Being born is agonizing. I was born on the eve of one the harshest winters humanity had battled during its time in the walls. My mother's cries and my own caterwauls made the silent night sound like a massacre. The memory is one of my most vivid, it has always been my curse to be so much aware then most children. It is hard to forget the viscous blood sticking to my stubby, new limbs and the darkness I had awakened to. My naked body was draped in the biting cold for several long moments before someone wrapped me in a scratchy wool blanket.

In those hours I wouldn't stop shrieking as the nurse and doctor poked and prodded at me. They needed to make sure I was a healthy babe. I was safe under their care but I wasn't able to understand that. Everything was so foreign it made me terrified. The thoughts wouldn't stop rushing in. Where was I? Why is it so dark? Where is my family? It wasn't until I was placed in my new mother's arms that I stilled. I think it might've been her warmth that made feel so immensely secure. She was much softer and kinder than the rough material I was cocooned in. They were at a lost for what happened, I had been near possessed seconds before and now my fists had stopped swinging and my screaming had halted.

From that point on I was a fairly silent baby.


When I first learned to talk, I started with singular words unable to quite string together the complexity of a sentence. The new language was confusing and frustrating in many ways, but I had more experience with linguistics than your average baby. I was already fluent in one. Sometimes I would talk in it, just to feel the syllables roll off my tongue. These vowels and consonants tasted like home. My parents, however, unafraid by my aptitude to take in the world around were thrilled at how quick I was to catch on to things. They grew boundlessly proud of even my incomprehensible babbling. Still, I refused to name them my mother and father.

It saddened my mother more than she'd like to admit I think. When she thought my father wasn't looking, she wiped away tears. I spent a week calling out the names of common household objects and even a tree outside the window. Never did I point at her and call her mother.

The first time I got sick I finally cried again. It was my first birthday and the wind and snow had been tickling my senses through my thin clothes all month. The sickness started in my lungs and soon I could barely pick myself up without being sent into a fit of coughing. Each day became a battle as a fever overtook my body. Was I going to die so soon? For the first time in a long while instead of feeling apathetic and detached to the experience of life, I felt with a ferocity that was alien to me. I was just observing this world, gleaning what I could from it, and not realizing my vulnerability in it. I played an intricate and fragile role on this greater stage of a world. It made me afraid. I think that was the first time I realized that this wasn't just a matter of being, it was one living.

I called out for my mother. She took me in her arms and tried to calm my horrid sobbing. I clung to her warmth and repeated over and over. Mother, mother, mother, mother.

This was my home now.


The days of my first words, first steps, first book, and first time writing my name past like a leaf in the wind. They were sweet and they were fleeting. We moved when I was four. The past few months beforehand my parents began to grow concerned that I was growing up too fast. I took the move in stride, unlike the usual response you would receive from a child. No kicking or screaming was involved, I just went. I had no reason to be upset for I had grown no attachment to our home.

The abnormal maturity I had finally started to bewilder my parents. If it wasn't apparent to them before that I wasn't an ordinary child it was now. They dealt with it before shrugging aside my intelligence and independence. She's a bright little girl, that's all. Now, they couldn't ignore it and turn a blind eye. There were things you couldn't ignore. How when I got a bruise or scrape I handled myself in a callous manner. I rarely ever cried. Or smiled, where most children were jubilant I was only curious. Apathy seemed to plague me.

The people of the city noticed things right away when my our family came searching for residence right away. They smelled the interior on us like a predator senses the perfume of its prey. No one could walk away away from my gaze without a comment on how odd I was. That girl, her eyes are too old for such a young body.

I think something is wrong with me as we make the journey to our new home. From the city it is about an hour by foot and half that by horse. I keep flexing my fingers, jumping as our cart jostles over the bumpy path, pondering how much of a person I really am. My mother takes me in her arms and I soak up her warmth. There is one thing for certain, I am her daughter. That is who am. I am blood and flesh and bones. I am a beating heart and gasping lungs. If anything, I am human.

Our new home is shrouded in the forest. The nearest village is a mile from us. No one speaks as we unload or belongings. We began to fill the empty space of the cottage with a sense of us. Dust and cobwebs litter the dark corners of the rooms, indicating to me we are the first residents in awhile. My mother offhandedly mentions she does not like the place. I can see she misses the small dose of luxury we owned behind Wall Sheena. My father does not seem to mind and instead appears like he is relishing being tucked in a corner of the woods.

I try to be indifferent, but I am excited by the prospect of this place. Nature has always been fascinating to watch and here I was, smack dab in the middle of it all. The calming atmosphere washes over me as we spend our first few days adjusting. After the first week, my father and I venture out and explore our new land. Quickly we find the uptake will require more labor than we are used to. Father doesn't seem phased, rather I think he is thrilled not to be idle anymore. As a carpenter he did not achieve much except cater to the demands of richer, more important people.

I toil under the first few weeks of work. My back aches and my limbs burn with soreness. Every time I shift to move my body howls in pain. Each step is followed by labored breathing. But soon I become tolerant to the work and it becomes integrated into my life as if chopping down wood and tending to crops was something I had always done.

Soon, however, I was faced with a new challenge. School, and all the horrors of social interaction of children my age followed it. I found that children can be exceedingly cruel to each other. Often I came home with a busted lip or black eye because some petulant child decided to test my patience. Fights became another integral part of my life. Some part of me enjoyed the rush of brawling with other children in back alleyways after the class was dismissed. No one could really pursue vengeance once I handed their ass to them, I did live in the middle of nowhere and school was in the city. I think it grated on the older kids that a six year old could beat them up and get away with it. They deserved it though, after all the names they called my family and they taunted me for being mentally superior to them.

While this was all going down, my younger sister was born. She was a bit of incandesce in the dullness of my life. When I held her for the first time and those little hazel eyes peered back up at me with such a fiery tenderness I couldn't help but beam and laugh. I think I shocked my parents with the joy I felt when I was around Annabeth. A bit more life flickered inside of me and I became more than just the girl with the old eyes.

I was alive.


Two years past and Annabeth went from crawling to running, from babbling to berating us with questions. I came home looking worse and worse. The older kids who picked on me and I hit in return, grew bigger and stronger. I started losing more and more fights. Life dragged on.

"Do you even have a personality?" one girl asked me as she watched our lesson with a vapid expression. I gritted my teeth and paused my scrawling, Fiona was two years my elder and more irritating than even Arthur, who always tugged on my braid.

"Do you have a brain?" I responded. I had no time for idiots, but her question continued to bother me as I trekked home.

There was something cold about me, I decided, I was closed off to others, even my family. I preferred to watch others react than to do so myself. Expression was something I rarely partook in. The detached way I lived finally began to gnaw away at me. The process was slow but as I aged I began to reveal more and more of myself to my family. I showed keen interest in the survival tactics my father was researching in his free time. I shared what I had learned in school with Annabeth and discussed the books I had read with my mother. Questions about my legacy were finally asked. How did you meet? Where did you get that scar? I laughed and smiled more, even dared to make my own jokes despite the humor being dry and oftentimes insulting. I could tell it made them all happy.

It made me happy too.

"What do you think the outside is like?" Annabeth asked with glowing eyes and a wide smile, showing off the tooth she had already lost. She was growing fast.

"I don't know," I said, sifting through our cabinets. She had been bothering me for the past hour with her impossible to answer questions. "I've never been."

That's a lie.

She pouted, attempting to guilt trip me into a more vivid answer. Then she bounced back with even more energy, "I'm going to go outside the walls! I'll join the Survey Corps like Gerard."

My grip on the mason jar of precious peaches tightened, "Don't be dumb, Gerard's just saying that so people will like him. He doesn't have the balls to fight titans."

"How would you know? You've never seen a titan before."

I stilled, "I don't need to see one to know what their capable of. I've heard the stories and that's enough."

"That's a cowards way of thinking," Ananbeth said, avoiding my eyes and swinging her arms at her side.

"Where'd you hear that, huh?"

"Some kid."

"Well, don't listen to that kid," I said, kneeling down and taking her hands. "Look at me, valuing your own life is not thinking like a coward."

"But how do our lives mean anything trapped behind the walls?"

I didn't have an answer for that.


I often dreamt of the outside world, of the world I called home before this. There were infinite masses of water brimming with life. Oceans. There were forests like our own and ones with vast differences, the trees brushed the sky and it rained near every day. Rainforests. There were lands were it didn't rain, places were you'd expect to be barren of life but they weren't. Deserts. I had been robbed of so much.

Yet I didn't want to give up the life I had now. I didn't want to give up my mother's smile or my father's hardworking spirit. I wasn't going to let go of Annabeth, perhaps the one I love most in this godforsaken world.

I told her about it, the outside world she and I yearned for so much. I hadn't meant to but I did. She made me vow to take her to see it. I gave her my word but...

Some promises were made to be broken.

That day was was peaceful I remember. The sun was shining and the birds were chirping as Annabeth and I played with the wooden figurines Father had carved for her. I just turned ten and she was proud to be eight. Mother was singing one of her sweet melodies as she wiped sweat from her brow. Father tended to our old but loyal mare, Noel. She had grown sick for some unexplainable reason. Annabeth giggled gleefully as she knocked over my toy soldier with her own. I was too busy transfixed by the birds as the scattered suddenly, I grew uneasy. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

I stood up, ignoring Annabeth's protests. In the distance, if I strained my vision, I could see smoke gathering over what was the Shiganshina District. Dread followed as I saw a figure on horseback dressed in the clothes of the Garrison approaching. He was so pale and wan I thought he might topple off his steed. His eyes were wide in terror and he was screaming something I couldn't quite understand.

When I finally heard, I grabbed Annabeth and ran.

"THE TITANS HAVE BREACHED THE WALL!"


(a/n);

Hey! Welcome to this fanfic,,, LEMME teLL you I am so excited. I hope you've enjoyed what you've read so far! I'd like to hear your thoughts on my character, Wisteria.

okAy yeah that's all I have to say for now.