Full Summary:

Living among the trees isn't easy, but it's better than what you will fall prey to if you fall. And it's the only life she's ever known.

She's never even seen the walls, but the way her mother talks about them is as though they're a fairytale she once knew by heart.

But all Morrigan knew was the treehouse and the trees she had hopped from and around her whole sixteen years of life, and the monsters below; that her mother taught her to respect enough to either not bother, or put out of their misery.

And she knew the stories her mother would tell her. Of how they came to be where they were.

This is the story of a young woman finding her way to a fairytale and being the hero she thought she needed.

NOTES!:

I have awoken from my deep dark depression that killed my flow of creativity from 2017-2020 and I am now back to writing fanfiction at the ripe old age of 21.

This is honestly gonna be a pretty self-gratifying fic that's just gonna end up w/ my cool ass OC saving characters I didn't think deserved to die without ruining plot-points tooooooo horribly. Likely to end up with a romance between either Jean, Mikasa, Levi, or Hanji. (Or a combination of any.):)

Warning: this is almost entirely based upon the anime, I have not read the manga :c I do try and do as in-depth of research as possible though, so that may also give some lag on my uploads. BUT! I WILL Be trying to update this at least weekly, with chapters at least around 1.5k words each.

All 104TH Training corp ages are going to be advanced a few years. Rather than starting at 12, Mikasa/Armin/Eren and Jean will be 15, everyone else will also be between 14-16. Levi is 21; Hanje is 25.

P.P.S. Any eventual smut will not be posted here to stay in compliance with ff . net policies. This work is also being uploaded to AO3 . org where such things are acceptable.

This work includes graphic descriptions of gore, violence, and will not include a main character that is weak nor fragile.

I hope you enjoy


PROLOGUE:

EXCERPTS FROM FLORA ALLAWAY'S JOURNALS CIRC. 831

WRITTEN ONE YEAR AFTER STRANDING.

The world had come back to me tinted in red. Upside down and quiet.

I liked the quiet.

You never hear it behind the walls. It's too crowded. Too cramped and locked in.

I never liked tight spaces.

I guess that's why I joined the Scouts. I was tired of being trapped like a rat in a cage.

I had found myself strung up in a tree, deep in the Titan's Forest, deeper than we ever had gone before due to being chased down by multiple abnormals, for many days by horseback; my ODM gear the only thing keeping me up. I was alone. My horse's carcass was at the foot of the tall, tall tree I had somehow found myself in. It appears to have been squashed.

As I hang there, trying to remember where I was or how I had gotten there, I realize it is not silent. Not quite.

I can hear…. Birds?

Their gentle warbling is soft and beautiful, and I see a deer peering through the trees, maybe fifty meters away. This is unheard of within the walls, human desperation devastating any natural wildlife inside them. It's prettier than the photos Erwin's shown me, in the books we were never supposed to have.

Erwin…

The thought of him was what finally pulled me out of my reverie.

There were signs of a fight, struggle, everywhere, but far below me, I was...unusually high. I found no corpses but plenty of blood, plenty of scrapes of my own including a nasty gash across my eye. I'm not that pretty anymore, unfortunately.

'I must have been thrown or tossed by a blast…' I had thought to myself.

So I gathered what I could from my horse and started searching through the trees.

I ran out of gas within hours. Food from my pack in days,

Hope in weeks.

My gear off of my horse and the lines out of my ODM gear allowed me to string my tent up high into the trees. And it was there, I planned out what I didn't know would be the rest of my life.

And the beginning of someone else's.

The treehouse was the product of six months of nonstop work put in by myself upon realizing that I had no way home. I was too far into the tall trees of the Titan Forest in the deep, deep southeast, with no mode of transportation. I was stranded in a sea of people-eating giants, and it became clear soon enough that no help was coming. They think me dead. I know that now.

A couple of the six remaining blades from my ODM gear were broken and turned into axes; my scout training along with my knack for hunting and gathering that I had picked up growing up in the small population of people in Dauper combining into pure survival tactics.

The sounds of my chopping down branches always inevitably brought a couple of titans but as time went on I became more and more accustomed to climbing trees, to the point where it became second nature. As easy as walking by the river.

Despite the name, the titans I came across were few and far between in the forest, never tall enough to reach me in the hundred-meter treetops; their arrival always preceded by an eerie, breath-stealing silence, as the birds and other fauna go into their own hidey holes.

Once at a certain height, though, I found they eventually lose my scent, and therefore their interest in me. It was rare that I ever had to jump from the trees to dispatch one, but if I did it was almost surely an abnormal. One that would just stand there for days, watching me. Almost seeming to...think. As though it were analyzing how it would be able to get to me.

I didn't like those ones, so they were dispatched with quickly. No one likes being watched. Especially by bulging-eyed freaks.

It was four months into my new hell of a life when my stomach began to bulge, and I had to sit down, in my half-finished tree hut and fully realize where I was and what was truly going to happen.

Could I do this? Bring a child up in this world away from the world? Was that possible? Or should I…

The glint of green-tinged sunlight shining off the blade of my knife had drawn my eyes towards it, and as I got closer, I could see myself. Perhaps for the first time in many months.

My coiled red locks were thick and tangled, and my eyes, near the same shade of the leafy treetops above, are bloodshot and raw.

"I could end it all now. ' I had thought. I was tired. I was ready. I was so ready…

But when I grabbed that blade again, when I looked into it, looking for myself, I swear to you upon the Gods above Erwin, I saw you. I saw your stupid eyebrows and your steely gaze.

I saw your smile.

I felt your touch. And for a moment it all fell away and you were there with me, a hand on my stomach, feeling the baby kick for the first time.

And I realize that I had to survive. I had to survive as long as it took for you to meet your daughter.

If you're reading this, Erwin, you have. At least I hope that's who is handing you this note right now. Pretty girl, hair as red as mine and eyes as sharp as yours?

She's beautiful, isn't she?

She's smart. She's sharp, quick, and everything you could ever imagine. And more. I hope you get the chance to witness it.

I love you, Erwin.

My knight in shining armor I never thought I needed.

Until the Gods bring us together again,

Flora Allaway

Year 847

Sixteen Years After Stranding.

Long, freckled fingers trace over the words written into the pages of the well-worn journal, salty, bitter drops dripping from the teen's face as she reads the journal for the last time where she was now sitting.

Morrigan was sitting on her knees in the middle of their home far above the ground, held up and of thick, woven branches, sixteen years of adapting and evolving turning the structure from something a little more than an unsteady shack- into a sturdy home, with walls made of wood planking, holes sealed in with mud, roof watertight with clay found from digging a bit deeper underground.

They even had a small fireplace, and a chimney that chipmunks got stuck in quite often unfortunately for the critters, but fortunate for the women, who had enough to make gloves, and slippers, and even me out of.

The walls were lined with animal skins - over a decade of hunting and recording the local fauna.

Whitetailed deer.

Wild Boars.

Hares,

Even a fox or two.

Arrows made with owl feathers.

Grappling hooks made with ODM wire and antlers, there wasn't a part of Morrigan's wardrobe that wasn't the skin of some animal that had sacrificed its own life for her and her mother to keep their own. Even now, she wore doe-skin leggings and a vest, tied together with leather strappings made from rabbit hide, her feet adorned with moccasin-style boots.

They learned to respect the forest that housed them because you can tell if you're safe; based on the sounds of the forest. They'll tell you if you should be quiet.

It had been a week since her mother had last come home. The longest amount of time by far. She was always back within two, three days tops. She had a caution to herself that Morrigan always teased her for, for her daughter was always almost a little too daring with her own life, alway wanting to go further, whereas her mother preferred them to be safe.

And they were, for fifteen years.

It was soon after Morrigan's fifteenth birthday, when they noticed a distinct shift in the Titans' migratory patterns.

A titan or two would wander by inevitably around three to four times a week, usually coming from all directions, usually right after they would return to the trees after hunting or foraging, their scent being far enough to attract the monstrous beings. But, at one point in the early summer, something changed. Drastically.

From the south. They all came, it wasn't one massive rush, but enough of a stream to keep the forest quiet of all natural life for many days, weeks. By the time the birds started singing again, Flora and Morrigan's cheeks were sunken in and they were lucky to be alive enough to hunt.

Flora knew that something had happened. Something had happened to the Walls. She felt it in her soul. But she couldn't go. She couldn't take her daughter, no matter how capable she thought she was. She was just a child.

It was a year after the event her mother called "The great migration." And they hadn't seen a Titan in almost a month.

Which is just what made her mother's disappearance so strange.

' Was now really the time where you weren't careful enough, mother?' Morrigan thought to herself bitterly, snapping shut the journal and tucking it to the bottom of her leather pack.

The cloak she wrapped around herself was rabbit fur, waist-length and various shades of brown to near black, the hood entirely covering her face and wild mane of fiery ginger hair.

Her pack was filled with exclusively essentials, her waterskien strapped to her waist and her knives on various bodyparts, she stares at the two, untouched blades her mother had left. From all that time ago. Morrigan wondered why she'd never really used them, but had simply taught Morrigan how to at the ripe age of 12.

But she thinks she understands now, as she puts them in the sheathes she had watched her mother painstakingly take weeks making, sheathes that not only strap to one's back and provide easy access, but don't impede ones' movement while swinging/running through the trees.

As she's about to step outside what she's known as home for the past decade in a half for what she knows is the last time, she hears the silence.

It's deafening. She pauses, hand on the loop of twisted bark that served as their door handle, holding her breath as she pulled it open, not expecting anything immediately, but the eventuality of encountering a titan was enough to set one on edge.

But when she opened the door, it was not green-filtered sunlight that met her.

It was the disgusting, hot, wet breath of a Titan.

She felt her heart skip, once, twice, three times, processing what was before her in both slow motion, and the speed of light.

It was between ten and twelve meters, it's hair a ridiculous bang ordeal, with wide, accusatory brown eyes and a sneer upon its lips. It was disgusting. The thing had climbed the wide-based tree across from their home, using that one to avoid shaking theirs. It was… stealthy. That was the only thing Morrigan could process before a massive hand was reaching for her.

She threw herself through the door, knowing that if she didn't, she'd be stuck and die for sure; her body inevitably being ripped apart and devoured by this vile creature

The grappling hook was swung, and it luckily hooked onto a tree branch, swinging her quickly behind the Abnormal and allowing her to perch just above it, unsheathing the blades and grimacing, eyes staring down its naked form with pity-laced disgust.

For all she knew, this is the monster whose fault it was for her mother not coming home.

It was that thought that launched her off of the branch, before the creature could even turn around and try at her again, she had done what her mother had taught her, and what those people behind those walls were supposedly "so good at."

' One meter across ten centimeters wide…' She thought to herself, as she slashed across the back of the Titans' neck. She knew she had done it correctly when the thing slumped forwards, falling and hitting every branch on its' way down. It had begun steaming almost immediately, and she crinkled her nose in disgust.

"Good riddance." She said softly, before shaking herself off and resecuring all of her things.

This was going to be quite the journey.

She wasn't sure if she was going to find her mother or the fabled "Walls" first.

But she knew she refused to die until she found both.