abashed the devil stood, and felt how awful goodness is
Hospitals, Annie finds, are always equal. They are always the same. Because medicine – and any advances made in its name – does not care for the petty contrivances that humans imagine in order to divide themselves. It does not care what color your skin is or what blood runs through your veins. It does not care who your parents were or who your children will be. Medicine cares only about what products shall kill the most germs, what surfaces will be the easiest to sterilize, and what practices shall save the most lives the fastest.
Strip away the armbands, Annie thinks, and the only difference between this hospital and the one in the internment zone is a matter of geography.
Though, she will concede this. The Marleyan hospitals have much more comfortable seats. In Liberio, the chairs are all old, cracked leather, dry and poking her in all the places necessary to make her the most uncomfortable. Scritchy, white fuzz peeks out at the world from between those cracks. When she was young – younger, she thinks to herself sourly – she would pick pieces of that fuzz out of the seat and hide them in her pockets so that the doctor wouldn't see. She'd been afraid of doctors then.
The seats in the Marleyan hospital don't have cracks in them. They're supple and soft and almost comfortable. Annie runs her hand over the cool, cream colored leather and pretends that she doesn't hope to find fuzz.
The hospital they are in is a military one, built adjacent to Marleyan High Command and, as an aside, the Warrior program's training grounds. Annie has become uncomfortably familiar with this hospital's particular brand of sterile. The doctors here have marched her and her compatriots through its long, winding halls into closely confined rooms where disinterested doctors poke and prod them in any number of ways in the interest of 'health', or so they claim. In particular, Annie has come to an unpleasant sort of understanding with this room, which she has been in and out of a dozen and a half times in the last four months.
She will stay very, very still and make no complaint about being forced into the rigid square of its confining walls, and it, in turn, will spare her from having to hide her emotions by casting long shadows across her face through the only window it has for most every hour of the day. It's a good, strong working relationship they've developed. Annie doesn't know how Pieck's presence will affect the balance of her relationship with the room but judging by the way the shadows stubbornly avoid her, allowing hot sunlight to bathe her face, she thinks it has taken some offense.
Pieck sits beside her on the cream colored operation chair, a parody of poise. Her back is ramrod straight, her ankles crossed, her hands folded. A far cry from the girl that Annie knows from the training grounds who, while perfectly polite and entirely pleasant, lacks the decorum she is displaying here. Annie, when she is upset or nervous, goes still from her face to her toes. She does her best to imitate a statue. Pieck, it would seem, settles for dragging up lessons of ancient etiquette and propriety.
Annie doesn't know why she and Pieck have been brought in for a medical examination together – it's never happened before – and, judging by her apparent nerves, neither does Pieck.
Later, whenever Annie thinks back to this day (and she will many times in her life) she will not be able to say exactly how long she and Pieck waited together in that tense, expectant silence. She knows that it felt interminable at the time, but it could have just as easily been a few short minutes. That is another thing that all hospitals have in common, she will think. Time never seems to work right in them.
She will recall with crystal clarity, however, the sound the door makes when it opens. That damning click of metal scraping against metal. The doctor who breezes into the room is a hulking man with more muscle than some of the soldiers that Annie has seen. He has close cropped hair, such that it looks more like a dusting of black paint atop his head than actual hair, and the lightly tanned skin of a man wealthy enough to enjoy the sun in short bursts.
He pauses in the middle of the room, bringing a clipboard with what must be a dozen pages on it up to his face. He has moved so fast that the door doesn't click closed until he is already in the center of the room. "Annie Leonhart and," he says and flips up the first page of his documentation, eyes flitting across the page, and for the life of her Annie cannot tell if he is putting on airs or if he genuinely doesn't remember their names, "Pieck Finger." He looks up at them. His eyes are coal black and very bored. "Yes?"
A protracted, awkward moment of silence follows, filled with naught but the distant drum of other doctors and nurses' feet on the tile floor of the hallway. At length, Pieck stretches her smile into a heinous little thing, all waxy and stiff on the edges. "Yes, sir," she says, a slight nod accompanying her dulcet tones.
Seemingly unconcerned with their delayed response, he consults his paperwork again, noting something down on the edge of the paper with his pen. Without looking up, he says, "And you are our new Female and Cart Titans, yes?"
Surely, Annie thinks, he's being an ass on purpose. Who among the Marleyans doesn't know who they are? They only Inherited a week ago, and she has seen her own face reflected back at her from the front page of newspapers for three of the last seven days. But Pieck doesn't share her stupor, or at any rate she isn't as chained by it. "Yes, sir," she says again in the exact same tone of voice.
He nods, says "Congratulations" in a tone of voice like he is talking about a particularly colorful drawing his toddler has presented to him and says his name, something long and overcomplicated with more syllables than necessary. Annie will thank God the rest of her life that she doesn't bother to remember it.
Still looking down at his paperwork – he has thumbed through five pages by Annie's count – he tells them, "This is to be your final medical examination in relation to your status as a Warrior and Inheritor." He says this like he has said it many times to many people. Like he has rehearsed it to the point that he isn't even consciously aware of what he is saying. "As a result of your Inheritance, your body will have undergone a number of physical changes that you may or may not have already noticed." This is sounding disturbingly like the talk she had received from a nurse a few months back relating to the onset of puberty, and Annie shifts uncomfortably in her seat at the thought. "Should any unforeseen complications, symptoms, circumstances, etc. come up, you may request a private medical consultation at any time through Marleyan Command."
He looks up at them again, black eyes lidded. "Do you understand?" he asks.
For a third and final time, Pieck says, "Yes, sir."
He nods and turns his back to them. "Your basal body temperature," the doctor begins his explanation in the same bored tone of voice, pressing noisy, laminated photographs of their bodies onto a display board across from them, "has risen to an average of 107˚ Fahrenheit. Depending on external circumstances, it will fluctuate, give or take, two degrees across the span of a normal day, and up to three degrees during menstruation. As a result, you are effectively immune to most any common infection."
Here, he places another laminated piece of paper onto the board, this one an illustrated depiction of the germs responsible for the common cold, and Annie thinks that he thinks they're both too dumb to understand why people get sick. As if they haven't lived with more germs in everyday life than this man has seen in all the years of his medical profession. Another illustration follows depicting featureless human bodies – one male and one female – with a thermometer beside it reading frigid temperatures. The body is colored to display its reaction to the cold, but Annie thinks that something about it is off.
"Now," the doctor continues, turning around to lay his baleful eyes on them, "the flipside of this benefit is that your bodies will have an adverse reaction to any cold temperatures in comparison to your standard human as the temperature differential will be starker for you. Temperatures that an ordinary human would be able to shrug off or chatter their teeth through may well prove fatal to you. So bundle up, devils." He sneers these last words, his voice a mockery of care. It is the first inflection his voice has had, and it is telling what word finally drags it out of him.
"Additionally," he says, and here his voice lowers beneath the weight of his glee, or so Annie thinks. Perhaps she is imagining the way his lips curve into something adjacent to a smile in preparation for the devastating news he is about to deliver. In tandem with his words, he places a final illustration on the board behind him, depicting an obviously female body with emphasis given to the stomach. At this distance, Annie can catch only a few of the tidy, hand-written words adjoined to arrows that point out aspects of her anatomy she has only recently become familiar with. 'Uterus' is among them and 'ovary' and a word that begins with 'endo' but tapers off into a hasty, unreadable scrawl. A primal sort of fear clenches her heart in preparation for something she can't fully understand, and Annie's fingers clench tightly around the cool leather of the hospital bed. Beside her, she thinks she can feel Pieck stiffen, but perhaps that is just wishful thinking. "As a result of your body's higher than average temperature, neither of you are capable of giving birth. No fetus would survive your body's temperature. This is not to say that you can't get pregnant. You most certainly can. It means only that whatever brat you begin to have will not live long enough to grace the world with its presence. You can't have children."
Can't.
Annie has never given the word much thought before. She's heard it often enough, in tandem with every other way it's possible to say 'no' in the English language. She is more than familiar with denial, but she does not think she's ever given it quite as much thought as she does today. Annie has never considered having children. She is young, still a child herself, and anyway she's not had the greatest role models of parenthood to wonder at and think about. It has never been part of her future, not really. Not so far as she's ever thought. Not…now. Why didn't they tell us? Why not before?
Can't.
It's a terrible word.
Pieck is beside her, black eyes welling up with silent tears. As Annie watches, one escapes confinement, trailing a line down the length of her clenched jaw and coming to rest at the bottom of a chin that is just beginning to tremble. Pieck is older, nearly sixteen, and Annie is certain that she has considered children. Certain that she has more than considered them. That she has thought about them, dreamed about them, wanted them. She is devastated, but even in the midst of her devastation, she knows well enough to muffle the shattering of her heart.
Can't.
The Marleyan doctor who had delivered the news had been gruff, to the point and uncaring. A distant part of Annie wishes that the doctor had been female, thinking vainly that the two of them may have received a touch more sympathy from a woman, but she pushes the thought aside. Male or female, they're all Marleyan, and they're all – she is certain – none too displeased that two more Eldian devils can't spawn further 'abominations'.
Can't.
The doctor is still there, impatiently shoving clipboards filled with forms into their numb hands. A pin rolls noisily down the length of cardboard and bumps against the outer edge of Annie's thumb – the first sensation she's registered since the news had been delivered. She takes it up in curious fingers, tracing its edges with dumb eyes, as if the answers to what she should be feeling are locked away within its ink. She signs her name across three medical waivers and two acknowledgment forms with a scrawling hand that gets more unkempt with every line until the only legible letter on the last one is the overlarge 'A' of her first name.
Beside her, Pieck's signature is worse. Her tears are smudging the ink.
The doctor leaves, having nothing else to say to them. They remain still. Perfectly painted statues in the shape of human girls. But they aren't human anymore.
Perhaps they never were.
The click of the door mark's a rare moment of solitude for the two Warriors, and Pieck can muffle her sorrows no longer. A choked sort of sobbing gasp escapes her, and it's the most horrendous thing Annie has ever heard. The older girl chokes on her dreams beside her, eyes overflowing with desperate, dangerous tears, and Annie does not know what to do. They cannot be here much longer. It is a military facility, and they are welcomed only in the most basic sense and anyway, their training is not done for the day. But Annie shudders to think what Magath will do if Pieck shows up to training like this, so she resolves to give her fellow Warrior a moment.
Pieck clogs her tears after two minutes of sobs that eventually crumble into coughing gasps before quieting entirely. She holds Annie's hand on the way out of the medical facility, and Annie lets her. She doesn't look well by the time they return to the others, and Reiner is dumb enough to make a smart comment about it up until Annie puts his face into the rough edges of nearby tree bark, more than happy enough to take advantage of their newfound healing factors.
She and Pieck never speak of it again with anything resembling words, and they never tell the boys their unpleasant truth.
But more than once, Annie finds Pieck shivering naked on the tile floor of their shared bathroom, face pale and lips nearly blue from the frigid ice baths that she subjects herself to in a desperate effort to lower her body temperature. She never succeeds, and on the island of Paradis, Annie still wonders who is drying her off now that she is gone.
