An Eldian's Journal

Wartime Shenanigans

Chapter 22: Perceptions

On the night of the day that K the street-dweller taught me his philosophies, I sat in my room, recycling his lines in my head, doing my best to keep them there. I didn't want to risk forgetting it all, so I thought about writing everything down. I took one of my old math notebooks and flipped past the legions of X's, Y's, and other multi-purposed letters and symbols until I found a blank page.

I picked up a pencil.

What came out next was organized vomit in the form of pencil lead and letters.

I had reduced the man down to a couple of lines on a torn piece of paper. I guess you can say it's the unintentional first outline of this journal—primarily character analysis. When I reread the lines, I could see K's creased skeleton face hiding in the vowels and consonants of the quotes. I guess part of him was immortalized on that page, as long as someone didn't erase any of it.

After a few minutes of scribbling, a voice peered out from my bedroom door. It clothed itself in a brown dress: mama. Behind it was another voice with a hyphen-like scar on its head: papa. I wasn't expecting them around that time of day since they seemed to be throwing themselves into work much more than usual, especially after the declaration of war.

I tried to hide the torn paper underneath my notebook, but the woman was too fast.

Mama: "Heinrich, what are you writing down?" She pulled the paper from underneath the notebook. "'You're a slave to your goal.' W-What is all this Heinrich?"

"It's nothing, mama."

I could never hide anything from that woman.

"This...this—" She grew speechless. Her eyebrows drew together, and her blinking flickered like the lightbulb above our heads. Her mouth opened slightly, and she handed the paper over to papa. The hyphen-like scar became an 'm' on his forehead as he kept reading.

"Heinrich..." he whispered. Mama took the paper back and continued. "Normal boys don't write stuff like this...they play soccer on the street, they sell newspapers, they flirt with girls. They don't talk like philosophers...they don't shoot people..."

A tinge of anger from the back of my throat glued my mouth shut. I watched as mama's gaze landed on her hands and her face softened. As she came up with the words, I wondered when I would see that iron character from her again; it had been a while since I had seen it.

She continued: "You know why I go to the bar more than usual, Heinrich?"

"..."

"I'm afraid if I come back home too early, I'll have to look at some bruise on your face..."

"..."

She looked over at papa. "Say something to him, you fool—"

"What's this really about, mama?!" For the first time in my life, I had felt the divergence between my parents and me. They were people of different experiences, and I grew too much for them to comprehend.

"W-Why didn't you ask us for help, Heinrich? You're going out there and talking to random people...what if they manipulate you again? Why don't you ask us for help?"

"Because you two haven't failed enough!"

"What?—"

My sentence didn't feel right; it stepped out awkwardly from my mouth, but it still felt true. I continued, "I don't know what he's done, but...I can just tell he's wounded."

"Heinrich..."

"He says that he's already dead...maybe he understands me better than you two can."

Mama took a pause before answering: "Who's...he?"

The iron woman who breathed words of syrup melted, but her fist hardened as she turned towards papa behind her. She threw a slow punch to his stomach, but I think papa understood what he needed to do: he took it kindly. Maybe she couldn't bring herself to punch me, so she put it upon papa to bear the burden. He took it and kept taking it.

After they left my room and I returned to my task of writing, I heard some sounds from the hallway that was in desperate need of tissues and comfort.

I think you know what sound that is.

I did too.

I kept writing.

XXX

The day after, I went on my typical newspaper route. After I finished it, I spared one newspaper for K (I paid for it, of course.)

I read the headline for the first time that morning when I saw him again:

REGISTRATION PROGRESSES WITHOUT DISSENSION
More Than 10,000,000 Men Obeying Government's Order to Sign Roll

MARLEY TAKES HER FIRST STEP TO REFUTE THE MID-EAST ALLIED FORCES

The World's Greatest Military is Growing In Numbers...

"These poor boys..." K's features wrinkled as the paper did in his hands. "The recruiters must have waved the bait of Honorary Marleyan status for the Eldian boys. And simple glory and heroic status for the Marleyan boys."

I replied with silence as usual. "..."

"They must have also lured them with the possibility of becoming warrior candidates." The jaw bulged underneath the skeleton face. "Pathetic."

"Maybe some people think they can become the next armored titan since they've lost trust in Reiner."

"People don't view Reiner as a human anymore."

I narrowed in on K, for it seemed like he was entering his phase of saying deep things and showing his wise-ness to everyone. As I kept visiting him, I noticed some patterns in body language. Whenever he said something relatively insightful, he would position his gaze towards the street and look blindly. It was as if he was summoning his sentences from an outside influence.

I asked. "What do you mean people don't view Reiner as a human?"

"He's a caricature."

I was confused, but I kept listening as always.

"In the eyes of everyone, he's a stage actor—a celebrity. They want to know every piece of drama that he does outside his performance on the battlefield. They always complain about him, but they never go to the lengths to try understanding him. They only see one face of him."

I noticed how K's body language grew slightly more open day by day. He began to move his left arm in the air as if to accentuate his points. The tiny things revealed so much.

K continued: "It's like I told you, H. To understand someone, you have to understand what shade they view the world in."

"How should I do that?"

"Put yourself in his shoes."

So, I did precisely that. I imagined I was Reiner Braun.

I looked away from K and instead looked straight into the street. I closed my eyes, and my mind kicked off a pair of muddy shoes and stepped into the pair worn by depression's feet. They felt heavier. I wonder how much blood they once trod over. For the face, I imagined what it was like to have sorrow weighing on my eyes and cheeks for every waking hour.

I imagined having to control the frame of a 6ft 2in man. I assumed it would feel roomy and lanky, but no, it felt congested, faulty. Every limb had sinned. I imagined looking through his eyes; there was no change in color from mine, but one thing felt different. Something invisible was clouding my entire being, and it felt as if I knew a secret no one else knew. Still, I didn't know what it actually was. I couldn't imagine his identity in all of its dimensions.

Maybe that's it. Reiner views the world through the shade of a deceiver, going about life saying the same things repeatedly to satiate people. Despite the lies, he seems to chase their approval and fights to prove himself, like in the broadcast night and radio talk.

Even knowing that, I still didn't know what the secret actually was.

'Maybe I should imagine him younger.' I thought I should see through him at an age where he wasn't wounded immediately in a mental state, such as the time before he learned the secret. So, I imagined taking up the frame of a 12-year-old, something unadulterated yet still carrying the weight of the power of a titan.

I slipped into my imagination; I became a younger Reiner Braun:

I imagined getting off a Marleyan ship and looking at my comrades. I looked down at Paradis island's ground. I wondered how grass and foliage would exist when growing next to people supposedly as horrible as the islander devils. That shouldn't be possible, should it? Would the air smell different? Would the sky look different?

The trees in the forest near us stood like neglected children rather than the totem poles of nature that they should have been. The sky was a blanket of velvet with cotton candy pink stitched on as the clouds. I thought maybe the real horrors were not with the scenery but rather the islanders themselves.

My comrades and I kept traveling on the island by foot, past the neglected children that were the trees until we came across our first obstacle. A pure titan—its limbs were wooden branches attached to a flesh-woven crate. Carrying the abomination were two flesh-filled pegs, and the face was a child's nightmare wrapped in the gift-wrap of skin.

My legs grew weak, but before the titan could chase after us, I looked at my comrades. Their eyes were as wide as saucers. They must have frozen up. Despite this, I knew my duty, and I trusted that I was chosen for a reason.

I bit my hand. The pain was ripe. Lightning came crashing from above as strings of flesh summoned from thin air and cocooned me.

I transformed into the armored titan.

The ground seemed so feeble below my feet, and I could have crushed my comrades so easily. The pure titan was half my height.

I grabbed it by the head. As my fingers dug in, the nightmare disassembled into its individual eyes, teeth, and brain. It was a concoction of pure gore.

I had such power, such destruction. Having a titan makes you invincible, doesn't it?

After I got out of the armored and returned to the ground, Annie handed me some golden words despite her still shivering in fear. "Thanks, Reiner. We could have died and lost the titan powers if you hadn't transformed."

I was a hero. I had slain a titan.

Afterwards, Annie transformed into her female titan since she had the most stamina out of all our titans. We all rode around her neck as we approached the walls; titans trailed us as we got closer. Wall Maria grew more and more ominous as we came.

When we arrived at the foot of the wall, my legs trembled once more at the sight of something as tall as the colossal titan-the god of destruction himself.

Bertholdt transformed into the colossal titan and plunged a hole into the wall. I rushed inside with the armored.

The devils stood below me, scattered around my feet.

But their faces were blank.

I looked for the traits of monsters, but I couldn't see horns, large teeth. I couldn't see any misshapen features. I didn't know what was supposed to be there. My imagination failed to take me further.

Just like that, I was sucked from my imagination.

I returned to the sidewalk of section F as my eyes readjusted to the meager sunlight.

"Mr. K, the person I shot...was Reiner."

His eyes opened large enough for me to see the retired pupils inside. They realized the intensity of what I did. But the question that followed didn't acknowledge the entire seriousness of it. "Do you...regret it?"

"I don't know but...I think I was doing him a favor."

As a kid, Reiner may have viewed the world as a playground with a large group of children on one side but a small group on the other side. The larger group of children spread negative information among themselves about the smaller group of children. Yet, they never sought the truth, even when they chose a few people to kick the small group out of the playground.

The kids on the mission made it over, and they played on the playground with the kids they were told are monsters, and as this happened...

One of the boys on the mission started seeing this world as more than just a playground. With every day and week that he aged, children's bodies would show up on the slides—bodies with their lives scooped out of them. The playground would keep expanding, and his original home would keep feeling further and further away.

It didn't take long for the slides and swings on the playground to transform into watchtowers, fences, itchy barbed wire, and puddles of blood. The playground became a battlefield in the boy's eyes.

It kept expanding.

When that same boy returned to the side of the playground where he was born, he was stuck viewing it as the battlefield that grew in his head. In contrast, the family he once knew existed within the same playground gossip—he must have felt so out of place.

The people he terrorized on the other side of the battlefield were left to brew in their thoughts. It didn't matter if they deserved it or not.

***ANOTHER WISDOM***
"We don't react to reality, but to a perception of it."

K's statement was odd to hear, for it made me question what I was seeing.

"Reiner must perceive that his life isn't worth it anymore, but in reality, despite his failures, he is needed for the military prowess of Marley. It's easy for me to say that, but I'm sure he can't think that way." He continued. "The marleyans are teaching one perception of history, that Ymir was a tyrant seeking to destroy the world. Is that the reality? I doubt it. But to their ancestors, that's what it must have felt like."

"What about what I see?"

"Your perception is not reality either. You're a teenager learning about the world. You attach ideas to people that don't exist."

That may not be comforting for you to read. I guess the shade that I view the world in is clouding the truth. What you are reading may not be the truth but instead my perception of it.

(I guess you're just going to have to believe it since it's the only perspective you're getting.)

Hearing that what I saw may not be reality made me shiver once again. But then I wondered how in the world K knew all this. His way of thinking was against the grain; it was ripe with color. No one else that I knew would say the things he did and with the lack of hesitation that he had. I then came up with a few questions: was he homeless because he refused to believe what the world thrust upon him? Did the marleyans take away his belongings and livelihood because of it?

"How do you know all this, Mr. K?"

"I live off the side of the street, H. I watch people from far away, like an owl." He paused. "It's easier to see the patterns in how they act, especially when I'm not a part of society itself."

Everything K said about reality... seemed so negative—so red. He seemed to doubt the human race in so many ways. But I also wondered, in all his supposed understanding of humans, where did his weaknesses lie? Was he too harsh?

"You sound so negative."

His voice began to roughen. "What did you say?"

I said it a little quieter. "You sound so negative."

For that, he didn't answer; his mouth simply closed. Our conversation rolled off into the street and lost its momentum. I let the words that sat in front of us soak into my ears as he reached over to his guitar. His arm wobbled as he brought it over; it looked like it could have fallen off any moment.

The guitar rested on his dust-bag lap and the morning sun caressed it as a mother does with a newborn infant. The irony was the guitar looked close to death but was still intact. Each strum had wrinkles much like the owner himself. K must have sensed how my eyes were staring at the instrument, for he asked me a question.

"How did you learn guitar?"

"My mama taught me."

He let out a wheeze, and in return, I asked him the same question. "How did you learn guitar?"

"Trial and error."

"Trial and error?"

"Yes."

As he turned the tuning pegs, I wondered how someone could learn an instrument through that method.

"All you need is your ears." He said before strumming on the thinnest string with his thumb. "I learned how to play chords by simply playing notes until I found the ones that sounded good together."

"But that would take so long."

He chuckled without a smile. "I'm homeless. It's not like I have anywhere else to be." That was the first time I heard K making a joke or at least some witty response. I chuckled along with it.

He then shot me a sideways glance. I think I accidentally saw compassion through the whiskers on his face that made up his beard. I scooted closer; the thought of his horrendous scent was long banished. He set the guitar on my lap.

"Play me a song, H."

Those were the words that I was waiting to hear for so long. It was music to my ears (pun intended), so much so that a tear slid impatiently down my face. I immediately rubbed it off with my sleeve. I held the guitar and put my right thumb on the strings. Once again, it felt a shadow of its old love and small memories of my deceased guitar lit in my head repeatedly like fireworks.

I strummed all six strings.

My eye strummed a tear.

I tried positioning my left hand into some chords. Still, my fingers danced as effectively as baby animals try to walk for the first time. It was pathetic. My fingers had lost their grace in a span of a few weeks.

I tried to strum a chord, but there was discourse in the sounds; notes fought with each other like siblings and couldn't get along. They didn't sound...musical. There was only dissonance and mistakes.

K put a stop to my embarrassment and took back the guitar. He said, "You don't need to overcomplicate it...all you need is a few simple chords." I watched as he positioned his twig fingers into a basic chord, the one I first learned from mama. K appeared to have mastered the art of simplicity.

He strummed in an unexpected elegance, some delicateness, and some respect for the instrument. He didn't slam his thumb down but instead gently pushed against the friction. The guitar was his old love.

After a few minutes of strumming chords, K threw in the spice of lyrics—he sang. If his music was a lovely soup before singing, it became a rich stew afterwards with gravel.

It was interesting really,

I watched a self-proclaimed dead man feel alive.

Too bad a bomb siren went off.

The Real Author's Note

I came up with most of the ideas from this chapter and the previous one back in March of this year. (We can thank my university psychology textbook for that one). But I came up with the idea of Heinrich using his imagination to think from the perspective of Reiner like a few days ago :)

I just wanted to make something clear. I know what actually happened to Reiner and the warriors on the island. But Heinrich doesn't know what actually happened there, so there are discrepancies between his take on it versus what actually happened.

As always, any concrit/feedback is appreciated!