3. Of monsters and men
He makes a mistake of asking his aunt about titans once. It goes as well, as expected – which means, he ends up getting locked in a cupboard for the duration of the next week, not a single step closer to having an actual answer.
Because no matter how many times he sneaks into the living room, while his uncle is watching the news, no one ever mentions giant man-eating monsters. History books in school's library say nothing about Walls (except for the Chinese Wall, but even that is not high enough).
It is strange and wrong, and-
This whole world is strange, wrong, and terrifyingly unfamiliar. There is technology, the workings of which he can't even begin to understand and will probably never be comfortable around. There are all kind of books – about seas, and oceans, and deserts, and mountains (he slips a National Geographic magazine from the library to his cupboard and leafs through it long into the night, marveling at all beautiful pictures of different places around the world, silently vowing to travel to all of them someday). There are planes that could fly you to the other side of the world in a matter of hours. There are skyscrapers, some of which are two, three times higher than Walls.
But the most disturbing revelation he gets is upon the discovery of wars. There are wars, he learns, and people fighting not just some external treat for the survival of their race, but with each other, and that nearly sends him into shock, because he just doesn't understand, can't wrap his head around it and, honestly, doesn't want to. The concept of hundreds, thousands, millions of people dying because of differences in opinion is repulsing to the point of nausea to him and utterly foreign.
(Everything is foreign here).
All of it makes him doubt himself, his memories and his sanity, eats him from inside out slowly, but surely, drives him insane. (Because most of the time he is not even sure, whether he is Harry Potter, dreaming of being Eren Jaeger, or Eren Jaeger, dreaming of being Harry Potter – and it is terrifying.)
He doesn't know what to do, what to think, whom to fight. And so – he waits.
Waits for a long time (year after year after year) for something, anything to happen – for Armin to suddenly wake him up with a smile and a promise of a new story. For Mikasa to silently fall into step with him on the way to school. For a giant hand to peel off their rooftop and for a reeking greedy maw to sink its teeth into the screaming, crying, pleading bodies of his relatives. (Sometimes it scares him, how the last image makes him feel almost hopeful).
But nothing ever does.
He is tired and lost, and confused, and so, so angry.
When his uncle breaks his arm one day for turning up on the school's roof with some "freakish display of freakishness" (and how did that happen?), he is almost relieved. Because this is violence, pure and simple, and Harry (or is it Eren?) knows exactly how to deal with violence – to hit back twice as hard.
(The back of his uncle's neck looks particularly inviting).
That night he dreams about knives, about the sound they make, slicing through meat and bones, about monsters, wearing human flesh, and Mikasa's empty broken eyes (you can't win if you don't fight). He wakes up to the taste of blood in his mouth, accompanied by a curious set of marks on his hand, and to a grim (satisfied) realization, that even if titans don't exist anymore, monsters - monsters are universal.
(-and he will exterminate them all.)