise it was making earlier. “Is there a partner you’re stepping out on?”
“No, I-” Pieck grimaced, “I just like sleeping in my own bed.”
Antoinette looked skeptical. Picking up a robe from the floor, she wrapped herself up in it and went to go get something from her kitchen. Pieck continued dressing, ignoring the other woman.
“Here’s my card,” Antoinette, whose last name was Tailler apparently, handed a small piece of card stock to Pieck. She didn’t take it.
“I can’t. This was nice but I can’t see you again.” Pieck worried her bottom lip between her teeth, tugging at a loose piece of skin.
“Why not?”
Because she’d be disappointed. Because she’d realize Pieck was gone all the time either to the facility or to some distant land. She’d learn that Pieck was far from interesting, and then Pieck would die, and she’d be disappointed by that too.
“I’m not looking for anything serious,” Pieck settled on saying.
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