Chapter Text
It wasn't like she didn't know who they were taking her to see. Eren, directing construction from atop the brand-new Wall Carla—little Titans making glassy dog-piles, a hundred feet below his vantage point—told her everything about what Historia had been talked into, though he told it with a distraction that could be felt even above the trademark intensity of his sky-silvered stare. When he'd first seen Ymir, that had been one thing. His attention had been total, if largely incoherent. But once the shock was over with—absorbed as completely as if his mind, like his changed body, would never suffer itself to bruise—he spoke in a voice whose apologetic burr fell miles shy of fury. She wouldn't have believed it, but the signs were under her nose: having lived to eighteen, he'd grown up. He let the patrol squad dump her back in the wagon after ten minutes' recapitulation with barely a death threat to their leader. Mikasa, coming up behind him with cropped hair and new scarlet darns on the scarf, had said, “You've become lucky, Ymir”—like they had ever been on diagnostic terms before.
But it was what everyone told her. “You're in luck, Dancing Titan,” said the little captain with a frown; in three years she'd forgotten his name, if not his Byzantine grace, the stop-and-start of dense efficiency. “She won't even let us interrogate you. Executive order: first dibs to the king.” He signed the transfer papers that would deliver Ymir into the hands of the MP, his pen moving for a surprisingly long time. She hadn't thought he'd be the type to have a last name. Or to know how to write.
The hell of it was, she'd have been happy to talk. If they'd asked, or stood still long enough. She would have spilled her guts, what she had left of them. The whole thrilling escape, theirs for the price of removing the muzzle. She hadn't had mouth or hands free since a squad netted her outside Carla. At which time she had heard them argue seriously, their voices muffled by the fog of intercedent flesh, about whether to free her from her cocoon of nerves and live in fear of future enlargement, or leave her in gross Titan-shape and rely on what security stakes and rope mesh could offer. She could have told them—but she was grateful, in the end, that they had decided to spare their horses and bring back the human kernel: the greater part of her flesh left split, steaming, jewel-bright as a grapefruit in the sun. She was grateful for the muzzle. She was grateful for her hemp-wrapped manacles, designed so that the wearer could never cut themselves on iron. Pathetic, but she would have done and hoped for worse, if it meant not returning to Historia in the oversized nude; not saying words of three years' dreaming with a mouth best-formed for regicide.
Oh, yes. First dibs to the king.
Still, it would have been nice if they'd taken the gag off now and then to feed her. She had thought they might, before she remembered that she was a Titan, and they'd had time to learn what Titans did other than kill. The sun on the side of her face, as she lay curled in one corner of their cart: eyes closed, body shuddering, fear and its vibrations outclassed by a wheel dragged over some rocks. The mammoth gear of this uneven world, locking cogs with her too-meager frame. Sending quakes, revolutions, from her edges inward to her heart. They had taught her the workings of the 3DMG, so long ago, with charts and wooden models. Shadis himself had explained the axles: how the centers at least remained still. Although, on a wagon, even the hubcaps were moving. Just forward: onward, steady, a straight shot above the earth.
“You're a lucky bitch,” said the guard sitting on the supply boxes at the front of the cart. He sounded tired but happy. There might have been a note of humor, certainly a note of pride. When she opened her eyes he was looking at the horses, and beyond them to the road north; like her, was thinking of the center, and his unaltered home.
Historia was on her throne.
She's cut her hair, was Ymir's thought on entering: first, dizzy, idiot thought, the thin white figure in deep gloom like a salt lure to the nose of a stag. She was serious-faced, cloaked in black velvet, a chain of uncut gemstones hanging taut around her neck. The crown sat forward, hard on her brow. White gold turned by hair and skin's proximity to brass. She had a stand for her feet, which would otherwise have dangled above the uppermost step. Her expression had morphed rapidly from austerity through horror.
Except you couldn't tell if the last was repulsion or rage. In the moment of change you knew the difference, but at its end you were only afraid.
“Remove her restraints,” said the king, so shortly Ymir struggled to hear. The guards did not. Several advisors from around the throne's steps spoke up in a reflexive babble of protest, and the highest-ranking MP soldier present—Marlowe, she thought his name was, stupid hair—looked suicidally tempted to join in. But Historia said: “Leave the cuffs. She can't bite her wrists behind her back. And—” Feigned hesitation, probably. “If she tries to bite anything else, you can always hold her head.”
Like Ymir was one of the spies, always thinking in last-hope ways to harm themselves enough. Tooth and ring. Did it escape the crowd that when she'd been honest at Utgard, she'd done it with a knife, like a civilized tool-user?
Okay. Very likely yes. And she'd learned to be more inventive, in her time away. But the roof would constrict even her compact Titan, and—
It didn't matter. Off came the leather cup, the stinking straps. She lifted her face from their unwilling hands and resisted an abrupt urge to spit benevolently. Death to the human cancer, you'll never break us! If that was, perhaps, what at least a few in the anteroom were expecting, it would have been kind of her to indulge them, goddess-like to seed fear. However... she'd finished her sacrificial stint a while back. Or she wouldn't be here now, would she?
It was hard to breathe. Christa—Historia—was still looking at her, and she was free, lips and tongue, her breath steaming dove-gray out on chill air. At the pit of her stomach, some coward's pyre was burning. They were surely supposed to keep palaces better heated than this. All human ingenuity, propulsion and consequence: in the end, running would have left her warmer. (Legs and back as long together as trees—loping across grass which, though tall for its species, would poke like eiderdown beneath a Titan's board-thick soles. Historia, say, in the palm of one hand.)
“Hi honey,” called Ymir, all in a burst. “I'm—home?”
Beside the throne, an officer Ymir belatedly recognized as the Corps' scientist laughed. Marlowe pinched the bridge of his nose. But Historia had done nothing for several moments; sat forward, now, her eyes like abalone, the pupils pores through which something long-dead had once exhaled.
“We are content that this is the Titan Ymir,” she said, “and no impostress.”
What, she'd had copycats? Ymir experienced a brief, deeply embarrassing desire to hunt these people down, knock them around a little, and then encourage them to find happiness in themselves and their own identities. She crushed it, but the outline remained: help them. Change them. Help her.
“...As such, we ask that the honorable representatives of the Police take her into custody at your capital headquarters, until such a time as the matter can be dealt with more suitably.”
Relief from the advisors, muttering from the guards—Ymir was pretty sure they'd been instructed to drop everything for this transport, and two had been with her for every leg of the journey since Rose, so it made sense they'd be huffy. She couldn't claim overwhelming sympathy. Historia was there, fewer than twenty paces from her. Historia held her gaze like a magician at a market, so she couldn't look down and see the trick. In her face Ymir saw panic, emptiness, a trace of blunt joy; she was smiling, though maybe not aware of it. Her hair, behind the elfin bulk of her ear, cupped her temple like snow on the hard banks of running water. Maybe Ymir had been wrong to prize good looks, shorter vocal cords, for this; maybe she should have come a shambling giant, and snatched their king away.
Too late for that. The thread snapped; Historia turned, face smoothing, to look calmly and gravely at the scientist's report. The MP obeyed its motto. She was bundled out of the dark, chilly, high-ceilinged throne room, out past brightening walls and gold-accented amber pillars—she stumbled, shoved, from an archway into a courtyard, and the full light of noon.
They held her at the capital headquarters for two days, underground. No one put the muzzle back on her, but no one spoke to her either. Just what were they afraid of? Historia, who seated couldn't touch her feet to earth?
Hanji brought down a meal the second night, their long features electrified by a thunderbolt of a grin. There was another scout with them: hooded, standing coyly apart from the bars—no badge of rank left visible by the fall of dull-green wool. Like an artist’s rendition of “Martyrdom” in old bronze. They had that kind of statue, here in Sina—faceless military silhouettes, named for unpensionable virtues.
Hanji pulled the cover off the tray with a flourish, and Ymir tried hard not to let emotion reach her face. She tightened both hands around iron, instead; leaned against the limits of her cage.
“Squad leader, is that tomato soup?”
“It's commander now, actually,” said Hanji Zoe, jiggling their bolo tie.
So much for saving Erwin Smith. “You boiled a commander just for me?”
“All right then!” Hanji announced, eyes raised to Heaven. “I’ll just leave you to it, Private Lenz.”
They slid the tray into Ymir's hands through a waist-height slot in the bars, and then, while Ymir was still collecting her jaw off the flagstones, turned away. Though not without flinging her an exaggerated wink, like the dazzle off rain. “And, soldier—” this to the shadow, the idol, the girl at their back “—what I said about the debriefing stands. If you need help, you only have to ask.”
“Thank you, Captain,” said Historia, pushing back her cowl.
Hanji went up the stairs two at a time. Historia took their place before the door of Ymir’s cell.
She was paler seeming in the light of the torches than in the day-smudged darkness of her court. “Your soup,” she said, and Ymir looked down automatically at her overflowing bowl.
It was very red. The color and slow texture both sparked nausea in her gut. But sparked, not stirred: one volatile reaction, queasiness gone as it came. She hadn’t eaten with this mouth in three weeks. If she’d been human they would have assigned her water, tea; would have led her back to fullness by demure half-inching steps, with fluids, crackers, and long months till meat. Her weak imagined stomach; her dry limbs. As it was, they’d brought her everything she wanted—and damn them, but she felt ready to eat.
There was bread beside the soup and a surprising wooden spoon. Apparently they'd gotten over their fear that she'd self-aggrandize with a splinter. She sat down on the floor with her shins bending up against the bars, and Historia, after a moment’s transparent indecision, knelt across from her. She seemed to be drinking Ymir in. That was fine: Ymir could do tall, dark, and potable. She sipped tomato viscera and wondered what it would be like to lose your mind in a carcass entirely your own, without the possibility of extraction or rebirth.
“I thought about this,” said Historia distantly, “for so long, it seems to me I’ve said everything already. Like you’ve been here for years, listening.”
“Well…”
Ymir could point to several problems she had with that scenario. Number one being the projected term of office.
“About that,” she said, shaking her head. “Just how much vacation time, with the good ol’ MP, do I have to look forward to?”
Historia looked off to one side. Funny. She had done plenty of that when they were trainees together. And earlier, in her ceremonial robes, she had been mistakeable for the Christa Lenz Ymir knew. All strangeness owing to the burdens of command. But to see her now in uniform, fair head familiarly turned; her neck and jaw like one of Connie’s little carved-soap figurines, every flake of wax and, hah, lye, scraped from the perfect candor of the pulsing jugular—
Ymir had spent years groping after a fiction’s guessed-at soul. Had found that here: curled, rotting in the shade. Fed like a mushroom or white grub on rich obscurity. It occurred to her that she had missed forever the chance to speak to perfect Christa, who worried and helped, and who had befriended Ymir when Historia Reiss might have left her to blindness, or a nightmare's afterimage. That she ought perhaps to mourn even the necessary loss: as a fugitive pays witness when the bridge behind them burns.
Then she saw Historia’s mouth open—heard the first stammered sounds of her excuse—forgot all, not unkindly. Falseness, goodness, the means to this end; but Historia was there, cowardice worn like firelight, and if she’d faced Ymir directly then greed would have charred her glance.
In one moment Ymir traded her first love for a stranger bisected by bars. Or not quite a stranger: met once before, on a tower, and again in the woods.
She put the soup down. She surged forward to grip the bars again. It was too fast, too much, she knew that even as Historia flinched back; she had pressed her forehead against a gap and she could feel her eye pulling open, the wide unready orange. “Hey,” she said; and closing both eyes heard bestial ardor in the word. “Hey. Just tell me, please? Wall’s wounds, your majesty, you know how I trust you.”
There was a silence. “'How I trust you,'” Historia said—quoting, not correcting. Her voice had climbed in pitch, and Ymir supposed she must sound that way to her: high and desperate. It was a better impression than Reiner’s sharp falsetto.
Then: “No, I’m sorry. You’re right. I just... need them to forget you. It may take a little time.”
She reached out to smooth the chapped dun skin of Ymir’s knuckles. Her fingers, once they’d arrived, wrapped around every edge of Ymir’s fist—canvas over the iron manacles.
“Forget me,” Ymir echoed, testing the weight on her wrists.
She’d tried, earlier, to push away these ideas, and with success. They returned now too-bashfully, as though they’d have preferred a longer trial separation. The truth was, she believed humanity needed her. More as the years passed, not less. Lumpy Wall Carla, sure; but didn’t they—hadn’t they—did they know what was coming?
Did she?
“Historia…”
“I can do it,” Historia said. “It won’t take long. And after you’ll be free.”
Not just above ground, then, or in a more comfortable box. Ymir thought of the world beyond the walls, its forests, prairies, oceans, pits, eye-blue abandoned cities; thought of how she had slept under a waning moon, on the top of Wall Maria, and doing so felt time itself slink down to fence her in. “I believe you,” she said. “Guess the songsters are right—it is good to be king.”
Historia laughed. Ymir pushed her head down further along the channel formed by bars, scrunching up her forehead, butting against warm air like a dog would squeeze through pickets. “It’s not all sunshine and roses,” Historia said, thumb and forefinger fitted to the tense scallops of Ymir’s knuckles. “Remember when you swallowed me alive? At least you coughed me up.”
“So they made you,” said Ymir, confirming what had been her suspicion since the news came out of Eren’s mouth. “This was never your idea.”
“Don’t be angry with them,” said Historia, but offhandedly: probably Ymir could be angry if she wanted. “I went in eyes open.” She snaked her left hand into the cell, suddenly, hooking it around the little arch of Ymir’s nape. “Please.” Her voice cracked, a seashell in sand underfoot—so crisp and hollow. “Don’t think I was unwilling. I knew what I had to bargain for.”
The bar on Ymir’s cheek, like a stopped blow. The hot, halved, liquid mouth. You were my condition, Ymir heard, unspoken, as she relaxed into the kiss: thinking about the probable blood-and-tomato cocktail of her breath, thinking about the other kingly hand twined in her collar. So no one was coming for her. No one would torture her, speak to her, ask for her help; tell her what she’d forgotten, between capture and release.
She drew back to take painful breath. That was all fine. But: “Historia,” she said, “get me out of here. And we’ll see to those roses. How about that?”
Later, in a disused castle chamber with the internal complexity/approximate color scheme of a reopened wound—still shackled, face-down, and as conscious of heat from Historia's side as a lodestone must be of the pole—Ymir lay waiting: for the first word or sign that she should turn her head.
In the doorway, Marlowe, who had brought her here, had something left to say. And at this rate would spit it out when Sina went a-walking.
“Is there a problem, Captain?” said Historia, not nicely. She was carding her hand through Ymir's hair, short strokes from the root out to a length she could wind around her fist; it went lace, pull, pull, wind, loose, and lace again, until Ymir's head felt like a corset, or a bed of flowers post- the weeding. Either way, crap news for excess brains. Ymir was a Titan: she knew what her mind was. Illicit, invasive. Fat which hangs off hunger's bones. The pure line of planned beauty, a starved monster with one purpose: around that, human reason, choking—obscuring—intent.
“I just don't see,” said Marlowe. He stopped. A calculated lull, probably, he was Sina-bred. Love in his voice like the echo of a whetstone, coming high off the swing of the sword. That squeak, that whine: but the words were sharp. “Your Majesty, I must ask you—shouldn't I, shouldn't someone stand guard? At least outside the door?”
He sounded as though he would rather have been anywhere else. Speaking to merchants about their tax invoices. Speaking to Survey Corps members about their leader's political ascendancy. He was not comfortable, that much was clear, with what he believed would happen here once the great door was shut. But he had considered the problem. Probably with the help of diagrams from his laughing coworker, the snub-nosed bottle blonde; but he had thought, and thought harder, through the lady's half veil of his distaste. About the facts of bodies, and Ymir with both hands free.
Good man. Ymir didn't think much of his persuasive technique, but he was doing the best he could with what charm-free courage he'd mustered. Historia said something cold, and he replied, while Ymir breathed in rose oil, shining small on Historia's wrist.
It was certainly a terrible injustice to say that because her policemen cared for her safety, the king had lied to them. But Ymir did wonder about the process. Thinking of Historia without Christa was like parting the puppetmaster from his livelihood. You could see her back at the workshop, tinkering, dreaming up the loved machine. Underground, Ymir had felt one mask was shattered; but the problem wasn't props alone, so much as it was a gullible audience. Puppets played to worse than puppets: automata, wind-up toys. Once you worked out what people would accept in the name of a familiar story, you never could replace the lid on their quick-turning gears.
“You know my decision, corporal.”
...Or so Ymir assumed. She wasn't in the business of seizing spectators, rebuilding them as loyal acolytes. Maybe, more likely, it had been hit and miss and miss, a twelve-year-old formally doing the math on kindness. Maybe it took another liar—the likes of her, the likes of Reiner Braun—to be so damn resentful, or so wooed. Yeah. And maybe she would have believed that, if Marlowe hadn't dropped to one knee and given Historia the key to her shackles, before he marched out the open door.
“What'd they find in that basement?” Ymir asked, when he had closed it. Historia was turning her prize over between two fingers, like air could be unlocked. Which it did feel like, the closer they got to each other.
“Sorry?”
“Eren's key. I mean, if they've retaken Maria...”
“Oh. Yes. I think it was nothing we didn't already know. Humans, titans, history's suppression. And there was something there that made crystallization much easier for him, but he didn't want to talk about why. He said—” concentration, as though studying notes scratched up her inner arm “—he understood Annie better now, and probably her dad had been 'a real piece of work.'”
Ymir tried to imagine the relevance. Did hardening require a flashback to an older man, who looked like you, waving a green syringe?
“And that's it,” she said, questioning: unwilling, not unable, to acknowledge her dismay. “Just some doctor's theories. One weird trick to save humanity?”
“So they tell me,” said Historia quietly, putting down the key.
“And now, this fourth wall—”
“Can I please kiss you?”
Ymir didn't bother to rattle her chains. She rolled onto her back, instead, and sat up awkwardly, and let Historia push her down. There were curtains around the bed, drawn on one side, and after a moment Historia moved away and undid their ties. Kneeling at the edge of the mattress, she pulled the curtains shut: so that suddenly the light on her was rose-colored, dyed by tough silk. The muscular striation of dark folds, which cast vertical shade on Historia's cheek: as though that childish gesture—two fists brought together in a defiant bid for the privacy already assured them—had been, disguised, the motion of a knife under the skin. Skin peeled freely from the marbled red-gray core.
Historia remained sitting with her face to the drapes for a raw moment. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think he's lucky. I would like to go back to my farm.”
She shifted her weight backward, folding her arms atop her knees; dust billowed at the movement, rusty steam floating above the site of injury. “I don't know why, really. I haven't got pleasant memories of it. But it was the one place I ever felt like things belonged to me—even if it was only a bucket, or the stone walls of that stable. The hay in the loft, for goodness' sake. The rocks those children threw at me, I used to take those back and hide them with the chickens, like they would hatch.
“Ever since then... it's been what the government issued me. Even this room.”
“You are the government,” said Ymir, over other answers forming sour on her tongue.
Historia shook her head. “I no longer view the world like I did as a child, when everything I could touch was mine. Whether that meant a hug, or simply handling a tool—or being slapped. But still, because I remember my misunderstanding, I want to go back there. Maybe only to clarify for myself that I was wrong.”
“Sounds like a fun day trip.”
Historia was still talking. “I have no claim on anything in the world, besides my name.”
What?
What about her dullard species? Or her lies? That scarf Ymir had bought her the winter of their first year, what had happened to that? What about—me, me, me, me, the worthless when-unbroken refrain of living minds. Devoted subjects all. But none so steadfast as Ymir, who had died and not stopped asking.
She had once believed—
Selfishness her maker's mark, her signet ring, used to seal even submission. Hiss of lead on wax. Hiss of blood from a pinprick like clear light through a pinhole, projecting human weakness onto some enormous screen: the only other effective function, for a ring, she'd ever heard of. There was a part of Ymir's mind that knew her protests were mere vanity, even as they pertained to great distinctness from Annie Leonhardt. Not valuable enough, not rare enough, to be collared and held! The same objection she had raised to the Survey Corps' forbearance. And bullshit, in at least this instance. She was, if not a person, then close enough to twice betray one. If she loved Historia, trusted Historia, coveted the depths of Historia's want as water maps a well, still she might one day wake with the compassionate sense to desert her. She might grow tired, bored, savage or prudent; and when that happened chains would buoy flesh, compared with the heart's lapsing servitude. She would at best linger without belonging. So it was not a love that could be called unconditional, or place her on a level with the child's false beliefs.
There was another part of her mind that knew, if Historia asked it, she would roll over and beg.
To the best of her clamped-down ability, at least. Where was the key—she was still tracking the key. Did that count for something? Historia was probably sitting on it. Why had she come here, across a thousand miles of unsullied ground, only to falter at an imagined choice, giving or not giving the last inch of herself? She had been coughed up by Bertholdt and Reiner's home to travel wasteland that was genuinely, honorably, wasted, no side favored by its casual flourishing. She had slid into the walls' concentric cuffs, willingly, her body a penitent murderer's hand or just the forelimb of a kinky fucker. And despite that she chafed against her actual manacles. The sores healed and reopened at such a pace that sometimes smoke had gloved her to the elbow, underground. Her hands lost to vision, like the censers swung in bygone Wallist churches, blurred and golden at the heart of a cloud. A censer and a censor. The haze of myrrh not less unfathomable than those harsh anesthetics earlier Reisses had doled out: you forgot the forgetting, or saw at most a shadow draw sharp curves on a short chain.
She drew breath.
“Just the name, huh?”
“Don't think I don't remember who gave me that back,” Historia said. A smile you could hear. She pulled off the nightgown, another dermal layer shed in one impressive piece: though it got briefly caught on the arms squared above her head. Her back was white and broad. She bent down for a second kiss, and this time round remained there.