Dichotomy

by saphira and shruikan

AU. Jean just wants to be better at hunting than that Eren Jaeger kid, and he figures that following a master hunter and picking up some tips will do the trick. But when he follows Ymir, the best his village has got, on a solo trip, he gets a little more than he bargained for. JeanMarco, Naga!Marco.

6. Secure

Secure

The rabbit's skin goes on our wall, right next to Thomas's badger. When I walked in with it, still in a daze from the day's events and Ymir's deal, my parents swarmed me with questions, demanding I sit and explain just where I'd gotten this creature from, because apparently it's unbelievable that Jean Kirschtein can catch something for himself. Oh, who am I kidding? It is unbelievable.

I've listened in on other expeditions enough to be able to give a half-bragging half-bullshit story about surprising the animal and jumping it that doesn't sound like complete crap. My parents seem convinced, and that's what counts, I guess. I specifically stress that I went into the woods alone, so no one suspects that I actually had a bit of help. A lot of help. Whatever.

When they finally let me go to bed after an amount of attention I'm entirely unused to, I flop onto my bed, arms spread over the sides, struggling to compute . . . well, everything.

The next day I go to Reiner's as usual, walking in the street toward the front of the shop as though in a dream. I keep glancing shiftily at people, as if expecting them to see me and somehow know that something has shifted in the world of Jean Kirschtein, something has been monumentally changed. And this is entirely unrealistic, considering it's only been a single day, but I can't help greedily soaking up every glance my way and choosing to interpret them as just the warm-up before the imminent onslaught of praise and attention for my rising hunting skills.

Low humming meets my ears as I walk across the town square, and I start to hum along to one of the familiar hymn that I've been raised with. I glance to my right and see the church, run by Pastor Nick, from where the noise emanates. The structure is huge, white, and spiraling, easily the largest and best-kept building in all of Trost. Etched into the heavy oaken front doors is the side view of Maria, the goddess that protects Trost from freaks and foreigners. My family goes every Sunday to the mass held there. Pretty much the whole village goes at least once a week, if not every day.

The doors are closed for the current service, but if you go inside you see lots of old statues made of white and gray marble. One of them is of Maria, the protecting angel; the rest are the demons she's protecting us from. Pan, the half-goat, whose wicked eyes and prancing hooves are said to lure believers into temptation. Equa, the half-horse, the succubus who runs down unsuspecting commoners lost in the woods and rapes them. Anube, the half-dog, who eats from the scraps of her fiendish brethren. Naga, the worst of them all, the half-snake, who wishes to devour the world. These names are burned into our memories.

Of course, Naga is considered the very basest and wickedest demon, who struggles against Maria on a daily basis, their battles consuming and birthing the sun in a constant cycle, forming day and night.

It's no wonder no one dares go up where Marco dwells.

In the middle of the plaza is a raised dais with two huge, scarred wooden beams erected vertically a few feet away from each other, with a small hump of stained stone before them. Prisoners are tied up there for public humiliation or execution. Basically, if you wake up and find yourself up there, you are one hundred percent fucked.

When I'm within sight of the bakery I see Reiner's there with Bertholdt, on opposite sides of the counter, and Reiner spots and greets me with a fervor that's somehow both special and very normal for him. "Heeey, Jean!"

I know exactly why he's behaving so jovial, and I can't get displeased for the life of me. I let an unwilling smirk crawl across my face as I saunter up and around the counter, grunting, "'Sup, guys," as casually as I can.

"Ruthless killer in the works over here," Reiner chuckles aside to Bertholdt, throwing his arm out to grab my shoulder and jostle me playfully – or at least he tries to, because I shy and wriggle away. I don't like being touched, like, ever. "Soon the woods will be run dry."

"Ha ha," I snort, going inside to set up my station. Reiner's messy as hell, and it's my unofficial job to clean up all his obnoxious shit. And holy shit, is it strange sometimes. Sweeping up stray flour is one thing, but why the fuck is a spare pair of underwear back here?

I step into the front, call Reiner's name, and lob them in his face when he turns. "Quit getting laid where I work," I yell, then go back inside to the sound of Bertholdt getting incredibly flustered.

"I was not getting laid, as much as I'd like that to be true," Reiner booms back, sounding like he's struggling to contain laughter. Bertholdt being agitated makes him giddy for some reason. "You never know when you might need some extra clothes."

"That's fine, just stop leaving them on the cutting board!" I holler, picking up a broom to sweep up a pile of . . . some questionable substance under a stool. It looks like crushed oatmeal, the kind the big asshole uses to make his Reiner Braun specials. Maybe I should set fire to the mound and save our darling customers.

"Guy catches a little bunny and thinks he runs this place," I hear Reiner snort good-naturedly to Bertholdt. "Don't get cocky, kid! I control how much money you get!"

"Like you would reduce my pay," I drawl right back, feeling weirdly hyper myself. I mean, usually I just kind of wordlessly grunt when Reiner tries to mess with me. "You don't have the guts."

"He knows me too well," Reiner keens. "My big heart betrays me once again."

I roll my eyes, ready to let it drop there, but then after a pause he pops his head in and asks curiously, "So was that a one-time thing, or will there be a repeat?"

"What thing?"

"The rabbit. You going to go out and catch yourself something else?"

"Oh, about that," I say, remembering Ymir's request (Ymir! Deal! Oh my god! Killing things!). "Um, from now on I can have Wednesdays off to, uh, do that stuff, right? The . . . hunting stuff?" The hunting stuff. The hunting stuff. Who the fuck phrases it like that? Smooth, Kirschtein.

Reiner pulls the corners of his mouth down and shrugs. "Why the hell not?"

"Really?"

"Yeah! How else are you going to learn if I'm keeping you here every day?" He steps into the store proper, looking at me seriously. "Now, like, do you have a plan for this? Because, I mean, I can't let you go running off into the woods again on your own. There's all kinds of dangerous things out there. I could take you, if you want. I just, you know, I don't feel comfortable letting you get out there on your own."

Oh trust me, I've already met the most dangerous thing out there. I shook his hand. "Actually, uh, I'm not going alone."

"Oh, never mind, that's good! Who're you going with? Thomas?"

I bunch up my lower lip, doing weird shit with my mouth, I don't know. I feel like grinning and bragging and curling up in a ball. "Ymir," I mutter.

"Who?"

"Ymir . . . whatever her last name is."

"Wa- d- Ymir?" Reiner repeats incredulously, gaping and blinking at me. "Freckles Ymir? Naga Ymir? Ymir with the crazy ponytail?"

"The one and only."

"Are you serious? How the hell did you- Wednesdays! You're going with her on her trips?" Reiner's voice has gotten steadily more high-pitched and breathy in disbelief and pseudo-big brother pride. His little project of me has reached a breakthrough. Jean Kirschtein's finally going out and doing shit for once! Close off the streets! Make an announcement!

When I nod he shifts his weight to one hip and gawps at me, trying not to smile. "Look at you," he squeals delightedly. "How the hell did you get that old grouch to let you come with? Do you realize how many people have asked to hunt with her? She's never said yes to anyone."

I shrug, resuming my cleaning; this shit's not going to clear itself. "I don't know. She just sprang it on me, I guess."

"She offered?" Reiner looks like his jaw's going to unhinge itself; it's gaping and working itself back and forth in utter disbelief and I'm violently reminded of another mouth that unhinges. "Holy shit. What'd you do, seduce her?"

I almost fall the fuck over. "Fuck no," I gasp, ignoring the muttered "Language!" from Reiner. "She is the last person I'd want to seduce. Not that I couldn't."

Reiner rolls his eyes. "Sure you could, hotshot. Hey, be careful out there, okay? Don't piss her off."

"I already have," I grumble under my breath as Reiner exits, probably to tell Bertholdt the exciting news that Jean isn't quite the loser he was yesterday.

v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v

"Jean, get up."

Groggy, tired, my body heavy, the first thing on my mind upon being roused is fucking murder. I groan angrily into my pillow, hissing wordlessly for him to leave.

"Jean, get up," Thomas repeats in exasperation from somewhere next to my bed, somewhere entirely too close. This is his room too, but holy shit does he need to step the fuck out.

I raise my head blearily, squinting at the small window between our beds. The sun has barely even come up yet, and the sky is that fragile white-blue color of a newborn day. In other words, much too early for anyone named Jean Kirschtein to be expected to do anything more complex than snoring. I flop my face back under the covers. "Go th'fuck away."

"Language."

"Fffffffffuck you."

"Jean, that woman Ymir's pounding on our door and I'm a little scared. She's yelling for you. Get up."

My brain and body freeze for a second, utterly blank, before I lift my head and stare at the wall between my bed and Thomas's. "What day is it?"

". . . Wednesday."

"Fuckin' shit," I mutter, whipping the covers off my bed with new purpose. "Fuck fuck fuck." I tumble off my bed and scramble around for clothes, practically shoving Thomas out of the way.

"Language, Jean. What's going on?"

"It's frickin' Wednesday," I try not to yell, wrestling on a pair of pants and casting around for something warm. Damn, when Ymir said bright and early she meant it. I shake my head roughly, trying to wake myself up. "And I got up late, of course I did, somehow-"

Now I can hear the shaking of our front door as someone pounds on it from outside, and I yelp. How fucking long has that been happening? Ymir's going to kill me.

"Are you going somewhere?"

"Yeah, uh," I answer distractedly, trying to find my fucking boots that always get fucking lost because Thomas fucking always puts them somewhere that's not where I put them. "Where the eff are my boots? I'm, uh, going out. To hunt." Also to see a naga, but, you know, we'll omit that.

Thomas raises his obnoxiously blonde eyebrows. "You're serious."

"Hell yeah I'm serious," I say, too giddy to be adequately snappy. "And Ymir's taking me."

Thomas's eyes widen, and he spins to look dumbly out the bedroom doorway, as if to glean whether I'm lying or not from the wood that really sounds like it's going to break under Ymir's fist. "No way."

"Way," I growl, finally locating my boots under my bed (who the fuck keeps their shoes under their bed?) and flopping down on my ass to wrestle them on. "Found a tutor."

"Ymir?"

"What, are you deaf? Yes!" I say, bounding to my feet. Oh fuck, what the fuck do I bring? We didn't talk about this. Am I expected to have my own weapons? All I've got is a dumb little dagger collecting dust on the top of my shelf (come to think of it, that would've been nice to bring when I had to go visit Marco last week, just to make myself feel a little less powerless). I hop onto my bed, the springs creaking, and feel around for it, trying not to cut myself on it like a fucking idiot when I find it. "She's teaching me how to hunt and shit. Once a week. So tell Mom and Dad or something, 'cause that's where I'll be."

How long am I going to be gone? Will it rain? Do I need a coat? These are the things I should've fucking contemplated earlier, like maybe last night, or the entire fucking week preceding today. Way to go, Kirschtein. I was so caught up in the fact that I'm going to be doing shit that doesn't involve sleeping or baking that I just kept daydreaming about the fact, not the details.

"Since when has this been happening? How?" Thomas asks dumbly, slowly rotating to follow me as I rove around grabbing random things I might need.

"I don't know," I mutter distractedly, trying to find a belt that'll carry this damn dagger. Most of them don't fit me anymore. "Last week. She offered."

"She offered?"

"Yup," I say with a little more perkiness. Everyone seems to have a hard time with this fact. It feels fuckin' great. That's right, bitch, I didn't have to grovel and beg to be around Ymir; she invited me.

The door pounds even more insistently, and I groan under my breath, deciding to just carry the damn knife. I barrel past Thomas and toward the front door, my clothes and hair all in disarray from my haste. When I open it Ymir stands there, back straight as a pole, her arms crossed and chin jutting out. She's got on a heavy coat (cool, so do I), a pair of heavy boots (mine are not as heavy, but okay), and a heavy-looking belt lined with pouches and scabbards (damn it). Against her back rests a large bow, an intimidating, shiny curve of wood, as well as a quiver bristling with arrows strapped over her shoulder. She looks ready for some heavy shit.

"Took you long enough," she drawls. She sizes me up, her eyes running from my head to my toes, looking unimpressed. "Got no gear?"

"Not really," I admit glumly, shrugging a bit.

"Eh," she grunts, lip curling. "We'll work on it. Let's roll, Jim."

She spins on her heel, marching away with her characteristic arm-swinging and back swaying. I nearly trip out the door in my haste to follow her, turning around to shut my front door, and before I do I see Thomas standing there with Cane, staring with blank incredulousness. I flash him a smug grin before the door clicks shut.

I jog to catch up with her, my breath puffing a bit in the morning air. "Why so early?" I demand. "You usually wait until the afternoon."

"No time like the present," she drawls, her squinty eyes set ahead of her.

Even though it's barely sunup, a considerable amount of people litter the streets, setting up shop and chatting idly to each other as they nurse tea and a few cups of coffee (like cocoa, coffee beans are a bit of a luxury). I can't remember the last time I was willingly awake this early. I usually get up a few hours later than now and then head over to Reiner's.

I wonder if anyone notices that Ymir and I are walking together (well, I'm kind of trying to keep up with her long-legged stride, but it's pretty obvious we're walking together. I think). I make an effort to lift my head, jut out my chin like she does, trying to look as badass as I feel. Oh man, does Eren know about this? Oh my god. I hope we stop by Ymir's house. Ymir doesn't have a shop; the wooden porch of her house is enormous, so that serves as her workplace, and you just stroll right under the overhang of her roof to browse her work. Oh my god, I hope Eren is there. Oh my god.

But we pass the road that leads to her house, so unfortunately that's not happening, but it's got to happen sometime. Who do I talk to? Thomas and Reiner, pretty much, I guess. I hope Reiner's been blabbing all over town about my arrangement with Ymir. Godspeed, Reiner, you and your loud fucking mouth.

"You look fucking stupid," Ymir snaps suddenly, and I realize I've been strolling along placidly with this dumbass grin on my face. I scowl at her before straightening out my mouth, clearing my throat awkwardly. "That's better."

She's making a beeline right for Reiner's bakery, and I guess she must be picking up Marco's gross-ass chocolate stuff. I wonder if that's a naga thing, or if he just has terrible taste. The bakery's not even open yet, so I'm not sure what the hell Ymir thinks she's doing when she vaults right over the counter (literally how long would it have taken her to go around? Two seconds?) and ducks under it, frowning. She plucks something from the shelf under the countertop and spins it casually into the air, catching it and hopping back over the counter to me. Yup. Another bag of rolls.

"Reiner made those?" I ask blankly, staring at the dark pastry stains at the bottom of the bag. I frown, a little put out. Despite myself I was looking forward to more mindless compliments.

"Well you sure didn't," she grunts disapprovingly. "He made them last night and left them out for me."

"I didn't know we were going this early! Usually you stop by at, like, noon."

"I figured we needed a head start. You seem like you need a lot of work."

I stew over this as we continue, simultaneously embittered because yes, I do need a lot of work, as well as heartened, because Ymir's taking extra time to help me and she just said so herself. I keep an eye out for people I know and try to walk extra close to Ymir; it's got to be obvious that we're traipsing around together.

Unfortunately, I pretty much see no one but boring adults as we near and then enter the woods. I glimpse Mr. Carolina leaning against a fence and chatting with a group of people, to whose house my mom drags me sometimes for boring dinners, as well as Mrs. Braus the butcher, who narrows her eyes at me again in suspicion. Christ, it was one fucking sausage. On a dare. Like five years ago.

I don't want to look too lame and desperate, posturing and posing and checking to see if anyone's watching us, so I just focus on plunging into the woods like I know what the hell I'm doing.

It's eerie, how quickly the atmosphere changes in the transition from light to dark, movement to stillness, yellow and brown to green. The town is knowledge and safety, predictability; it borders on boring, and filled with equals. I can name every feature of life in that goddamn town. But the woods are Ymir's domain, Marco's domain; everything is new, and I've got no idea what to expect in here. I feel like I'm trespassing. I feel like a child, and they're the adults that tell me what to do now.

I look at Ymir. It's odd, walking beside her so brazenly after my disastrous first expedition into the forest after her. I'm not hiding, and I'm not alone; I'm actually allowed and encouraged to be here for once.

"So how's this going to work?" I ask Ymir as we wade through the bushes. "Like, tell me what's going to go down. Target practice? Sparring? I'm all over that." The thought of me picking up skills immediately and wowing Ymir with my natural prowess flits through my head.

Ymir throws her head back and laughs once, a harsh and brusque sound. "Hold your horses, Jimbles; we haven't even gotten there yet."

"I'm just planning ahead."

"Sure. Plan this, then. We've got to establish a few ground rules before we begin this little arrangement, all right?" Ymir states seriously, turning to look at me as she trudges on.

"Sure."

Ymir raises a finger. "Rule one: don't be fucking rude."

My eyes flutter skyward. "Next."

"Rule two: don't be fucking rude."

"Yeah, I got that the first time."

"Rude."

"All right, I'm sorry," I grunt, raising my hands in defeat. "Next."

"Three: you've got to face reality, Jimbles. You have to do exactly what I tell you to, when I tell you to," she intones. "You follow my orders like I'm a fucking queen. No pissing and moaning, clear? No complaining or setting me off. I tell you to run, you ask how far, huh?"

"Sure, just- wait, are you actually going to make me run? What-"

"Four: now see if you can guess this one." She glares at me challengingly. She's still walking. What the hell. She's not even looking at where she's going. I almost want her to trip or slam into a tree or something.

I shrug. "Be nice to Marco?"

"Be nice to Marco. Excellent. Oh my god, what a great start. I can't believe you remembered that it pays to not be a douchebag. You're a star pupil already."

I just "tsk," and don't dignify her with a response.

My stomach feels like it's taken over my entire chest cavity, a yawning expanse of absolutely nothing, and I remember I haven't eaten breakfast at all today. "Hey, got any food?" I ask.

Ymir flips open her satchel and withdraws an apple without a word, tossing it to me. I catch it grudgingly. "That's it?"

"Want me to prepare a feast for you, Jimbles?"

I don't really know what else to say to her for the rest of the walk (conversations with her always turn out exhausting), so I stay silent except for crunches of my apple. Over the smell of the fruit I can detect something else, something carried through the trees by a steady breeze. It smells like salt. Sometimes, when the wind is strong and blows from the west, the smell settles over Trost like a heavy blanket, bringing strange white wheeling birds that have ululating cries and hungry yellow eyes. No one knows where the hell it comes from. Pastor Nick says it's a warning that our fields and forests will be burned and salted unless we repent for our sins, and the white birds are agents of the four demons. Well, someone better fucking repent before that happens.

The forest goes on repetitively and without variation, so I'm basically dependent upon Ymir for navigation. When we draw near to the clearing I toss the apple core somewhere in the bushes and wipe my hands on my trousers, still feeling pretty hungry.

I stroll right into the glade without hesitation, no looking around or anything, and wonder what this says about my mental state. It's surprisingly sunny today, and warm; I think of discarding my coat, but I don't really want to leave anything lying around. I don't know, I feel weird doing so.

I look around at Ymir, expectant and just brimming with potential skill and wonder, but she just stretches casually and flops down upon the tree trunk, looking obviously unconcerned with starting anything. I stand there awkwardly, fidgeting, waiting for her to say or do something. Nothing happens. It's at this point I start feeling a bit of doubt. I mean, we're here. Actually in the place where she'll be teaching me shit. It feels a bit daunting. "So, uh, about the whole. Training thing."

"Would you relax? I just sat down," she grumbles impatiently, stretching. She huffs out a satisfied breath, leaning back with her knees spread wide. "So," she says, "what're you interested in, exactly?"

"Archery," I say instantly. She raises an eyebrow and I try to see this as a good thing.

"That's going to take a lot of work. It takes years to really get everything down. You prepared to make that kind of investment of your time and energy?"

I nod immediately, eagerly. It's not going to take Jean Kirschtein years (but of course it will, my rational side whispers). "Of course. Obviously. Definitely."

Ymir raises her hands. "Who am I to deny you, then?" she questions airily before turning to her satchel. She withdraws from it a roll of what looks like string and a long, white, irregularly-shaped object, which I recognize a second or two later from its porous base as a portion of a deer antler. She sets them down on the bark next to her and nods to them, leaning down and propping her chin up with one fist. "Go nuts."

I stare blankly at her, then at the materials she just laid out. "What?"

"I'm assuming you went out with Shadis at one point, right?" She widens her eyes expectantly. "I'm sure you know how to make an arrowhead. Go wild. I'll be waiting here."

Oh shit. I hate shit like this, where you're supposed to show how much you know before the actual good stuff starts. It just puts into perspective how much I don't know. Shadis took us kids out, like, four years ago. How am I supposed to remember all the details of what he drilled into us before dropping us? "Seriously? But you didn't even give me anything to make arrowheads with!"

Ymir spreads her arms, straightening up; the white scars on her waist flex with the motion. "Of course not. I gave you something to cut one up with. You've got to find the shit yourself. Quick quiz: what material are you going to use?"

"Uh . . ." I say the first thing that pops into my head. "Rocks."

"Too vague," Ymir sighs. "Flint. Go get some. I recommend a stream or something."

And this is how I find myself stomping into the woods, struggling to find a goddamn body of water. Thank god I remember what flint looks like. When I finally manage to locate a little brook (by fucking stepping in it) I hunch over and scoop up the biggest cache of smooth rocks I can find. I'm not looking forward to this at all. It's just imminent humiliation. Ymir's not going to go easy on me for forgetting shit. I can't believe I thought I was going to pick this up like nothing. I'm supposed to be cynical, what the hell.

One shoe sopping wet, my hands coated in dirt, I squelch my way back into the clearing, where Ymir is knitting something baby blue in color but so misshapen I can't tell for the life of me what the hell it is. I'm surprised to find her alone. As I dump the flint in a pile by the tree, I ask, "Don't you call your brother or something?"

Ymir shakes her head, pursing her lips. "He's probably still asleep. It's chilly this morning, and he hates that."

"Oh," I mutter, sitting down next to her. "Hey, so, you know that big rock thing up the mountain a bit? That's got a path going up to it?" When she nods I continue, "What the hell's back there, anyway? He had me help him clear the path last week and it took forever."

She gives me this look. "Why didn't you ask him, if you wanted to know?"

"I was still edgy around him."

To my relief she seems to find that answer satisfactory. "It's where he basks. Marco can't really generate much body heat himself, so he goes up where the sun hits him and takes a nap for an hour or so." I try and wrap my head around that concept; living things are warm, and Marco isn't? Does that make him not alive? "I'll call him around noon, I guess. He should be awake by then, the lazy ass." She raises an eyebrow at me. "Not anymore?"

"What?"

"Not edgy around him anymore?" she elaborates, and I shrug.

"I mean, I guess he's not that scary," I grumble, thinking of Naga the devouring god and scoffing at the comparison between groveling, submissive Marco and the huge white statue of a snake with soulless eyes in the chapel. "Even though I'm still pissed he chased me."

"You'll get over it," Ymir drawls, then points and shrugs deliberately at the stones I dumped there. "Eeeh, debatable quality, but they'll do. Get to work." She resumes her knitting.

Oh Christ. This is the part I hate the most; knapping. Somehow I always manage to crush my knuckles under the mashing tool or slice my fingertips open on the sheer chips of flint. The ground beneath the tree is sandy, lacks grass, and is studded with rocks and bits of ancient bark. Well, someone's not going to have very clean knees by the end of the day. Ugh. I kneel awkwardly in the dirt beside the log, taking the piece of antler in one hand and a rock in my other hand. I get to work. Or, at least, I try to, but then Ymir speaks up. "Um, hello? Safety first?"

"What?" I ask for what feels like the thirtieth time today.

She tugs a pair of goggles out of her bag and tosses them at me. I catch them and stare at them. They're like the kind a blacksmith would use, the ones that make you look bug-eyed and stupid. "Don't want that shit flying in your eyes. God damn," Ymir mutters huffily.

"Where'd you get these?"

"Swiped 'em. Get to work."

Unsurprised, I fit the goggles on reluctantly, the straps squeezing the sides of my head uncomfortably, the lens turning my vision constrained and orange, and resume. I remember that you've got to hold it at a certain angle or something to split the flint right, but I can't remember what the angle looks like for the life of me. We were taught to just eyeball it and guess.

"Forty five," Ymir interrupts again suddenly. I look up; she's bent on her knitting, not focusing on me.

"What?"

"Forty five degrees," she sighs. "Just a tip. That works best."

This means absolutely nothing to me. "What the hell are you talking about?"

She puts down her string and sighs. "I forgot Trost is dripping with testosterone and run by chuckleheads. It's an angle, dipshit. Like this." She holds up her needles at a certain angle. Oh, well that looks manageable. Since fucking when do numbers equal angles? Who comes up with this shit?

We resume our awkward silence, punctuated by my tentative taps of bone against stone and the knocking of her needles. I'm too much of a pussy to hit the flint hard, but I'm getting there. Slowly. I manage to knock the thing in half and get to work chipping slivers.

I glance up at the forest around us, at the clear sky, then at Ymir and to the white marks across her skin. The scars on her stomach look like they were painful. It's kind of a relief, learning it was a bear and not the naga. It gives me less of a reason to be so painfully anxious.

"So," I begin casually. "What's . . . you know, what's your deal?"

"My deal?"

"Yeah," I continue. "The whole hiding-my-brother-in-the-woods thing. How long has this been going on?"

"Ever since we came to Trost," Ymir mumbles distractedly, then squints. "Abouuut . . . seven years ago? Maybe eight. Somewhere in there."

"You weren't born here?"

She shakes her head. "Nope-ah," she says, popping her lips on the p.

"So where were you born?" I ask, surprised. This explains why she's so crazy and weird; she's not even from Trost. I only know a few other people who weren't born in Trost, and even fewer are generally considered socially acceptable to interact with (the others are either deadweights, crazy hobos, or both). One is Ymir, which I've just learned, and another is Bertholdt because he knows Reiner and is competent with a bow. We don't much like mixing and mingling in Trost. "And why's your brother a naga, anyway, and you're not? How does that work? Did your mom or dad screw a snake or something?"

She gives me a withering, vaguely threatening look, and I'm genuinely surprised she didn't swing at me for that. "You've got a lot of questions for a bleeding guy."

My thumb stings, and I look down to see a few beads of blood collecting on the pad of it. I grumble curses under my breath as I set everything down and suck on it, tasting dirt and salt and copper. I must've sliced the damn thing on the flint.

Ymir waves a hand dismissively. "You wouldn't want to know anyway."

I pop my thumb out of my mouth to say, "I kind of do." When she looks at me skeptically I add, "I'm actually a little curious now. Honest. Spill."

Ymir rolls her eyes silently, resuming her knitting. I wait for her to speak for a bit, but it seems she's not going to. Only when I turn back to the flint does she start talking.

"We're from this village by the coast. Somewhere blessedly far, far away from here. My father was a midwife and my mother was a scholar. It's tinier than Trost, nestled right next to a scrubland. Much sunnier. Much sunnier. You'd be a ghost compared to these people."

I'm surprised she's actually telling me this. I continue to listen in silence.

"Something you've got to understand is that Trost is extremely conservative and really fucking dumb. My village . . . it was all about new things. Culture. Learning. Diversity. We ate it all up. We celebrated difference. We had festivals all the time, for every goddamn occasion. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, divorces, funerals- hell, maybe we just got bored sometimes and threw a big-ass party. It wasn't all green and yellow like it is here, it was . . . colorful.

I was the baddest bitch in town and my very favorite job in the world was being a big sister. I vividly remember being three years old and looking at this dumb fat bloodstained thing wrapped in a blanket and my dad saying, 'Look, Ymir, it's your little brother,' and I fell in love instantly."

This is the most I have ever heard her speak, and I say so. "So what?" she demands. "I'm a talkative person."

"This is pretty personal stuff. You don't seem like the type to, like . . . pour your heart out. You know, allow people to know stuff about you."

She grimaces. "I don't like telling people a whole lot. I don't like them knowing things about me. But if you're going to be spending a lot of time around us, how're you supposed to understand anything if you don't know the backstory?"

"I just didn't expect it, is all," I say, shrugging, refusing to wince when she glares at me. Honesty is a good policy. "So, your brother was normal? Human? He got born?"

Ymir nods. "Normal as can be. Fat little legs and all. Used to tramp after me like a duckling all over the place, and I loved it. Everyone adored Marco. He just loved everything and everyone, the cynosure of everyone under fifteen. Every little boy and girl wanted him to be their little boyfriend. 'Play with us, Marco,'" she imitates in a squeaky voice, obviously one intended for a child. "'No, play with us.' Everyone knew him; everyone was charmed by him. Everyone. He was that kind of kid.

"So. I was ten, and he was seven. People started to disappear. They'd just vanish from their homes, from the street, from anywhere. No one knew who was doing it, what they wanted, what the hell was going on. That is, until people started reappearing as mutilated corpses haphazardly dumped on the side of the road. I was just ten, so they wouldn't let me see, but I got a glimpse of one anyway. It was a woman. Her spine was growing another spine."

Ymir sets her needles down and puts her wrists against her temples, splaying her fingers skyward. "Her ribs were coming out of her face, like this. Her jaw was split, like an insect's, and her eyes were gone. Whoever was doing this, be it a singular person or a group, was doing some fucking twisted stuff to people. Trying to turn them into things, but none of it worked, and they just chucked the bodies wherever. We were all warned to stay indoors, lock up our houses, don't go out alone, the works. It was a paranoia breeding ground. I'd never heard my village so quiet. It was beyond eerie."

I feel a little nauseated, listening to this. I didn't anticipate such heavy shit. This is the reason no one leaves Trost. The world's full of some shitty things. It's much better to just stay in Trost and never leave. It's safer.

"Then Marco went missing."

I expect this part by now, but hearing the words still makes my skin crawl. My hands are on my lap, my thumb long since ceased in bleeding. The tight straps of my goggles are digging uncomfortably into my temples, so I tug them off for now. The air feels cold against my eyes.

"He just didn't come home one night. I was a fucking mess. Screaming, crying, throwing things, demanding we go out and look for him and throwing even more of a fit when my parents refused. The whole village could hear me, day and night, wailing and screeching because I was so fucking pissed and confused about what the hell was happening. 'You've got to stay strong for us, Ymir,' they used to say. 'Well, fuck that,' I remember thinking. I wanted Marco back. I didn't want him to wind up carved up and growing body parts out of his fucking mouth in a ditch.

"I needed some air one night, god, what could it have been, two or three months after he went missing? So I snuck out the back door. It was a full moon, I remember. Real bright and easy to see. I was practically daring them to come and take me, whoever those sickos were, because then they'd bring me to Marco and I could be sure he was all right or not. I missed him abominably. I walked out the back door into Dad's garden – Marco and I used to play in it all the time; it was practically ours – so I walk out, staring up at the sky and the moon, trying not to bawl my dumb eyes out . . . and I trip right over him."

Ymir has long since put down her needles, squinting off into the distance. "He was half frozen to death, just lying sprawled out in the dirt, and at first I thought a snake was trying to swallow him. But the moon was bright, and I could see it was part of his body now, somehow. That that's what he was. I could see a trail of flat dirt behind him where he'd dragged himself home. I was too scared to see where the path was coming from; I just picked him up and hauled him inside."

Her word choice stirs something in my brain, and I remember the weird sentence I'd recited to Marco to get him to stop attacking me. I tripped over a snake in the garden. Only someone Ymir told this story to could know the meaning behind that random phrase, and Ymir would only tell someone she trusts not to go blabbing. I feel kind of reassured.

"Huh," I hum in a small voice. "What'd your parents do?"

Ymir snorts, turning suddenly derisive. "Well, my dad started screaming and my mom tried to kill him, and I wasn't having any of that. So I packed my things, picked up Marco, and left. Didn't look back."

I raise my eyebrows, surprised. "Just like that?"

"Just like that. It was pretty fucking clear they didn't want anything to do with him anymore. Didn't think he was Marco anymore." Her mouth twists menacingly at this, this grievance that's nearly a decade old and still causes her to be visibly filled with venom. It's startling to see such a change in her normal demeanor; this isn't just getting bitchy and snarky over something, it's genuine agitation. "And I was not about that. I guess he's a little too different for my wonderfully diverse village, huh? I walked right out of there in the middle of the night with Marco in a torpor on my back and these psychopaths still running around abducting people left and right, and I didn't look back once."

She keeps slipping words into her monologue that have absolutely no meaning to me. She's also starting to pronounce things weirdly, drawing out different vowels and flicking over consonants in a way she doesn't normally do. I get the gist of it, though. "So someone kidnapped him and . . . transformed him into a naga?"

"Yes, indeed-y," Ymir affirms, "though technically I guess he's not even called a naga, since they're not exactly a thing. I made up the word. I don't know why Marco was the only one that lived through their fucked up experiments. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe there are more. I don't know how he got himself out of there, or if they let him go, or what. All I know is that he dragged himself through the dirt in the middle of the night until his hands bled and almost froze to death there . . . because he wanted to get back home."

"What'd you do then?"

She shrugs. "Wandered. Tried to find a place to stay. Had to keep us hidden, 'cause people would take on look at Marco and either scream or whip out a weapon. We were starving and half-dead by the time we hit Trost. I set Marco up here and carved out a living for myself on Trost's streets. Which is a lot more difficult than it should be, by the way. Trost is insanely xenophobic. It's actually unnerving. I still get death glares just because I'm a lot tanner than you snow people."

I stare at the bark beneath my fingers, at a couple of ants darting their way in and out of its flaky, lichened ridges, and I feel kind of bad for Ymir. Even if she is a loud, dirty foreigner. "Wasn't he, like, eight or something? Did he tell you who did it? What happened to him?"

Ymir looks at me suddenly, sharply. "You didn't bring it up to him before, did you?"

"Uh . . . no," I say slowly, startled by her sudden urgency.

She relaxes. "Good. Whatever you do, just . . . do not bring it up. Don't. I've asked him and it was a mistake."

I screw up my face in confusion. "What did he say?"

Ymir gazes at me impassively. "He didn't say anything. He had a panic attack so bad he couldn't speak again for days. Just . . . do not talk about it. He doesn't really remember anything, and I don't want him to. However they did it, it fucked him up in more ways than just the physical sense. Don't make him remember."

Well, good fucking thing I hadn't let my curiosity overpower me last week, then. I like to ask whatever the hell's on my mind, but I was deterred by Marco's . . . uh, differences. I don't really know what I'd do if Marco began freaking out. Wait, no, yes I do: I would begin freaking out.

"So what was with that- that thing he did? When he first saw me?" I ask. "He looked pretty fucking demented. Like, his fucking mouth- Is that, like, his snake side coming out to say hello? Why the fuck was he so vicious

"The vicious thing . . . that wasn't Marco," Ymir says. "That wasn't him controlling it. You know what? That is an actual thing. I honestly have no idea what the fuck that is. I never have, and it's not exactly Marco doing it. I call it, I don't know, the 'berserk state', and it's happened ever since he got turned into a naga. It's like . . . it's not even him doing it. He gets all demented sometimes whenever he gets too scared or angry, and blacks out, and attacks everything that moves. A random stranger popping up in his territory after almost a decade of seeing no one but me? More than enough to trigger the transformation."

"Yeah, sure, but . . ." I gesture vaguely. "Snakes. Snakes are all evil and shit. He's just, you know, being a snake."

You know what kind of snake Marco is?" When I shake my head she continues, "He's a king cobra. You can tell from the markings. They used to be everywhere where we lived. You know what we used to call king cobras back in my village?" I shake my head again. "Gentle giants. They didn't do shit unless you attacked them first, and they take the first opportunity to run away. Big striped pansies. So I can't think of a reason for him being part of one making him violent."

I still inwardly contest this, since everyone knows that snakes are pretty much the devil incarnate, and "gentle snake" is probably the dumbest mental image I've ever conjured, but I don't argue with her. "Then what is it?"

She shrugs again. "Like I said, I've got no idea. Neither does Marco. He doesn't know what he's doing while he's berserk and he doesn't remember it afterward. We don't even know what triggers it. Some things that stress him out do it, and other things don't. It's sporadic."

"How'd you get him to stop chasing me?"

She leans over and jabs my shoulder with her fingers. "Ran up after him and got his attention. On his own it wears off after a while, but the second he sees me he snaps out of it every time. You're lucky I felt bad for your sorry ass and saved you." She pauses, then adds, "Good thing he didn't bite you, though."

I stare at the sky with a why me expression. I'm not even sure if I want to know. "Why."

"Because he's venomous," Ymir says smugly, grinning at my obvious discomfort. "One bite, three minutes, and you're a dead boy."

"Thank you," I say forcefully, nodding really deliberately at her. "Thank you so much for this knowledge."

"You're so welcome, Jimbles," Ymir snorts. "Now get back to work." And thus ends our most in-depth talk yet.

I look down at the flint and antler that I'd completely forgotten about working with. I wrestle my goggles back on and get back to it, mulling over the long conversation we'd just shared. I guess I'm unsurprised that Ymir would share so much; she doesn't seem the type to censor herself, even though she's normally so strangely secretive. I know a lot more about her and Marco than I had beforehand, that's for sure. Apparently nagas aren't even a thing. "So, uh, if there's no such thing as a naga species, how'd you come up with the name 'naga?' Did you just make up a random word? Because the demon's got the same name."

"Your cult," Ymir mutters, "has always derided snakes and the fictional demon you call Naga. What better name to call Marco than something you consider the devil itself? What else could possibly deter you idiots so much? When we came here and I saw that you have a snake demon called Naga, what else was I supposed to call him that would scare you shitless?"

"It's not a cult," I say immediately. "It's the church of Maria."

She rolls her eyes. "Trost worships a woman on a wall. Great."

I let it drop, feeling sour. What? Does she even live in Trost? No wonder she still apparently gets death glares; you're kind of considered nuts if you don't attend the church.

In my agitation I've made quite a few arrowheads, I realize, piled up in a stack. They're sloppy and aren't centered, but for a couple of shitty arrowheads I made for the first time in a good amount of years they're not bad. Thank god for my meticulous neatness. I actually feel pretty reassured. "How many do I have to make?" I wonder aloud.

Ymir leans over and squints. "Oh, damn, that looks like enough. We were talking for a while. Now, I'll be merciful and understand that you're probably an incompetent little shit, so you don't remember how to put the actual things on the arrows."

I squirm a little bit. "I don't really remember that bit, nah." My dad makes all his arrows, so when I used to steal his bow to practice I never thought I'd need to make the actual things.

"No shame in that. I'm surprised you even dress yourself in the morning without your daddy doing it for you. I'll walk you through hafting."

Her method of walking me through it is actually pretty patient. She explains what everything is and how to do it, teaching me how to specifically tie the arrowhead on and what holes to thread through and whatnot, giving me plenty of time to try for myself, and I try to have a little self-control in return and not complain about everything. It's even more reassuring that she seems to be capable of being patient. Maybe I'm going to pick this up after all. This can't be that bad. How else am I supposed to learn?

But then she leans over and brings forth her bow. That thing is fucking huge. "Got the arrows, got the bow," Ymir says. "Now let's see you shoot."

All right. It's time to not fuck up today. Let's go, Jean motherfucking Kirschtein. Let's rock this. I hope.

Ymir reaches into her bag again and withdraws a glove with only two fingers on it and a vambrace. "Righty or lefty?"

"Righty."

"Oh, good, because I've only got shit for righties," she says, tossing me the two pieces of equipment. "Put those on."

I'm familiar with these, since you're not supposed to shoot without them (I learned that lesson the hard way by slicing an entire layer of skin off my arm when I was twelve) (ow). I strap the vambrace to my left forearm, tightening it, before slipping on the glove. Hell yeah, I feel like a professional.

That feeling dies quickly when Ymir tosses her bow onto my lap. I scramble to catch it, shooting her a glare, before holding it deliberately in my hands. Its wood is smooth and cool under my fingers. This is some professional craftsmanship, I realize quickly. My dad's bow is some cheap-ass shit compared to this. It's symmetrical and glossy and kind of reminds me of the sheen of Marco's scales.

Ymir must see my awed expression, because she smiles smugly. "I made this bow. Maybe I'll teach you how, if you're good enough. See that tree over there, the one that hangs right there?" She points it out to me. It's a wide one, with a trunk that's nearly flat. Ymir points at the ground about halfway between us and the tree, handing me an arrow. "Stand there. Try to nail it right in the middle."

I chew my lip and trudge over there, the bow swinging slightly in my hands. I wish I don't feel so goddamn awkward with it. Bows aren't normally this frickin' big, are they? It's over half my height, and I am not a short guy. There's no way they're this big. Don't they have cute little versions? For when you don't want to deal with carting around the big-ass ones? Are those even real? Have they been invented? I will invent them.

I chance a look over my shoulder at Ymir, who shrugs. "Don't be aiming at me."

"'M not," I mumble, facing forward. "I just . . . don't be surprised when I fuck up, all right? I don't think I'm good at this. Yet."

"That's the point of showing me how you shoot, kid. Then I can pinpoint where you're fucking up. Shoot."

I swallow again, the corners of my mouth pulled back in this gross grimace, and nudge my feet into a position I think looks vaguely like the correct archer's stance. I nock the arrow with clumsy fingers, setting it on the groove in the bow's wood to keep it still, and raise the whole arrangement, drawing my arm back as far as I can. Holy shit is this string hard to move, holy shit. It's like trying to bend a piece of fucking metal. I can only manage to do it, like, five inches or something.

An absolutely earsplitting whistle erupts behind me and I jump, squeaking. I whirl and glare at Ymir, who lowers her hand from her mouth and grins. She points a finger skyward and says smugly, "Noon."

I don't grace her with a reply and try to imitate what I was doing before her interruption. Now I feel like hurrying. It's bad enough having Ymir as an audience, but I don't want the naga to see me utterly fail to hit this tree too. Then Ymir will have someone to laugh about it with. Oh god.

I try not to think about what Ymir is thinking as I draw the string back as far as I can manage, which, again, isn't very fucking far, and let the arrow loose. It wobbles through the air at an agonizingly slow pace before bouncing to the ground not even fifteen feet away, rolling to a rest half-hidden in the grass.

I can hear Ymir slowly clapping behind me. "Wow," she intones.

"Whatever. I told you I wasn't good," I mutter, staring at the ground as I stomp back to the log and sit upon it heavily.

"That was . . . pretty terrible."

"I warned you," I snap, arms crossed.

"No, but, I need to capture this moment in my mind forever. It needs to go down in my personal history as the absolute worst shot I've ever seen."

"Shut up."

"Like, I think I could pull off a better shot blindfolded. Marco could do it better with his feet and he doesn't fucking have feet."

"Would you fucking cut it out?"

Ymir finally lets out a snide little snigger. "All right, all right; I'll stop tormenting you. Let's just go over what you did wrong." She stands, motioning for me to do the same. "It's going to take a looong while."

I slowly rise to my feet, slow as molasses. My insides churn with embarrassment. I kind of want to just go home right now and lock myself in my room for the next six years and not speak to anyone.

Ymir turns to me and puts her hands on my shoulders, guiding me to where she wants me to stand. "First off. Stance. Give me your best archer's stance." I shuffle my feet apart a few inches and Ymir shakes her head. "Shoulder width, Jimbles, come on. There, good. Turn so you're facing perpendicular to where you want the arrow to go. No. Ye- other way, no- yes, there we go. Head to the left. Chin up a little more. Down. God damn it I said down. Okay, roll your shoulders back . . . not that much back, you look like a penguin-"

She cuts herself off suddenly in the midst of me wondering what the fuck a penguin is, her jaw going slack, before waving and calling, "It's okay, it's all fine." I turn my head and see Marco is hovering at the edge of the glade, his hands in nervous fists, his tail curled up tightly under his body, staring at us both with wide eyes. Clearly he has no idea why I'm here.

Ymir abandons me to saunter over to him, grinning – am I supposed to just keep standing here or what? – and he slithers forward to meet her. "Shit, Marco, you missed the funniest moment of your life. Jimbles here just shot the most pathetic attempt at archery I've ever seen."

"Don't fucking-" I cut myself off, chewing my tongue to get myself to stop talking. Freckled brat. I'll punch her, I swear to god. One person to bear witness to my suckiness is too much already; now she's got someone to confer with. Fuck me with something sharp and painful.

"Oh," Marco mumbles, glancing over at me with a little nervous confusion, and maybe some apology (yeah, bitch, you better apologize for her). He sidles closer to Ymir and murmurs something in her ear.

Ymir straightens up and says loudly, "Jimbles here is the most pathetic piece of trash I've ever encountered-"

"Thanks."

"-so I'm going to be teaching him some useful shit. Shooting things. Not being deadweight! Is that okay?" she adds a little more quietly.

The changes I noticed in her voice all day suddenly dominate her normal tones, and I realize what she's been doing: lapsing back into an accent I'd never noticed before. It's not as strong, but she has the same accent as Marco does. Her voice barely sounds like the one I recognize.

Marco glances uncertainly at me, then shrugs slowly. "I guess." He smiles nervously at me, a gesture I don't return.

Ymir throws her arm across his shoulders and tugs him after her, still speaking in that accent, and she actually speaks a little faster, like it's more comfortable. "Good! Now you can watch Jimbles here be absolutely abysmal at everything he attempts! Oh joyous day!"

I can't see myself but I'd like to think the cold of my gaze can freeze fire. She flashes me a cheeky smirk, releasing Marco and strolling over to the log, calling over her shoulder at me, "What do you think you're doing? Archer stance, loser. Don't slack off."

Reluctantly I resume the stance she wants and I really hope I don't look like an idiot. I'm hyperaware of Marco approaching cautiously and hovering a few feet away from me. His tail's doing that writhing thing at the end. We stare at each other, and I say, "What."

It's odd, now that I know more about Marco than I did before. Ymir is too brusque to adequately distrust, and her explanations for everything that's happened have sounded rational enough to peel away my abject disgust until there's nothing left but minor apprehension. Marco still looks weird as fuck, but I now know the stepping-stones around his fragile temper. As long as I watch my mouth, I really don't have anything to be afraid of. And why should I? Look at this thing. He's the most painfully awkward creature I've ever laid eyes on. Even more awkward than Bertholdt when Ymir jokingly hits on him. That is funny.

He stares at the ground, then at me, then starts inching toward me.

Wait, is he.

He is.

He stops in front of me and offers his hand shyly. Rolling my eyes, I indulge him with another handshake. He perks up immediately when he sees I'm reciprocating without being told to. His hand really doesn't feel like anything other than human.

"Um," he says slowly after letting go, "wait, I thought your name was Jean."

"It is," I grumble. "Ymir's just . . . being an . . . idiot."

I momentarily wonder if this is the smartest thing to say, considering that's his sister and he's capable of going crazy when he's stressed out, but he gets this mildly exasperated look, like he knows exactly what I'm talking about. It's surprisingly mature and expressive for someone I considered so childishly foreign, and I snort. "Sorry," he says. "If she was rude."

I shrug. "She's always rude."

"Yeah," he agrees solemnly, and god, it's almost funny. "Did you, um."

"Did I what?"

Marco's hands curl in on themselves and hover in front of his chest in that nervous praying mantis pose. "The, um. The rabbit. You, um, took it with you, didn't you?"

My immediate reaction of staring blankly at him must not be the one he wants, because he immediately sputters, "I mean, when you left I realized it was weird to just throw a dead animal at you, and I didn't want to chase you down and explain because I am not supposed to go close to the village, and I was sure you would be unnerved by-"

"All right, dude, relax," I mutter, raising a hand. "It's all good. I took it. So, uh, thanks. By the way."

"Oh, good," he sighs, relaxing. "Good. That is good too," he adds, grinning as Ymir saunters back over and hands him a pastry bag. He accepts it eagerly, waving bashfully at me before wandering away from us and tearing it open.

"Now, I know you're not the brightest star in the sky," Ymir sighs at me, "but where the hell did that stance go."

I mumble something and resume what I was doing. Ymir moves my shoulders and kicks my feet into position until she's satisfied, then hands me her bow. "Draw."

I do so, twisting my spine more than I feel I should to aim sideways and pulling the string back as much as I can. Ymir moves my elbow and hand around, correcting a lot more than is enough to preserve my pride, then tells me to stop slouching. I roll my shoulders back a bit, but I guess that doesn't satisfy her because she scoffs and buries her fingers in my lower stomach; I yelp, my spine going ramrod straight, and she nods in satisfaction. "That's better!"

I manage to hold my tongue, but give her the most viciously venomous glare humanly possible. She sneers at me, gesturing for me to draw.

I screw my face up in frustration, drawing the string back again and giving her a pointed look. Ymir returns it with incredulity. "That's it? Christ, it's not an infant, Jimbles, pull it. That's it? Well, doctor Ymir has diagnosed your problem." She squeezes my arm. "You're fucking weak, dude. Nothing but fat and bone here, sir."

I tug my arm out of her iron grip. "Well, then what do we do?"

"Well, you are going to start rectifying this fundamental problem, and Marco and I are going to watch and laugh at you."

"What the fuck is a rectifying?"

"Never mind that. You need to start working out. Like, a lot." Ymir curls her forearm skyward, fist clenched, flexing her biceps, and god damn is it intimidating. "You think I'm on the top of my game from slouching around? I warned you you'd have to work for this."

I pull my lips back in agitation. "All right, whatever. So what do I do?"

"Well, first of all," Ymir says, "you need to start exercising. And not just here, either, but on your own free time. I noticed you were pulling the string with your arm."

"Thanks. Did you also notice I was lifting the bow with my arm, too? Standing with my feet? I think those are also important."

She gives me a withering look. "That's not what I meant, asshat. You're supposed to pull it with your back. And since I am pretty sure that if I were to tear your shirt off right now I'd see ribs, that needs to be surely rectified. You've got to get as strong as me, Jimbles!"

"Right," I say dryly, looking her up and down. "And how exactly am I going to know when that happens?"

"When you achieve lethal levels of attractiveness," Ymir proclaims. "When you can draw that string back hard enough to break it; when you can, I don't know, snap an animal's neck or something, because apparently that's an important quality in your godforsaken village. When you can lift something over, like, three hundred pounds."

"You can't lift three hundred pounds."

Ymir starts nodding incredulously, putting her hands on her hips. "You want to go, bitch? Don't test me."

"Prove it."

"Fine," she simpers, then abruptly starts grinning, and I take a step back. She's not planning something good. "Wow," she sighs loudly, her voice carrying. "If only there was something nearby that was extremely heavy so I could prove something to cute little Jimbles over here."

Marco, who has been munching methodically on his pastries, the lengths of his body draped all over the log in a sprawling shiny mass, suddenly drops the bag. "No."

Ymir whips around. "Marco! I didn't see you there. Why don't you come over here, little brother?"

Marco looks terrified; loops of his tail slide off the log as he straightens up a bit. "No, Ymir no, I hate it when you do this, please-"

Ymir begins to advance on him, swaying exaggeratedly with every step. "Oh, Marcoooo-"

"Don't you dare!" he yells back at her, then yelps and bolts when she charges him, laughing maniacally. "Ymiiir, stoooop!"

I shake my head disapprovingly as they chase each other around much like they did the first time I saw them, Marco yelling fruitlessly at Ymir to stop ("You can't even lift me anyway!") and Ymir just straight-up ignoring him ("Marco! Don't you love me? Come back!") until Marco makes too sharp a turn and Ymir takes the opportunity to dive, wrapping her arms around a section of his tail. Marco groans in defeat and turns around and folds in on himself to try and shove her off his body, but she just abandons his snake part and wraps her arms around him instead.

He giggles – actually giggles – and simply gives up and goes limp as Ymir throws him over her shoulder, stooping down to gather up one loop of his snake tail and lift it like a roll of rope. She bellows skyward in victory, then staggers, her arms occupied with lifting Marco and therefore unable to help her balance, and falls heavily on her ass, cackling.

"Told you!" Ymir yells at me from the ground as Marco slides off her and slinks away, muttering about how he feels manhandled. She clambers to her feet, dusting herself off.

"You didn't even lift all of him."

"Well. Of course I didn't! No one can, dude, he weighs, like, I don't even know how much. It ain't humanly possible for anyone to do that."

I stare at her dryly, and she shrugs. "All right, maybe I was exaggerating with the lifting thing. But you need to bulk up, Jimbles, you're thin as a reed. Starting next week you begin the most intensive training regiment of your life. Better mentally prepare yourself."

"Great," I mutter, rolling my eyes skyward. "So what do I do today?"

The answer to that question is more stance training. Ymir shows me the correct way to hold myself and forces me to do it over and over again until I've met her standards. Then she sends me off to make even more goddamn arrowheads. We're not even shooting them anymore, so I'm not sure what the point of it is, but Ymir gets what Ymir wants. And she keeps randomly making me stand up and do the stance again and correcting me. You'd think I would run out of ways to fuck it up, but you'd be very mistaken. My knees are never bent enough or they're bent too much, my spine is never straight, my shoulders or feet never squared. Oh, and my wrists. Apparently I constantly twist my wrists too much when I draw back the damn string.

I stomp back to the log and throw myself down to the ground in frustration after a particularly error-filled session. Marco stares curiously at me and I glare back, daring him to say something, but he quickly looks away. Good. Staring is fucking rude.

Marco slips off into the woods somewhere a minute or two later, and I wonder if I scared him off, but I mostly welcome the lack of company. Now Ymir can finally fucking stop exclaiming over my mistakes to her one-man freckled audience. I've been in a constant flux of thinking this is amazing and thinking this is the worst decision I've ever made, and Ymir does not help one fucking bit.

After a while I see movement out of the corner of my eye and glance up to see Marco quietly emerge from the woods, returning, his hands clasped behind his back as he slinks his way through the grass toward us. Ymir is facing the other way, back at her knitting as I knap, and does not notice his return. Marco's staring at her very carefully, maneuvering so that whatever his hands are doing behind his back is faced away from her.

I watch him quizzically as he withdraws from behind his back something shiny and sleek, and my face twists in confusion when I recognize it as an entire duck. Like, an actual duck, the kind from a pond, the ones that are brown with dark speckles. I wonder at first if it's for me like the rabbit, but then I realize it's alive, wriggling and jerking its neck to try and wrench free of Marco's grasp. He's got one hand around its back to hold its wings down and the other clamped down on its beak. I can barely hear little gurgles of protest and distress from the duck's throat.

I'm wondering just why the hell Marco is holding a live duck – a live fucking duck – and looking like he's trying to hide it. He slinks up behind Ymir, lips pressed together like he's fighting back laughter, and slowly opens Ymir's satchel and slips the duck inside, quickly releasing it and closing the bag before the animal can escape. He does all this with Ymir still oblivious of his presence and antics. The satchel twitches a bit as the duck tries to nose its way free, then goes still.

What the fuck.

Marco creeps backward, hands spread out as he tries not to make any noise, and he notices me watching him. He freezes, and we stare at each other blankly. He glances at Ymir's back, then at me. Slowly, very slowly, he raises a finger to his lips, and I nod at an equally slow pace, confused but compliant.

Marco beams at me before getting up on the log next to Ymir, now alerting her to his presence. She flashes a rare, genuinely pleased grin and ruffles his hair fondly as he settles down, draping his tail over and under himself in shiny knots, like a built-in pillow and blanket. One thick section of it loops around Ymir's waist and she doesn't even bat an eyelid, just casually lifts and rests her elbows on it. Don't snakes, like, wrap themselves around you and squeeze until you suffocate? How the fuck do you stand that?

They start talking. I can't really hear what they're saying because they're murmuring in low tones, probably because of my presence. I guess we're just going to . . . ignore the fact that Marco just placed a live bird among Ymir's personal belongings. Okay. I hunker down and ignore them, ignore the incessant buzz of their voices. It's kind of annoying. It's not like I'm some big person to keep secrets from. I kind of want to know what the hell they talk about.

It doesn't take long for them to get over that. It's hard to decipher what exactly they're saying when they're both speaking so strongly in that accent. It's rapid-fire, familiar, calm and casual. Ymir puts down her knitting to gesticulate; Marco props his head up in his hands and listens rapturously, a tiny smile on his lips. Ymir's hands rest when she's not gesturing on the portion of tail encircling her waist like it's nothing special, like it's her own lap. Sometimes she pats it, like you would if you were talking animatedly to your friend and you pat their knee for emphasis. Not that I would know. Even if I did have friends, I don't like touching.

When the traders come two or three times a year they bring all kinds of foreign things, though they rarely even bring out most of their more domestic wares because they know Trost has no interest. For us they bring out the weapons, the furs, the precious metals made valuable only for their practical use and not for looking pretty. In the back of their tents they keep the wares no one in Trost will buy; the works of art: sculptures and maps, little trinkets made of crystal and amber and ash, colorful tapestries with fantastical, impossible landscapes.

I don't blame us; none of these things have practical purpose, and it's just not our thing. But I remember once being little and wandering under the thick flaps of one trader's tent, probably running from whoever was it in a game of tag. The second I stood, the light so dim I might've been mistaken, I came face-to-face with a painting. The frame was made of hard, oiled oak with intricate vine patterns carved into it. It was taller than me. Its brushes of color weaved and stroked together to form a lake, but one unlike any lake I'd ever seen; its far beach was so far in the distance it couldn't be seen, and its waves lapped at white sand instead of soil and rock.

It was something that could only be born from someone with a bountiful imagination. It could never exist, not water of what scale, so I turned away, probably to resume my game of tag. That feeling of looking in on something so foreign it shouldn't exist revisits me as I watch Ymir and Marco out of the corner of my eye, trying to convince myself I'm not the least bit curious. It's such a domestic, regular scene – two people talking – that it gives me an even more surreal feeling. I, from Trost, light-haired and pale as snow, born from and raised among those who occupy and employ themselves with the harvesting of animals and little else, witness them, dark as polished oak in every respect, they who speak with thick tongues and large words that don't mean anything to me. And one who's not even human.

Ymir has her blunt way of speaking, simpering and harsh and unfiltered, and I wonder how much of that was always a part of her and how much of it might have been self-taught on the streets of a village that treats her dark freckles like leprosy. I mean, I always thought they were weird too; they make her stand out. I've never known her much. It never occurred to me that people might genuinely give her shit for it.

But Marco has never touched Trost, or anywhere for that matter. He's the one you get a taste of real foreign vibe from. He stares a little too long, or holds himself a certain way, and it's very easy to see how little he's interacted with people. I've never thought about how many cues you can pick up from body language, but now that I'm staring – rather pointedly, too, whoops – at someone who's more than a little bit off, it makes me think.

Ymir is talking. ". . . turns to me, this bitch turns to me and sticks her beaky nose up and says, 'Ymir, I don't like your attitude,' and at this point I'm honestly about to cave her fucking face in, you know, but I refrain because I'm a patient saint, and I just go, 'Ma'am, you've been stepping on my goddamn heel for the past three blocks; maybe if you stopped trying to crawl up my asshole there would be less of a problem.'"

"She could have been in a hurry," Marco murmurs, but Ymir scoffs and shakes her head.

"And that's what you said last time. All she's doing is going to the pub to smoke and drink; she can step the fuck off for that. Did I mention Niles sent for me again? I did, didn't I? Well, I weaseled the fuck out of there right quick. Kept me for three goddamn hours, laying out his dumb deal and bringing in these other grunts to endorse. Look, pasty, if I don't want to join the fucking military police, I'm not going to join. 'No' doesn't mean 'convince me.'"

"Niles asked you to join the military police?" I interrupt, because this tidbit is too interesting to ignore. The military police is Niles's personal guard, plus the general peacekeeper of Trost. You can't join of your own suggestion; you have to be invited, and only people of note get invited. It's the highest honor we bestow. They're the aforementioned optimal lifestyle I always think about. Members of the military police get anything they want, and all they do is answer to Niles and walk around making sure no one gets any dirt on their fancy cloaks with the sigil of a unicorn on the back. I could care less about venturing outside of Trost once I get in there; I'm really lazy, but at least I'm honest about it. That anyone gets asked is kind of a big deal.

Ymir levels me with a stony stare. "Yes," she says, "about fifty fucking times. Bitch can't take no for an answer."

"You don't want to be in the military police?" I make a confused face. "Why?"

"Why would I want to?" she demands.

"Well, for one, you'd be set for life."

"I'm doing just fine on my own. I am not a peacekeeper. Other people are not my responsibility."

This is pretty fucking rich, considering the inhuman little brother wrapped around her right now, but I don't comment on that. "You wouldn't have to, like, even run a business anymore. You pretty much get anything for free. Reiner gives handouts to the police. I heard they only pay one penny for ten pounds of leather."

Ymir scoffs. "I enjoy occupying myself. I'm not turned on by the thought of uselessly dragging my feet around with a bunch of coddled idiots with more weapons than they know what to do with."

Ymir has, like, sixteen knives strapped to her in all kinds of places. Nice. "You wouldn't have to work with Eren anymore," I say, wrinkling my nose distastefully.

"Apart from making initial mistakes," Ymir says, "there's nothing wrong with Eren."

She notices the look on my face and raises an eyebrow. "He's intense, and he's not particularly good at what he does, but he doesn't let that stop him. Lately he's been improving a lot because he practices, like, constantly. Soon I can let him run the place and come visit you more again," she adds aside to Marco, petting his hair back in a motherly fashion; Marco's mouth falls open in glee at this, and he thumps his head against her stomach as he hugs her middle. Ymir snorts softly before continuing, "He's not afraid to ask for help, either. That's refreshing in Trost."

Wow, okay, I do not like this. I didn't ask for hearing good shit about Eren. "Yeah, well. He's a hotheaded brat. Come on, there's got to be something. Isn't he annoying?"

She shrugs. "Not really."

I frown. "He doesn't, like, nag you or anything? Be generally annoying?"

"His passion is a little off-putting," Ymir says, "but he's a nice kid, I guess. Very respectful. He's asked for pointers about various things from me, and he's always polite, unlike some horses we know. He's very diligent."

I stew, feeling weirdly shut down and oddly jealous. So apparently Eren has been asking Ymir stuff? Yeah, well, I'm still better than him at Ymir-socializing. I mean, I know her big secret. I'm in the woods with her and her naga brother, for Christ's sake. The only way to one-up that is to date the woman.

There are some sacrifices you just don't make.

"Why are you so fixated on Eren Jaeger?" Ymir wonders aloud.

"I'm not. I just know him, that's all."

"Yeah, well, he barely mentions you."

That's news to me. I always had the impression Eren finds me as infuriating as I find him. I scrunch my eyebrows together. "And what does he say?"

She shrugs. "He just mentions you in passing. That you work with Reiner. That you used to hang out."

Yeah, and he conveniently left out the part that he's an enormous asshole to me. He may have everyone else fooled, but not me.

"Do you have any more food?" I wonder aloud, feeling the urge to sink my teeth into something.

Ymir sets down her knitting, lips pulled back in exasperation at my greediness, as Marco slowly unravels the tail from her, perking up, eyes wide and glancing back and forth from her to me with subdued excitement. I feel like I should be understanding something, until I notice Ymir's going for her satchel. Oh.

Ymir starts to drawl something but I don't even hear or remember, because the second she drags her satchel over and opens it the duck, now suddenly active, bursts forth, its taut wings flapping frantically and neck sticking stiffly out, quacking harshly. The shriek Ymir lets out is the loudest, shrillest noise I've ever heard, and her bag goes flying toward the grass as she falls backward off the log in shock, her legs sticking in the air, and the duck makes its low escape into the brush.

Marco and I are both bent over laughing, he out of predictability for his prank and me out of genuine shock, because holy fuck was her violent reaction funny. Ymir scrambles to her feet, hair a mess and teeth bared. "Marco you PIECE of SHIT!" she roars, launching herself at him. "I FUCKING HATE BIRDS!"

"Oh my fucking god," I choke out, my stomach aching, as Marco tries and fails to scramble away when he's still laughing so hard he can't breathe, and he raises his arms weakly to fend his sister off as she slams into him. They go down in a tangle, Ymir immediately trapping Marco in a headlock, and he just goes limp into a giggling mess like before as she bats him around roughly.

I try to regain control of myself as the two idiots wrestle, Marco being much more passive than Ymir is, but the expression Ymir made when the thing burst out, oh god. I can't stop erupting into giggles.

Ymir yells in frustration and I look over again. Marco has apparently tired of Ymir's roughhousing and curled a single loop of that thick tail around her stomach, pinning her arms to her sides, so she lies there on her side effectively helpless. She kicks her feet. "Marco, let me go! I'm not done killing you yet!"

Marco's long enough that he can crawl away from Ymir and lean his human torso casually back against the log, resting his elbows on its surface. "That's what you get for trying to pick me up."

"You don't have a picking-up phobia! If that thing shit all over my stuff I'll kill you!"

"Do you have a bird phobia?" I ask Ymir incredulously. "You're scared of birds?"

She freezes, looking livid, then groans, plunking her forehead down on her brother's scales. "Look what you made me say," she whines at Marco, then flops her head back and narrows her eyes at me upside down. "Tell no one."

"Won't say a word," I say in a strangled voice, thinking of all the amazing ways this can be exploited. Marco chuckles again as Ymir starts rolling around aggressively, trying to get free, and I catch his eye. We're both grinning like idiots at each other, and he tilts his head at me, studying me, his gaze turning curious, and it occurs to me that maybe he just did that, all of that, for my benefit. I turn my head to watch Ymir's struggle instead.

Ymir goes limp again, facedown and groaning. "If you let me go I'll love you forever."

"You already love me forever," Marco says, but unravels himself from her anyway, relaxing enough for her to wiggle free. She scrambles to her feet immediately, charging over to him and snapping him up in another headlock. She gives him the most aggressive noogie I have ever witnessed in my life; he winces, half hugging her and laughing, but she's laughing by now too. I'm not sure if Ymir knows how to be anything but aggressively affectionate.

I still half this half-smirk on my face and Ymir notices. She narrows her eyes at me before I can fully master a stoic expression. "Gimme the stance, Jimbles," she says shortly, reaching up to fix her hair.

Ugh.

The minor good mood I developed dissipated (and I still want to eat something), I heave myself to my feet reluctantly, scowling. Marco looks suddenly very put out. So he had done all that for me. To . . . cheer me up. I'm not sure whether to be amused or weirded out or . . . what. Appreciative, I guess.

It was pretty funny.

I trudge over to where Ymir gestures and she tosses her bow to me. "Do it up." I do it up as well as I can, not even bothering to hope anymore that it's correct or not, because guess what, it probably isn't.

As Ymir stops in front of me to inspect, Marco bounds into my field of vision behind her. He squints at me, his snake body weaving as he leans back and forth to peer around Ymir, and then he starts silently mouthing something at me, over and over. Ymir's too distracted by the precarious placement of my knees to notice me staring blankly back at him, narrowing my eyes, my lips mutely forming a what?

Marco raises his right hand and points at his wrist with his left. "Wrist," he mouths again, and when it occurs to me what he's trying to convey I glance at my own. They're twisted too much again. I correct them right before Ymir straightens up, looking pensively at my whole body, and Marco and I wait with bated breath for the verdict.

"Well! That's progress," Ymir huffs. "Got it right for once."

"Uh huh," I agree dumbly as Marco beams at me, giving me two thumbs up. I do that half-smile thing where you bunch your mouth up toward your nose in thanks, and my lips actually quirk to the side a little. That was, uh, nice of him. Surprisingly nice.

Ymir gives me a companionable whack on the shoulder, which is less companionable and more oh-my-god-I'm-going-to-fall-over. "Celebration. Lunchtime!"

Now she's speaking my language.

v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v

Lunch is more fruit. More goddamn fruit.

Apples, to be exact, because they're the only things around still ripe this late in the year. And there are a lot. They're the good kind, too, the really shiny ones that crunch loudly when you bite and aren't too sweet (I hate sweet shit, ugh). When I ask Ymir where she got them all she replies she stole them from the big tree in Bertholdt's yard. Figures.

We're clustered on the log again, which I now recognize is the general place of convening in these goddamn woods or something. It must get boring, just hanging around this log all day every Wednesday doing nothing but talking to each other, but Ymir and Marco don't seem to have any trouble. Good on them, I guess.

Ymir and I are sitting on the log munching pensively, and she still has her knitting; Marco has draped himself between us, yawning quite hugely, the thick spools of his shiny dark body wound up in neat bundles that he nestles his human half within. He takes up a hell of a lot of space. We've been eating for a while, mostly because apples don't do much for you in the hunger department and we just keep burning right through them. Ymir holds up an apple, eyebrows raised inquisitively, but Marco shakes his head.

"Is chocolate all you eat?" I wonder aloud. Marco looks over in surprise.

"Um. I eat animals and other things," he answers in confusion. "It's not physically possible to live on only chocolate. It would be nice, though," he adds quietly.

"It would be nice if I could live on compliments and death glares," Ymir puts in dryly, "but that ain't happening."

Marco flops over so his head's on her shoulder, gazing up at her fondly. "I would give you compliments all day and make you fat."

"Aren't you devious. And sweet," Ymir sighs, trapping Marco with an arm around his neck, planting a really loud kiss on his cheek. In true little brother fashion Marco wrinkles his nose and makes disgusted noises, but he's smiling all the same. He detaches himself from her with some difficulty, making motions like he's going to wipe his cheek but never quite getting there.

That's about six hundred percent more affection than I expect from Ymir. "You guys are gross."

"What, you jealous? You want a smooch too? Marco, give him a smooch."

"No," Marco and I say at the same time. Keep that mouth exactly fifty feet away from my face at all times.

"Killjoys," Ymir mutters, stretching. "Sorry I'm being boring today, Marco. That loser over there needs more help than I anticipated."

"You're not boring, Ymir!" Marco denies immediately. "You are never boring. Don't say that. I don't like it."

"As you wish, my irascible young friend."

"How's your sweater coming along?"

Ymir proudly holds up the sky blue thing she's been knitting all this time. "What do you think?"

"It's starting to look like a sweater!"

"That thing is a sweater?" I ask incredulously. It looks like a bedraggled heap of frizzy blue yarn with no discernable shape or function. "Since when? Where the fuck are the sleeves?"

"It's coming along," Ymir sniffs, waving her hand at me. "It takes a while."

Marco inches closer to me, looking gleeful. "Ymir is in love with Christa Lenz."

"Wha- Marco!"

"Christa?" I repeat, startled. The only Christa Lenz I know is a small, petite girl a couple of years older than me. I haven't spoken to her much, but I hear she has a reputation for being universally kind. I think she's Trost's record-keeper, an odd job around here because reading isn't high on anyone's priority list. "Seriously?"

"Marco, you're not supposed to tell people!" Ymir is howling, and I try to visualize her waking hand-in-hand with dainty angelic Christa, but cannot.

Marco doesn't look apologetic in the least. "Jean won't tell anyone. Will you, Jean?"

"I haven't made my move yet and if you spoil it for me I'll rip your dick off," Ymir mutters viciously, glowering.

"Ymir is knitting that for her," Marco says aside to me. "Ymir says blue brings out Christa's eyes."

"Well, it does!"

Dear god, Ymir is actually blushing. Her freckles disappear as her cheeks slowly turn red, and my mouth hangs open in glee. I never imagined someone like Ymir being in love with anyone. Oh my god, am I going to exploit this. I turn to Marco. "Does Christa like her back?"

"I don't know!" Marco replies enthusiastically. "But I can't imagine why she wouldn't."

Your sister is kind of a douchebag, that's why. "I wonder how long this has been going on."

"Marco, stop encouraging him," Ymir sighs, obviously trying to play it cool when she's still blushing like mad.

"Ymir always talks about Christa. I can't remember when she started because it was such a very long time ago. But she mentions Christa every day."

"Damn, she's got it bad."

Marco's face falls into confusion for a second. "Wait, what is it? What has she got?"

"Oh, uh . . . a crush, I guess." Big dumb and scaly takes everything literally.

"Oh. Yes! She does! Last week she was telling me that Christa has a perfect laugh and blush and Ymir really likes seeing her get all worked up because she looks like a puffed-up puppy who's trying to be bigger-"

"Kitten, I said kitten-"

"Yes, a puffed-up kitten, who's trying to be bigger to be threatening, and it doesn't work because she's so small, I guess," Marco finishes finally. Damn, does this kid rant. His voice is full of enthusiasm, and it feels both forced and not forced at the same time. I don't think he knows how to address me. It seems with Ymir he can speak as naturally and calmly as he wants, but with me he suffuses speech with so much cheerfulness it sounds weird.

"Why do you take such delight in divulging all my secrets, Marco?" Ymir groans.

"It's making you blush!"

Ymir turns away from us in a huff, back hunched forlornly. "Like I said, I haven't made my move yet, but I will. If you breathe a word to anyone-"

"My genitals will be forcibly removed, yes, I get it," I sigh. I feel like a treasure chest full of Ymir's secrets.

Ymir puffs her bottom lip out, and we watch her relax as the discomfort drains out of her. She sighs wistfully, "Christa does have a perfect laugh and a perfect blush."

"I've never met her."

"A lot of people haven't," Ymir snaps, "because Trost is an idiot town where no one reads."

"No one reads in Trost?" Marco repeats quietly, perplexed. "Why doesn't anyone read in Trost? Do they not know how? You should teach them, Ymir."

"Because they're all fucking stupid."

"Oh, would you stop," I complain at the same time Marco goes, "But Jean's from Trost and he doesn't seem stupid to me. Do you know how to read, Jean?"

"Yeah." I pause. "Mostly. But I'm not stupid, for Christ's sake. I've just got better things to do."

Ymir snorts. "Yeah, okay," she drawls skeptically. "Like what?"

"Work," I say defensively.

"You only work, like five hours a day or something. You barely get paid. You are a charity case, not an apprentice, you idiot."

"Ymir, I don't like it when you get agitated. Stop," Marco says, poking her in the ribs. "Also you're being unkind to Jean. Stop that too. I like Jean."

"You don't know anything about Jean."

"Yes I do! He makes good food and has pretty hair that I really want to touch but I'm not going to because that would be rude and I should ask first." Marco glances at me. "Can I touch your hair?"

"Wh- no!" I whine immediately, grabbing my head as if to stop it from escaping and placing itself in Marco's hands. Marco looks put out, which is miles better than how he would look if he went and touched my hair without my permission, which is really fucking dead. I spend a lot of time on this do.

"It's not polite to touch other people you don't really know, Marco," Ymir sighs patiently.

"That's why I asked, but," he adds, turning to me and grinning, "sorry."

I can't get over the weirdness of his eyes. The round iris is a pale cross between brown and gold and entirely too large, encompassing almost the entirety of the visible part of his eyeball, and there are no whites at all, just dark splotchy sclera.

He reminds me of a dog that's just met a new person. Sure, it's going to bark and be wary for a bit, but the second it's over that it just wants to flop all over you. I already have one slut to deal with back home, thanks. I can't believe I was ever scared of this loser. I shrug at him.

Ymir chucks an apple core at my head, which I dodge by mere inches with an indignant yelp. "Stance."

I loll my head back and groan loudly in exasperation, stretching my legs out in preparation to reluctantly rise. "Oh my god, this is so fucking repetitive. How many times to I have to do this?"

"Remember, Jimbles. Lethal levels of attractiveness."

"You make no fucking sense. What the fuck does that even mean?"

She flexes, smirking, her biceps bulging in a most obnoxious fashion. "People dig muscles, and as of now, you have none. Practicing even just drawing back the string makes you better and stronger at it."

"People," I mutter, "or just Christa?"

Ymir's smirks. "Christa finds muscles very attractive, thank you."

"Hopefully," Marco pipes up.

"Hopef- shut the fuck up, Marco," Ymir snaps. "Don't ruin my dream."

I slide off the log to my feet, groaning. "What if I get really buff and Christa suddenly wants to be all over me?"

"I will literally kill you. Catch, fucker." She tosses her bow and I manage to catch it without flailing this time. My right shoulder is aching by now, the kind of soreness and tightness that constantly makes you want to roll your spine backwards. I do the stance, and Ymir meanders over to check on me, and I should be watching her . . . but my eyes wander to Marco, who's staring at me with intense focus. Apparently finding me acceptable he smiles brightly at me, seemingly genuinely happy that I am no longer fucking this up.

"Isn't Reiner kind of crushing on Christa?" I wonder aloud.

"He'd better fucking not be," Ymir growls, kicking my toes to see if I wince. I don't, to my credit.

"Well, you said Christa digs muscles, so-"

"Who's Reiner?" Marco interjects curiously, his head tilted quizzically.

I'm about to answer something along the lines of, "My boss," or, "The guy who literally fed you for years," but Ymir speaks before I have a chance to open my mouth and leads this in a whole new direction. "A killer."

My mind kind of wipes out at that as she plows on. "This big brute in Trost whose specialty is beating things to death. He could snap your spine in half. I've seen him do it to some things."

Whoa, where the fuck did this come from? I gape at her in confusion, because the fact that Reiner is capable of butchering animals isn't exactly the first quality you'd describe about him to someone who has never met him. Hell, I would've started with his over-the-top boisterousness, or his charity, or his thing for Bertholdt that neither of them are initiating anytime soon because they're both fucking losers, not with the words "killer" and "big brute." I feel a rush of defensiveness for my hospitable boss. "Hey, what the hell, Ymir, he's more than ju-"

She whips around to glare at me, and I shrink back at the warning in her eyes. I risk a glance at Marco, thinking this must be some kind of a joke, but he looks like a cross between weary and cowed, a frown on his face and his obnoxiously weird eyes faintly mournful, and I decide maybe now is not the best time to question what the fuck she thinks she's saying.

"Shut up and go work some more on something useful," she snaps, and I flash her this irritated, bewildered look before slinking back to the log, setting down her bow on the wood near Marco; whatever, he can look after it, it's his sister's bow. I can't believe she'd just say that shit about Reiner. She knows the guy; I've seen them interact. I thought they were friendly.

"Reiner's nice," I growl at Marco, not about to let Reiner get dissed like that. I owe a lot to him; it's not easy to put up with me. "Like, really a nice guy."

Ymir has taken up her knitting again, impassively staring at her lap, looking like she's done nothing wrong. I meant that comment in passing, you know, like a for-your-information thing, but Marco apparently takes that as a cue to talk to me more because he glances at Ymir uncertainly, then sidles closer to me. Not even two feet away from me, but I'm surprised at how used to it I'm getting. "But that's not what Ymir said," he hums, low enough that she can't hear.

"Yeah, well," I grumble just as quietly, "I don't know what her problem is, but Reiner, like, barely even hunts all that much. He's a baker, for crying out loud. So, like . . . don't go thinking he's a bad guy or anything."

"I won't," Marco says slowly. He picks at the bark beneath his hands, looking contemplative. "Is he a . . . nice person?"

"Super nice."

"Is he the only one?"

I tilt my head. "The only what?"

"Nice person," he mumbles. "Anyone. Are there more nice ones? Because Ymir-" He pauses to glance over at her again. "-doesn't really tell me anything about people from your village except things like . . . that. And I, well, I didn't think that could be right at all, because I don't think people are like that. Not the majority of them, anyway. From what I remember. I won't say that to her directly." He looks at me with subdued eagerness. "What are people like?"

I open my mouth, then close it, uncertain of what to say. "Uh . . ." I begin eloquently, my eyes dancing over his face, his dark freckles all over his nose and cheeks, his large bright eyes. If you look close, like really close, you can see dark patterns marbling his honeyed irises, like lichen on stone. "Well, people are . . . people."

"People?"

"I mean," I continue, because that was a shitty ass description, "well, there are good people and bad people, but mostly good people, I guess. Everyone sort of acts decently toward each other, at least. Like, Reiner for example, he's a very good guy. Real nice to everyone."

Marco nods along with my words, entranced. "Isn't he the one who bakes with you?"

I nod and take up the flint, because the last mood I'm in is the one where I listen to Ymir tell me to make myself useful. I wrestle on goggles and start chipping again. "He baked them today, I think," Marco goes on, "because they weren't that good. Can you make them again?"

"Yeah, I was going to," I say, "I just didn't have time. Christ, you're demanding." I scratch my hairline for a second, then go back to working.

"So what are you?"

I glance up at him, confused. "What am I? What, demanding?"

He shakes his head. "No, I mean, a good person or a bad person. Which one are you?"

I open my mouth to go on about how I'm the most self-assured fucker alive, but I close my mouth again. This is the weirdest question I've ever been asked. Can I just neglect to answer this? "Well . . . it's not, like . . . black and white like that, dude. It's a mix. It's not either-or."

"I think you're nice," Marco says casually, "even though you look really angry all the time. Or at least very grim. Or smug. You don't attack me or anything."

"Well, it would be a dumb fucking move. You could probably fuck me up," I point out. "You're a hell of a lot bigger than me. Plus, you know, the whole . . ." I gesture vaguely at his elongated, obviously very muscular body. "Thing."

He tilts his head. "Thing? Oh! Me!" He shakes his head vigorously, his eyes widening in earnestness, his words clumsily tripping and tumbling out of his mouth. "I know I look weird but I'm not dangerous. I'm not. I don't eat people or attack them. I don't even go near the village; I stay up here and mind my own business. I'm not a monster. I'm normal, I just have a weird body."

It sounds rehearsed, sounds desperate and memorized and fake. He's leaning forward over the log toward me, his back hunched, eyes wide to drink in my reaction.

"You sound like you practiced that," I say eventually.

"I did," he replies, like it's obvious.

A catbird caws somewhere behind me. A squirrel jumps from tiny branch to tiny branch, its gray tail spinning as it leaps. "Well," I say eventually. "You're really fucking awkward, that's for sure."

His brow furrows. "Is that good or bad?"

"As long as you're not eating me, that's good."

He wrinkles his nose. "I don't eat people." I wonder if I imagined the long, thin, split tongue I'd witnessed when Marco went berserk on me. From what I can witness from his speech, his tongue looks pale and fat and completely normal to me.

I'm staring at his mouth. It is a weird mouth. Really dark lips. Lots of freckles. Aesthetically, they are exceedingly foreign; usually lips are pink or pale, you know? I wonder if you peel back his lips you'll find dark gums, too. I think dogs have dark gums. Where the hell are his fangs? His canines don't look any more pronounced than a normal person's. The whole berserk incident was so fleeting and frantic, it leaves me feeling I imagined half the stuff.

I internally shrug and resume knapping, a little more careful now that I'm aware I'm being intently watched because looking good censors no audience, though I note with pride that these last few arrowheads look damn fine. Damn fine. I'm doing good for the first day. I'll be an expert in no time.

I'm faintly aware I should be paying attention to something, that there's something vaguely wrong with this immediate scenario, but I just write it off as being in the woods learning how to hunt and being not too feet away from the fucking naga. Marco reaches over and picks up – wow, excuse you – one of the arrowheads from the pile, turning it over and over in his hands curiously. I want to find his presence annoying, but it's just so goddamn alien that it can't be anything but . . . mildly interesting. Or at least numbing. Whatever. I'm tolerating his presence, is what I'm trying to say.

Marco taps the point of the arrowhead with his fingertip curiously, frowning. Holy shit, he has a lot of freckles. There are a lot on the bridge of his nose, as well as his cheeks, a like a band between his eyes and mouth. I can spot a few littering his forehead and the hollows of his eye sockets. Some of them are really round and pronounced, drops of ink, and others are faded and blotchy, like miniature spills of tea on his skin. There's one just to the right of the tip of his nose, and the fact that it's not in the center bothers me.

Remember that feeling that something's wrong? I realize now what it is as I knock a particularly messy sliver of flint apart; tiny shards go flinging everywhere like sparks from an ember, bouncing off my goggles to leave no harm; Marco, who is literally right there with no goggles to speak of, can't even blink in time as one of those chips sail right into his eye-

And pings off, like it would off glass. Marco doesn't even react, tilting his head at me in curiosity as I stare at him in horror. He just got a rock to the eyeball and it bounced off. "Uh," I say dumbly. "Sorry."

"For what?"

"The- I just nailed you right in the eye. With a rock. A sharp rock."

"Oh," he says dumbly. Then he perks up. "Oh! Did you? I didn't even feel it."

"What."

Marco reaches up and, with a completely straight face, taps his fingertip against his eyeball like you would a windowpane. He doesn't even blink. "I didn't feel it."

"How did you not feel that?"

He frowns in confusion, then his face goes slack in comprehension. "Oh, your eyes are soft. Eye caps. Hard eyes," he says, pointing at his eyes again. "It's a thing on them. Like a shield. So I didn't feel anything."

"That's fucking creepy," I say bluntly. I wonder if that's why he never blinks; nothing gets in his eyes, so he has no reason to blink and clean them.

"Well, they're soft underneath," he sniffs. I kind of want to poke one. Do they feel like glass? Are they wet? This is weird.

Two of those strange white wheeling birds circle glide slowly overhead, lazily keening that odd cry. Marco glances up at them unconcerned (I look up with more concern, since they're harbingers of our doom or something), then does a double take. "It's so late! Ymir!"

I glance up as Marco scrambles down the log toward his sister, his tail lashing from side to side to propel him, and I wonder what he means; it's not super late, but it's a little darker than it was before. It's only midafternoon.

Ymir rolls up her knitting and stows it away in her bag, smirking. "That time already?"

"What time? Time to go?" I ask. Wow, that was frickin' short. We barely did anything. She didn't even hunt anything. How does she always come back with so much game? I still haven't forgiven her for that badmouthing incident, by the way. Not even close.

"Nope. Time for the contest," she declares, grinning wickedly and standing. She picks up her bow from where I'd placed it against the log, thumbing the string.

"What contest?" Do I have to participate? Oh god, I hope it doesn't involve strength. Imagine scrawny me going up against ripped Ymir and her just-as-ripped brother who is also half snake. Not happening.

Marco rises to a height a little below Ymir's, grinning like she is. "No cheating."

"I won't," Ymir drawls, rolling her eyes skyward. "What was one time."

"Four. Four times."

"I lost count; was it? Anyway. Jimbles, be our scorekeeper. You're an unbiased party."

"Scorekeeper for what?" I repeat, getting real done with their inability to explain anything. I am a really fucking biased party right now. Marco could spin in circles and punch me in the face and I'd still declare him winner over Ymir.

"How do you think I bring home so much game every week?" she demands. "I don't do it myself, certainly."

"I help," Marco pipes up informatively.

"He helps," Ymir confirms. "We see who can get the most quality game by the time I have to leave and whoever does wins."

"I usually win," Marco says smugly.

Ymir turns to him. "Oh, fuck you, you live here. So, normal end time?"

"Normal end time."

"Point or count system?"

"Mm . . . point. Deer should be out by now."

"Excellent. Top or bottom side?"

"Branches."

"Blood count?"

"Hm. I want to impress Jean. Bloodless? Or are you in a hurry?"

"Not particularly, so yeah, bloodless. Fuck, that gives you an advantage."

"Yup!"

"But hey, that means you can't use venom! Half points or point sum reduction for a penalty?"

"Half points, I think. So you have a chance of winning."

"Hey, fuck you."

"Can someone speak in a fucking decipherable language?" I wonder aloud.

Ymir turns to me. "Forgot you were here." Wow, thanks. "Your job is easy. Just sit tight on this log and look handsome – which I know is a task for you, but bear with me – and keep count of what we bring back. Make sure no one cheats."

"Especially Ymir," Marco murmurs in a tone of voice that makes me think he was speaking entirely to himself; Ymir whacks him in the shoulder.

"Knock it off. Jimbles, knap while we're off. Or nap. Or do a pushup or something, since you need those so badly."

"Thanks."

"My point is to make yourself useful. Now give us a countdown! Marco, I call north!"

"Okay, if I get east! The lake is east."

"Wait- shit, I actually said east. I call east." At these words Marco promptly spins and bolts, writhing and loping on his hands; I freeze and stare at how quick he is, how weird the motion is. His spine arches and flattens with every rapid stride into the trees, his long tail flattening and oscillating in thick slippery waves. He disappears quickly into the trees; Ymir chases him, yelling fruitlessly, "He- I call east! Get back here! I called it!"

I hunch there at the log awkwardly, listening to their yelling and crashing move further and further away. Eventually I stand and sit down on the tree proper so my back can have a rest from bending forward so much. Like hell I'm knapping more; I made, like, three hundred thousand million of the damn arrowheads and my poor fingers deserve a rest. The thumb I sliced earlier feels tight and fragile; I keep flexing it like I'm waiting for it to split open again.

I hope they don't take too long, but it's also good to get some alone time to digest. I can't decide if I learned a lot today or learned nothing. I thought I'd be making more progress to this. Well, I've got the stance down, thanks to Ymir making me do it fifty fucking times. That, and Marco.

Still not sure about how I feel around him. The fact that he's so flipping pathetic- it feels kind of cheap. Like, are kelpies actually just cuddly water horses, then, instead of drowning demons? Are dragons just baby lizards? Merpeople are happy fish guys who just want hugs? Because this fierce naga creature is actually pretty . . . chill. He's not even dangerous in a loony or antisocial way, least of all in a traditionally dangerous one. It's genuinely laughable that everyone back home is terrified of this guy. I suppose it's stupid to still be edgy. Impossibly, I'm really not anymore.

They are foreigners, however, and that part isn't going to be forgotten. That should be enough to watch my step around them. With Ymir's grabby pettiness and general pickiness and the "berserk state," I feel like I'm stepping in a room littered with snares.

This log doesn't exactly have a backrest, and my poor achy old man back is starting to protest in earnest. A glance to the side tells me there are still a few branches attached to this dead tree, rising at heavy angles into the sky. I heave myself to my feet with a grunt and trudge down the tree until I find a suitable branch. I sit down and lean my back against it, folding my arms over my stomach and kicking my feet up onto the trunk, crossing my ankles. Much more comfortable. I could fall asleep like this.

I don't know how much time has passed before I start hearing noticeably unnatural noises approaching, and I loll my head to the side lazily to see. Ymir comes trotting out of the woods, her hair a bit of a mess, a dead, hard, tan mass between her hands. I think it's a tortoise; how she managed to kill a tortoise without breaking the skin is beyond me. She lays it out on the trunk right above the tangled base of the tree, wiping her hands on her shirt, then glances over at me. "Comfortable?"

"Pretty comfortable, yeah," I sigh, staring at her, daring her to tell me to be productive when she's playing a goddamn game. But she just shrugs and jogs away. Good. I deserve a break.

The second time she comes back she interrupts my intense staring contest with the dead eyes of the tortoise. Ymir sets down two squirrels, their legs splayed, their tiny pink tongues jutting out of their mouths, beside the tortoise, stretching and sighing. She looks searchingly at me. "Marco come back yet?"

I shrug and shake my head. She grimaces. "He's either slacking, or he's hoarding. I cannot lose."

"I hope you flippin' do," I mutter under my breath as she leaves again. Maybe I should tell Reiner she badmouthed him. Or something. He'd probably just not care, the big obnoxious lug. But the venom in her voice . . . and the look Marco had, like this was nothing new. I mean, it's her business, but I can't deny it sits me the wrong way. If Marco doesn't even have a concept that someone like Reiner Braun could be a good person . . .

Marco is much more silent than Ymir is; I only notice him when he moves into my field of vision, and his sudden proximity makes me jump. I suppose it makes sense, when he doesn't have legs to step with, that he is so eerily quiet. In his hands, clasped between each of his fingers, is a considerably more impressive array of dispatched fauna: four squirrels, two ducks, and a limp, shiny fish about the length of my hand. Holy shit, how did he get a fish? Did he swim for that? How did he survive? No wonder he took longer. He sets them down right at my crossed feet, staring at me as I stare at him. Is it even possible to catch that many things in such a short amount of time? With your bare hands? No fucking way. The woods are not that populated – they can't be. How do you catch a squirrel with your bare hands? Those things move fucking fast.

"Did Ymir cheat?" he wonders aloud.

I shrug. "I don't know the rules."

"They can't have blood on them," he says, looking over at Ymir's comparatively sad cache. "Bloodless. Otherwise you only get half the points."

"Points?"

Marco nods, pointing down at the things he's caught. "Squirrels are five," he explains, "ducks are three, and fish are eight. Raccoons are ten, porcupines and skunks and turtles are fifteen, opossums are one, and deer are twenty. I didn't see any deer, though. I hope Ymir hasn't. Has she?" He glances down toward the roots again, then nods in satisfaction. "Good. I hope she doesn't try to cheat. Even if she does she's going to lose."

"Damn ruthless," I mutter, imagining far too easily Marco wrestling and killing an entire deer. Marco looks at me inquisitively and I shake my head. "What was that other bullshit you two spouted? The other rules?" I hope Ymir breaks a rule. I want to knock her down a peg.

"Oh, um," Marco hums. "We have a lot of different versions of this same game. Sometimes we go by how many we each catch, and sometimes by what we catch, and then we have points for different things. We put our catches on different ends of this tree so we know for sure who caught what because Ymir would always steal part of mine and call it hers. Bloodless means we can't break the skin, and I like doing that because Ymir is very sloppy and I'm good at breaking necks."

"What an admirable quality." I'm not sure if Marco picked up on my sarcasm because he looks pleased. "So what happens if you break a rule?"

"Sometimes you get the animal's points taken away," Marco goes on, "so if you got blood on a duck, you lose three points. Today we agreed you can get points, but only half. That's how Ymir usually cheats. She says she got bitten and it's actually her blood. That's never true."

"Got it," I say, making a mental note to go check on those three corpses to see if they're clean.

Marco turns and wanders away, without a goodbye or anything, and I don't really care. From behind I get a view of his dark spine swaying and rolling side to side as he oscillates back to the woods, like he's slowly moving his hips, if he even has hips. Weird.

I peer down at his catches. The fish's scales are shiny, even shinier than Marco's. I've never seen a real fish before, just pictures. No one goes near the water for fear of kelpies and merpeople waiting to drag you under. I wonder what they taste like.

Seeing the two ducks Marco caught just remind me of Ymir's freak-out earlier. I start giggling like a moron for a minute or two. Maybe I should order some wicker figures of all kinds of birds and request Ymir makes them.

Eventually I convince myself to get up and check the three animals Ymir has laid out; unfortunately they are clean, but the afternoon is young. Marco's fish is starting to give off a really bad smell; is it normal for fish to give off enough of this smell?

I sit there for a while, staring at the way to strangely salty wind tousles the boughs of the maples at the edge of the clearing. Maples are the best to climb, you know. Really clean bark with no bugs or anything. Lots of easy branches. Not so easy to draw. I've fallen out of being an artist – it was a dumb hobby, anyway, and I was never any good – but I can't get rid of the fact that I have a very visual mind. I can't remember words or voices all that well, but I can remember pictures like it's nothing. Everything I see almost immediately gets evaluated: whether I can draw it or not, how hard it would be, how long it would take, how much shading, all that bullshit. This would require waaay to much detail, I can tell right away. The way the leafy bunches hiss and shake and bob, ever sifting, ever sliding, is much too intimidating.

I actually nod off for a second – hey, I'm not used to getting up so early – and jerk awake when Ymir flops down upon the distant trunk a hefty brown-furred animal with a meaty whump. I glare at her for being so needlessly loud. She glares right back. "Any blood?" I ask innocently.

"No," she drawls back.

"You sure? Let me see."

"No," she drawls louder.

"Why not?"

"Because you don't need to."

"You told me to be the judge."

"I told you to sit there and look handsome, and you're not doing very well at that."

I slide off the tree and stroll towards her. "Inspector Jean, coming your way."

"Go the fuck the other way," she growls, turning her back to me hurriedly, hunching over her latest prize. I trot up behind her with a smirk on my face.

"What'cha hiding?" I wonder, and see immediately what's up. She's furiously scrubbing with her sleeve the back of the animal's neck, which I see now is a groundhog; a dark stain is matting its coffee-colored fur, a stain Ymir is trying and failing to covertly get rid of. I cluck my tongue in disappointment. "That looks like a penalty to me."

"It bit me," she says, turning to me. "That's my blood."

"Nuh-uh, Marco says you spout that bullshit whenever you're losing. Looks like half points for you."

"Of course he betrays me for the new guy," she sighs. "Fine, I'll take the half points. But why don't you try to kill a groundhog without breaking the skin. They're too fat to bludgeon to death."

I raise my hands innocently, grinning in triumph at getting her caught. I want to be nastier to her, but I also don't want to cause a scene. Being a smug bastard will have to suffice. "That's why I'm the judge."

"Smug bastard," she simpers, reading my mind, strolling back toward the woods. "I'll have to catch myself a bear, then."

"Try not to let it get you again."

She squints over her shoulder at me, looking confused. "What're you spouting?"

I roll my hand, gesturing for her to get on the same page. "Bear. Chest?"

"Ah." She looks down at her chest, like she's forgotten it's marred, then shrugs. "It was a long time ago. That bear's probably dead and gone by now."

"Spit on its bones or something out of spite."

"I'll do that," she says, raising a hand and disappearing into the brush. I almost call out to her to ask how long this will take, but she's already too far away for such a conversation to not be a hassle, so I just give up and go back to my comfy spot on my branch. Maybe I'll take a real nap this time.

Flies are starting to gather around the neck of the groundhog. I can see them swarming from here. Gross. Good thing the animal's all the way at the other end. I hate bugs.

Speaking of bugs, I see a suspicious dark shape moving on my sleeve. With horror, I realize it's a tick; I swat it off, squirming and grimacing and making a groaning noise, and decide right then and there I hate the woods.

My spine's still crawling when Marco lumbers out of the woods, cradling in his arms . . . what. A fawn. A literal fucking baby deer, and it's dead. Stone fucking cold. "Holy shit," I mutter as he draws near, depositing the thing gently right by my fucking feet holy shit it's a baby.

He tilts his head at me. "Your face is making a funny expression," he states matter-of-factly at my ogling.

"That's just . . . a baby deer," I point out dumbly. Aww, it's got little spots and little pointy black hooves and a little black nose and everything.

"Yes, she is."

"You killed a baby deer."

He grins, looking a little sad. "Actually, she was already dead. I smelled her. She smelled like a sickness. I'm not letting Ymir take her home or making it count for the game; I'm going to bury her." He rotates his torso around completely – holy god, that's weird – and stoops over his own snake back, picking something up that was draped over it: another trio of squirrels and a fish, as if this place needed to smell worse. He lays them neatly over the log next to the others, nothing like Ymir's haphazard stack. Then he gathers up the fawn in his arms again, like it's sleeping, like you would a baby, and turns to wander off. His snake tail slides for a while in a curve in the same place until it runs out and follows him into the woods.

I sit there for a bit, watching the shadows swallow him up. The smell is unbearable now that there's two fish right at my feet. Wow, thanks, you stupid snake.

I wonder where Marco went.

He literally went to go bury that deer? I mean, the thought of him killing it rubbed me the wrong way because it's just a baby, but apparently he found it dead. And now he's burying it. In the middle of his weird-ass contest that he was pretty sure about winning . . .

Haltingly I stand, and immediately kind of regret it because now that I've stood I can't exactly sit down again, can I? I wander into the woods in the general direction Marco had disappeared in, my feet slow and unsure. I probably look like an idiot. Whatever, I can just say I was stretching my legs and getting some exercise and totally not leaning and squinting around for Marco.

I find him because I almost trip over him. He's so long that he takes up an audacious amount of space, and his dark body cannot shine with the writhing canopy overhead blocking the sunlight, so the thinner end of his tail looks like any other root. I see it at the last second, poking out from behind a bush, as my toes are about to slam into it; with an undignified flail I hop over it, managing to miss it. I follow the nearly black scales all the way up to where Marco is, hunched over by a tree, unaware of my presence.

His torso and about six feet of the snake part is lifted off the ground, curled around in a semicircle in the air, as he hovers over a patch of dirt he's steadily digging a hole into. His dark shoulders flex as he shovels and drags soil out of the earth, making a neat pile. The dead fawn is curled by his side, delicately placed; if its dark eyes are not half-lidded and dull, and its neck lolling a bit too limply, it can almost look asleep.

Apparently satisfied with the depth of his crude grave, Marco shifts, part of the airborne snake trunk swooping and curving sideways so that Marco himself can turn to the fawn. He hovers over it, looking mournful but deliberate; his fingers descend to gently slide shut its listless eyes, his touch obviously feather-light, and then he slowly gathers it in his arms. The snake trunk loops and twists again so that he bends over the grave, carefully lowering the animal in before letting it slide out of his arms, and then he withdraws, sweeping the mound of displaced dirt back to where it came from with two drags of his arm.

He wipes his hands of excess dirt slowly, straightening up, his spine rolling; when he turns and sees me watching him his eyes fly wide and his whole thirty-foot body jolts in alarm, whipping away from me. I raise my hands. "Whoa, just me."

"You surprised me," he states, pausing for a moment, then hunches over the ground again, his gaze sweeping back and forth over the foliaged earth. The way that snake trunk can raise him and twist and tilt him at various impossible angles makes it look like he's flying, hovering like a dragonfly. Apparently finding what he's looking for, Marco gathers his hands under a portion of a small clump of ordinary white wildflowers sprouting in the embrace of a maple's root flare; he tugs their pale, fuzzy, tangled roots out of the ground with enough skill to leave the structure mostly intact, then swings himself back over to the grave, scooping a handful of the freshly overturned soil over the fawn out of the way for the flowers to be nestled in their new home. He pats the dirt around the flowers to settle them in, then glides back a bit to admire his handiwork.

"Why not just leave it where you found it?" I wonder aloud. "It could've been food for something else."

"There is nothing around here that would eat it," he replies, glancing at me. "Carnivores don't come up here."

I shrug, because that makes sense. "Nice grave," I say simply, then turn to leave, having seen what I came for. I'm honestly surprised Marco's mature enough to grasp something like death rites. Where would he even be exposed to that, here in the woods? Who's he going to see die?

Marco says, "Thank you," behind me, and I just wave my hand out to the side. When I hear his heavy glide behind me I glance back. He's following me, gazing calmly at me.

"Aren't you doing the game thing?" I ask.

"It's hot," Marco states. "I'm done."

"Oh." Looks like I'm not napping after all.

Marco follows me back into the clearing, his presence silent and constant, making my spine tingle. I'd rather have him in view. The odd camaraderie against Ymir before when he asked me about Trost has died out; with Ymir not around I'm left with little idea of what to even do around him. Like, do I try to make small talk? Ignore him? I'm probably going for the latter.

I wish his catches aren't there on account of the smell, but my spot with the branch is too comfy to give up. I turn and settle down again against it, kicking my feet up again with a sigh, crossing my arms across my stomach. Marco slithers right up to the log – aw, come on, couldn't he choose somewhere else to be? – and pauses, apparently trying to decide what to do with himself, before settling down by my feet, pillowing his head in his arms on the bark. The snake trunk flexes and undulates, sliding toward me; it rolls flush along the tree, lying stretched out in the log's shallow shadow, and settles down. He's so long that most of it coils under the crown of the fallen tree behind me, under the branches digging into the ground.

I try not to shift away, no matter how much I want to. My ankles tingle from his proximity; I glance down at the dark, shiny scales resting on the ground against the tree not two feet below to my right. If I flop my hand to the side it'll land right on his pebbled back, not that I ever will. The day I touch that is never going to happen; it looks constantly wet and cold and slimy. How Ymir could stand sitting curled up with him before, acting like it's normal, is beyond me.

He tilts his head at me. I stare back. "What?" I ask eventually.

"You have a strange look on your face," he intones. "You look uncomfortable."

Well, I fucking am. "I'm just . . . not sure why that's, like. Right there." I gesture vaguely with my chin down at the snake tail right next to me. As in, get it the fuck away.

"It's shade," he says matter-of-factly, like this is obvious, not shifting an inch. "I'm hot."

"Right. Got it," I mutter. So, not moving. Fantastic.

Marco blinks slowly at me, continuing to stare. God, that makes me uncomfortable. Makes me feel like my face is weird enough to never look away from. I'm already edgy about it from Eren fucking Jaeger; I don't need the friendly village naga to add to the fun. "Can you stop staring?" I mutter.

His face screws up in confusion. "O- Uh- is looking bad?"

"It's rude," I say bluntly. Marco immediately looks dismayed.

"S-Sorry! I didn't know it was- I mean- you're just new and- Ymir and you are so- sorry," he finishes lamely. Like he's afraid I'll yell at him he looks away hurriedly, staring with wide eyes at the tree he's leaning on, stiff as a board and not looking like he's going to move for the next several months.

I roll my eyes. "It's not a big deal," I concede, taking pity, because he looks downright pathetic. He glances at me sheepishly, then relaxes visibly.

"Y'all are some morbid motherfuckers," I say. When Marco tilts his head I go on. "Like, making a game around breaking animal necks with your bare hands. You guys get your kicks from some gross-ass stuff."

Marco looks contemplative. "Doesn't your village revolve around killing?"

"Well, yeah," I mutter defensively, "but we hunt. We don't make games out of it. We actually use the animals for stuff. The skins and meat and things. And we don't, like, physically snap their spines. At least, I don't think." Because how the fuck would I know? The furthest I've gotten is crafting some lame-ass arrowheads and embarrassing myself in front of mythological creatures.

"Ymir does all that, though," Marco protests. "She needs game. She needs to work. She needs money. She says the town taxes her too much."

"Everyone says the police tax them too much," I say tiredly.

"She says they do it because she's foreign."

"Well, she needs to deal with it. We don't like people not from Trost." I lean my head back and close my eyes. "That's just a reality of life."

When he doesn't answer I peek through my lashes at him. He's staring at me, looking sorrowful. "Why don't you like foreign people? I'm foreign."

"Well, you wouldn't do very good in Trost, then," I say bluntly. Was him stating the obvious an attempt to convince me my logic is flawed? "That's not even counting the whole freaky . . . . snake tail. Without that you'd just be shunned, but as you are they'd kill you."

"Ymir says that too," he murmurs.

"Well, it's true." I'm not going to sugarcoat it for him. "Shoot you in the street or something. I mean, you can go berserk and stuff, but you wouldn't stand a chance against the military police."

Maybe my mouth shouldn't be running. I'm not scared of him anymore; I guess that's my cue to be honest. People think I'm an asshole for it, but that's their problem.

"Jinae loved people," Marco says.

"Who's Jinae?"

"The village I was born in. Jinae. We loved people. There were all kinds of people there. Dark, pale, ebony, ivory, people with squinty eyes and people with red eyes and yellow eyes and- and just all kinds of people. But Trost only has people like you?"

"Thaaat's right. And we like it that way." I ponder what he said. Ymir gave me the impression Marco doesn't remember anything before he got turned into a naga. I wonder if that was unintentional, or if she even knows she's clearly wrong.

There's a pause. Then: "Well, I don't think that's very practical," Marco decides lightly. "There are all kinds of nice people in the world."

Nice people that abduct people in the middle of the night and turn them into things like you, I want to say, but I'm not about to trigger that damn berserk state. I just shrug. "Trost is nice enough without, like, riffraff dirtying it up all over the place."

"My sister is not 'riffraff,'" Marco says suddenly, steadily, "nor dirty, or not nice."

"Yeah, well," I start without the intention to finish. I regret speaking; now I just want the conversation to end.

Marco shifts up a bit, propping his head up in his hands and watching me. Then he seems to remember he's not supposed to do that, and his eyes widen and flit to stare hard at the top of my head. I roll my eyes heavenward in exasperation for a second. Even without the snake tail, this kid wouldn't last a day among the teenagers of Trost. Between his dark skin and complete lack of social skill, they'd rip him apart.

"What's your last name?" he asks, and I groan internally.

"Kirschtein."

"Keer-" he tries, then frowns. "Keer . . . sach . . . teen. K-"

Okay, I have got to interject before he mangles my name further. "Kirschtein," I repeat.

Marco mumbles it under his breath a few times for practice, then tries, "Kirs-tein?"

"Kirschtein."

"Kir . . .schtein. Kirschtein. Kirschtein! Am I getting it right?"

"Now you are," I agree, listening to his accent bend and twist my name around. Odd.

"Jean Kirschtein," he says slowly. "That is a mouthful."

I almost make a perverted joke, but he probably wouldn't get it. "A delicious mouthful." Well, that's less dirty than what I was going to say.

Marco wrinkles his nose. "You probably are not delicious." He makes a weird face then, opening his jaw and jamming his tongue into the roof of his mouth. I have less than a second to ponder what the hell he's doing before something shoots out of the darkness under his tongue. I jump a foot in the air. It's another tongue, thin and dark and forked at the end; it hovers out of his mouth a full six goddamn inches for a second, the tip whirring, then disappears back into his mouth as fleetingly as it appeared. He closes his mouth and shakes his head. "Nope. Wouldn't taste good."

I gape at him, and he starts to look anxious. "Wh-" Then he claps his hand over his mouth, eyes huge. "I'm sorry. That was weird. That is really weird."

"Hell yeah that was really weird," I repeat dumbly. "What the hell was that?"

"Smelling you?" It sounds like a question. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that. That probably looks weird and I do it all the time around Ymir but she doesn't care and I forgot- and I'm trying to make you not afraid of me but I forgot and that didn't really help-"

"Well, uh," I just grunt dumbly, trying to make sense of all this. "Just, uh, yes, that was really weird." I pause. "What do I smell like?"

What a dumb fucking question. Why the fuck did I ask that? "Salty," Marco says quietly, still pouting and not looking at me. "I don't know. Different from Ymir. More . . . male? I guess. Also nervous. You smell nervous."

"You can tell when I'm nervous?" I ignore the salty part and the perverted implications of that. Wow, I need to get my mind out of the gutter.

He shrugs, nodding. "Not as bad as you used to be. But still nervous. That . . . probably didn't help. I know normal people don't do that, so I was stopping myself, but I forgot for a second."

Whoever made this guy, whoever took him and turned his legs into a tail, they really did their fucking homework. "Can snakes do that?"

He nods. "Wow," I mutter, raising my eyebrows contemplatively. "Yet another reason to avoid snakes."

Marco shrinks back shamefully, and I realize what I said was kind of mean. "Wait, okay, I didn't mean it like that," I say quickly. "It was supposed to be a joke about, like, snakes being creepy and smelling people, but- okay, you know what, just ignore what I said. It was a dumb joke. Sorry."

"Okay," Marco says slowly, still looking nervously at me. "You're very strange, Jean Kirschtein."

"I'm very strange?" I repeat incredulously. "You should get a mirror, Marco . . . whatever your last name is."

"I have a mirror," Marco says, "and I know, I'm stranger. Bodt."

"Butt?"

"No, Bodt. Marco Bodt. That's my name. My full name, I mean."

"Marco Butt."

"M- it's Bodt."

"Marco Butt," I insist, smirking.

His lips curl up in a grin. "Stop. It's Bodt."

"Marco Butt. Marco Snakebutt."

Marco guffaws. His laugh is deep and vibrant; it's easier to notice when we're not both laughing at Ymir's expense. "No! Definitely not Marco Snakebutt."

"Sorry, that's how I'm going to address you."

"No-o! Marco Bodt, Ymir Bodt, Lynne Bodt, Samuel Bodt, Ilse Bodt. Definitely no Snakebutts."

"Ymir Bodt," I repeat, snorting. It doesn't sound like it fits her. "Well, I finally know her last name. Who're those other people? Your family?"

He nods. "Used to be. Mom, Dad, cousin. Not sure where they are now. We left so long ago."

The laughter has left his voice, as well as the grin from his face, replaced by that same weary look from before when Ymir had been spouting about Reiner. I frown, not liking this sight. "Well," I say definitively, seeking to distract him, "nice to meet you, Marco Bodt."

Marco beams at me again. "You said it right this time. Nice to meet you too, Jean Kirschtein."

Maybe he's a little all right.

"Ymir Snakebutt," I mutter, suddenly thinking of this, then snort.

Marco giggles, hiding his face in his arms for a moment until he's recovered, then grins up at me. "Don't say that to her. She'll probably kill you. I won't let her, though. You're nice. I like you."

For once, that doesn't annoy me. "I'm gonna say it to her."

"I'll protect you as long as you don't call her riffraff again," Marco says sternly. "That was mean. I don't like it."

"All right, all right," I concede, raising my hands defensively. "I'll keep it to myself."

I catch movement over Marco's shoulder and jerk my chin to indicate to him Ymir has returned, grinning in that smug way of hers, her hands full with some unidentifiable creature. Upon seeing her Marco perks up immediately, any lingering malcontent dissipated at the sight of his sister, and the audaciously long snake tail beside me jerks to life and slides through the grass as he gathers it underneath him to gambol lithely up to her. "I'm done, Ymir! Let's count."

"Done already?" Ymir repeats, setting down the black mass of fur in her hands. It's two identical animals; I recognize them as skunks. "Wow, today was a slow day. Got too hot?"

"Yep," Marco confirms, and I get confused because it's not even that warm out. It's actually kind of chilly from the wind. "I'm sorry I didn't get more. I have fifty-seven. You have . . ." He peers down at her pile for literally half a second before saying, "sixty. Oh! You beat me." He doesn't sound like he particularly minds. Holy shit, how did he count up points that fast?

Ymir smirks. "As I knew I would."

From over here I can see Marco's mouth do that weird arrangement as his snake tongue flits out. Ymir doesn't bat an eyelid. "You cheated, I see."

"I caught her," I call down helpfully. Ymir rolls her eyes.

"Get down here. Time to go, Jimbles." I groan and stand at having to move, trudging over to where they are. Ymir kneels down over her cache, dragging over her bag; from it she withdraws several long strips of thin paper that she uses to begin wrapping up the dead animals and stowing the bundles in her bag. "Even with the blood, I still won. Whoa, you really slacked, baby."

Marco grimaces, like this is an actual tragedy. "I'm sorry. I'll get you double next week. You are coming back next week, right?"

"Of course! And even if something comes up, Jimbles over here will be there to help you out," Ymir declares, standing and clapping me obnoxiously on the shoulder; I stumble under the force of her strike. "If he can even help." Done with her own, she walks down to Marco's pile and starts to wrap up his catches.

Marco turns to me. "You're coming again next time?"

I nod. "Ymir's teaching me stuff, so. I guess I am."

Marco looks really, really excited at that. "Good! I mean, cool! Awesome. I hope you learn a lot." He doesn't seem to know what to say, so he just grins and beams and his tail does that twisting thing. I snort at his enthusiasm.

Ymir comes back over, her now very full satchel slung over her back, plowing her shoulder into me as she walks by. "It's late. Your poor mommy and daddy are probably worried sick about their precious Jimbles."

"They know where I am," I protest, grumbling, but she probably doesn't hear me. Figures.

Marco bounces up to Ymir and sweeps her up in a tight hug, kissing her on the cheek. She grins and reaches up to ruffle his hair roughly. "See you next week, kiddo. I'll get you back for that duck thing, I swear it."

"See you!" Marco squeaks back, setting her down. He turns his freckled face to me. "Bye, Jean!"

I wave shallowly in his direction. "See ya."

I turn and walk behind Ymir toward the tree line, stretching my back from its soreness gathered on the tree. Ymir says, "Next week you'd better be up by the time I get there, all right? Go to bed earlier or something."

"All right," I grumble, not about to admit just how early I go to bed on a normal basis. I'm not giving her any more ammunition to make fun of me; I'm determined not to let my lack of a life join her quiver of petty insults.

As we trudge under the trees I glance back over my shoulder. Marco hunches in the same place he was, watching us go, looking like he's about to follow. He doesn't.

v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v

Reiner literally will not stop accosting me with questions about yesterday. I tell him everything I can, being as vague as humanly possible, but he keeps exclaiming over it, popping his head into the back of the bakery with a new query constantly.

Like right now. "So, is she, like, inhuman or something?" he demands, his big bony head sticking through the doorway into my workspace inquisitively. "Where the fuck does she even go to get that much stuff? I'm lucky if we can nab three animals when Bertl and I go out between us, especially this time of the year. But she comes home with ten! Where does she go that's that rich?"

"Uh," I say dumbly, staring at my dough-covered hands, busy kneading a huge white mass into something more deserving of the title edible. "I dunno. Out. Around."

"Where did you go with her?"

"S-South . . . east," I lie badly, but Reiner doesn't notice. He falls silent, and I peek over my shoulder to see he's gotten distracted by a customer. Good. Picking harmless details out of yesterday's adventure is proving to be a bit difficult.

Idly I start making shapes out of the dough, like kids do with mud when they're little. In an act of treachery, I craft a little horse's head, then quickly crush it into a pancake again. Ugh. I do not look like a horse.

I twist the pancake around between my fingers, twirling it distractedly, thinking about Ymir and Marco. Odd motherfuckers. I'm not sure how successful this whole hunting-teaching endeavor will be with those two oddballs. Might as well stick around for the novelty. It'd be lying if I said this isn't going to be interesting.

I glance down at my hands. The pancake is now a little stick, stiff and sticky and covered in patches of flour. On a whim I fold the very end over once, poking in two eyes on the top. There. It's a snake.

I stare at it for a second before remembering myself and mashing it into an unrecognizable ball before anyone can wander in and see. Snake imagery and paraphernalia is strictly off-limits, considered demonic. Making little snakes out of dough in the backroom isn't our idea of a healthful pastime.

I look down at my hands again. The ball I'd compressed the snake into, the way I'd dug my fingers into it, kind of makes it look like a duck head.

When Reiner pops his head back into the backroom I can't explain to him for the life of me why I'm giggling like an idiot.

—-

Hehe, whoops! This was uploaded to AO3, like, three months ago, but I just realized I never put it here, I'm sorry! So. If you want immediate updates, as well as most of my activity, I've pretty much moved to AO3. My handle is Saphruikan.