!MAKE SURE TO READ CHAPTER 25: THE STREET OF EMBERS BEFORE THIS!
An Eldian's Journal
Wartime Shenanigans
Chapter 26: Cousins
I walked to the cart, not knowing what to do with the information I was given. The typical shock and uneasy feeling of learning something new were there, but I still didn't entirely know how to proceed.
Why?
Why would K keep that name away from me? Was there something wrong with that name? Was it taboo? Those are the questions I asked myself as I lowered cans into the cart. I looked at the mutt, but it just looked at me blindly with its tongue out instead of giving a response. It then licked a can as if it was trying to get into its contents.
My hands curled into fists. I was done with K's withholding of facts; I wanted the answers.
So, I turned around and asked the man my question. The same one I've asked ever since I met him.
"Who are you?"
No one answered it at first, not even the crowd of dead houses that must have already known the answers. K took out one of the cans from the cart and motioned me to open it. I repeated my question, but he insisted that I open it. Using the ring on top, I opened the metal lid to see imprisoned meat and vegetables shoved together like Eldians in a bomb shelter.
Without a utensil, K shoved the food down his throat. His adam's apple awoke, and I saw it go up and down. It was as if he needed food to muster the energy to tell me the answer.
"I'm the nephew of Eldian Restorationists."
I fell back onto the cart. The wood dug into the back of my knee as the mutt came to my rescue and licked my hand.
"Y-you're what?"
I picked myself up and stood looking at the man. "There are some things that I can tell you. But the rest…." K led me over to the sidewalk. It wasn't a typical sidewalk, for it was caked with ash and not just the mundane layer of dust. There was room for some devils to sit on it despite the footsteps of charred and overcooked Eldian ghosts.
"Let me tell you a story, H."
Let me tell you a story.
It's a short tale not of an Eldian newspaper boy. But a story of two cousins who grew up as brothers. Here we go…
XXX
Alex and Liesa Kruger were Eldian restorationists.
They would spend randomly scheduled evenings with other Eldians of similar objectives and mindsets. In reality, they were just a bunch of crazy people that were too ambitious for their own good.
When they were discovered, the Marleyan government sent in two officers to do what they do best. Oppress. Eliminate the threat. So on one night, they brought in two flamethrowers to do the deed. Still, as the adulterous flames bit into everything their home had to offer, something was lurking around them.
There was a tuft of brown hair sitting in the cabinet watching through an opening, and it had no other choice but to witness the sight of sizzling humans.
The tuft of brown hair belonged to a boy named Eren Kruger.
He survived the flames, for the flamethrowers couldn't sniff out his existence.
After the flamethrowers with Marleyans attached left the house, Eren stayed in the cabinet while being force-fed the smell of the iron ascending from his parents' bodies. Their despicable pair of scents were the only animate things from their corpses.
The world fed him that plate of scents until the cabinet opened, and he saw a different couple of Krugers. Ones that weren't burning but had ash poorly decorated on their faces.
He heard fragments of sentences. Something around the lines of. "Don't worry, Eren. Everything will be ok." It was funny that they said that since the tears on their faces underwrote a different statement. Especially the husband of the couple, he cried out to the male corpse on the ground as if the yelling would reignite some life in the body and peel back the char.
The husband picked up the boy, and they all ran out.
Eren noticed the burning houses that cried rivers of flames and tears made of scorched bodies were gathered in one giant pile in the corner of the street.
After a run through the night, while making sure guards weren't around, the couple arrived at their home. After they entered, they found a boy peering out from a bedroom. A fresh guitar laid against the wall behind him.
"Eren, you remember your cousin, don't you?"
The couple called out to the boy peering from the bedroom door. "Come, Walter." It was their son. Walter approached, and in his childish ignorance, he asked, "Why are you crying, Eren?" Something stuck with him that day, though; Eren's puffy eyes were wide, displaying the white. His lips pulled back, baring his teeth. Tears spilled from his eyes like steaming tea overflowing from a cup.
"Why are you crying, Eren?"
Walter still didn't understand.
Walter's dad said, "Walter, my brother...your uncle was killed."
"Ok." Walter walked into the kitchen and stood there with the disheveled pots and pans. He told himself, "My uncle died. Is this what being sad feels like?"
Walter felt the corners of his mouth teetering into a smile.
He was smiling, knowing his uncle died.
The parents and Eren approached Walter. "Why are you standing in the kitchen, Walter?"
"No reason, mama."
Walter's mama covered Eren's eyes during the whole conversation in the kitchen.
"Auntie, why are you covering my eyes?"
"I don't want you to see Walter crying. It'll just...it'll just make you sadder."
The morning after, Walter woke up to see Eren peeking out his bedroom door. He could hear stagnant voices poke through the walls. They were quiet at most points, but at some words, they would get excited and poke through the wall, hitting Walter in the head. Eren and him could hear what the adults were discussing in the kitchen.
Mama: "What are we going to do if they find out we have Eren?"
Papa: "They won't. I placed a burnt homeless kid in the large cabinet Eren was hiding after we pulled him out. They won't be able to tell the difference."
Walter heard a slap.
Mama: "How can you say that so easily?!"
Papa's voice deviated. He was probably rubbing his cheek: "It's only the truth."
Walter saw Eren walking out of the room, and he heard his question: "Why'd they have to burn everyone in that whole street?"
Walter's parents attempted to simplify it all down. "Eren, your parents did...bad things, ok? The government wasn't sure who else did the bad things so they burned the whole street just to be sure."
Papa: "Maybe we should hide him in the basement."
Mama: "That's too cruel."
Papa: "It's just for now, Eren. Until it's safe."
Eren didn't argue. He most likely didn't have the energy to.
After a day of Eren in the basement, Walter's parents sent Walter down to the basement with the guitar they had bought for him a while before. There weren't many stories written on it yet. That would take many more years.
Walter sat on a stool while Eren sat on the ground in a fetal position. His gaze was fastened to the floor, and his lips formed a simple dash on his face. Eyes had no backbone of strength; they were withered and straightforward.
Walter tried playing some notes. He went up all six strings and hoped to hear music. But the notes were all jumbled together as assorted, expired candy in a shattered jar. Eren's withered eyes grew more and more creased from the bewildered notes, for the melody cannibalized itself. The notes were like mice in a maze, bashing into walls again and getting cornered.
Eren had enough of it. "Why do you have a guitar when you don't even know how to play it?"
"I can think better when I interact with things."
He hoped that the notes would flatten themselves into a nicely wrapped melody, but it didn't happen as he continued. Despite this, he didn't feel upset-he didn't really know what he felt like. Eren stood up and approached Walter and strangled the guitar's neck, silencing the strings of their civil war.
"Walter, why do you never smile? And why is your voice always so...flat?"
"I do smile...but I think it just happens at the wrong times."
"What do you mean wrong times?"
"I did it when I heard your parents got killed."
Eren's eyes took a break from their withered-ness to open. They glared straight down at Walter from a position above—a stance of power. A standover man. "W-What's wrong with you?" He then wobbled back to the ground, and he zoned out as if he was thinking about something.
His hyphenated mouth opened to describe what it was like to watch his parents get burned alive through a narrow opening of a cabinet. Maybe he was testing to see how Walter would react. The emotionless boy sat observing the way Eren's face contorted when telling his story. When words were being expressed, he looked at the colors Eren painted them with.
Eren looked at Walter again with his head tilted and a few drops sprinkling from his eyes at the end of it. Upon seeing Walter's nonexistent reaction, he asked. "Why can't you feel pain like I do? Why aren't you disappointed in the world like I am?"
"Because Eren...I don't know what disappointment feels like."
"What?"
"Everything feels mushed together for me." His shoulders were relaxed, and his eyes didn't feel any tension in contrast to the traumatized boy. "Did I upset you, Eren? I don't know if that's the look someone makes when they're upset."
"You're...you're a psychopath."
Those words were expected to hurt, but Walter's facial features twinged in an undeterminable manner, similar to static in a radio. That's what Walter felt was comprehensible: the fact that his emotions were incomprehensible.
Eren punched Walter off the stool and knocked him onto the ground. He then grabbed the guitar and hit the boy in the head.
Eren: "Are you angry now—"
Walter grasped Eren's throat and squeezed.
"Walter! Eren! What's going on?!"
Walter's mama rushed down downstairs, for she must have heard the discourse poke through the walls and ceiling. She pulled Walter away from Eren and slapped him in the face.
With eyes blanker than fresh snow and a voice with no peaks, he said, "I think I'm angry now."
All the Krugers in the household grew to understand the issue Walter was cursed with. He simply lacked emotional awareness, found identifying/describing feelings difficult, and found distinguishing feelings from the bodily sensations of emotional arousal difficult as well.
This was reaffirmed in Walter's early teenage years. Long after Eren started living upstairs and suspicion waded, the cousins began running "track" after school. Due to the over-looming fact that they lived in the internment zone, there really wasn't much room for an actual track and field. Marleyans must've thought sports were only for non-devil humans.
That didn't stop the kids, though.
Every day, they would conduct 100-meter dashes on the sidewalks. They would wait for the moment a sidewalk was clear and then bolt till the end of it or until they crashed into a random bystander on accident. The squeaks of feet stabbing the pavement were something Walter and Eren could discern when they walked around the streets of the internment zone.
Walter joined these kids one evening after his curiosity was peaked.
So, when Walter and four other kids stood side-by-side, a 6th one threw a stone straight into the air. Everyone bolted the very moment it touched the ground.
Well, not everyone.
During his chance to race, he got distracted by something on the sidewalk. It was the decreasing whimpers of someone nearby. Rather, something.
A wounded puppy was breathing its counted breaths while dying next to a trash can. It must have been hit by a carriage but managed to limp out with its remaining energy.
Walter went over and picked it up in his arms. He just stared down at it, almost observing its last breaths or maybe giving it little comfort before it passed. Alas, Walter couldn't save it, and the puppy's lungs stopped their battle within his grasp.
"I finished first!"
"No way, it was me!"
When the other children came back to the starting point of the race, they saw the blood on Walter's hands and the deceased puppy's organs peeking through the fur. And as all humans do, they misconstrued the situation to match their biases on him already.
"Psychopath."
"But—"
"Psychopath."
"...I was trying to save it."
"Psychopath."
The emotions in Walter's body were scrambled once more.
It was ironic really, the boy who struggled to empathize had the most incredible amount of sympathy.
Every time his schoolmates would do their 100-meter dashes after that day, he would watch from a different sidewalk like a freshly planted tree-sampling on the side of the road. It would be a position he would take up his entire life, but he didn't know it right then.
As Walter grew up, he tried memorizing the facial expressions of people around him. And when he was at home, he would look in the mirror and try to replicate them. He thought copying those faces would teach the emotions that are associated with them.
He wanted to understand people.
He sought to learn about the world around him.
He wanted to know the way emotions worked.
At around 16 years of age, the two cousins started working proper jobs. Walter got into carpentry, whereas Eren began working in the factories. This marked the beginning of Eren's alienating behavior.
After his first day of work, late at night, Eren came back home with soot hugging his body adamantly, not wanting to let go. He set his tall frame on the chair, with his limbs overflowing the seat. His overalls lost the brightness that once existed in the fabric earlier that day.
With eyes revealing the whites once more, Eren said. "They...They treat us like dogs."
Walter and his parents laid sleepy-eyed on the couch, but upon hearing Eren's words, they got up and listened. "What's wrong, Eren?"
"Fully-grown Eldian men get paid as much as Marleyan children do. We have to work 16 hours when the Marleyans work 12. If we take a break, they whip us..."
Walter's parents looked at one another and then back at Eren. "Did you at least get the money?"
Eren looked at the aging pair and shot a thunderous voice newly constructed from the power of increasing testosterone and smoke inhalation. "Is the money all you two care about?!"
"No, Eren—"
"I see why you two took me in, you just needed someone else to work in the factories so you two don't have to."
"Stop it, Eren—"
"You two should have been burned instead of my parents. At least they had ambitions. You two do nothing!"
Eren rose up from the chair with a closed fist and then walked into the room he and Walter shared. Walter went right behind him. They shared a parallel conversation on their parallel beds—a discussion of silence and backs turned opposite each other. This became somewhat of a routine for the months that followed. Walter and Eren rarely saw each other due to their jobs. The only time they would see each other was when they were going to sleep since their beds were in the same room.
A few months afterward, Eren said something out loud before going to sleep. "I'm joining a labor union." Walter didn't know how to respond and drifted off into sleep as well. Their backs were opposite of each other as usual.
One day, at 18 years of age, Walter turned his back toward Eren, who was lying on his back looking at the wooden-planked ceiling. He looked at the features on the cousin's face. They were dark—not necessarily from the dark, but rather the sternness that existed even trying to fall asleep. The nose was long, the jaw blunt, and eyes not ready to sleep despite whatever his body was telling him. It was flat and mute.
Walter: "Eren, you've become like me now. Your face is flat."
"I'm not like you, Walter." Eren turned his head on the pillow towards Walter. "My face became like this after watching the horrors our people have to go through."
A week after, the sternness that was Eren Kruger disappeared from the household. Walter's parents didn't kick him out; they all assumed it was because of his own fruition.
XXX
"I never saw my cousin again after that...But I know he's alive somewhere. He's too strong to die. I think I've lived this long to tell him when I see him again: I'm like you now. I've seen the horrors for over four decades now."
K the street-dweller's full name is Walter Kruger.
His story cemented his position as the most pivotal person in my life because he represented the essence of what I find fascinating about humans: their irony and contradictions. The man who should have known the least about people was the one preaching the most about them. But every time he talked about the species as a whole, it sounded as if he didn't believe he was one of them. He spoke from an outward perspective.
I guess that's the advantage of being an aching tree on the side of the road.
He was a skull.
"Mr...Kruger. Why did you never tell me any of this before? Why did you wait until today?"
"If I told you before you wouldn't understand any of it."
Mr. Kruger's response was not a satisfying reason, but I was more consumed by the fact that I really didn't know what was going on inside his head that whole time. I had no idea that he was handicapped the way that he was. I took a few moments to let the story bake in my head as I returned mentally to The Street of Embers.
***QUESTIONS FOR YOU***
Have I ever described the emotions in his voice?
The facial expressions outside of eyes and wrinkles?
You don't remember, do you?
My point exactly.
There was no emotion to describe.
Mr. Kruger: "Remember how I told you that the shade I view the world in is the kind that makes everything look like hell?"
"Yes."
"That wasn't the right way to say it." After his story, I started becoming more cognizant of the monotony and dryness of his voice. "I see the world as a ballroom of colors where sometimes I can't discern which color is which. I don't know the blue from the yellows. But rarely...I can see red so clearly. It's the one I can recognize the easiest."
"What does red stand for?"
The skull turned towards me, and with a typical deadpan delivery, he said. "Anger."
I wondered whether anger was the only thing he understood.
"You can't feel anything besides anger?"
"Yes."
I thought back to the moment with that first bomb siren. "When that first bomb siren came around, did you not feel scared at all that you could die?"
"I felt like a jumbled mess. All emotions at once."
It made sense. Mr. Kruger would show his anger to me quite obviously in the first days that I met him on the street. But something was still missing. How could he say all those things about people when he used to be so clueless back when he was a kid? What happened after his cousin left that made him change?
"What happened after Eren left? Did you ever go looking for him?"
"I never did."
"What happened then?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Why not?"
"I don't want to feel it again! Anger was the only thing I felt then..." I watched as the mute skull-like face unexpectedly crack at various places. Bone marrow in the form of tears dripped from the cavities holding his eyes. The skeleton went on his knees and dropped his fists to the ground. "I don't want to feel it again."
He told me a story about not having the ability to exhibit many emotions. Still, right after that, he went and contradicted it by showing something he said he couldn't display on the day his uncle was killed: grief.
The greatest tragedy for K was not his homelessness. But the fact that his face lied to everyone his entire life. He revealed that layer to me, and there were a few left that I wanted to see.
"I don't want to feel it again."