title: slept in last night's clothes and tomorrow's dreams
summary: somehow, despite being dropped in a different world with different monsters, it would be Hange who would do what she does best.
an: what do you mean there isn't a lot of x-overs between SnK and OnS they were made to be x-overed fix this people. also, [uma thurman], fob.
warning: if you find yourself unable to properly place the correct timeline for both series I've done my job. also, this was a lot funnier in my head.
Hange isn't exactly sure what happens. One minute, she's in the barracks, lights dimly lit as she reads notes written in her scrawled, spider-like hand, too busy trying to put pieces together in her mind to reach a conclusion to even take off her gear.
Or maybe that's a dream. Maybe she just died while battling titans, batted out of the air by huge hands and swallowed, only to be vomited back up to lie in a puddle of slobber.
Whatever she had been doing doesn't matter, because the next minute, she falls hard on a chunk of rubble made out of something that feels like rock, except there are thick metal wires buried within, sticking out all haywire.
The world has changed, she thinks as she slowly looks around, rubbing her aching backside to soothe the pain. This is not the inside of the walls, not like anywhere she has ever seen. Buildings shaped and coloured oddly lie in clear ruins, destroyed. The ground is hard, covered in black and occasional paint but broken, shattered.
This can't be the inside of the walls, because she can't see the walls. She sees the sky, unbound by the edges of any of the three walls that keep the last of humanity safe in a gilded cage of complacency.
This is the outside, where the Survey Squads regularly go for the sake of furthering humanity's advance. Except, she has never seen a place like this before in all the trips to the outside she's taken.
Warily, she pulls out a blade and readies her gear for action. She hears no sounds of titans, the paced, dread-inducing thump-thump-thump of large feet drumming against the ground, but she can't imagine anything else that could have created the destroyed wreck that she sees now. Perhaps these are leftovers of the civilizations before, even if they look nothing like what she is used to or expected, shattered by scavenging titans scrambling for humans.
But they look too intact to be ruins from over a hundred years ago. She places that theory lower on the list of possibilities, and focuses on her surroundings, odd as they are, ready to get up in the air at a moment's notice.
When she hears the sound of movement, she whips around, ready to fire the gear into action to take down the threat, and sees . . .
. . . a man.
Well, Hange uses the term 'man' loosely. This human-shaped thing has pointy ears and red eyes, and she sees fangs sticking out of its mouth.
"What's this?" the 'man' says. "Heads of livestock, perhaps?"
Nothing short of her gut feeling makes her raise her blade up in front of her. Instinct has saved her sorry ass more than a few times in the past, and she tries to follow it when she's not busy thinking up ways how to research titans.
She feels a jarring thud and an ache in her wrist a second later, when the 'man' clashes a blade against her own. She hadn't even seen him draw it, and certainly hadn't seen him approach.
He's fast. Unnaturally so.
He's not a titan, but he's definitely not human.
He begins talking to her, but she drowns him out. The monsters she hunts usually don't talk to her, and unfortunately it's become habit to not try and make sense of the sounds they make when she's fighting them so she can concentrate on surviving and capturing them.
She draws out the other blade and swings but he jumps back. Again, she barely manages to block another swing, and has to grit her teeth when he strikes, because he's not only fast, he's also strong.
"You don't look like you're part of the army," the 'man' says as she zones back into his words. "So I guess I can just-"
Hange shoots out the hooks of her manoeuvring gear, and gets lucky when one pierces his face. The motors drag him to her, and she swings her blade to behead him. Very few things, titans included, survive when the head – the spine – is no longer attached to the body.
This 'man' is no exception, although she doesn't expect what comes next. He explodes into ashes, and she hacks and coughs when some gets into her mouth.
When she straightens up, finished spitting out the remains of the 'man' with pointed ears, she finds herself looking at a tall man in black clothes that look official with slightly long hair. This man definitely appears human, but she tries not to judge based on appearances.
"Who are you?" he asks her.
Something about him reminds Hange of Levi, and his no-nonsense, 'I-don't-give-a-shit' attitude, and that is the only reason why she decides to tell him the truth.
"Hange Zoe," she tells him. "Squad Leader of the Survey Corps. You?"
"Oh, boy," is the reply she gets.
"I doubt that's your name."
His name, she learns after pestering him for a while, is Guren Ichinose. He introduces himself as a Lietenant Colonel of the Japanese Imperial Demon Army, which is officially when her meter for all things interesting that she can explore starts ringing.
Hange has a ton of questions she wants to ask, and begins to barrage him with them when he puts up a gloved hand. This one's attire is definitely not meant for hunting titans, she idly thinks while she shuts up.
"Give me a second," Tall Levi says, and pulls out a device before beginning to talk into it. "Hey, it's me. We might have a problem."
In this world, there are no titans. Never have been, except in myths, and even then they were never the titans she saw and fought. She tries describing them to the people in black uniforms, but gets only confused and disturbed looks.
They're different from the looks of bewilderment she used to get from back home, when she was enthusiastic about her research and the uninitiated would flounder, unsure of what to make of the woman who loved titans. They don't fundamentally understand the thought.
Something about that makes her sad. It brings out more of a reaction from her than the days of interrogation from the men in black did, anyways, asking about where she came from and who she was and whether she was a spy.
Hange's pretty sure they deemed her insane, and released her into Tall Levi - Guren's care because they didn't want to deal with her once their interest wore out, and figured she was harmless. Crazy, but harmless.
Which she is, until she has her brand of power – knowledge and understanding. Until then she might as well be powerless.
"Well," Tall Levi says idly. She can't help but equate him with Levi in her mind, but also partly herself, and to a stretch, Erwin. He hides his true self so as to survive in an army where internal politics interfere with their function and personnel.
No one has to tell her about this. She figures that out on her own. She's been around Erwin long enough to pick up the political mumbo jumbo well enough.
"If it makes you feel better," he says. Guren Ichinose, the Tall Levi, is the one person who she has talked to so far in this world that doesn't treat her as completely insane when she speaks about titans. Hange appreciates that. "We have vampires in our world."
Her interest, slightly sagged when she thinks about a different world, is peaked. "Vampires?" she repeats, remembering the inhuman 'man' she managed to kill.
Guren lasts all of three minutes under her barrage of questions before he hands her off to a woman in a similar uniform. "She'll tell you all about them," he says, picking at his ear with a pinky finger.
He lasted longer than Levi, the first time. But Levi would probably never just pick at his ear with his finger – he hates getting dirty.
"I'm gonna go take a nap."
The woman, who introduces herself as Sayuri, struggles to answer her questions to the best of her abilities. She reminds her of Petra.
Hange throws herself into learning to distract herself from the maelstrom of negative emotions welling within her.
Guren's friends and close coworkers believe her, but only at Guren's support. Guren Squad (the name makes her giggle to hide the tears in her voice) is welcoming, though, and adopts her into the camaraderie they have as best as they can.
She appreciates it, and in times of awkwardness asks questions to fill the silence. Her best attribute was always research and analysis, and whether that gift was due to her passion or her passion due to her gift, she never quite knew, but this is enough for now, to distract and comfort herself.
Soon, however, she finds that her questions are met with 'I-don't-knows' and shrugs of shoulders covered with epaulettes on black fabric.
"You don't capture vampires to test on them?" she asks, possibly on the verge of tearing out her hair. Do these people not strive to understand? Do they think that not learning anything about their opponents in battle will get them anything useful?
"Sure we do," Guren replies, and everything within her ignites.
Even he blinks in surprise – and possibly slight fear – when she turns on him, eyes blazing madly. "Take me to that place," she begs him, nearly shouting.
It's not that easy, of course.
(it's never that easy)
Honestly the army's higher ups don't trust her and really, they don't have any reason to, Hange knows, but at the same time she's impatient because there is a whole other species out there that can do things humans cannot do, and she wants to know more about them.
The lab is her natural environment. In there, where she gathers and organizes data so she can analyze and collect them, she is in her zone, her element. She excels, she has power.
And, unlike titans, vampires can talk. That alone opens up a whole other well of information that she couldn't even dream about with her titan subjects in the rare times she and her squads captured one.
Her chance comes, though, when Guren asks her – orders her, really, because that man doesn't exactly 'ask' anyone – to demonstrate use of her gear.
Her skills feel rusty, but she manages to execute a few tricks in the air while hanging on wires perfectly, complete with slashes of blades in the air. The hooks have to dig into the structures of the wrecked buildings, and while they're no trees, they work fine enough.
Petra - Sayuri - holds this thing in front of her eyes the whole time, pointed at her, and only stops when she lands. "Is that good, sir?" she asks Guren, and Hange thinks, Petra and Levi.
He doesn't even look at her, and the similarities almost hurt. "Yeah."
Hange doesn't know why that was necessary until three days later, when, at the meeting, she sees herself on a screen projected by light in the darkened meeting room, all eyes of important hoity-toity uniformed superiors glued to the moving images. She watches herself twisting and spinning, flying in the air, and while she's no Levi or Mike, the sight of herself in the skies is definitely impressive.
"So that's how I look," she mutters under her breath, and adjusts her glasses.
"If she's not telling the truth," Guren states to the superiors when the projections – the video, he called it – finishes and the lights return. "Then this is a pretty elaborate device to make, and some intense practicing she went through. We tried to have someone duplicate her movements with the gear."
And it had not ended well. Her gear very nearly broke, and the man was lucky to end up with a broken leg rather than a broken neck and shattered skull.
"Who knows?" Guren shrugs like he doesn't care. "She might end up bringing some insight we all missed."
Then, he leans back and takes a nap. She shrugs, and leans back as well while the superiors of the black-clothed army discuss amongst themselves.
It's not that easy, of course.
But in the end she gets in that lab.
"Human experimentation, huh?"
The eyebrows man who introduced himself as Kureto Hiragi waits for her actual response.
Hange knows his type, the rich ambitious one who was born to a path of greatness through his blood. This world is like the future hers might have had, what with its advanced technology and all, but some things in human society do not change.
She's been warned about him, though. He's not only got the bloodline, but also the power to back it up. He's got the desire, too.
And the eyebrows.
Erwin, if he was a rich bastard.
She misses her Erwin.
Hange shrugs, playing casual while knowing she walks a razor-thin edge thousands of feet in the air, no gear to keep her safe. Her usual attitude might get her killed. "Depends." She channels her best Erwin demeanor and mixes in Levi's iron will and Mike's solemn air. "Does that lead to saving humanity?"
"If it does?"
Erwin, Erwin, Erwin. "To defeat monsters, sometimes you have to throw away humanity."
Hange sees the approval in his eyes. "Why do you want to get into the labs?"
This time she doesn't pretend anything, doesn't imitate the people from her world. This is her, through and through. "If I don't understand something, I learn to understand it."
He makes a few threats of torture, but eventually lets her be. He's letting her do as she wants – within limits, of course, but still.
The vampires have an attitude.
Titans never did. They never really talked or showed much emotion – other than slight determination to swallow and regurgitate humans, and the occasional loud roar and the even more occasional deviant type titans – and when they were caught, pinned down by wires, they never exactly cursed the squad, at least not in language humans could understand.
She gets called livestock, hears about vengeance being sworn upon all the 'filthy humans', and listens to weak pleas for blood in the span of five minutes from the same vampire.
"I'll ask if you can get blood if you answer questions," she offers. She knows that her new superiors-slash-administrators-slash-supervisors-slash-babysitters would say no (more like hell no) and that would be that, but the vampire is too weak to notice the loophole.
When the vampire prisoner screams in agony, she screams along, sweat and tear dripping down her face. The jailers stare at her in disbelief, and even the vampire looks at her with confusion.
"Why are you screaming?" one finally dares to ask her.
Hange wipes away the wet trails from her face with the edge of her sleeve. She doesn't have to scream along, especially since the vampires are more than capable of it themselves. She's learned some interesting curses involving anatomically impossible feats in the last few days, ones she's willing to use if anyone ever cuts her squad's budget again.
Except she doesn't have a budget anymore, nor a squad, not anymore.
"It helps me better understand," she replies, hiding the truth like her screaming does. She reties her hair, and the ponytail is as messy as before.
They deem her eccentric and leave her be to her devices.
The vampire lasts a little longer. "You realize I'm the one getting tortured, not you, right?"
They can't regenerate limbs. They can reattach them, though.
They crave blood, because they actually need to drink it to sustain their lives. They don't go around vomiting it back up on purpose.
They actually work pretty well in the presence of darkness. They avoid sunlight, because it weakens them.
They have a hierarchy. Nobles are stronger and faster than regular vampires.
Nothing she doesn't know, really. But it's interesting to hear from the mouth of the vampires themselves, even if she feels slightly bad for giving them false hope to reaffirm data. Despite their superior attitudes, they do show actual emotion.
Still, she has questions she wants answered. Ten new ones appear for every one that's partially answered, like a hydra's severed head popping up new ones until the monster becomes nigh impossible to kill.
Such is the nature of curiosity and knowledge, however.
"But does the time it takes to starve them out before they turn into demons depend on the vampire individual, or their class?" she wonders, tapping a pencil against her notes.
Guren buries his head in the file he's holding.
She meets Guren's protégé and Shinoa Squad. She thinks of the 104th Trainees Squad –
- of a rash boy with a power that has so much untapped and unanswered potential he wants to use to protect his remaining family while vowing vengeance against monsters –
- of a timid boy who understand, who have entire universes within him –
- of a proud boy who bickers with a rash boy but engraves the faces of friends in their hearts –
Hange wishes that she knew the rookies a little better, if only so she wouldn't be making comparisons all the time for the smallest similarities.
"Maybe the nobles wear white clothes because they want to keep from eating too dirtily," she hypothesizes.
"Does it matter why they wear white?" a member of Guren Squad asks her.
Hange responds with wide eyes and a wider smile. "Of course!" she nearly shouts. "Figuring out their culture and thought processes are important keys on discovering their patterns!"
While others let that sink in, she continues. "Normally just stabbing the major blood vessels on the neck would result in humans simply bleeding out," she says excitedly. "But from what we've observed, on how soldiers who survived being fed on and continued to fight without bleeding –"
Something lightly hits her on her head. "Shut up," Guren says, looking bored and lifting the file in his hand back.
"This is important!" she insists. "And I haven't even started on how they could excrete what they eat, or the process in which they digest blood in their own body! I have a few theories, but they're only hypothesises at this point! If only they could let me try feeding some of the captive vampires . . ."
Ignoring the sudden green faces sported by many of those listening, Guren hits her with the file again, this time right in her nose. She mock-wails in pain and insults him for not wanting to learn.
"Hey, Miss Hange."
"Hmm?" Hange looks up from her notebook to see one of Shinoa Squad, the rash boy who reminded her so much of Eren. Guren's protégé. Guren's ward, the one he calls a reckless, stupid virgin with a fond light in his eyes. The one named . . . "Yuichiro, right?"
He nods, and something about him, the air he wears like his uniform's green-lined mantle, looks subdued.
That is a wrong look on this boy, who is usually vibrant with the force of life and fresh young enthusiasm not yet chipped or dulled by the constant wear and tear of blood and gore and loss.
She's seen children forced to grow up too fast into soldiers or die in the process, heard the stories of tragedies made real in people over and over again, but there's no denying that seeing this boy like this brings sympathy stirring inside of her.
The Eren-like boy shuffles on his feet. "You like studying vampires, right?"
Hange feels her lips widen in a smile. "Are you interested in that path?" she asks him, knowing that's not his answer.
"No," he replies quickly. "No. I mean, I wouldn't be good at that kind of shi – stuff. Yeah. No."
Patiently, quietly, Hange waits for him to get to his point, understanding the conflicts and chaos of youth.
"It's just . . . I have a family member who's a vampire, and I wanted to know if there's a way to reverse the process," he finally manages to admit to her. "Make him human again."
She tries not to grimace. "None that I know of," she speaks, reluctant to break this boy's heart and hope. That he came to her, trusting her expertise is something she appreciates greatly
"But," she adds. "If I ever find out, you'll be the first to know."
The boy's face brightens, and he throws his arms around her in a fierce hug, silently wrapping her in relief and gratitude.
After a second Hange hugs Yuichiro back.
"To really sympathize with them, I started to fast before going in there," she announces. "I think it'll help me really understand the process in how they undergo the transformation from vampire to demon. I'm so hungry, I feel like transforming into a demon myself!"
While everyone else stares at her with various degrees of incredulity and confusion, Guren slaps his forehead.
They're smiling with a tiny bit of fondness, though, and she feels more comfortable here now, like she's finally carved out a place of her own in this foreign place and latched on tightly, digging in fiercely.
Guren no longer gets equated with Levi or Erwin or herself. She just equates him to Guren now, much like how she equates Yuichiro to Yuichiro instead of Eren or Yoichi to Yoichi rather than Armin.
She manages to create a weapon of a higher grade than expected, and the only reason she doesn't do so again is because they don't have 'the materials' –
(read: a noble vampire, ranked nineteenth progenitor, caught by sheer luck and thirteen dead soldiers)
- and no one questions her place in the labs again.
This is an odd world, and yet not quite unfamiliar to be completely foreign to her. The walls are made out of spells and blessings rather than the materials sheathing huge titans. Humanity's numbers are drastically low due to disease, and must fight vampires for supremacy in the world once more, because the apex predators cannot share the same niche in this small world. Humanity accelerates in their development to fight back, making up for lacking strength and speed with technology.
There are parts of it she does not understand, and perhaps never will, but she finds a place, and thrives. Eventually she lets go of the unfinished work in the other world, praying to some god up there in both worlds that it will be carried on, preferably by someone like Armin, and fully dives into the one she has here.
Perhaps this time she'll be able to unravel the mystery of the monsters threatening humanity.
an: please review :)