No Promises

(One)

"So how does it end?" Conny asked, taking the heavy pail of slops from her hands and throwing the contents to the ravenous pigs.

Inez wiped the sweat from her forehead, she almost didn't hear what Conny said. There was a ringing in her ears that she couldn't shake.

"The story about the Titan and the one-eyed Scout that you were telling me about yesterday. What happens after? Martin and Sunny were bugging me non-stop last night, wanting to hear how it ends. Martin wants to know how the Scout killed the Titan and Sunny wants to know if the Scout and the farm girl get together in the end."

Without the heavy pail weighing her down, Inez straightened her back and immediately appeared three inches taller. She stretched her arms and rolled her stiff neck until she heard a crack. Her stomach rumbled as she'd only taken two bites of the day-old, hard as stone loaf of bread that had been her only sustenance for the last few days. Her arms and legs were aching from working the whole day in the fields. All she wanted to do was to go back to the shed where she lived and sleep until the next morning.

When Conny asked for her help with the animals she almost said no. But seeing the dark purple bruise below his eye, remembering how that was her fault, she couldn't bring herself to reject his plea for help. Yet all Conny seemed to want was to ask about the story she started telling him the night before. She had fallen asleep before she got to the end of the story so today, Conny had been following her around all day trying to ask about what happened after.

"I'll never hear the end of it if I don't tell them the rest of the story." He picked up the pitchfork, started lifting bundles of loose hay and laid them down inside the pigpen. "So, can you tell me now? How does it end?"

She had just opened her mouth when the world began spinning rapidly before her eyes. She lost her balance, falling face first into a puddle in the dirt. Conny carried her on his back to the shed where she lived, which was at the border of the village and the woods. He held a glass to her lips and tipped it gently so that the water slowly flowed into her mouth. He had seen his dad take care of his mom like this.

After making sure that she was feeling better, Conny put a small and round packet in her hand. Inside the brown paper wrapping was a round sponge cake with bits of blueberries at the centre. Inez greedily stuffed it in her mouth without thinking twice and, realizing what she'd done, looked guiltily at Conny, who started laughing and pulled out another packet from his pocket. It was the same size as the one he had given to her. He unwrapped it and showed her what was inside. On the outside, it looked exactly the same as the sponge cake she had just devoured. But instead of blueberries, this had strawberries in the middle.

"I was going to let you have the first choice but you just gobbled that up!" he giggled. "I know this one's your favourite. Don't worry, you can have this too." He held the sponge cake close to her face as though he would stuff it in her mouth. But there was a loud knock at the door. The cake rolled to the floor. They stared at each other for a moment as if to ask 'do you know who it is?'. Inez walked over and opened the door slightly, poked her head out to see a tall, hooded figure glaring down at her.

Erwin really didn't know what to expect when the villagers of Ragako pointed him to this run-down shack on the edge of the woods. He had asked a couple of people where he could find someone by the name of 'Inez Ysaye' and the looks he got from the villagers gave him a bad feeling. Erwin took out the section he had cut from last week's paper and checked that he had not misread the name of the author. The name Inez Ysaye was still on the page, exactly the way it was the first time he stumbled upon it.

"Sir...if you don't mind me asking, why are you looking for this girl?" One of the villagers asked, gazing in awe at Erwin's tall stature and the wings of freedom on his cloak. "She's just an orphan we take care of here in the village. Her mother wasn't even from these parts. If it turns out that either one of her parents are convicted criminals, you'd be obligated to tell us, right? Seems like a nice, hard-working kid, but one can never know what could happen once they grow up-"

"This person...this child, Inez. You're saying I'll find her in there?" Erwin asked, pointing at the dilapidated shack.

"Yeah...things have been rough around here ever since those refugees came in through the Wall. You might not've noticed it because you're deeper in the Walls than we are, but it's the reality we live in every day."

Erwin thanked him for showing him the way and hurried away from him. He didn't want to spend another moment talking to that man. Whatever the reason, no child should be brought up in a place like that. He tied his horse to a tree that stood a few metres away from the door and walked over to knock. He heard the sound of a boy laughing.

When the door opened and he saw the child for the first time, he felt something fall into place deep inside his chest. The wind that blew past his ears, seemed to be whispering to him, telling him that this was meant to be.

He crouched down to take a closer look at her and stuck the newspaper clipping in front of her face. "Is this yours?" he asked. "Did you write this?"

Conny came up behind her, holding the fallen strawberry cake in his hand. "What's going on? " he said, a serious look on his face, demanding to know who this stranger was, and what he was doing here.

Inez picked up the bit from the newspaper that was dangling in front of her eyes. She read the first sentence and immediately recognized it to be hers. She didn't remember showing this to anyone. She had written it in a fit of fury brought about by exhaustion and a bout of illness from the cold weather, poured onto the page all of her anger and pain and sadness, her feelings of being trapped in this village where everyone saw her to be a parasite. And she had kept it hidden from everyone, so how did it end up printed in a newspaper?

"It is mine," she replied. "But why do you have it?"

His eyes widened. "Your name is Inez Ysaye...?"

"She is! So-what do you want with her?" Conny asked fiercely, coming in between the two people. Erwin's face betrayed only the merest trace of surprise and amusement seeing a child ready to engage in a fistfight with him, the Commander of the Survey Corps.

"I want you to come with me," he told Inez, staring into her eyes, getting down on one knee so that she stood taller from the ground than he did. There was more kindness in his eyes than she had ever seen in her entire lifetime and she found that she trusted him completely.

"I want you to come work for me," he said. "You have a rare talent and I believe you can help me achieve my dreams."

The first time she saw the insignia of the Survey Corps was the day he came to take her away from everything she knew.

Ragako was not an isolated paradise. Ragako was a cruel place but there were also angels hiding in plain sight. Every moment of suffering she'd been through, Conny had always been beside her.

"But, don't you find it's a bit dodgy? What if he's not who he says he is? Dad says a lot of bad people steal kids to sell to other scumbags and that it's a very dangerous world out there...Are you sure you want to leave Ragako?"

But Inez didn't think Erwin Smith was a bad person. Conny hadn't been there to see the way he talked about his dreams, the glimmer of hope in his eyes when he went on about everything he wanted to achieve, the regret he had that he only just found her. Even the first time she laid eyes on him, she felt she'd been waiting for him for a very long time. Maybe that's why everything happened the way it did, all the pain and sadness, leading up to her writing the story that led him here.

He said he wanted Inez to write for him. Would a bad person use those words to steal someone away?

she turned to Conny. Seeing the side of his face, her heart beat faster. His frown was cut in half by what she could and couldn't see. What was he thinking, what did he think of this? The bruise under his eye was swollen and dark. It looked worse than it did yesterday.

"I thought you'd be happy," she frowned and buried her face in her arms. "That way you won't get hurt anymore. You got that bruise because of me."

"Even so, I like hanging out with you. I don't know...Maybe you can go and get stronger, then you can beat those guys up with me once you come back," he grinned.

"Promise," she said. "You could come with me-"

"-Don't be stupid. I can't leave my family," said Conny, looking through the cracks in the wood. "When is he coming?"

"He said he'll be here by sundown," she said, gazing towards the same direction.

She handed him a rectangular package wrapped in brown paper that carried a faint scent of butter and strawberries. "Here's the ending of that story I started."

Conny's smile extended from ear to ear and there was a sparkle in his eyes. "Martin and Sunny will be so happy!" he exclaimed. But then his excitement fell flat. He sniffled and turned his face away so she only saw the back of his head. As though a mysterious force was making her do it, she reached out and put her palm flat against the back of his head, and touched the tiny, prickly short hairs, but Conny jumped and covered the back of his head, wanting to yell at her, blushing slightly like he was embarrassed.

The sound of horse hooves clopping along the dirt path reached their ears. Through the crack in the door, they saw the man in the green cloak walking beside the horse, emerging through the dense forest. He was walking very slowly and deliberately, stopping every few minutes to let his horse graze.

"I'll miss you," Conny said.

The one person who mattered to her didn't want to leave. She didn't have much else to take with her.

The first time she saw the insignia of the Survey Corps was also the first time she experienced the pain of saying goodbye to someone she loved, long before she understood what love was.