ikanisfish: I am glad I satiated your appetite with this story. I have a few questions though. When you said "remarkable word-building" do you mean "world-building" or "word-building"? Just curious! Second, do you ever plan to write a fic? I've clicked on your profile once before and didn't see any fics of your own so I was just asking.

To answer your question, I DO NOT plan to write a story like this in the future or any other fanfiction ever again for that matter. When I am done with this story, the anime will be over and I hope to move on from AOT. I used to be extremely attached to the manga/anime during the pandemic that I got quite annoyed in myself about it. Writing this fic thankfully helped me divert my attention, but when this is done, I am done with fanfiction permanently.

But don't worry. We have over 23 chapters left so there's quite a while.

AJ: My winter break started so I'll be having more frequent updates to make up for that!

mykasa: hiiii!

An Eldian's Journal

The Soul of War

Chapter 40: Creative Process

The wall-keeper's drunk comments echoed in my mind while walking back to the barracks. I pondered the fact of drunk people not having inhibitions and telling their truths and wondered about the credibility of this concept. As usual, that was a puzzle that I couldn't solve. Yet, I laid on my metal bed frame, searching for the solution between the decaying structural beams holding the hat-like roof of the barracks together.

Despite getting angry at myself for viewing everyone around me as puzzles that need to be solved and are hiding something from me, I kept at it.

Closing my eyes didn't scare these thoughts away; they were almost as stubborn as street children playing with tires and rolling them around with sticks. That's what these thoughts did. They rolled around like loose tires and cackled at me. On the other hand, my nose carried the memory of alcohol and disdain and grew more uncomfortable with every inhalation.

In this movie that played exclusively with my eyes shut, I could see it center around one specific child that wasn't allowed a turn to slap the bicycle tire around the street. He was a skinny one, far from anorexic, but far from fit and far from loved. This was no memory, however. My internal movie camera was recording something with a cast of characters that I had no recognition of.

The boy said one unoriginal comment to the kid nearby that wasn't letting him play. "You're a bully."

The other clapped back, "And you're skinny."

It was a stage play being written beneath the curtain of my eyes. And most importantly, it was free for viewing without a penny being stolen from my non-existent pocket. That was fantasizing. It doesn't always have to be boys doing unseemly things with girls.

I opened my eyes and took the paper sitting on the edge behind me. I sat up and picked up a pen. It was time to write.

I set the black pen on the paper, and in the moonlight faintly licking the page, I drew those little ears that are the double apostrophes and filled the thought in the middle. It was a sandwich of ink, hoping to be consumed by someone reading it in a newspaper one day.

"You're a bully."

I closed my eyes, expecting to see how this would all play out. My omniscient perspective had holes, but it didn't matter, for the scrawny boy was still at the center of the story. I followed him. His ragdoll clothes fluttered lifelessly as the giant wall around him throbbed in his vision.

He walked towards a little home with a little door and little windows. Peering from the door was a big sister with an even bigger heart.

I wondered, 'Is this how Viktor could have grown up?'

This thought rescinded when a mom peered from behind, not from a photo frame but rather in a physical form. The scrawny boy walked up to his family, and upon his arrival at the door, the three humans looked straight at me, the cameraman. They had no faces, only skin.

These constructions were hollow beings waiting for me to fill them with something, for I was the director, the screenwriter, the executive producer, the set designer, and every other role.

I didn't know what else to do, so I opened my eyes once more and returned to the darkness of the barracks. The moonlight still highlighted that singular sentence on my paper as if it were expecting something else to be written along with it. My back rested on the bony bed frame as something unexpected came into my vision from above.

This unexpected thing was a girl with a scraggly dress, white headband, and blond hair. It was the bane of my imagination: the imaginary Ymir. I hadn't seen her for a while, so I thought I was finally growing up, but she was still there for some reason.

"Hi, Heinrich."

"Oh, great. What do you want now? You want me to write you into this story like how I drew you into that drawing of me, Viktor, and Lina?"

"Well, I wouldn't mind that."

"Why are you still here? I'm 15 years old now." I turned on the frame to ignore that impoverished yet comical face.

"Yes, I know. I can count."

"I'm too old now for imaginary friends."

She moved away and mockingly opened her mouth, acting hurt by what I said. "I think you should reconsider our relationship, Heinrich. Have you ever wondered if I am not an imaginary friend? Maybe something….more interesting."

"Like what? The real Ymir?" I asked sarcastically.

"I'm sure she's too busy for you, shoveling sand somewhere up there with her bucket."

"How would you know that?"

"I wouldn't know that. That's the point, right? You're stupid. Therefore, I am too…But anyway, you keep changing the subject. Maybe I am something more permanent than a silly imaginary friend."

"Like what?"

"Like an illusion."

"Illusions are for mentally unstable people."

She smirked as she got off my bed and strolled around my metal frame.

"Are you saying I am…mentally unstable?"

"I didn't say anything."

"You just did!"

"No, I didn't. I simply said illusions are for mentally unstable people."

"You implied that I am unstable."

"But you said it."

"What?!"

She stuck her tongue out at me in mockery like a tiny child before she ran off and jumped out through a window. Thankfully, her idiocy, along with my brain overheating, finally lulled me to sleep, even with an uncomfortable sleep surface.

Instead of being woken up by the always insightful imaginary Ymir, the following morning, I was woken up by a less majestic but a more realistic devil, not a rat, but Kurt.

With morning breath and a twitch, the former 'warhammer' ordered. "Let's run half a lap."

"B-But, I gotta pee." My sleep nearly made me forget Kurt's animosity towards me, but after I went to take a piss in the bathroom, the confusion truly hit me.

Kurt and I stood outside the bathroom in our undershirts, shorts, and tiny shoes. He then led me outside the fence, and we stood there awkwardly in the perimeter. Some people peppered the paths, but Kurt appeared determined for something. I made that assumption since his face didn't twitch once over 10 minutes.

"Shouldn't we use the track?" I asked while looking at the people eyeing us down.

"That's too easy, though. We wouldn't be using a track in the trenches."

"That's true…."

"What's this for? Aren't you ang-"

"3." He positioned his arms and legs and looked forward. "2." I gave up trying to question the guy and just mirrored him. "1."

I assumed he wanted to jog with me as a morning warm-up. I couldn't have been more wrong. The fool sprinted and pushed past the people walking around the perimeter. I picked up my pace shortly after with the concern that he would have an asthma attack.

When I finally reached him, he was as stable as an average person is when sprinting; his breath was chaotic, but it was organized chaos, for he was breathing in and out rapidly. His face was a shade of red. I could only notice so much, though, since I was growing tired.

The training camp's central section was much longer than a football field, so we planned to stop at half the perimeter length. In the last stretch, the former 'warhammer' surged down the path as the wind ate my face and a mosquito gave me a kiss.

At the end of our race, I wiped the mosquito corpse away, and Kurt stood coughing with one hand on his knee. The boy corrupted by asthma was triumphant. How did he do it?

"I'm…not…weak." He put his pointer finger down at me. "I'm not weak, okay?"

I nodded in agreement.

He laid on the ground and muttered while still trying to get air. "I finally beat one of you guys at something physical. I finally did it."

"How can you run? I thought your asthma would get in the way."

"It does. But I've been doing this for way over a month now…I just got better at controlling it, but the warm weather helps keep it in check." He sat straight up, and past the red shade of blood in his face was a natural shade of excitement. "Remember what that doctor asked you back at the internment zone when we were getting physical examinations?"

"He was warning me about letting you join."

"He asked you, 'if he dies, will it be the bullet or even the titan's fault? Or your incompetence for even letting it happen in the first place?' But now…if I die, it will be from my own incompetence rather than yours."

"..." As usual, I struggled to respond, but it may have been because my brain wasn't entirely on yet.

We got up and wiped off the dirt from our off-white undershirts before walking back into the training camp. When we passed a cart of ammunition, Kurt handed me a bullet of truce forged with the metal of spoken word. "I forgive you, Heinrich."

I opened my lips, but he spoke for me.

"Being angry at you hurts me more than it hurts you. Being silently angry isn't going to somehow change you or solve the issue…I also forgive Viktor for acting the way he did."

"...Thanks."

"We never had an issue like this before, so I can't expect you guys to actually solve it properly." His minor triumph was getting to his head, but I let it pass since he taught me his little lesson that holding anger is more dreadful for someone than it is for the object of your anger.

He then pulled a piece of grass from the ground, bereft of moisture and exuberance. "Here's my olive branch."

"This is just a piece of grass."

"Use your imagination. That's what you are so good at doing nowadays."

The morning trumpeters stood outside their tents and crowed their songs for military officers and cadets alike to groan about. After we passed by a few trucks, Kurt revealed even more thoughts through the piercing sounds. "To be honest, I didn't really know you were hiding stuff until I started paying attention. I was also kind of self-centered earlier on."

I stopped walking and asked directly, "Why are you so rational all of a sudden, Kurt?"

And with a signature twitch, he asked, "Someone's gotta be rational around here, right?"

I wondered about Kurt through the trumpet cries, wondered about his tendency to be rational when it comes to the considerations of other people, and wondered about his oddly irrational way of thinking when it comes to "dying usefully."

XXX

When I got back to the barracks, I stuffed the paper with the line "You're a bully" into my pocket, along with a pen. I wanted to have them in case I came up with a memorable line while going about daily soldier training activities. It didn't really hit me that I would like a loser pulling out a piece of paper to write on while doing push-ups.

Unfortunately, I came up with ideas in the middle of my maps skills training instead.

A cadet sitting on the bench next to me asked. "What are you writing on that napkin?"

"Do you really want to know?"

"Yes."

"I just thought of a perfect insult."

"Oh, can I see? I don't have good insults."

"That's cheating. Make your own."

While some old guy was lecturing about the longitudinal axis, my brain couldn't help but wander off with a film camera into the beginnings of my little story. Those characters that I thought of needed names and something to fill their personalities to make up for their hollowness. And most importantly, I pondered how they would progress until the scrawny boy joins the military and gains those powers that he does.

I needed to fill that gap with something. I needed to connect the bridge between those ideas.

Nonetheless, instead of doing that, the story hopped past the development, and my internal film camera sprang between fantasies of villains with the same powers as the hero himself. There were also thoughts of desperate researchers trying to manufacture artificial titan powers through science without needing the PATHS, etc.

This imagination was an ankle-brace, though. It held me down by being too free since I was doing everything but creating that critical, initial bridge between the child phase and the phase before the hero received his powers.

That was a struggle I had more pleasure in attempting to decipher than all the other shenanigans I had to deal with around the training camp.

I faced another one of these struggles later that night when I met with Colt. It seemed like I had a date with one of the Grice brothers every night. We met outside the dining hall and strolled through the training camp, looking for a place to train.

Colt was relatively quiet on our walk, and the situation's logic hit me. "Colt, how are we allowed to use rifles at night? Isn't that unsafe?"

"We aren't allowed to."

"Then how are we going to practice?"

"We aren't going to use actual guns. I have another idea." He didn't say this with a cheeky smile that one often makes before doing something sneaky. There was too much integrity in the muscles of his face.

He led me outside the training camp perimeter, and we approached a tree. A light blanket of nighttime enveloped it, and Colt decided against waking it up. He looked up at it but then crouched to search for a large branch that might have fallen. It was as if he didn't want to hurt the tree by breaking off a branch directly.

We walked back over to the fence, and Colt handed me the branch with a faint smile. I asked, "How is a stick going to help?"

"Sometimes, the gun itself isn't the issue. Let's find out what that other issue is."

"Where are we practicing?"

"Here." He pointed at the fence. "Hold the stick like a gun. Your targets are the crosses of the wires of this fence."

I raised the stick and looked along its length like a barrel. I used one tiny off-shoot of it to know where I was aiming. How stupid did I look then? Since Colt would be the last person to tell me, I had no idea. Someone like Kurt or Viktor would be honest with me, and of course, Kaslow.

After holding my position, Colt said with a figure on his chin, "I don't think there's anything wrong with your posture."

"Really?"

"Yea, there's nothing wrong with it."

"What is my problem then? Why am I so bad at shooting?"

"Well," He looked away as if he was avoiding confrontation. "I'm not sure."

He took the "gun" and got into position. It was pretty good considering our ages. He then told me about his mindset, "Whenever I pick up a gun and aim it at a target, I press it quickly. The longer I wait, the stronger anticipation builds, and the more hesitancy builds. If I'm hesitant on the battlefield…I think you'll know what happens. Anyway, I make sure my mind is in the right place."

"Are you saying my head is not in the right place?" I guess I said it out loud for him. It seemed like he was trying his best the entire time to give advice but avoiding making them sound like criticisms.

"I-I didn't say that."

"That's what you implied."

He didn't bother to defend himself and instead continued with. "Whatever I said, one thing is important, it can be difficult for me to use a gun if I overthink who my target is."

"That's my issue. Every time I pick up a gun, I see the same man there."

His eyebrows softened, and he nodded as if he knew who I was referring to. His unsaid words fell upon my ears and perched there while I sighed.

He continued. "Someone else needs to be there. Or no one at all."

"How can I do that?"

"I don't know, Heinrich…But I have a feeling you aren't the only one. Maybe talk to someone with the same issue."

I searched through the database of professionals in the back of my mind, but no one obvious would have that issue, except maybe the wall-keeper, of course. Everything was leading back to that suspicious man.

I threw the stick back at the tree, and we walked towards the dining room. A chill breeze crept underneath my uniform and sat there as if I was its bed and pillow. It was the only semblance of cold we could get in that warm climate.

Colt struck up a conversation about the story. "How is that story going?"

I thought about my conundrum of being unable to connect essential points. "It's…going okay."

"What will it be about?"

I got into a general synopsis. "The Eldian main character will be extremely loyal to Marley initially, but with his time in the military, he will change that attitude, especially when he gets some special power."

"..." He was speechless. "That sounds interesting. But have you seen the recruiting posters around the internment zone?"

"Yea. What does that have to do with this?"

"Those posters are supposed to make people feel honored to join the military. If I were a regular soldier and read a story that tells me being a soldier isn't great, I don't think I would be too happy,"

I stood right in front of him. "What are you telling me, Colt?"

"You have to write pro-Marleyan propaganda no matter what you write."

"But that's…it's naive."

"Just write what you know. And there's another reason." His words drooped and flew away with the snoring wind. "My mom and dad talk about my uncle sometimes-"

I stood in his path once more. "You haven't been direct with me at all today. We are in a training camp. I'm sure you can't say anything worse than my drill sergeant can."

He took a deep breath. "I want to keep my brother safe, ok? If someone sees that he's connected to pro-Eldian stuff, I don't know what would happen to his warrior status or even my parents….I don't understand why he asked you to help him instead of me first."

"..."

"Was that direct enough?"

"Yes."

"Honestly, I don't know why he's here. I'm already a warrior candidate. Why is he trying so hard to become one too?"

"I don't know, Colt."

I did know why, but what would he do if I said it to him? He seemed like the kind of person to avoid confronting people about issues since he lacked the assertiveness one expects from a warrior. The truth would just sit inside him, and he wouldn't say anything about it, much like another warrior I met.

We went our separate ways upon arriving at the dining room, and I headed back to the barracks.

I was greeted by Kaslow's rippling back when opening the door. "Oh, look who decided to show up. I'll repeat my announcement just for you, Heinrich." He got near my face and yelled. "Assessments are coming in a few weeks!"

As if rifle trouble wasn't enough, I had to worry about physical assessments too.

The Real Author's Note

For anyone curious about what my creative process is, it's basically the same as Heinrich's. With the earlier chapters, I would have a scrap of notebook paper where I would write random dialogue when my mind wandered off during zoom classes haha