Ymir had a quiet view to the end of the world. Her on a pedestal, a blank canvas all around, and all of her leftovers from the mortal world coming home to roost.
She'd imagined it a few times before. Once, when Ymir Fritz passed on her gift to her offspring, and the careful stitching she'd put in place started to come undone. In passing, a thousand times, then one more time for every destroyed life she could claim direct responsibility for. If she wanted to be bitter and mimic the humans, that added up to roughly all of them.
The last time she considered ending it all, she'd made a deal instead.
Having as much faith as she tended to in Ymir Fritz's disaster-prone progeny was always a mistake, and she was out of chances to correct it. By her choice. She was a deity who held all power of creation in her little finger, and if she wanted to go some more rounds, no one could stop her.
But if she ever went through a century like the last one again, she'd have to start coming up with ways to kill herself just to adequately describe the kind of psychic torment the humans had put her through.
She'd trusted Karl. She'd even trusted Helos. Obvious mistakes. Then she'd gone down to play in the world they both created, and besides pointing out just how obvious those mistakes had been, she got a front row seat to all of Ymir's children killing each other. Again. If she were still human she'd put a happy little star next to the centuries where they managed to get along more often than they committed genocide.
She wasn't. She never would be again.
It was time to call it quits for good.
Unfortunately, even for the easiest of decisions, she couldn't just pull a lever and have all of creation fix itself. Nearly two millennia of crap that wasn't there the first time had to be carefully measured. All-knowing and all-powerful were easy. Speed just meant needing to come up with more things fill her days, so she'd never bothered with it.
The end of the world would come as slowly as she'd settled on it. There was no one around to care but her, but she could appreciate it enough for everyone who would stick around to matter. Her, herself, and all of her corpses.
That was the plan, and the thing about godhood was that her plans had a say in what happened.
So she wasn't sure on how to respond to whatever it was going on in the plane of existence she kept her throne room on, except to note that it was probably yet another point in favor of getting rid of this world. If she'd done it sooner, the whatever wouldn't have been an issue.
There should have been nine bodies frozen in the white haze. One for each host of the original mistake. Eren and all of his inherited plans had cut the number down a couple sizes. Fantastic for consolidating the amount of pain reintegrating all the shards would cause, and despite everyone's efforts, not much else.
That made seven.
There were eight human bodies in her throne room, and no good explanation. Not even a hint at why one of them was hyperventilating on what passed for the floor.
The others were sharing in the quiet, and perfectly still. Trapped in their human cages, that's all they were capable of. Maybe, if they stretched, they could reach some comprehension of the reminder that they were all insignificant fractions of the true power in the room, with only as much strength as she cared to give.
That gift of autonomy was almost two thousand years old. There wasn't much point in arguing how it had overstayed its welcome. Ymir had already covered the important parts; she thought they had, and now they were all sitting back and waiting for the universe to adjust to a world where her interference began and ended at making bets over how many new ways the humans would find to screw up their lives all on their own. God complexes were common enough before she gave them a taste of being one.
In hindsight, it was a mistake to think that was ever going to go well.
Luckily for all of them, she still was a god. Hindsight could wrap around into foresight. These weren't ripples that any of them would have to live with for very much longer.
That still left the shivering human body without an explanation.
Ymir could come up with a few. She didn't like any of them. They were altogether too human and too full of the exact type of pathos that had landed her with this choice to begin with. They told her that she had a body here, and even with its weird mixture of titan and human that she couldn't shake since her step into mortality, she had a hand and claw to spare. She could walk or float or materialize over and help.
She'd never touched Historia with her real hands before.
Ymir stayed turned away and tried to focus on the end of the world. Bracing herself against the coming storm. Because one of those answers she didn't like was right. In a dozen short minutes, give or take, its significance would be erased with everything else, but a dozen minutes away wasn't now.
Now, Historia was still alive.
An ache that had done nothing but grow for four years chilled in her chest.
Four years was nothing. She'd watched the rise and fall of empires with a blink before. Even for humans, even for her humans, it was barely a fraction of life. A meaningless period of absence matched by the excruciating humanity of the three years preceding it.
Time wasn't supposed to matter to things like her.
Many things weren't.
Ymir didn't need ears to feel Historia's breathing even out. She didn't need eyes to see the way she froze so suddenly—so naturally next to the other bodies—when the tremors stopped. She'd venture to say she didn't even need omnipotence. The soothing home that her human self had found went beyond most of her usual skills. Historia existed, and breathed, and her heart pounded like a drum next to Ymir's, and Ymir would know her everything no matter what she was or what she had to work with.
The skip of Historia's pulse thrummed inside of Ymir, and thousands of years of watching hadn't prepared her for how much it hurt.
"Ymir?"
Historia's voice was quiet. Full of silent nights of shared beds and warmth, both of them begging for someone else to see them for the monsters they were. When all along there was only one. It howled inside Ymir's head, and there were a number of reasons why this, this specifically, had not, could not, be part of her plans.
She was supposed to be too sensible to look. The world was ending, and there was no point. She wanted to blame that classic Fritz magnetism she never learned how to say no to, but Historia was something strange and different.
Humans shouldn't have still been capable of being strange to her.
Ymir looked, even though she didn't have to, even though she really shouldn't have, and found her home looking back at her. Covered in blood that would never drip to the ground, hair shorn short in a style that said haste, not preference, and eyes that glowed with the same ache Ymir had come to know more intimately than the person behind it.
She had memories of thousands of starving children. Millions. She had memories of being one. Shipwrecked sailors. Every single titan. Too many examples to choose from, and more than she'd ever wanted to see.
Ymir recognized hunger, and there was no good explanation for why Historia still made it look more desperate than any human she'd known. There was no shortage of awful ones.
Historia stumbled to her feet. She managed a step forward, but the stuttering quality Ymir's mind had picked up seemed to be having a strong effect on her body's obedience. She stared, and stared, not even a flicker of wonder at the odd fusion of monster and human that Ymir's visage had adopted.
"Ymir?" she asked again, strongly enough for the hope to escape.
This would destroy both of them in the time it took for it to have never happened. One more thing for Ymir to bear the brunt of responsibility for, but this came with a twist of karma that seemed unfair for a goddess to have to navigate.
"Not the one you know, sorry," Ymir said, before she could think of a less dishonest way to put it.
There was a flicker, then, Historia taking in the grotesque fangs and black eye that was paired to the human face she was more familiar with. Confusion more unsteady than her feet blossomed.
"Am I dead?"
"No," Ymir said.
She was breathing, and her heart was beating. Not dead. Basic logic even a mortal could love.
Some humans would probably respond to a meeting with the divine with some manner of enlightenment. Ymir Fritz had, spiraling things down to a place where her descendent could make the opposite trip and wind up in a goddess' backyard. With zero sense of enlightenment, and all the uncertainty.
Historia hadn't looked away yet. Like if she just kept staring, she could work out the full picture for herself.
No, that wasn't right. She was staring because Ymir was her full picture.
Ymir had tried, so hard, for four years, not to look too deeply into the heart of Historia Reiss. Even as she and her role in all the world became something Ymir really had to know things about, she drew a line. Historia belonged to humanity, not divinity, no matter how hard she tried to fight that when she was younger.
Now, it was impossible not to look. Historia was as captivating as she had been for every second of Ymir's human life, right up until the end. Ignoring any of her for some bizarre adherence to boundaries no one was making Ymir obey wasn't something she was interested in or capable of anymore. This world was ending. This was the last moment Historia would exist.
She was spending it on Ymir.
"Are you…" she started. She shook her head, flecks of blood catching the light but staying firmly in place. Ymir tried not to think too hard about them. It was easier when some of Historia's steel shone through her uncertainty. "You—I saw you. In my book."
"One illustrator's interpretation," Ymir said with an empty grin, showing off her fangs.
Historia wasn't religious. She'd never realized, the way other members of her family had, that they really were interacting with a piece of a god. With where that had landed most of them, and how bad Ymir was for her worshippers, Ymir couldn't hold it against her, but it gave the conversation more stalling pauses to fall into each other's eyes. Like the present one. Which she minded less than she should.
Out of all the human experiences that had shaded her decision, the one she'd done her best to put to bed was what it was like to fall in love.
It had never worked, just like distrusting Fritz spawn and telling them to just fucking behave never worked.
Ymir had still managed to forget.
Historia took another stilted step forward, and it was unbecoming to consider running away in Ymir's own domain, but for an instant, the thought was as inescapable as she was.
"Who are you?" Historia asked. It was a shyer question than the mortal world had heard from their queen in a long time, closer to the tiny girl hiding away bread that had caught Ymir's eye.
Ymir cast her gaze out at their surroundings. "That doesn't matter much at this point," she said. "If you want to play questions and answers, 'what' would have been a better choice."
Historia didn't blink at the snark. "You're the one who gave Ymir Fritz the original Titan."
From anyone else, that would have sounded like an accusation. Historia sounded too confused for that, so Ymir let her own opinions on the disastrous choice make up for it.
"Technically, I'm the original," she said. "Ymir just borrowed it, and decided to share."
Because that was what nice, kind bastions of nobility did with presents. Ymir should have put more thought into what would happen when she trusted an exception with something she could pass on to more predictable figures. She should have done a lot of things, but better late than never.
Historia said nothing for enough moments to tempt Ymir's eyes back.
She took that as a signal. "Is that what you did with her name?"
Ymir really was sick of humans. A chance whim had given her this form, but her spine stiffened as genuinely as it would have back down below. "Sure," she said.
Historia came another step forward. "Why," she asked, "do you look like my Ymir?"
Her heart reacted like a human's, too. With twists and flutters and pain that made her want to take Historia in her arms and never let go. Funny how none of these parts had felt like inconveniences when an entire reality stood between them and the person who inspired them to be inconveniences.
It would have been too easy to say that she was Historia's. Inaccurate to the question, too. Ymir was hers, and she already knew she always would be, but calling her and her human self one and the same was more complicated than she'd ever had a reason to parse out. Historia was never supposed to be able to have this conversation with her.
Ymir sighed and looked out at the seven bodies surrounding them. Historia looked too, for a brief second of distraction.
"I was her," Ymir said. "I wanted to see what things were really like for all of you after I—well, after one piece of me made that deal with Karl." The piece now prominently jammed in Eren. Ymir watched the frozen young man's face for a moment. He was about what she would have expected from Frieda and Grisha's legacy; driven and completely broken.
She spared the rest of them a glance or two to go with. That description fit all of them.
"It didn't take long to realize that Karl hadn't really fixed anything. Not that I knew that was what I was learning at the time; the only way to stop my head from exploding was to keep my human self and deific self separate." She didn't bother hiding the way her trailing gaze stopped between Reiner and Annie. "That didn't work out, so I had to leave, and her death brought our collective consciousnesses back to a more manageable number."
She paused, waiting the second it would take for Historia to process that and skipping in ahead of the inevitable reaction. "Now there's just me. More if you count the leftovers Ymir Fritz passed on, but those are going to be gone soon enough, too."
Historia hadn't taken any more steps forward. Pain, and the beginnings of what had caused that massive wound in Galliard's shoulder, smoldered in her eyes. "You killed her," she said.
"More of a suicide," Ymir said. The full blaze that answered that would have been deadly against someone who wasn't immortal. For Ymir, it only hurt. Badly. "If it makes you feel better, she got off easy. I had to watch, then experience it myself when she came back to me. You can scream about it all you want, but she's not the one suffering for it anymore."
Knowing it was coming made it easy to catch Historia's fist before it connected. It was a bad time to notice how warm her hand was, but there wouldn't be another. Her eyes were glistening with tears, and her arm shook like a leaf holding on to its tree in a windstorm.
"You…" Whatever the thought about what Ymir was, which couldn't have been much worse than what Ymir was coming up with herself for putting that look on Historia's face, Historia didn't complete it. She thrust her head into Ymir's shoulder, her free hand furiously collapsing against the other in an aborted punch. "No," she said, word puncturing the air, "that does not make me feel better."
Ymir didn't risk turning the tortured embrace into a hug. Her talons weren't the best comforting tools anyway. But she held Historia's fist until strength left it. Until Historia mumbled a heat of words into her chest.
"You being in pain never makes anything better."
Ymir squeezed Historia's hand tightly enough to bruise, in another dimension. Historia only tucked her head more firmly against her, harsh, strangled breathing giving away how deep the marks Ymir had seared her soul with. She had felt bad about that, once. When Historia was far out of her arms and crying over a letter that couldn't come close to sharing Ymir's full history. She'd thought that she should have just stayed out of the girl's life. She knew she had an expiration date and she strung her along anyway, and that was wrong, and terrible, and she would do it again.
She would cause and relive all that pain a thousand times over if it meant knowing Historia's love.
Ymir was despicable. As a goddess and as a human. She'd known that for so long that there was no point in hiding from it. She had done everything wrong, and ruined the few things found to do right. Historia made it sinfully easy to stop caring. In every form.
Historia wiped a smear of tears against Ymir's shirt, and it was dumb human idiocy but Ymir wished they could leave a mark. She inhaled roughly, and asked another dangerous question. "If I'm not dead, does that mean I have to leave?"
"No," Ymir said.
Historia stilled, catching the obfuscated truth. Ymir couldn't resent her for it, but it would have made life easier if Historia just knew her a little less.
"Ymir," she said. Those syllables alone had the power of ward off the apocalypse, and that was a serious problem considering where they were. Keeping with that theme, she pulled her head away to meet Ymir's eyes. "What's going on?"
There wasn't a way to make this conversation better. Ymir knew that. Even if she didn't, a Connie could guess it.
Trying on her best goddess voice, which had never had a need to be practiced, she said, very plainly, "The world's ending."
Historia's world had been ending in one way or another since she was three in increasingly devastating ways, so it was an understandable regret that she wasn't going to treat that proclamation as the severe promise of Ymir's choices that it was. She had the same look on her face as she had when Ymir-the-human had gotten her hands on several kegs of beer for their training squad. Ymir didn't know when she got it in her head that it was her job to keep Ymir from doing things that caused widespread chaos and malcontent, but it was rooted in deeply enough by now to put most trees to shame.
"Why?" Historia asked. In a tone that said, "What did you do now?"
Ymir's last argument with Historia had ended with both of them dying emotionally, followed by one very literal death. This one wasn't headed anywhere happier. She didn't want to have it. She wanted Historia to stay in her arms for the rest of eternity.
That wasn't an option for humans. Historia still was one, remarkably.
"I gave Ymir Fritz power because I thought she could handle it. She could. The rest of you," Ymir's eyes swept back towards her missing pieces, "not so much. I should have stayed out of it from the start, so I'm turning back the clock to undo my interference." She stopped at Eren. "No more titans. Ever."
Historia pulled away completely. She caught on faster than she would have as a recruit. Running a kingdom intent on running itself into the ground would do that to a person. "That would…" She turned around, and for the first time seemed to really see the other bodies joining them. She swallowed. The blood dressing her neck gave the motion a gory glint.
"It will be like none of it ever happened," she said quietly.
"Yeah," Ymir said. Historia's eyes snapped back to her. "The world gets a new cast of humans to play with. They'll do whatever they want to each other, like always, but without me stepping in to make it worse.
"It's better this way," she added unnecessarily. Less of Ymir ruining things, more of humans ruining things. With the immense difference in power, the end result was an easy positive for the world.
"You always think that," Historia said. She sounded like she had back on top of Utgard. Right before she started throwing rocks. "You always think that it's better for you not to be there. That people will be okay without you."
She didn't need to say that she hadn't been. Ymir had watched the whole thing. Dying was the easy part. But not every human was Historia. Historia was unique in all the garbage nonsense human ways all people were unique, but also in how seamlessly she was welded to the divine. No one else alive could lay claim to that.
Ymir breathed in. "I'm not human anymore, Historia. This isn't me being sad at all the problems I cause by being alive." She had a running tally of those, and it was sad, but she was also fully responsible for the very concept of things being alive, so there wasn't much point dismissing the importance of her influence—in some areas. "The descendants of one of my favorite humans are constantly fucking the entire world over using a gift I gave them. That's not something that needs to stay."
The spark of challenge was bright and sure in Historia's eyes. "And it's taken you two thousand years to decide that?"
"Karl was my last hope," Ymir said. "I think we can both agree that hasn't ended well."
Historia shook her head jerkily. "It hasn't ended at all. We're in the middle of—"
Historia stopped talking.
She looked down at her clothes, drenched in blood.
Her hand, slowly, lifted up to her chest. She dipped two fingers into the largest pool of blood swamping her shirt. None of it came away on her hand. The same held true no matter where she pressed. Her neck. A slice to her forearm. A small graze under her ear where her emergency haircut had shaved too close.
Blood wasn't something soldiers of Paradis tended to notice, if they weren't in pain. Titans often spilled all over them in the heat of battle, and it always evaporated.
The blood covering Historia didn't come from a titan.
Ymir wanted to look away from the dawning comprehension. The memory playing out on Historia's face made her sick. She wanted to interrupt the moment of realization. She wanted Historia's last moments to be something good, or failing that high bar, not terrible. The world was ending, and Historia didn't need to remember what had happened to her the moments before it did. She didn't need to know what any of that felt like.
Historia swallowed. The blood on her neck gleamed. She looked back at Ymir, expression a maze of confusion and dread. The dread found its partner in Ymir. Some things didn't need to be talked about. She'd place this firmly in that category, and as the only deity present, that should have been all there was to it.
She knew Historia, though. Almost better than she knew herself. That combination told her they were stepping down into dangerous waters.
Historia looked smaller than she had in years, under Ymir's guilty eye. The queen shrunk back into a nervous girl who didn't know her place in the world. Her eyes flitted over the row of bodies nearby, taking in their complete stillness and lack of lethal injuries. For once, she didn't even stop to glare at Galliard.
"They're here because they're pieces of you," she said slowly. "They're a part of you. When you unmake everything, they'll come back to you." She took her breaths with a faint shudder. "But they can't move." She looked down at herself, past the blood, and over her twitching fingers. "Why…?"
"Wouldn't be the first time your royal blood has kicked off something weird," Ymir said. The excuse sounded as weak as it was. Worse when Historia turned her perplexed sights over to Zeke, who was still standing stationary.
Ymir knew what the answer was. Before Historia started talking, and breathing, and being, it was just a guess, but by now, there wasn't much room for doubt. It wasn't a good answer. It promised more pain and regret than she'd banked on, and she'd known to expect a lot. Immortality meant she'd survive, but it was going to hurt.
If Historia said it out loud, it would do a fair bit more than hurt.
There was a good chance she wouldn't. It was a concept that went far beyond anywhere Historia had allowed herself to go before. She'd had a tragic, miserable life, with her best memories of love consigned to a sister who did everything she could to keep that love so hidden that Historia had spent most of her life not realizing it existed.
Ymir had abandoned her. Historia had grown since then, but Ymir could still see the chip of hurt tearing away at her. She was someone who had never understood how deeply she was valued, and as wrong as that was, it meant Ymir had the high ground.
"I'll die if you put everything back the way it was," Historia said.
Ymir gave her the only promise she had left in her. "You are not going to die."
"Because I won't have existed."
Ymir's claws clacked together when she balled her fists. "Lots of people won't have existed," she said.
Historia fingers prodded again at the bloody hole in her shirt. She remembered what happened. She'd always had such an expressive face, and with a heart made so open to Ymir, it was impossible not to know what she was thinking. Ymir could remember lying awake at night in her human body, playing visions of emotive blue eyes back through her head, and falling in something like love.
The actual fall came later. The second winter, when Historia had stepped outside in her parka, shivering from the cold, and stopped for a moment, searching for Ymir before she took another step.
She found her. And she smiled. At someone like Ymir, who spent the last winter and every season before and after that telling her how she was doing her life wrong.
She smiled like someone who had never known pain.
For a moment, Ymir had forgotten that both of them had.
Historia let her fingers fall. Her eyes were dark, and sharp, and very well versed in pain. Ymir doubted she could still smile like that. She hadn't in four years. Historia looked up at Ymir. There was a second's delay, where a soft glow tinged her sight, and then she was stepping back into Ymir's gravity.
The girl was a queen again, and the queen said, "You'd rather destroy the world and start over than be god of a world where you watched the girl you love die."
Her hands shook, but she said it, and she looked Ymir in the eye when she did. Ymir couldn't return the favor. Deathbed confessions had never been her favorite to watch, and she didn't need her eyes to see. Paring herself down to something closer to human just made it easier to relate to her subjects.
Historia had always been easy to relate to.
"Ymir," Historia said, "I can't let you do this."
Yelling would have been easier. Ymir's claws dug fiercely into her skin, but she didn't look back. "Don't kid yourself into thinking you have a choice. I'm the god here, you're the mortal. My say wins," she said. She almost sounded like she meant it.
Historia made a disgusted huff and swung herself back into Ymir's line of sight by force. "You're an idiot," she said, affectionate enough for tears. "You always are, and you always will be, and I will always—" Historia clamped her eyes shut and Ymir wanted to, but— "I…"
"It isn't all about you, Historia," Ymir said. Lying, because she was a terrible god. "This has been a long time coming. You're just a convenient excuse."
Historia smiled. A bitter one, one that had taken Ymir's absence for her to grow into. "You tried that trick before. I don't need Connie to point it out this time."
Ymir ignored her, for the sake of her highly valued sanity. "You grew up in a world terrorized by monsters that shouldn't even exist, and you want to tell me to back off on getting rid of them because you think I'm doing it for the wrong reasons?" Ymir cocked her head and smiled. "Didn't you have a few relatives who tried it that way? How'd it go, I forget."
Historia grabbed her. Both hands, both cheeks, dragging them close together. Intoxicating and distracting, two more things Ymir did not need at the moment. "You're not the one to blame for what we've done with your power."
Her eyes still had an unnatural shine from her earlier tears, and Ymir was caught between wanting to wipe them all away and falling into her arms to shed a few of her own.
Historia would be there to catch her, if she did.
"Maybe," Ymir said, "but I'm the one with the power to fix it."
Historia's fingernails dug into her cheeks. "You aren't fixing anything," she said. "You're breaking it."
"'It' won't even exist past a memory in a few minutes."
"What happens after that? You hide up here for the rest of eternity?" Historia's voice caught. "Alone?"
Ymir closed her eyes. "We're talking about your lost cause of a world, not me."
"It's your world too!" The yelling started, and it did not make anything easier. The fire in Historia's eyes calmed as fast as it raged, and one of her fingers was brushing hair away from Ymir's pointy ear, touching her more softly than anything ever had. "We made it together. You came down, and you left Ymir Fritz a part of you, so you could be part of our world."
Ymir didn't want to remember. Didn't want to, didn't need to, but Ymir was Ymir was Ymir, and she remembered that moment with the same crystal clarity she remembered all the others with.
"Did you… want to be friends with me?"
"No," was the lie. "No way." "Definitely not."
Historia always used to believe her lies.
She didn't anymore.
It was unfair.
"You want to be part of this." Historia pushed her forehead against Ymir's. Somewhere during the proceedings Ymir's hands had found their way around her waist, clinging to her. "Don't throw it away. We're not done yet. We can still fix it."
Ymir barely even wanted to believe that. She'd sat through generations of people trying to fix the wrong problems. Most of them related to her two favorite humans. Grisha and Kruger had kept things interesting for a while, and sometimes the sheer tenacity of Karl's chosen few made her think that maybe this would be the time something went right.
Then Zeke and Eren started to move, and all the wrong people were killing each other, and the one person she would do anything for was left bleeding on the ground.
It didn't matter if they won.
"You'll still be dead," Ymir said, hating that it was a consideration, hating the way her voice broke when she said it, hating that Historia could hear it, hating how much she needed her to be around to hear it, but mostly hating, hating that it was true, and not something she would ever tolerate. She was selfish to the core; she could watch Historia suffer through a world of Ymir's own making and call it good enough, but losing Historia to it was too high a cost.
She didn't want a world where Historia could end up dead.
She was a goddess. It was her right to apply that preference to her domain.
"I'm not dead now," Historia said.
Ymir ran her hand through Historia's cropped hair, ruffling the streaky edges. Her thumb stroked Historia's cheek gently, and she ached at the sight of Historia easing into the touch like they'd never been more than a step apart. "I know you're not," Ymir said. "That's the point."
Historia nodded, rocking Ymir's head with the motion. "Is there a reason you can't keep me here?"
Ymir's heart gave a resounding, undignified thud.
Their people would freak out over the disappearing queen. Someone would make a power grab. Their friends would be demoralized. Connie would cry again.
All problems her death already caused. Minus the missing corpse.
"You're… mortal," Ymir said.
Historia opened her eyes, and with the careless simplicity stubborn obliviousness had always granted her against impossible odds, asked one very basic thing.
"You can't change that?"
Ymir held her more tightly, and didn't answer.
Sure, she could. If Historia never left, and was willing to stay by her side forever, without getting sick of her, without breaking Ymir when she realized that death or nonexistence would have been a better fate than being permanently bound to a selfish goddess who couldn't even save the woman she loved without hurting her. The power was fully within her grasp.
She didn't know if Historia was.
She'd never been brave enough to look.
"Historia," Ymir tried, "you can't want this." She had explicitly turned down godhood before.
Historia smiled. In the way Ymir would always fall in love with, the way that should have been lost to the misery and cruelty the world that Ymir had corrupted rained down at a constant roar. Historia smiled, and everything was possible and worthwhile.
"I want you."
She was too close, and always too beautiful, and she moved first.
Historia kissed her soothingly, and Ymir fell into her, a burn of want hitting with the tender touch. It was slow, and gentle, and set Ymir throbbing for a lifetime of more. She kissed her like she'd been promised forever, and believed it.
Historia eased back, letting her lips linger on Ymir's with little concern for the piercing fangs a touch away. Ymir fought not to lean back in, but each hit of self control was met with a softer brush of Historia's lips. Slight enough to barely count as kissing. Full of enough intent that Ymir was having trouble standing.
"No matter where I am," Historia murmured, "as long as I'm with you, I'm not scared." She drew Ymir into another, fuller kiss that spoke of how badly she'd wanted to the last time she sworn herself to Ymir. "Unless you make me, I'm not leaving."
Ymir buried her head in Historia's bloodstained shirt. Awkward at their respective heights, but Historia propped her up easily. "Is that a promise?" she asked, half-hoping Historia wouldn't hear.
"Yes."
Ymir closed her eyes. Her home, breathing and sturdy, laid her hands softly on Ymir's back, stenciling tiny, comforting circles. "Then I guess I can hold off on the apocalypse," Ymir croaked.
Historia kissed the top of her head and didn't say anything.
She never had said the one thing Ymir had known to dread. She hadn't wondered how she was moving while all of the other incidental voyeurs were stuck in one spot for more than a moment. The dangerous area that Ymir had anticipated, and she'd written it off for the core issue. Probably without even thinking about how they were related. She did that with the weirdest things. Like trading in her mortal existence to be a douchey god's consort.
Ymir would have to tell her eventually, now that they were aiming for eternity.
She could control most pieces of herself easily.
Her heart had always moved on its own.