Ymir leaves.
Krista can't. The guard monitoring the camp exit nods to Ymir, who bears neither the injuries nor the decorative scrapes someone who had spilled or hurtled or flown herself down a cliffside should bear, and wins Krista's gratitude by flipping a bird behind her back as she passes. Krista he catches by the wrist before she tries to brave the blizzard again. His eyes narrow at her; he doesn't need to widen them to take in her entire bedraggled frame. To his credit he earlier gave Jean and Armin the same weary jerk of his head, and Connie a vehement shake. "You'll get frostbite," he says. "We're not receiving medical supplies for one girl in weather like this."
Two girls, Krista thinks, but she understands the mistake. Ymir has queerly long limbs and freckle lines and an air of being unlike you, whoever you are. The threat of her is ever present, but her sudden descent inspires the kind of mental fist-clenching one usually reserves for summer storms or titans.
"I understand, sir," she says. She smiles for him to see, and glides back into the garrison.
Inside's warmer, full degrees above freezing. She removes a glove. Her thumb prickles. She forces her right hand up her left sleeve and, alarmed that she cannot feel her fingers pinching the soft inner juncture of her elbow, or, for that matter, feel her elbow, looks about. There are people in the dorms and people in the kitchens, but that's not the kind of warmth she wants. Where should she go? She stomps her feet, relieved she can at least perceive the paralysis of her toes, and lets her gaze roam over the ceiling. Blackened caulk. The logs above are slapped together so haphazardly none of the Garrison officers she's met could be responsible. The walls are bowed outward like they've been forced up and around a fist, or undergone heat expansion, or gradually bulged like Ymir's belly when Sasha snuck them beer.
And once she allows Ymir to intrude—attends to memories of Ymir's stomach rising and falling as she slept, Ymir's grin cracking open like a frozen bottle to mock her—Ymir tends to overstay. Krista feels helplessly embarrassed. She notes the roof's shaping by instinct, stumbles through corridors that days of paring her mind down to don't fall and forward and survive have rendered unfamiliar, and thinks of Ymir. Yesterday Ymir had slid a finger down her cheek, leaving a trail of melted rime like tears, and hugged her off the ground when she wanted to rest; at the time she'd rationalized it. Their superiors didn't take kindly to trainees disappearing. Ymir couldn't give eulogies, and had thawed toward Krista enough to want her to receive one. Ymir had needed her supplies.
But perhaps Ymir had meant something else by it. Krista had a childhood affinity for places one could find hidden things, such as books or fire; and as the minute changes of air current she can taste usher her to the garrison's supply closet, tucked under the furnace-room, it comes to her. She'd liked the flames curling around her fingers, the book princesses staring back from their woodcuts. Having been measured and accounted for and avowed unfinished, and wanted still. It's the same draw with Ymir.
She wrenches open the door before she can think further. We're alike. The words are in Ymir's cool steady tones, but the person they depict shudders and shifts in Krista's head: it reveals little about you to say you're like Krista Lenz, the sun-blasted heart of the 104th, all-giving and therefore desolate. Perhaps Ymir had seen farther. Perhaps Ymir had meant that she was also a liar. Ymir liked to shear her nails short by, expediently, gnawing them; Krista can imagine Ymir grazing her palm now with those newly trimmed nails. The ragged edges would grind into her lifelines: I should steal you from the winter, Ymir would say, take you to warm me up, sound good? and she'd seize Krista by the nape, the strange heat of her body searing into Krista's skin like a brand. We could exchange debts and smash our fetters against a tree together, and run—
But that'd be a lie. The crisp grounding pain would have to come. By Ymir's words Krista would know she was not constitutionally incapable of kindness, because nothing about Krista was worth theft.
Shut up, she thinks, and feels foolish. Ymir's out battling the snow, not standing ready for dismissal in her head. Besides, Ymir wouldn't have crept into a closet because it stood out on a temperature map of the compound like Historia had on the farm, and if she had, she wouldn't have glanced furtively down the hall before slipping inside and rationing her breaths to stay quiet. If Ymir had scrunched her cloak and boots behind the kindling—released the symbolic hold of those incorruptibly crossed swords on her figure—she wouldn't have done it in mixed hope and fear. She'd have laughed. Coughed out, between chortling, You're jealous, huh? Pity they raise you in the city to think so trivially of yourself!
It's musty and cramped in this closet. Krista can only fit in a position that resembles Eren's first attempt at 3DMG. But she's tired and cold, and dealing with Ymir is hard, and she can dream of the scratchiness Ymir sometimes gets in her throat, here, without chafing on the sandpaper acerbity of her words. She slips her hand into her trousers, and she can stifle her own sounds without answering to Ymir, who'd—ah. Ymir and Annie had been very quiet, in the barracks; the subject of vocalizing one's desires while being fucked in the dark is likely one she and Ymir can agree on. Regardless. She feels evasive or perhaps like she's already evaded someone, despite the arm pinned under her hip informing her she has nowhere to run. Were she found here, denial would be impossible now that her underclothes are near to her knees and her damp fingers are spread on her thigh, finally warm.
She lets herself approach fractionally, a quarter, halfway, three-quarters of the distance between beads of cool sweat at her hipbone and her trembling muscles; but she remembers, at the last moment, the dust from the closet handle no one has pulled in a million years. She wedges herself more tightly into the unseen corner. Her tongue works over her nails and knuckles where she can imagine Ymir's. Hers would be darker and slimmer, but this sloppy, under no more than a millimeter's worth of light, she feels the limitations of the eye observing acrobatics: one can capture still flashes of a body one knows isn't truly hanging there for one's delight.
The whole room is grimy. Soon she can't taste any of it on herself, and a soldier lives by the principle of just enough. She rearranges her body and, grateful for Survey instruction in the vertical dimension, makes herself enough space to shudder up from her hips. Slides two fingers in. She's intimately familiar with Ymir's hands wrapped around her sword's handle, having stolen glances whenever they were allowed to use the blades, and in this Krista can imitate her; she curls her fingers until she has her knuckles and nearly her palm sinking into herself, thumb hooked where the slightest shift has her entire body slick and trembling, eyes unyieldingly shut, rolling her hips and squirming in her toes and heart.
So open, she hears, that, that's how wet and open I'd want you too. Say, if you can look like this why hide your sweet regal face? What's illegitimate about this, Historia? and when she throws her head all the way back the air currents swoop over her throat like a string of kisses, like Ymir's lips have brushed over her chin and she's got herself caught on Ymir's fingers. Ymir's fondly bared teeth over her mouth as she braces over Historia and watches her come.
Reality disembarks piece by piece. The cramps in her ankles, the unsightly... whatever where her underclothes and buckles ought to be, Ymir's name ringing and echoing in her head as if to enlarge the chamber. Ymir of no family or estate and Krista Lenz, and their unequal hollowness.
A weakness in her limbs. The fucking knocking. "It's you in there, ain't it! Open this bloody door, even a disheveled goddess won't soothe Shadis when he learns you've crawled into a hole to die."
The question of how Ymir knows quickly becomes secondary to other problems. At first Krista dresses carefully, hoping her belts won't clang against the floorboards; by the time she's wiped her hands inside a coat pocket and struggled into enough clothing to draw, against someone who isn't Ymir, on a bank of painstakingly earned respectability, Ymir's jimmying something in the lock. Krista lifts her hair over her face and hopes her obvious discomfort will pass as training stress to anyone outside the door who isn't Ymir: who has no intention of battering doors that remain unopened, and warming to what she finds.
A/N: All feedback deeply appreciated! Written February 2014 for the P Battle XV challenge.