Second part of Elizabeth's mission. Here you will also find a scene about her past, so that you can get to know her better.
Thanks to all the readers who have come this far.
Enjoy the reading!
When I grow up I want to be aware.
Year 847- June.
Levi was furious. As he passed, whether they were cadets or soldiers, anyone looked down or changed their way.
No one dared to approach the Captain that day, his gaze alone was enough to say he wanted to be left alone.
Even Hange tried to talk to him as little as possible just about the expedition they were leaving for, and dared not to joke.
The rest of the team, on the other hand, remained silent to observe him, trying not to annoy him and waiting to be asked to speak.
The slightest noise made him snap, and that fury in his eyes did not foreshadow anything new.
Petra knew perfectly well why the Captain was so angry; Elizabeth's absence was beginning to make itself felt for all of them but, on the contrary, he should have had more information about her and where she was.
When she left they were warned simply with an 'Elizabeth will be absent for some time for strictly confidential reasons. Don't ask anything.' And they had done it for weeks. Now worry and anxiety began to take hold of them who just had no idea what was going on.
And the fact that their captain was getting angrier didn't help placate them.
But that day, he was sure, something had happened; or surely it was going to happen.
They had never seen the captain so furious, he seemed close to murder. His expressionless gaze was filled with fury, it was darker and more terrifying. Even the superiors feared him that day.
Of the whole group of titans, only a few remained in the hands of the rest of the team; Levi did not even wait for Erwin to give the order, who immediately hurled himself against them in search of something to help him vent his anger.
He hadn't heard from Elizabeth since he'd seen her go down those damned stairs, and the commander hadn't told him anything about it yet.
As if she had never been among them. He didn't even mention that mission, even though it was him who sent her there.
He ran unstoppable, sinking his blade into the flesh of the titans as if they were responsible for the absence of his woman.
The rest of the team stood still after doing their part of the work. There had been no losses and they did not have to make an effort to collect the corpses.
The Captain finished his work only after making sure they were all killed and slowly returned to his team.
Nobody dared to tell him anything.
Hange turned with a conscious look towards the Commander who, however, could not hold her gaze or Levi furious one who was now settling on him.
He gave the order to go back, urging his horse to move with a heel strike.
Only when they were back inside the walls the team decided to speak.
Ever since Elizabeth disappeared, the Captain didn't even want to hear them mention her. Nobody had to try to say anything about it, they didn't have to ask questions and they didn't have to dare to even think about anything.
Just hearing her name darkened his gaze and filled it with anger.
Petra felt that there was something about this situation that Levi must have probably been against but she just couldn't imagine what it was.
In the solitude of her room, in the night, she tried to think about it; she even came to the idea that maybe she had left the Scouting Legion but they had been told it was temporary.
She even tried to find the courage to ask Hange but not even the squad leader said anything to her, she just smiled sadly at her telling her that she didn't know anything.
Eld closed the stable door after everyone had left, keeping his head down, absorbed in his thoughts.
The Captain was stopped by Mike who perhaps wanted to compliment him and they saw him pass with clenched fists in front of them, accompanied by the other squad leader.
"I wonder how's Elizabeth." asked Petra, waiting for the last one of the team with her arms crossed.
Eld raised his gaze in her, sharing her thoughts.
"It's just an impression or the Captain's grumpier than usual again?"
Gunther looked at the Captain's back, careful to not let him notice it or he could be punished. He was looking for an excuse to punish someone and he didn't want to be the one whom the Captain's fury would fall on.
"Again?"
Bossard started to walk, being left behind only because he had stopped staring at the Captain too, lost in his own thoughts. He noticed too that the Captain's bad mood started the day Elizabeth was left. Everyone noticed it.
"Yeah, in those weeks he seemed happier but now he's not anymore."
"I think he's concerned about Liz too."
Hange passed by them, hearing the words between Eld and Gunther and lowering her gaze.
She felt guilty, they cared about her too but she just couldn't let a single word escape from her lips. It was a confidential mission and they had to stay out of the story.
It was the girl who called her, gaining her attention.
"There aren't any news?"
The squat leader bite her lower lips, she couldn't tell anything but she could say them if she was okay or not. The fact was that she didn't knew anything about how she was doing.
"Only Erwin can know something. I'll ask him."
Elizabeth had been studying that strategy for two whole weeks.
After being sure that her track was correct, she made every effort to figure out how to approach that damn carpet without being noticed. She was small and easily would have slipped away in the evening crowd, no one would have noticed her after her shift, but there was always someone to watch, pretending not to, that carpet.
The hardest thing for Elizabeth was not getting noticed by the military police.
She had no idea why those men went there but had found them once a week looking for the most beautiful women and locking themselves in some room.
She was disgusted by them.
They should have been a symbol of safety for people and not take advantage of them like that.
Most of those women had nothing else to live on, they had children to raise, and if they could they would gladly change their lives.
The blonde took advantage of the end of her shift; the owner was dead drunk, the last customers of the night were choosing the women they preferred and she would no longer have to sing to anyone.
Every night she had to wear a colorful costume that exposed her belly and collarbones but covered her face. The owner, after the first evening in which she had been approached by too many men, had decided that it was better to cover her face with a light colored veil so that she would not draw too much attention to herself. And that was the only thing she was grateful for: it not only allowed her to study everything without being noticed but also not to be recognized by the military police. Because she had recognized two of them.
Sure, she didn't think they would choose that division but, in a way, she wasn't surprised either.
Those two were the ones who had verbally harassed her when she was chosen by Levi, she would not have forgotten that scarred face even if she had wanted to.
She waited until the corridor was cleared and for the man on guard to turn to the wall, thus turning away from her. As soon as he turned she approached him quickly and silently, pressing her fingers on a particular vein in his neck that made him collapse to the ground instantly unconscious.
"Thanks Captain." she whispered to herself, remembering when he taught her that technique in one of their nights spent on the roof getting to know each other.
She stepped on the carpet with her foot, feeling an unevenness in the floor. The fabric was thick but the grain was too uneven to be just the floor underneath.
She pulled back the right flap noticing a crack.
A better analysis, after pulling the fabric completely off the ground, revealed that it was not a crack but a trap door.
"I knew it."
Elizabeth opened the hatch, poking her fingernail under the crack to raise the lid slightly, and immediately noticed a rather shabby wooden staircase leading down. From there came a rather cold air compared to the hot one in the brothel, which made her realize that there was an entire room at the end of those stairs.
She was careful not to open it fully, in case someone was underneath, and lowered herself until her ear was adjacent to the newly created opening, hearing no sound.
Finding the green light, she barely looked around: the guard would sleep for a long time and the owner was already passed out, drunk, on a table in the hall.
She had the way completely clear.
She felt the first steps, finding them oddly sturdy, and closed the hatch over her head after descending the first four, and then continuing her descent.
The staircase had only one wooden handrail but she avoided leaning on it, opening her eyes and mouth wide when she found herself in front of a particularly cold room, also considering the fact that they were even lower than what were the underground roads.
What the fuck?!
The heat seemed something completely foreign to this place, as well as the disorder. Everything was meticulously put in its place, perhaps out of convenience or fear of losing it, but it wasn't like Levi's manic order, it was something much colder.
Adjacent to the walls was a bookcase and a shelf filled with glass test tubes and instruments she could not fully recognize; in the center, however, was a large wooden table covered with papers, books and a pair of glasses.
She slowly approached the test tubes, smelling them carefully and mentally agreed to Erwin: the drug was certainly manufactured there and, evidently, the military police protected the owner of that place to get the necessary doses to give to the soldiers.
She wondered which person would be crazy enough to be injected with substances created by a stranger just to be stronger. Especially if the goal was really to become stronger than Levi.
'The strongest soldier of humanity'.
She thought that that title must have appealed to many people if they had come this far...
One particular book caught Elizabeth's attention: the only black-lined book, on the large table, next to everything needed to write notes.
She opened it cautiously, reading what were people's names. But it wasn't just that.
She began to leaf through it delicately, careful not to tear any sheets; every few pages answered to a name, accompanied by the date of birth and personal information about the person in question.
It said how much of the product was injected, how often and how the subject responded to the procedures.
And at the end, date and way of death.
The names weren't many, just over a dozen, which for her were too much, but what struck her most of all was the only one who still had no date of death and who the experiment seemed incomplete.
She thought that perhaps they had no more information because that name written there made her freeze instantly.
Elizabeth Blossom.
The underground streets were animated by some merchant who was trying to sell vegetables that seemed to be going bad, someone was going to buy it, forced by too much hunger.
There were never too many people on the street and those who passed usually did their own business; so it was that no one saw a woman crouched next to dirty garbage bags, with a newborn in her arms, wrapped in a crumpled blanket, and an older child who seemed to desist the woman from doing something.
Mother and children.
"She's just a baby, mother!" a dark blonde child with two green eyes said, stopping the arms of the mother who was about to place the smallest on the ground.
"She's responsible of your father's death." said the mother with fire in her eyes, and a hint of fear. She looked like she was afraid of the little one who was in her arms and she just couldn't wait to get rid of her. "Look at her eyes, she's cursed."
The little one moved her hand, trying to touch the woman's face but she moved away to avoid that contact.
The eyes she was talking about where the child's one: a brown eye and a green eye.
Two colors.
"She's not cursed, she's unique."
The mother trembled slightly, giving her son a look of pure anger.
"You're blinded by the affect of this thing who is about to get all of us killed."
"My father did that to save her."
"He's dead and I'm stuck with a cursed baby. I don't have any intention of taking her with me."
She reached out her arms, ignoring the smaller one who still smiled too innocently to know what was going on around her.
The woman looked at her one last time with a grimace of disgust on her face, before dropping her on the ground and getting to her feet.
"If you leave her here, I'll leave too. I stay with her."
The woman swallowed, pausing in the act of turning to leave only to take the oldest by the arm and lower herself to the level of his face.
She kept a low voice, trying not to get anyone's attention, which she wouldn't get by screaming anyway.
"If you stay with her you'll stop having any parents."
"Fine. Bye, mother."
The boy waited for the woman, who had just stopped being his mother, to leave, without even a greeting or a last glance.
An anger filled with disappointment made its way into the boy's heart who lowered his gaze to the ground for a moment.
A small verse made him rouse from his thoughts.
His sister.
At that moment Max Blossom decided that he would also do the impossible so that that little creature would not suffer any pain.
The first thing he thought was that their mother hadn't even bothered to give her a name yet and picked her up and watched her smile.
It was so small that every thought disappeared completely from his mind; now he was only interested in her, for whom he would have to find a name.
Looking at her face, he saw their father's gaze, his smile and the happiness that had pervaded the man when he told him that he would have a little sister.
Then he remembered the name he wanted to give it.
"Elizabeth. My little sister."