A/N: Hello again! This chapter is just going to be snippets from Madeleine's time during the cadets, so it'll jump around more than normal! It's going to be covering the full three years. Thanks again for reading!
The Warrior's plan seemed simple, but not well-thought-out: join the military to search for the Founding Titan from inside the walls. With no real place to start, Madeleine doubted that they would succeed. But if they returned to Marley empty-handed and having lost the Jaw Titan, there was a good chance their Titans would be given to the next successor immediately. That meant the end of the line for three children who were just trying to better the lives of their families. If she returned to Marley unsuccessfully, there's no doubt that she would be passed up to inherit her family's Titan, and she'd be bound to a life of producing children until the day she hit menopause.
As if she would ever allow that to happen. No.
She tried her best to ignore the whispers of the children around her as she stood at attention, pushing thoughts of having her own tiny brats out of her mind. She refused to give them the attention or reaction they were practically begging for. Children or not, they were all monsters. Devils, the ancestors of whom wreaked havoc on the rest of the world for centuries. So she stared forward, ignoring the fact that she was nearly ten years older than the oldest other Cadet around here, and avoided giving the death glare her family reserved for Eldians. She was a proper Marleyan, she didn't care what her blood said.
Two people down from her, the Commandant was screaming in the face of a girl who couldn't be older than thirteen, and looked absolutely terrified. Madeleine heard the girl yell her name only moments before. Was it Leah? Something with an L. Poor lamb looked like she was going to cry any second as she responded to the questions being thrown at her.
While waiting her turn, her thoughts drifted back home. What would she be doing right now if she weren't here? Likely training on her family's private grounds with her siblings and her cousins. She'd been the third out of fourteen children her mother had borne over the course of twenty years. The two before her had already inherited the Titan, at this point her older brother Nicholas held it. His term would be up in six years, she would need the Founding Titan in-hand by then.
Madeleine was so lost in thoughts of home that she hadn't noticed the Commandant had quit yelling next to her until he was standing in front of her. "And where the hell are you daydreaming off to, Granny?"
Her brow furrowed; was he referring to the white hair, or the fact that she was older than everyone else? The Commandant stared her in the eye, clearly expecting an answer. "My home, sir!" she replied after clearing her throat.
"And where would that be, Cadet?"
"Madeleine Iscariot, from Karanes District!" she recited, saluting the officer. The Eldians on Paradis had no way of tracing a name back to Marley, so she'd chosen to stick with her real name to avoid the issue of her forgetting a fake one. And nobody bothered to check the records in Karanes when she'd enlisted to see if she actually lived there. It was far too easy to assume a fake identity here.
"Are you aware you're a freak, Madeleine Iscariot?" The Commandant yelled, nose-to-nose with her, spit flying from his mouth directly into her face.
Madeleine recoiled in horror. "Get your face away from me, you filthy de-" She stopped dead in her tracks, slapping her hand over her mouth. Silence could be heard across the training grounds. All eyes were focused on her and the Commandant, including other superior officers. She'd messed up.
The Commandant never moved from her face. "Filthy what?" he prodded her forehead with a single finger. But she shook her head, refusing to continue her sentence. "Laps," he demanded, teeth clenched. "Now."
"How many?"
"Until you drop."
The hand-to-hand combat and fighting with swords came easy to Madeleine. She'd been practicing both her whole life back home, training to take on the Scout. But the 3DMG she encountered near the end of her first week was a whole new enemy to conquer. The first time she used the belt and harness system, she toppled face-first into the ground. In turn, of course, the idiot children around her broke out into fits of giggles.
"You have to focus a bit more on balancing your weight from your hips and legs," a curious voice came from above her. Madeleine spit stray hairs out of her mouth and looked up to see the girl from Day 1 peering down at her. Lila, her name had been. "Strange how you're so good at fighting, but have no balance whatsoever. Don't you need balance for a good stance?"
Unhooking her belt to stand up, Madeleine huffed, "Of course you do, I just wasn't ready."
"I can give you some pointers if you want," Lila offered.
The older of the two paused, considering it heavily. She'd noticed the girl hanging without much of an effort before, she clearly had a knack for it. But nobody did something for nothing. "In exchange for?"
"Teach me how to fight!"
Laughing at the girl's enthusiasm, she agreed. Throughout their time together in the cadets, the two would become good friends. It would be a shame when she died with the rest of the dogs. Madeleine might have even said she'd miss her.
Lila's face hit the dirt much harder than Madeleine had intended in their last sparring session. Admittedly, the girl had gotten better over the past few months, but she was far from Madeleine's level. Laughing wholeheartedly, she helped the poor girl to her feet. "That wasn't half bad! But your stance when blocking isn't nearly low enough, your feet aren't fully planted. Try it a bit more like this." Squaring her knees so that her hips were directly above her feet, she demonstrated. When Lila followed suit, she made some adjustments to the girl's footing.
"The old lady teaching the children how to fight, huh?" A laugh emitted from behind them. Paul was one of the cadets from the corps ahead of them, the 102nd Corps. Despite acting like a big tough man, he was still a stupid teenage boy who thought far too much of himself. His troop hadn't been in Shiganshina the prior year, she'd learned. The dumb boy had too much puff in his chest for someone who'd never even seen a Titan.
Madeleine's eyes narrowed as she sized him up. "Why don't you come teach this 'old lady' how it's done then?" she offered, pulling out the faux wooden blade. "Up for a friendly match of Retrieve The Knife?"
Paul glanced over his shoulder at his friends, all of whom wore matching grins. "I'd say I don't want to hurt you, but you're literally asking for it," he laughed, rolling up his sleeves. "This won't take long."
She swiveled the knife and sheathed it in her belt loop, taking the same stance she'd been showing Lila only moments prior. She'd seen Paul spar before and knew he would hurry into an attack as soon as he could, hoping to catch her off-guard. And that's exactly what he did. Paul rushed her, and both parties gripped the forearms of the other, grappling. Because of the low stance, he hadn't been able to knock her over as planned. He swiped at the knife, but Madeleine jerked her hips back, narrowly avoiding his hand. Letting go of one of his arms, she jammed an open palm of her hand upwards into his abdomen, just below his ribcage. Stunned, Paul gasped for air as the wind was knocked out of him, and she used the opportunity to swipe a leg out from underneath him.
A respectable foe would've graciously accepted defeat as she stood and began walking away, but Paul was far from respectable. Anger filled him as he watched the her retreating form, and it boiled over as she laughed at something Lila had said. He rolled onto his feet and flew the few meters between them, tackling Iscariot to the ground in what was much less than a fair fight. He fought her flailing arms for the knife in her belt loop, and she earned a right hook to the jaw when she tried to shove him off her.
This prompted his friends to come running, and Madeleine spat blood from her mouth as he was forcibly removed from her. She heard his friends trying to talk him down from his anger. "Can't stand to lose to a girl?" she taunted.
He snarled in response, actually snarled! Like a beast. She couldn't help the upturned nose she gave him, and she took Lila's helping hand to her feet.
"Was that really worth it?" The girl was clearly rattled. Most of the people in the Training Corps didn't take hand-to-hand combat seriously since the entire point was to either laze around with the Military Police, drink and play games in the Garrison, or fight Titans with the Survey Corps.
"Of course it was," Madeleine smiled through what she was sure was a mouthful of blood, holding up the knife she'd managed to hang on to like it was a trophy.
Her escapade with Paul had buzzed around the grounds and gained Madeleine quite a few new friends. Apparently the boy wasn't well-liked outside of his immediate friend group. By the end of that evening, she must've re-told the story a dozen times, and Lila could likely top that with her own number. Each time the younger woman told it, it became more and more ludicrous, until she someone approached her to ask whether or not she'd actually knocked out several of Paul's teeth.
Madeleine smiled to herself as she pulled the straps of her harness up her thighs and into place. Lila was just a child, her excitement over something as silly as a fist fight was pure innocence. She'd tried all day to think back to her first win, if she'd ever been as excited as that girl was today. But she couldn't remember, she'd been training for so long.
This was her nighttime escape, something she would do often throughout her years in the Cadets; most evenings, she would sneak out and grab a set of 3DMG from the supply room and hide out in the trees surrounding the training grounds until everyone else had gone to bed, and she'd practice. They didn't have anything like it in Marley, if people wanted to fly, they'd simply hop an airship. But this...this gear allowed you to fly, not a machine. She would often pretend she was a bird.
Once her gear was in place, Madeleine pulled the trigger and the wires shot out into a nearby tree, pulling her upwards. Even swinging through the trees, she couldn't get past the idea that someone was following her. She'd felt it every night for the past week. But every time she turned around, she'd see fleeting movement, as if someone were ducking out of view.
As she continued soaring through the air, the feeling eventually vanished. It always did. Instead, she turned her thoughts to finding the Founder. That was what she was here for, after all. Reiner and Bertholdt would certainly place in the top 10 of their training class, and she needed to as well. The best bet for finding the Founder was by joining the Military Police. The usurper was likely hiding out inside Wall Sina, since that was where it would've been stolen from. Madeleine didn't have the money to live there, so she needed to be there by other means, and the MP's were a sure way to get there. Her grades were good enough, and her combat skills were far superior to anyone else around her. All she needed was to master this dang gear.
The training years passed quickly. Reiner, Bertholdt, and Annie joined the Cadets the year after Madeleine did. Admittedly, they had one of the best groups of trainees she'd ever seen - there was an unsurpassable amount of skill among the ranks of the 104th Cadet Corps. She would have to keep an eye on that Ackermann girl, she was dangerous for sure. She watched the Warriors from afar; Bertholdt and Reiner kept their distance from Annie, but not each other. It would've been best for the three to separate entirely, but it was their plan, she was just there to help.
Madeleine had associated with a few of the other trainees during her time here, though she wouldn't call any of them friends. It was hard to think of them as her friends, knowing they'd all die an awful death at some point in the near future when Marley invaded. She was closest to Lila; the girl had stuck to her like glue since the incident with Paul in that first week. She reminded Madeleine of her sister, Lucy, despite the age difference between the two. They even looked alike; both were tall for their ages, with dark hair and green eyes - though Lucy's were a light green, like all the other women in the Iscariot family, and Lila's were a deep green.
On the eve before her graduation, she was approached unexpectedly by the Commandant during dinner. "My office, Granny," he demanded. "Your presence has been requested by a higher-up."
Her brow furrowed. The mood all day had been relaxed - training was cancelled for her class due to the impending graduation, as it was for each Corps the night before - so she couldn't have gotten into trouble. And if it wasn't the Commandant who needed her, she wasn't sure who she'd see as she rounded the corner behind him. He closed the door behind her, not following her in.
At his desk sat a man who, even sitting, was clearly very tall. At least, compared to her. He had dirty blonde hair and thick eyebrows, and a serious look in his eye despite the smile on his face. In his hand was a thin manilla folder. "Miss Iscariot, it's nice to finally meet you," he said as he stood to reach across the desk and shake her hand.
Despite her Marleyan brain screaming to not take it, she did so, giving it a firm single shake before sitting across from him. "You're Erwin Smith, Commanding Officer of the Survey Corps," she said plainly. "What do you want with me?"
"Straight to business, I like it," Erwin laughed. She couldn't tell if it was genuine or not. "I came to find out what your intentions are after graduation, what Regiment you're planning on joining."
Why was the C.O. of the Scouts interested in her career choice? When she didn't answer, Erwin took it upon himself to continue. "You know you're poised for Rank Number 1 tomorrow, don't you?"
"I didn't," Madeleine feigned ignorance, but it was thinly veiled as she couldn't help the smile that crept up on her face. "But it's good to know."
"I came to see you," he continued, "to discuss your future in the military. To be frank, the Scouts could use someone with your skill."
The smile slid off her face into a look of confusion. "Are you recruiting me? I thought that happens tomorrow night, after the ceremony -"
"It does," he interrupted her. "However, if you're choosing the Military Police or the Garrison, I wanted the chance to try and change your mind. I wouldn't get that if I were to wait until tomorrow."
"The decision has been made, I'll be joining the Military Police," she said curtly.
Erwin couldn't help the grim expression. "I was afraid you'd say that. But I fear that your talents will go to waste if they're hidden away inside Wall Sina."
Admittedly, she felt a bit insulted. The only reason anyone worked as hard as she had was to join the Military Police, and he wanted her to throw it away so that she could play soldier outside the safety of the walls? "Thank you for the thought, Commander," she deadpanned. "But I didn't work as hard as I did to die like an animal."
As she stood to leave, he called out to her. "That's the thing, though, I don't think you would." Erwin flipped open the folder, and she caught sight of her name in bold lettering at the top. "I've read the transcripts of your time during the Cadets, and Captain Levi has been keeping an eye on your training sessions -"
Captain Levi? Is that who had been following her in the evenings? She'd heard tale of Humanity's Strongest - and snorted at the very thought, mind you. But to think the Commander had her followed, the thought infuriated her. "I don't need someone stalking me to make sure I'm as good as your paperwork says I am," she practically bellowed in his face.
Just as she'd heard, Erwin was as calm and collected as his reputation was. "Is that really how you want to spend your life?" he argued. "Moseying about all day, doing meaningless errand-boy tasks? You don't even want to try and see the other side?"
"You know nothing of my life or what I want," Madeleine said through gritted teeth. "My choice is made, my mind won't change."