Warning: sexual violence
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In the underground crypt, an incomprehensible mass of flesh and limb moves without motion, not thrusting, not grinding, just pulsing, palpitating. They let go. Her knees thud to the ground. Her face steams, ten degrees hotter than her throat. Her eyes are blind, filmy, subhuman; unintelligent like fish eyes.
They grab her by the long black hair, and the straining roots of her scalp haul her up and off the ground, her head jerked at a near perpendicular. Her breast crashes flat against her chest bones, springing forward again, bulging out in a full reddening swell when a palm strikes her there, once, twice, then the same palm claps her between the legs, and her head jerks back, her engorged mouth gaped open, silent, submissive, suffocating, self-hating, the grip still in her hair. The straining roots of her scalp keep her chin high, thrust out and forward.
One man boots her in the neck and she falls bodily sideways, her eyes glazed with that fishlike, subhuman unintelligence. She braces on one arm, then rolls onto both, palms down-facing, her hips twisted sharply left, weakening, failing, never evolving beyond the small-minded, truncated worldview of a woman who not only needs men (for protection, for economy, for company, etc.), but identifies with the attachment, the parasitic role in which she's latched her claws into his ribs and calls herself wife, mistress, and whore. That is the symbiosis. To let him kick her in the neck as long as she can call herself his whore; to not just let him, but to entreat, and be entirely grateful for it.
She retches. Nothing but drool and a whitish saliva-mixture propels from her tongue.
She doesn't cry. She's not afraid of numbers. With an unflinching composure and female duplicity, she faces them. There are five men and only One face: An erasure of the individuality, where one man becomes the next in a single expressionless non-identity, a face without any pathos or thought. Their actions already predetermined by a homogenous aggression and privilege that has been bred for hundreds of generations—and women thereupon bred with the obverse: the passivism and the inferiority in order to bring balance to all things. This is her place, she knows that.
In a draft she doesn't feel, a stream of wind she doesn't think is there at all, the light suddenly snuffs out, whipped off the lantern, flinging them into the crypt's underground dark. These are not the sort of men who can see in the dark, nor do these men care to see in the dark. All their lives they haven't needed to see in the dark. So they don't have the imagination to conceive the terrors of a dark place. But then, they've never needed to use the light either. Never needed to look at or around themselves for anything at all. Neither have their fathers or their fathers' fathers. For generations, indifferent, ignorant, and intolerant of the things they never even bothered to look at from the start.
She hears the click and scrape of tossed coin as they grope inside their pockets, and then the freeze as one of them either gives up or finds it.
"Did you get that light?"
"Where's that light?"
"Ay—that light."
She doesn't climb from her knees. She never climbs from her knees, only falls onto them, the way pious men are conditioned to fall, day after day, into prayer at breakfast, lunch, and dinner without ever thinking about why. Dear God, thank you for this meal. Amen.
On all fours, she crawls to the side.
Slowly it fans across the floor. She can't see it. She can only hear the small, crackling, pooling sound as the stone absorbs the fluid; can only feel and smell the air condensing with an outpouring of warmth.
She fumbles her hands out in front of her, her toenails scuffling behind. A forelimb connects with a hot, slack-muscled mound. She jerks backward. Her knees hit the ground, softly, like two rotted peaches.
She sees a spit of light. It shrivels into a star, going dark. Another snap—and the light expands, blowing open the four walls of the secret room around her: unfurnished, bricked with stone, subterranean, a black retrograding exit. Next to the burning wall lamp, poised in an up-reaching hand, the silver lighter spurts its tiny flame.
Light sheds across a different man, a man whom she hadn't seen come in. It must've been some time after the five had overtaken her, flowing her into the chapel, sweeping her down into the crypt. He flicks the light closed. That's when she realizes his eyes are like the lighter, able to flick open and closed with illumination and heat. He's a man who can see in the dark. He pockets the lighter.
The five men lay around her, arms and legs bent off and away like collapsed scarecrows without the wooden stakes, with opened black throats and all the black throbbed out of them.
She thinks, A man only saves a woman from other men so that she'll become subservient to him and only to him, so that she can never become his equal or equal to any extrapolation of himself, subordinated by that false, double-edged chivalry.
Without climbing from those peach-rotted kneecaps, she says, "What's one more?" while still crouched on the ground, her dress still near the exit, wrinkled and deflated, the sleeves poised in a fleeing lurch, as if she had disintegrated directly out of it in the thrashing struggle. "You're all the same breed. You're one creature incarnated into a thousand faces. So what's one more when there were five of you already?"
His mouth barely moves when he says, "I've come here to ask you a few questions," and his voice seems to boil up from the profundity of solitude—not merely the solitude of a solitary man, but the historical and ancestral solitude of a person without a name, without a past, ageless and neutral.
"Questions? There's something you don't know, and you think that I do? Me?" She grins rigidly. "Go away. Leave me alone. I know what you want. And I'll give it to you. I'll hate every second of it. But I'll give it to you. That's the way you want it, isn't it? That's the way all of you want it, isn't it?"
Levi raises his knife by the grip. She crouches lower, her palms pressed flat on the ground, her eyes reduced to the scared animal blindness of complete submission. He pulls the flap of his cloak to the side and reaches behind his back and slides the blade into a leather strap and lets his hands fall and lay down, one against each hip, stiff like dried straw, shaped quick to violence, but laying down now.
On her hands and knees, the woman draws up a little, coming off her palms, still crouched low, in a misappropriated quivering squat. The black interspaces of rib bones and chest bones begin to jerk and throb. A noise is purged out of her, and it is nothing like laughing. But then Levi doesn't think it is laughter at all, and he hadn't thought she'd been smiling at him either.
"I hate short men," she says. "Little men have little dopey cocks. You little impotent limp-dick runt. You're not a man. You don't even look like one."
"You're losing blood."
"Of course, I am. Men don't bleed. Only women bleed because God wanted us to suffer and we don't stop suffering until we're old and useless. You're no man. You're just a little runt. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do? hit me? piss on me? fist me in the cunt? What are you going to do, huh? You bastard. You son of a bitch. Go on, then. Do it. What's one more? Can't you do it with that little dopey cock of yours? You're no man. So take your fist and do it, you coward. You goddamned coward. Then you'll be a man. right? right?" Her eyes show a full ring of white as she starts to laugh again, a shrieking noise of panic and the anxiety of not-knowing because solitary, individual men cannot be predicted, cannot be fathomed. Below her quivering squatting thighs, her red blood gushes, spreading into the pool of thicker black blood. "You'll never be a man if you got to use your fist. Ha ha ha ha! So why don't you just do it?"
With his hands still out, laying down against each flank, Levi turns over his palms, his wrists as stiff as sunbaked straw. Not only is he a man who can see in the dark, but he is a man who can open his palms without shame, without self-deprecation either, becoming no less than he was a minute before. He's not a long man, and he's not a broad man. He's just a small man. He snaps the button of his cloak undone, draping it over his elbow. Then he undoes the leather strap around his waist and lets it fall, scuffling it across the floor with his boot toe.
She watches, still on her knees, thinking it isn't the dropping of the knife, and it isn't the removal of the leather strap, it's the shedding of the cloak that has reduced him. She starts to make a small, whimpering noise. The interspaces of her rib and chest bones jerk again, this time without the laughter.
"Oh, god. Oh, god."
Her mouth opens without anything coming out yet. A second later the shriek fills and writhes from her mouth like a solid invisible mass of outreaching tentacles, ripping open the seam of her lips. Sudden tears run thickly, melting her eyeballs. In a trembling hunch, she jams her fists against her face, her knuckles embedded into the dissolving heat of her sockets, tears flowing fast around them.
He takes his folded cloak from the drape of his elbow and takes a few steps forward, making no sound at all, and spins it out in a ballooning arc. It settles closed around her naked shoulders. "I want to die," she whispers. "Just kill me, you . . . you . . ."
The cloak slips off. He draws it back around her and closes his fingers at her throat. "I told you, I have questions," he says, without so much pity or even sympathy as there is an acknowledgment of the human crises, quiet, nonviolent, and incurable. "And you're going to answer them for me."
Levi
When he reaches the two-story house, the sun has already set. Inside the vast lawnless yard, the madam and a few of the girls stand, huddled, speaking to each other. A latticed fence circumscribes them, and when Levi steps through the fence's entryway, his leg slips into an insulation of synthetic illusions and fantasies, as he is thrown twenty, No, thirty years into the past, already smelling the perfume and the mead, hearing the murmur of closing curtains and clambering high-heels, up the staircase and down into the basement as the house begins to stir inside; the change moving up his leg, thirty years backward.
Bunching up her skirt, the madam rushes over, her feet kicking up in a pair of laced ankle-boots. A red rosacea has flared across her pink face. She races nearer. Broken vessels stipple the flesh-knob of her nose.
"You've brought back my best girl. My raven-locked porcelain doll."
Levi holds her away from his chest by the sole strength of his arms, the muscles taut but not strained. She lies entirely upon the brace of his forearms.
"You can't go in, you understand. I'll take her from here."
Levi passes the girl into the madam's larger embrace. Her arms hold the girl without strain either, without labor, as if the girl weighs no more than a mannequin filled of wood shavings.
"I have questions that she alone has the answers to," Levi says. "And I'm depending on her to answer them."
"That's it? That's all you want?" The madam looks at his face. His eyes are grave, dark, heatless, and self-contained. "All right, all right," the madam says. "When she's feeling better, I'll send her in your direction. Thank you for bringing her home, Captain."
"That girl there." He gestures with his chin. Behind a tall girl stands another girl, smaller, with thin copper hair and the lean, shapeless frame of an adolescent boy. The dusk falls thick on her myriad freckles, falling scarce on the soft, white, baby skin between them.
The tall girl lays hands on the small one, as though the hands might snatch the girl right out of Levi's view.
"You can't take Breanne."
"There's an orphanage," he says. "Out in the country."
"Blessed," she says. "Are you the saint we've been praying for? Should I thank our holy walls?" A couple girls cough, stifling their mouths with their fingers, shuddering quietly in restraint.
The madam says, "Hush, now," with the black-haired girl cradled in her big arms, serene and unmoved, and then to Levi: "Yes, I know of it. Everybody knows of it. It's the queen's policy." Levi's eyes let go of the girl with the copper hair and move to the madam now. The rosacea has cooled a little in her cheeks. "That'll be all for one night. Go on home, Captain Levi. You'll hear from me again, don't you worry."
Eren
At nineteen years old, maybe he just wanted a mother again, it's been quite some time since he's had a mother. And the war began simply because he had wanted his mother. And although the war has already begun, he can't forget what it was like being a young boy, and that's keeping him from being a grown man because he hasn't been given the time to relinquish into the present and to nonviolently bereave himself of the past.
The nurse has the dark, dominant, feline eyes of a woman who only wants to make grown men cry. So she can't be his mother, she can't be even like his mother, and he can't be a boy anymore either, not now and not here. Maybe if she hit him, he'd think differently. Maybe if she yanked his hair and wrangled him like a gangly-limbed calf, he'd think differently. He relaxes his jaw when he realizes he's grinding his teeth. His nostrils stretch as he breathes and thinks about how little mental and emotional energy he had expended to amputate his own foot, almost like bringing down an axe on a defenseless, autonomous, forlorn log.
"Outside of war and violence," he says, "I suppose I haven't lived very much."
"This is your first time?" Miss Mary says, and when he says nothing back, she knows. "You won't have to do a single thing, Mr. Kruger. I'll take care of you. Is that all right? it'll be all right."
He seizes her wrist when she starts to lift the bed sheet, not resisting, not complying, and most certainly not dissenting. Then he starts to think of Eren Jaeger himself as a boy, as if it were not himself, as if he'd never been a boy at all; trying to be a grown man now without any experience or involvement from the childhood, relinquishing, trying not to think or remember, his logic and mind violated again by his own thoughts, bursting from that startling no-place subconscious like vomit — sorry sorry no its nothing im fine — "I promise you, I'll be gentle." — stop talking shhh you idiot — "You don't need to be afraid, honey. Relax."
Still not resisting, still not complying nor dissenting, violating himself with his own thinking — im sorry im sorry shut up —
"I'll take good care of you," she says, whispering into his ear; and when he opens his eyes, he finds himself alone, with a sweating glass of water on the bedside table. He drinks until it's empty, never feeling quenched.
Levi
The alcohol sits like a ball of copper twine at the bottom of his stomach as he sits idly in the armchair. His knuckles prop his cheekbone in the indolent observation and detachment, as if it were not his eyes seeing the girl, as if it were somebody else telling him about seeing the girl, and his own mind begins to conjure up the images as they tell him about it. The girl was made of wax, they would say—and he sees her now, made of wax too, the light shining lustrously on the hairless wax-flesh of her wrists.
And they would say: She was just watching the fire, doing nothing. And I was looking at her the whole time, not doing anything either. And I could see the backs of her knees under the white nightgown and in the blasting heat where she stood, that nightgown never did move. It just fell straight down her back like it was made of paper.
And Levi would say: You're not getting enough sleep, is all.
And they would say: I can't sleep at night. I've been trying to since I was eight years old. But sometime in the childhood, I think I forgot how. And I think you know why I forgot it.
The girl turns her head, the nightgown straight and unflapping against the soft backs of her knees. Levi lifts his cheek from his knuckles. Dim unimpressionable eyes of round, blank rubber are stamped into her face. His neck stiffens, the little hair-bristles lifting. Her head turns across the shoulder now. Her wax profile yields in bloodless, un-body, un-sexed un-substance against the hearth. Her soundless white foot lifts from the floor. She starts to leave. She steps out of the room and vanishes midstride out of sight.
They (that person telling him about the vision) describe this to Levi, and Levi imagines this part too when they say to him: Then I went after her because I wasn't going to suddenly remember how to fall asleep. I was just going to be sitting there all night, doing nothing—hey hey—Why are you looking at me like that? I'm not insane. I'm not. You know I'm not.
The hallway writhes with its invasive mind-worms inside a darkness so complete that sight is inverted. Not as though sight has been temporarily revoked, but that the optic nerve itself has been clamped in a tourniquet, stopping the stream of vision altogether, pumping it straight backward down the neurons now, not in blindness, but in un-sight.
He follows her, not seeing any trace of her, knowing exactly where she's going and where she will be, knowing exactly where he's going and where he will be too. When he finds her at the end of the hall, her face is pale, her eyes as blank as rubber, the window grave and dark behind her. Mikasa drops onto her hands, striking the floor with her palms. The white nightgown floats a moment without her. Levi watches her lips flinch open and the cords in her neck suddenly inflate. Heaving up in a strong convulsion of stomach muscles, she makes a low guttural sound and vomits a puddle of thick colorless stomach bile.
Levi moves next to her and touches the back of her neck. The underlayer of hair is wet and cold. He squats down.
"Captain," she says, saliva running in thick bright tendrils from her lips. "I don't feel so good." The back of her hand smears across her mouth. Her wrist comes away, glistening.
She sinks to the floor, arms braced beneath her, in a half push-up, legs wrung sideways, knees facing out. Her calves slide against each other, weakening, as the interval between her chest and the floor detracts, like gravity has found that pin in her sternum and pulls her down by it. Her cheek quietly drops against the rug, and she goes limp.
He lifts her with a thrust of his arms. Her pores secrete a cold, sick sweat, deprived of any real fever, vacant of warmth. Her body slumps against him, liquid, heavy, unresponsive, faint. Her right arm dangles like a dead wooden limb.
When he reaches the room, he puts her on the bed. The sheets crackle with disuse. The room is neat and plain without identity. A private, auxiliary bathroom cuts back from the west wall.
He puts on a light and goes into the bathroom and turns on the faucet. He fills a bowl with water and comes back into the room, the cloth in one hand, the bowl of water in the other. He puts both down on the bedside table and draws up a chair and sits in it. The nightgown sags against her body. Clingy, translucent circles fan out in the material. Beneath the gown, she shivers, pumping out unceasing rivulets of cold sweat. He dips his fingertips in the bowl; the water is warm. He dips the cloth in next, wringing the rag. Trickling water wimples the mirror-surface inside the bowl.
He mops her forehead and behind the ears. The whole time her blank black eyes stare through him, not seeing him, not really looking either. Little black hairs swirl wetly in the frame of her face, her complexion as white as ceresin wax.
She says, "I think I'm pregnant."
For a moment, he says nothing, mopping her throat with the warm rag, his face without expression. "That," he says, "is impossible." And he almost says too, Eren is across the ocean, but he doesn't say that, just thinking it, then wondering if it actually is possible, if she'd been sleeping and he'd been sleeping and without being in the same room, without being on the same continent even, sleeping together at the same midnight hour, both on their backs in horizontal repose, if they could've met each other somehow that way. A child born out of the concept and the shared mind-space, rather than the conjoined body.
"Yelena told me a story," she says, vaguely, as if she's unaware he's there, as if she's forgotten that she's speaking out loud. Merely moving her mouth, looking right through him. "It was about a virgin mother who bore a son."
"I don't know that story."
Her eyes sink into her head. Her face turns away. More sweat boils coldly from her pores, rolling pale down her neck into the hollow of her throat. Her nightgown falls cold and wet on her body. She shakes. With the warm, damp rag, he mops her face and tucks away wet hair.
"It's only a story," he says.
"I know," she says, without opening her eyes, still speaking without trying to make speech, still unaware he's there at all. "I had hoped that I wouldn't have to do anything. I wouldn't even have to try. It'd just happen, and Kiyomi would be satisfied."
". . . ?" Levi dips the rag back into the bowl again. The ice water in the rag seeps away, transplanted by the bowl's warm water. "At that time, you had a strange expression. Did that woman say something strange to you?"
"I was a little surprised at first," she says. "But it's nothing in the end."
Levi
Mikasa looks wan with the labor now. The labor of illness and staying awake long past midnight. She sits up and pulls in her legs, tucking them under her. From her shifted thighs rises a faint, musky, brassy odor. It isn't the sweat. It doesn't have the same ill, gelid, pale scent. She seems to perceive the odor too, reverting her head, looking down behind her. Levi looks behind her too. His gaze overlays hers.
They see, seconds apart, that it has sunk through the seat of her nightgown in a dark vivid stain.
She starts to say something and lifts off her knees, silent, cringing. She tries again to speak, inarticulate, abashed, and apologetic: "I hadn't realized—I need to—" Levi touches her wrist. His mouth has blanched. The veins in his temples look black and thin. "I need to—"
It's nature's cycle, he thinks, that's all it is. The color washes back into his mouth. She starts to lift off her knees again, shrinking, her wrist still closed inside his fingers. He opens the bedside drawer and takes up a tin container of tissues. He gives her a few. She takes them with a pale hand. He releases her arm.
"I'm sorry about your sheets. I'll replace them with new ones." She reaches the tissues under her nightgown, secretively, in a kind of embarrassed introversion, angling her knees away from him. "It seems I've put you in an awkward situation. I'm sorry about that too."
It must be driving her insane, he thinks, trying to listen to her own blood quietly pulling behind the loud call and urgency and demand of their current situation. The unreadable, incalculable face of hers, like an unmarked dial, has nowhere to look, averted in profile, with a sort of mute introverted shame, and it shouldn't be shame, it shouldn't be embarrassment either. For a woman, she doesn't seem to know much about nature. But then maybe she's never been taught it because she didn't have a mother. She's only had those two boys of the same age, who could neither teach nor empathize—or perhaps it was Eren who taught her, since he seems to have taught her everything else, but his information was obviously incomplete and abstracted. So all this time, she's been deconstructing the ignorance or maybe just living in denial and self-effacement, wanting to be the same, not being the same, going by whatever Eren had told her.
Now that the flow has started, the onset of pain seizes the interior muscles. Her teeth grit together. Levi dips the cloth into the bowl, wringing it, and wipes her forehead, raking the hair free of its wet cling. The contraction passes. One of her legs stretches down to the floor, the nightgown sticking to the back of her knee. She slides off. She gathers the bedclothes in her arms and starts to strip the mattress. He rises from the chair, lifting the bowl from the bedside table, going into the bathroom. Without the bowl, without the rag, he returns again. Behind him, the bath runs fast and hard.
"Go ahead and bathe," he says, in that forceless way of his, barely louder than the bath, perfectly clear, "and get some dry clothes on. I'll take care of the sheets."
Levi
It is either in the last few minutes of night or the first few minutes of morning when Levi relates to Hanji the myth about the virgin mother. Hanji already knows it. At a rectangular table in her private study, they sit together, she at the north end, he at the south. A ceramic cup of tea communicates its warmth into his palm where his hand is bent around it. Hanji's quill pen scrapes ink onto a page of a leather-bound journal. Down the length of the table, he hears each minute sound of the strokes, acutely, as if the pen tip were scratching the fragile bones of his inner ear. In the middle of the table a candle steadily burns, shedding light over Hanji's handwriting and the keratin gleam of her blunt fingernails.
Without looking up, Hanji says, "It's only a story." The pen continues to scratch at Levi's hearing. Too internal for him to do anything about it. "And there have been much worse than that."
The ceramic cup clashes quietly away from the saucer, then clashes quietly back when Levi puts it down again. "I'm sure most people," he says, "at some point, wish they could be God."
"I never knew you were that kind of person, Levi. I'm sorry to hear it," and still never looking at him, writing by the candlelight, and Levi likewise enduring the scraping pen-tip.
He leans his face on his knuckles, his ear slightly flattened back, contracted in the interior agitation. "It's as you said. It's only a story."
Boys can't understand. But once he had become old enough to divide the world into its institutionalized arbitrary logic, he began to see it. That women are martyrs and all-mothers—and he has no father, or perhaps he has many fathers, and he will never know the answer to this: but maybe his mother had never acquiesced, that it'd been the faceless father or the many fathers who thumbed the seed into the soil before she'd ever thought of becoming a mother, and she had grown it anyway, delivered it, and christened it Levi, a name which had come from the same archaic book of stories in which the virgin mother gave birth to the son of God.
This world is patrilineal, and therefore a mother's name has no value and consequently a bastard son has no ancestry. And now a grown man, Levi begins to understand this: Sin has been gathering in his hands since he learned how to wield them, and yes, he has known this, he has accepted this, and he doesn't repent or even feel the need to. But the sin, he sees now, began before the hands, before the childhood, before the infancy. He has committed the unforgivable sin of conception itself.
As the realization sets in, the sin thickens and weighs down the irredeemable fatherless blood so that he can never again forget his breeding, his roots, realizing too that the long black hair was not to blame but, in fact, himself.
