running up that hill
is there so much hate for the ones we love?
It is an amalgamation of three different people that makes up Historia Reiss. She is one of them, two of them, all of them, before she is herself. And on some days, more than she is herself.
She is her mother: the washed-out gold of her hair, the deep sapphire of her eyes. She is the blood that flows in her veins, her skin and bones molded from the linings of her mother's womb. She is the crease under her eyes, the sour curl of her mouth. She is the greed that threaded its long, calculating fingers in the hair of a married man, as he clung to her skirt in desperate search of a kindred soul. Historia is Alma and she is Alma's screech of disgust whenever she looks in the mirror.
She is her sister: the perfect, blinding smile that everyone adores, the tragedy written in her stars. She is the curse that binds her will, the long line in their blood that traces back to the very origin of this hell. She is every memory made and wiped out, the grass beneath her palms at the farm, the giggles in the crisp, summer air. She is the good, shining girl in her sister's fairytales who was destined to save the world from damnation. Historia is Frieda and she is Frieda's look of sheer horror when her little sister says the shining girl is kind and good for sharing her apple with the lonely hooded creature.
She is her lover: the crass of her words, the truth in them, too. She is the light of mischief in her eyes, the stubborn square of her shoulders. She is the cruelty of her childhood and the foolish selfishness that stole a goddess's name in order to keep on living in the world. Her heart beats in time with hers to the rhythm of heavy secrets that wear their bones down. Historia is Ymir and she is Ymir's wretched, hollow grief when she runs to a place where love cannot follow, when she says live a life you would be proud of.
The curtains flap gently with the tranquil afternoon breeze. Eren sits across from her, painfully bashful, boyish. He says, "But there's something I like about you now. You're just normal."
She is Alma. Frieda. Ymir.
"A stupidly honest girl, but normal."
He spits out the name Krista Lenz like it's poison and embraces Historia fondly. Not Historia Reiss, just Historia. A normal girl. Normal, normal, normal.
She smiles fully and genuinely for the first time in her life.
She is the Queen of the Walls, the First King's descendant, the royal blood that calls upon the Founder to save humanity.
Paradis looks to her for hope. She is the cattle's caretaker, the orphaned children's protector, the very walls that shield the island from the threat of the outsiders. It is her and her children and their children's noble sacrifice that will allow them more time to build the technology that can defend against the rest of the world. Hange is a genius, and Armin is the smartest person alive since Erwin. They will find a way if she would only go up to the noose and accept her sentence.
Thirteen years.
She was a Scout, a soldier. Many of her comrades are dead, most of them in fact. Eren and Armin only have a few years left. Thirteen years are a blessing in comparison.
The Queen tucks her hair up in a bun and pretends not to see the guilty faces of her friends as they sit together in the council room. The gavel hits the hardwood in slow motion and the fight drains out of her body. It is then that she accepts her punishment. "I will inherit the Beast Titan," she says.
She pretends the pin-drop silence that sweeps across the room doesn't gut her more than it does. She pretends she doesn't want to scream her lungs out because she's dooming herself to a miserable decade of her life, dooming her descendants to the same despair and misery.
Dooming every royal girl after her into being Historia Reiss more than themselves.
She pretends, pretends, pretends.
Her stomach lurches. She scans the faces of every officer in the room, of Kiyomi Azumabito and her associates, and they all look away in shame and sadness.
She is Paradis more than she is herself. She wants to throw up.
The Scouts plan a mission of peace across the choppy seas. Eren sees her at the farm, pushing back the hood from his head.
The sun is setting and the world is very, very still. Serene. And Eren says, "You're the girl who saved me that day."
She is the Queen of the Walls. The descendant of the First King. The royal blood that calls upon the Founder to save humanity.
"You're the worst girl in the world."
He breathes out Historia like it's a plea for life and tears slide down her cheeks. She cannot seem to stop, cannot keep pretending. The sobs wrack her body until her eyes are raw, until she is reduced to nothing but sniffles.
She is not Eren Jaeger. She is not the name he calls her or the person he says she is. He had merely spit back all the things she'd told him, reminded her of who she really is.
I can't be a good girl.
I don't want to be a god.
Although I am an enemy of humanity, I'm your ally, Eren.
He knows her. He knows her, so intricately and viscerally that it hurts. Her heart swells with relief. Not grief, not horror.
She is the worst, most despicable girl in the history of mankind.
For the first time in a long time, she lets the mask slip. It clutters to the ground beneath her feet and shatters into pieces.
She is the good, shining girl from the legend and she gives the apple to the hooded devil who stands in the shadows with his lamp.
(The world pays the price.)
Historia visits his grave for the first time in five years. It sits in the blades of grass and spring dandelions and right in the shadow an old tree, a muted stone gray among the splotches of color.
The wind still carries a bit of the chill from the winter and she tightens her shawl around her shoulders. She stands there blank-faced, though her boots itch to turn around and walk away, never to return again. She steels her resolve.
It's been five years. The world has barely recovered from the devastation that was hailed upon it. Nature has taken so huge a blow that it's turned erratic, unpredictable. The storms are merciless as they barrel towards her people's homes, the sky raining daggers upon them like a divine punishment from the God that never listened to her pleas and prayers and now blames her for it. The winters are harsh and biting and the summers are hell on Earth, withering their crops and lasting for far longer than is normal.
The outside world is gathering its remaining strength, she knows. The surviving population is coming together in a history-making unity to put the entire island on the noose because Historia was selfish. Is selfish.
Historia was stupid.
(And desperate, and in love. She will always hate herself for it.)
One day, Paradis would be destroyed. She lulls herself and her people into a false sense of security by rallying the rest of the Jaeger faction. They are restless and Historia chants their war cry with them and the words feel like bile in her throat. Poison on her tongue.
She stares at the grave marker like she can burn a hole through it and it reads: My beloved.
She pretends it doesn't seize her heart and kills her, over and over.
(And it's almost funny how she's still here, pretending, after all these years. This is her eternal damnation.)
The pain pulses in every inch of her body. It is a knife across her back, slashing and stabbing a hundred thousand times. Her mouth is dry and she feels like crying but she doesn't. She can't. She's shed so many tears for him in the darkness of her room.
She didn't think it would hurt this bad to visit. It's been years after all, and she'd thought she would be past it now.
(Who is she kidding? She swallows back the bitterness whenever she thinks about the Scouts. The Alliance, they called it. They're alive and he's not. She has to force a smile whenever Mikasa and Armin talk about him like they know the entire story, the entirety of him. They didn't then and they still don't now. They never will.)
What is he now? A devil? A hero? A young man who fell victim to fate like the rest of the world?
He's just dead.
Had she known him at all, or just a facade of his? A mask he put up to get her to do his bidding. Did he let her think she knew him as intricately as he knew her so he could take her heart and crush it in his fist the way he did with millions of other people?
Or, did she know a facet of him, the boy who wanted freedom? Was he torn between realities, between worlds, between identities and the two girls who had loved him so dearly? Historia thinks he was an amalgamation of the different timelines that he had to sift through, of the sins and the escapist realities he'd created and burrowed himself into. She thinks she feels sorry for him now, beneath all the hurt and anger and love she had for him.
If anyone knows what it's like to be ripped apart by personas, it's her.
She's not sure what she came here for. It's not closure, she knows, because closure isn't something she will attain in this lifetime.
A dove flaps its wings in the periphery and perches on the gravestone. Historia startles.
It stares at her with beady eyes, head slightly tilted as if curious about her presence. It blinks, once.
She wants to laugh.
She feels like crying.
Had he ever loved her at all? Or was he in love with someone else the whole time he was with her? She wants to ask: Was anything he said to her real—the affection, the protectiveness, the promise that now lies broken at her feet like the mask she'd taken off for him. Did he ever actually consider coming back before he lost himself in that eternal world of sand and lights or was it all a lie from the very beginning? Which version of him was the real him: the boy who wanted to live in frangible peace with his friends or the boy who sought freedom no matter what it cost? Which one had been her Eren?
(If he'd been hers at all.)
There are so many things she wants to ask, so many things she could say to him.
A breeze passes and ruffles her skirt.
She wants to hate him, has tried to hate him for years.
(She loves him.)
Her husband is good to her, she wants to say. He takes care of her and her child and he bakes delicious pies. He's jolly and he shamelessly tells her silly jokes to make her laugh. He understands that she only continued to live for her daughter—her beautiful, sunkissed love—and understands that her heart will never belong to someone else again.
She wants to say: he will never be you, but I don't have to pretend that much around him. He will never be you, but he didn't betray me and he never would.
"Your daughter looks like you, you know," she says instead, softer than she'd intended.
His daughter.
Sometimes she fears that Mikasa and Armin and all the others would find out if they try hard enough to discern why the stubborn furrow of that child's brows are so familiar. Little Ymir will never know, though. Historia and her husband have worked tirelessly to protect her from the scrutiny and the truth. If, one day she asks about the man who possessed the same fire in his veins that she does, if she asks, "What about Eren Jaeger, mama?" Historia will tell her that he was a comrade and nothing else. Had he ever been anything else?
The dove blinks again, slowly, and almost a little melancholic.
Her heart breaks for the thousandth time today and it will continue to break for the rest of her life.
Historia wishes she'd brought a bouquet, but it hadn't seemed like a good idea at the time. Eren is not a hero and he doesn't deserve to be hailed as a hero. There is no version of him that would want that title, that burden. Not even after death.
She spins on her heels and starts to trudge down the hills, the sky beating red and orange behind her. She hears the dove fly overhead and doesn't look up at it.
In the distant future, the world will heal. It will continue to move forward and leave this bruised and bloodied past behind. The winter will thaw and make way for the spring, and the summers would be right again. The population would increase and Paradis would be a mere name on a history book, and Eren Jaeger will be nothing more than a bitter memory in the spot of a green paradise where he's buried. Maybe even that would be gone one day. Only the sunset and the wind will remain to remember the story of the foolish girl and the broken boy who loved each other on that farm, and the world will be none the wiser.
Everything they worked for will disintegrate into dust, their descendants facing the eternal hell they created before they too are wiped out completely. People would say it's a curse, or justice, or maybe even a tragedy. The history books will tell a story that is so vastly different from the full truth. She will be Historia Reiss, the Queen of the devil island and he will be Eren Jaeger, the devil who brought hell upon this earth and deserved the blade that fell from the heavens to his nape. Their pages would be separate, disconnected from each other.
But for one, glorious moment, they'd clamored for freedom and held it in their hands. They'd searched for a kindred soul and found it in each other. They'd been in love in a hellish world where love was punished and suffering was the only way to live. At that farm, on late afternoons. It was just her and her Eren, the piece of him that loved her, that she wants to believe had loved her.
For one breathtaking moment then, they were just Historia and Eren and nothing else.