author's note: I dunno how clear Eren's ability in this chapter is, but it's basically the power to mind-control people or animals after putting a special mark on their skin.
Rows of identical houses gazed forlornly at Reiner as he stood in the middle of the cul-de-sac. The stucco facades looked to him like faces tanned from Mediterranean sun. The windows were sagging eyes, the shutters open eyelids. They were pretty faces, like the one Reiner had owned before—
He double-checked the address he'd printed. This was the right neighborhood. The house in front belonged to someone who knew far more than Reiner did.
Reiner took a breath and started forward. He was about to meet his maker.
Water trickled down a Spanish mosaic fountain as Reiner walked across the soapstone deck to the front door. From what he could tell, there weren't any cameras disguised in the nose-hair greenery by the first-floor windows. Reiner was about to bash the glass door to pieces before trying the handle to find it unlocked. He entered.
Classical music played softly from speakers somewhere. The entryway was decorated like a five-star general's chest, with plaques and awards and a framed doctorate. Reiner was thankful they weren't portrait paintings of any kind. Those always creeped him out, reminiscent of those haunted manors where the eyes would follow you as you passed.
He came into a lofty living room. A wire-frame cage squatted on the contemporary white carpet. Reiner thought for a moment that it might have a dog inside. He liked dogs, and dogs liked him. They seemed to view him as some sort of supersized chew toy. Extra Durable Tasty T-Bone Reiner Braun. Your pup won't get enough of him! He'd been trained in the same compound that they trained dogs in back when he lived at the Laboratory. Wore the same shock devices too, channeling up to 120 volts for misbehavior. It was like wearing two electric eels around your neck. He hoped that his furry canine friends had been released after the jailbreak. The thing about dogs, he thought; they sometimes went wild, feral, back into the natural order. Rogue, like Reiner had. And then it was survival of the fittest in the real world. And Reiner was the fittest animal on Planet Earth.
A second glimpse informed him that the cage was not, in fact, a dog cage, but a rabbit hutch. A red-eyed white-furred breed nuzzled the sawdust inside.
In the armchair beside the fireplace, a man sat facing away from Reiner.
"Are you here to rob me?" the man said.
"No," Reiner said.
A pause. Then, "Are you here to kill me?"
"I only want one thing, Doc," Reiner said.
A longer pause. "Reiner Braun? I didn't recognize your voice at first. It's been nine years."
"I've grown up since then," Reiner said. "Dr. Yeager."
"It's not just that you're older. You sound… different."
Reiner stiffened. "Well, like everything in my life, it's thanks to you. Since that night your sons and the little girl escaped, I have been different."
Grisha Yeager turned halfway over his armrest. Static shocks of gray impeded his slickly combed hair. His eyeglasses were misty, as though they had become fishbowls of tears and remorse. Reiner wasn't here for sob stories, though. He was here for classified information.
"I should have known that the past would make its appearance sooner or later. Subconsciously, I think I was hoping it would be sooner."
"It hasn't been easy, tracking you down," Reiner said. "The government moves your location every six months."
"Only to keep me from spilling the beans to anyone."
"Well," Reiner said, crossing his arms. "You're gonna spill 'em now, Doc."
"You're going after Zeke and Eren, aren't you?"
"I have to."
"Why? Why not just forget and move on with your life?"
At this, a teakettle tune whistled through Reiner's ears.
"Forget?" Reiner said. "FORGET?!"
He stepped forward and spun the armchair around. Hardwood groaned and Grisha Yeager was facing him now.
"How could I possibly forget?!" Reiner pawed at his ski-mask and peeled it over his head. "When they did THIS to me!"
Grisha's colorless eyes widened. He choked and sputtered. "Dear Lord!" he said. "Holy Jesus!"
Reiner took another breath and backed away.
"Sorry," he said. "I lost my temper. It's—" he sighed. "It's just been real hard lately—"
He looked up as Grisha gasped like a fish out of water.
"Are- are you okay?"
Grisha clutched handfuls of his brown tweed suit jacket. He hunched over in his chair.
"Mah- my- heart-" he said, his eyes bulging.
"Shit!" Reiner said. "Shit!" He dashed to the kitchenette and began to punch numbers into a landline. He got to 9 and 1 before Grisha said, "Ruh— Reiner!"
He had flopped onto the floor. Reiner knelt beside him.
"I— I've had this coming," Grisha said weakly. His face had turned the same gray as his eyes.
"Don't talk, just save your energy."
"I-It was so easy—" The cardiac arrest slackened his grip on Reiner's gloved hand. "To convince ourselves… that what was best for us was best for them. That the children mattered, not the money. I-I've been lying for too long."
"Hey, don't go dying on me, Doc!"
Grisha's eyes rolled towards a distant perception, between the atoms and molecules he had studied for so long.
"I- I hope that Zeke and Eren are happy, wherever they are," he whispered. Then his pulse deadened. His body stopped moving, still as a flatline.
From a tangle of gardenias, a Reiner watched sirens light the cul-de-sac and paramedics swarm the house across the street. He was a grim, solemn sentinel.
Dr. Grisha Yeager's body was carried out on a stretcher. Natural causes, they'd deduce in the autopsy. Survival of the fittest, Reiner would say. He wondered if Grisha had deserved his timely demise, if he had reaped what he'd sown.
Reiner shrugged and turned around. Under his trench coat hid what he'd come here for. A thick manila folder. He was one step closer to those children now. Debating the concept of divine judgment was pointless.
All Reiner knew was that everything always comes full circle eventually.
A jungle of grass. The world towered. It was a world of shadow and hidden places. Like a perpetually dark forest. It was seen through the expanded eye cones of Levi the cat. The fence rose from the singing fields like a palisade of power lines. Beneath a well-groomed black coat, sinew flexed and turned to liquid grace. A great leap, and the cat had scaled the fence.
Eren's mind rested languid in Levi's brain, a heavy blanket of consciousness sloshing through the central nervous system. He let the instinct of balance guide his fence walk.
Instincts were things that slackened or tugged at his hold on the reins. Depending on the animal, they could be anything. When his tongue lapped the air in a yawn, he tasted the urine scent of a territory marker, and the hair along his spine bristled. Levi was wary of the more ornery strays out there, bigger, meaner, all tooth and claw. Instincts could get irritating. A light breeze? Careful. Underground mole vibrations? Prey. Overhead shadow? Predator. Eren had gotten used to tuning it out, mostly.
As he padded along the cattle fence, steering clear of the piss-borders, Eren let his mind wander. Well, more than it already had.
He remembered one of the only times he'd seen his father; a man who shared facial features and nearsightedness with Eren's brother. Grisha Yeager had been with another man in a suit that made him look like an inflatable snowman and a clipboard in his hand.
That's the one? What'd you call the lad? Puppet-master? He'd said to Grisha.
Ventriloquist, Grisha corrected. His name is Eren.
The man tapped the seven-centimeter glass separating them. Hey there, Eren.
Young Eren bared his teeth. Shit! he'd said happily, a word he'd learned from Zeke. Fuck! You! Those were good ones too.
They'd left Eren alone to pet his rabbits.
Ventriloquist was a lot harder word to pronounce than shit and fuck. Eren had had trouble with such a big word, so Zeke had revised the nickname when they'd escaped. Vampire was easier, and cooler too, said young Eren, so that was what he'd been newly christened. He'd worn it as a badge of freedom. A fun act, playing creature of the night for their guests. The act grew old quickly. Now it was an everyday motion to go through. Eren discovered that Zeke had traded one cage for another. It depressed him to think this.
Having a cat was helpful. When Zeke had found Levi, he'd been a stray, a scrawny runty thing sopping wet from rain; little more than a hairball. He'd gifted him to Eren with a grin and a bag of litter. Eren hadn't liked it at first. The generosity reminded him of the scientists in the Laboratory who thought that trinkets and pet rabbits were an adequate substitute for parental love. But Eren had nursed the kitten to health, and now he used Levi for ventures far into the outside.
It pulled at him, the wind in the field. The beckoning freedom. He wanted to run away. His heart wasn't into the charade anymore. It belonged to the wide world.
Do as I say, not as I do, Zeke had told him once. This applied to everything. Drinking, cigarettes, and trips into town.
The brain of Levi the cat surfaced suddenly, a restless paw on Eren's mind. The feline body crouched on the fence. Ambling along through the grass was a tall apelike figure, the klutzy gait of a biped. To Levi's brain, his arch-nemesis.
"Hello, Levi!" Zeke said rakishly, carrying a pail of rainwater. "Oh, don't hiss at me like that!"
He continued on the path to home. With Levi's keen ears, Eren heard Zeke mutter, "What a nuisance of an animal."
Eren deserted the cat's cranium to go find Mikasa. An inkling of an idea was forming back in his own head.
Mikasa spoke behind Eren and his feet left the ground for a second. He'd forgotten that she was following him. Zeke called her an adept spooker because of her tendency to lapse into absolute silence for hours on end, then speak when you thought you were alone in a room and scare the living daylights out of you.
"Are we lost, Eren?"
Eren calmed his nerves. He was jumpy as he led the way through the woods behind the backyard. He didn't have Levi's night vision anymore, and this was his first time ever sneaking out.
"'Course not," he said and stopped suddenly. Mikasa bumped into him. Bending low to the ground, Eren touched his forefingers to a moss creep like he'd seen feather-clad shamans do in old Western movies. He stood back up and peered at the moon, a sideways slant between the adder-tongue branches.
He turned around to Mikasa. Her eyes were starless in the dark.
"Moss grows towards civilization, right? So we're going the right way."
"Oh, okay," Mikasa said, mollified. Then she took a step after him and fell down.
"Uh," Eren said. "You okay?"
"Ow," Mikasa said. She held her foot and Eren realized she wasn't wearing any shoes. A large thorn nestled at her sole.
"Shit, Mikasa! Where are your shoes?"
"I don't like shoes. The laces are too tricky. Even when I sing the bunny rhyme."
Mikasa memorized things best when they rhymed. Eren sighed, then he knelt down. He tried not to be mad with her, but he wanted her to be more streetwise. Tougher. So that they could survive in the real world. Together. He was reminded of a fable from one of Zeke's favorite bedtime storytellers; Aesop's tale about a mouse who removed a thorn from a lion's paw. Mikasa's more mouse than lion, though.
"Hold still," he said. "Hold still!" He gently eased the thorn from her foot and resisted the urge to lick away the blood beads. Sharing brains went both ways, and Eren always caught himself grooming or craving catnip hours after possessing the cat.
Mikasa said, "Thanks, Eren," and tickled her fingers underneath his chin. Eren closed his eyes, a purr rumbling through his throat muscles. Then he realized what he was doing.
"Stop that! It's weird."
"But you liked it."
"Shut up and follow the moss."
Mikasa hobbled down the forest trail until Eren gave her his left shoe. The end of the trail actually did guide them to civilization. The civilization in question was a barbwire-fenced perimeter of flattened earth and a herd of garish yellow beasts asleep under the moon.
Eren and Mikasa crouched in the bushes near the fence, alongside a nest egg of cigar butts and sandwich wrappers. Eren had worn the cloak from his old vampire costume in hopes that it would disguise him in the shadows, like Batman. It was riding up on his back though; he'd been twelve the last time he'd worn it.
"Here's the plan," Eren whispered. "I'm gonna sneak into the foreman's trailer. Where Zeke's boss sleeps, okay? Then I'm gonna Mark him."
Mikasa's eyes widened. "A person? You've never Marked a person before!"
"I've practiced on animals. C'mon, how much different can Magath's mind be to a cat or a rabbit? No big deal."
Mikasa looked unsure. "Then, what should I do?"
Eren gave her his Dracula smile. And then he told her.
The fence wasn't hard to vault. The cloak snagged on the wire bramble at the top though, so Eren had to ditch it. He picked his way across the floodlit quadrangle, stowing away in the darkest places. The same principle as inhabiting a mind. Be sneaky, be an anti-presence, a prickle at the back of the neck, a shadow on the wall, a monster under the bed. Manhunt was the name of the game; don't let yourself be caught. Most minds had natural defense systems in place. If they identified Eren as a virus infesting the brain, then bad things happened. As they would if the construction foreman caught Eren trespassing.
Behind the saurian neck of an excavator, Eren plotted and waited for movement outside the foreman's trailer. His nerves were flaring up again. Soon enough, the door opened and a man tromped down the stairs. Nobody could defy nature's call.
As the man-shape crossed the site to a cluster of Porta-Potties, Eren darted to the trailer. He stayed low as he climbed the stairs, and tested the door. Unlocked. Had the foreman some foresight, Eren would have signaled Mikasa for Plan B. But Plan A was a go, so he signaled that. An owl's hoot that could have fooled the real deal into mating with him. He'd possessed a barn owl once, and remembered the sound of the screech well enough.
Eren entered the trailer. The interior stank of cigarettes and rotted mini-fridge leftovers. A moment of panic as he looked for a place to hide. He heard the stairs creak outside. The knob turned. Eren dove under a table and banged his head loudly.
Theo Magath stepped inside, a crossword puzzle tucked under his arm. His shrewd eyes glinted back and forth in his skull. Eren gulped and pressed his back further to the aluminum wall. Bigfoot sightings must have been this guy all along, he thought. A real-life Sasquatch and a real-life vampire.
Magath sat down in his office chair and went back to his crossword, grumbling something about the toilet paper quality in the Porta-Potties. A football game fizzled on an overhead television. Eren jumped every time Magath's team scored, or the ref made a bad call that caused Magath to shout at the screen.
Mikasa, Eren thought, wishing he had a tail to lash in agitation. Any time now. Mikasa didn't have the power of telepathy though.
Magath lit a cigar to chew on, and the smoke began to make Eren lightheaded. Then his lungs gave a heave. A cough built in his chest. Silently, he pounded it. The cough mounted like a brewing storm.
Eren put his fist to his mouth and coughed quietly. Ol' Theo's chair did a 180 in a millisecond. Eren watched the dreadful descent of Magath's eyes to his hiding place. A funeral flashed in his mind. Mikasa weepy, Zeke comforting her, a closed casket affair. I should have told Mikasa, Eren thought. I'd like gardenias on my headstone.
Then the Porta-Potties exploded.
Magath spun back around to the window. One after the other, septic geysers spewed from the toilets, twenty, thirty feet into the air. A sewage spray painted the trailer windows, pattered the ceiling, slopped from pipe bursts deep in the bubbling earth.
"What the fuck?" Magath said, his cigar drooping from his ajar lips. The excitement continued.
Mikasa's touch reached throughout the construction site like a child on a playground, disembodied, untraceable. She woke the sleeping vehicles next. A bulldozer roared to life. A cement mixer began to churn. Engines hummed and motors vibrated and gasoline guzzled without any keys in the ignition. The ultimate key to everything turned everything on, and a machine rebellion ensued. Caterpillar treads seethed on the dirt. The phantom-operated vehicles turned in unison towards their overlord.
"What the fuck?!" Magath hollered. His cigar grounded into tobacco pulp between his teeth.
Eren crept behind him. He imagined creepy organ music playing at his appearance, missing the melodrama of his cloak.
"Looks like you've got a Ghost problem," he said.
He did not expect the elbow into his gut or the shoulder tackle that rammed him into the coffee machine. These sort of things didn't happen to the super-spies and chainsaw maniacs on TV.
The plastic table collapsed under Eren's weight and he landed on his ass against the wall, wheezing from the battery to his solar plexus and inwardly screaming at the coffee boiling through his shirt. A cigar ember died in the complete opposite way that stars die: a sizzling anticlimax in a puddle of Joe. Magath's boot came over it. Eren only realized now that the shoe's brown heel was stamped with a U.S Marine Corps logo. Magath loomed over him, huge in his neon reflective vest and mud-spattered trousers, an industrialized grizzly bear.
"Damn motherfucking kids," he growled. "Prank Theo Magath, eh?" He rolled his sleeves up his brawny forearms. "Ain't gonna get away with this one, you shit-for-brains teenager."
In a last-ditch act of desperation, Eren lunged for Magath's ankle, fast as a viper strike. He caught the pant cuff, hearing a grunt of outrage, and sunk the fingernail of his left pointer finger into a sliver of thick-haired skin.
Eren could feel the brewery at his lymph nodes swell and kick into overdrive, sweating a biological poison through his glands and down his fingertip, into the break of the skin. The sleeping syndrome was fast-acting. Once it entered someone's bloodstream, they were Eren's plaything. An all-natural suppression ability, Dr. Grice had described it to Eren once when they were doing biweekly checkups. That was what Eren had been designed to do, puppeteer high-ranking officials, presidents, prime ministers, kings, with just a tiny thorn prick.
The fight left Magath's eyes, and instead they filled with the dumb dead-space of a tranquilized animal. He swayed and tottered as though a light breeze would topple his mountainous form. Eren knew the spell would wear off soon, so he wasted no time. When he first used the ability on his rabbit at the Laboratory, they'd instructed him to assign a symbol to help him concentrate. He'd think real hard about it as he'd tattoo the image onto the test subject's shaved patch of skin. He did this now: a rough outline of a rabbit head with X-ed-out eyes, carved into Magath's ankle. Eren's Mark.
Eren knew that his eyes were shining silver now, like the ornate spoons twirling and catching sunlight on Zeke's antique spoon carousel. A spoon for every country, round and round and round…
Then Theo Magath's brain unlocked like a high-security vault door, and Eren stepped inside.
A stinking barge in a flotsam sea of trash. That was what Magath's brain looked like. Eren wrinkled his nose. Figures, he thought.
Under his feet, he could see that the platform was made out of a million flattened rubber boot-treads, each an ingrained march, rule, drill. A tube near the helm billowed noxious cigar fumes into the atmosphere. In the sea, half-forgotten mechanisms rusted. An anemic sex drive here, an unfulfilled childhood dream there. Overhead, papers had origami-ed themselves into flapping gulls, circling the trash heap. If he squinted, Eren could make out a Fine Arts degree, shopping lists, business charts, and a whole lot of words that Eren wouldn't say in front of his grandmother. If he knew his grandmother. A word for people with Mikasa's features, too, which made him bristle a little.
Eren began walking. This brain was garbage-clogged and borderline dysfunctional and he didn't want to stay for longer than necessary. He only needed to find the controls, and the helm seemed like a good place to start.
As he walked, he whistled a naval sea shanty, plucked cheerfully from a recess in the foreman's long-term memory. Eren hurried along; it was way past his and Mikasa's bedtimes already. Soon, he'd be one step closer to freedom. Or at least a night of freedom.
Magath would wake up the next morning in a coffee puddle, with a blinding headache and a cryptic, occult mark on his left ankle and a suspicion that he'd had something a little stronger than his average bean water to drink that night.
Zeke arrived punctually at 6:30 a.m and worked for six hours. He wasn't scheduled for a large-scale demolition until Wednesday, so he mostly helped with the pouring for the cement foundation.
Five hours later, he sat down on top of a four-by-four stack and peeled his gloves from the congealed concrete mix on his forearms and unpacked his trusty lunchbox and skinned his banana halfway and flipped the pages of his favorite book to a dog-eared bookmark and began to eat lunch at 12:30 p.m. Noontime was a time for breathing, and the breathing air was nice today. Crisp, cold, like freezer crystals on ice cream. Zeke finished his banana in four bites. The wolfish growls of his stomach ceased. He polished his glasses with a methodical lens wipe and slotted them back on his face. Blurry world, clear world. The trees were on fire, then they were only Mother Nature's turncoats. Brilliant gaudy snowflakes of orange and red and gold. His eyes tired of his well-read H.G Well's The Island of Dr. Moreau, so he looked towards the trees. A knitted twig ensemble balanced on a contoured branch. Zeke's eyes softened looking at it, at the tiny squalling featherless things inside. An ochre-breasted robin flitted down and vomited worm bait into their awaiting beaks.
Lunchtime for everyone, Zeke thought. He thought about his little brother and the girl who wasn't his anything by blood, but was no different than Eren to him.
Their family sat just as precariously as the bird's home in the tree. Eren and Mikasa were still only fledglings, just barely beginning to learn the artistry of flight.
Liar, liar, Zeke chided himself.
They were ready. They could fly all on their own. He knew this. And they didn't want worm vomit from Zeke anymore. Well, Mikasa tolerated it for now, but she would go wherever Eren went, and that was all there was to the matter. Eren wanted to fly far away, from Mule, from his big brother. Zeke knew this too.
But still—
"Hey Yeager! You hear about the plumbing situation?"
One of the Galliard brothers shouted from below Zeke's boots. He couldn't tell which one; they wore the same clothes and their bumblebee hard hats disguised the differentiating colors of their hair.
Zeke looked down. "Poop problem?"
"Oh yeah. Big one. No using 'em for the next couple of days for sure."
"Well, that's what the woods are for," Zeke said.
"Ha-ha! Ain't that the truth!"
"Boss-man must not be too happy."
"Got that right." Galliard pinched his nostrils. "P.U! Oh, yeah, speaking of, he wanted to see you after your lunch break."
Zeke tipped his hard hat at him. "Much obliged, Marcel."
The Galliard scowled. "I'm Porco. Duh." He hunched his sledgehammer over his shoulder and went to go goof around with apparently Marcel. Zeke liked those two. He thought they were models of a solid brotherly relationship.
The Boss-man looked like he'd been having a bad day. Leading up the stairs to his trailer were wet boot-prints. He must've stepped in the wet cement patch, which Zeke found strange, because what kind of foreman doesn't know not to step in wet cement?
Magath answered on the second knock.
"You wanted to see me, sir?"
"Yes, erhm, yeah, come on in," Magath said in a decidedly un-Magath-like voice, his eyes shifty, with signature raccoon bands under them.
Zeke stood at attention as Magath hovered in a posture awkward to his stature.
"So, Zeke, uh, I'm gonna need you to stay late Saturday night," Magath said.
Zeke tilted his head. He was universally referred to as Yeager around the construction site.
"Need something done that night?"
"Yeah, look out there," Magath pointed out his window.
"Sir, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing."
"That! Right there!"
"The… ravine?"
"Yes," Magath said, whose voice was beginning to sound strangely familiar and unfamiliar to Zeke. "The ravine. I'm gonna need you to blow it up."
"You want me to blow up the ravine," Zeke deadpanned.
"Yeah, man," Magath said, and Zeke searched his face for stroke symptoms. The man's heart was probably at a mortal mileage.
"On Saturday night," he echoed.
"Perfect!" Magath said, and clapped Zeke on the arm, making him stiffen and hike up his shoulders. "I knew I could count on you, Zeke!"
"Yessir, Boss-man…"
So Zeke accepted the overtime and went back to work, keeping an eye on the birdies in the trees.