We know what happened to all of the top ten members of the 104th Trainee Corps following the survivors' decisions to join the Scouting Legion—with the exception of one. What did Annie do after she joined the Military Police?

This one-shot, from Annie's perspective, explores the possibility that Annie was given a week's leave courtesy of the police brigade upon joining. With nowhere to go home to, and no particular desire to play tourist within the walls she is attempting to destroy, where would she choose to spend her free time? Chronologically, this is set in the days immediately after the branch selection ceremony, a few weeks before the 57th expedition beyond the walls.

No direct appearance by Armin in this story—consider it a guest appearance by everyone's favorite lady titan shifter. Yet again, I've indulged in my habit of doing what justice to minor characters I can.

I also hope this tale, to a degree, does something to explain the deeper story behind why Annie spared Armin's life during the Scouting Legion's expedition.

I've got a great idea for the sixth chapter, but writing it will take some time, and university classes are starting again in earnest. I'll work on it as much as I can, and hopefully it will be well worth the wait! Thanks for reading, and please favorite and follow!

OOOOO

Chapter 6: The House with the Green Door

A lone girl in military uniform wove through the mid-afternoon crowd filling the city streets. Her blonde head barely turned as she walked past the busy shops and the crowds of citizens clustered around news bulletins and livestock auctions, nor did her blue eyes acknowledge the flamboyant beckoning of the street vendors as she passed.

Annie had expected Karanes to look quite similar to the city of Trost; to her surprise, they couldn't have been more different. Both cities were located along Wall Rose, populous, and economically important, after all—yet Trost's long, ordered apartment blocks, wide avenues, and tall stone bell towers were nowhere to be found. In retrospect, Annie should have known this would be the case. Trost's rich merchant trade, fed by its location on the banks of the Hermiha River, had left its mark on that city. Karanes, however, was built on its agriculture, and she had seen nothing but a vast expanse of crops and mills during her wagon trip through the district's lands behind Wall Rose. Instead, Karanes's structures were slim and squat, built by hand and as unique as their inhabitants. The town houses were wood, white-walled, and timber-framed, and its streets were crooked, lined with market stalls. To Annie, the city's atmosphere felt close-knit and homey—like an assemblage of village towns.

It reminded her of Shiganshima.

Fear. True fear. Dashing with Bertholt through ruined, bloody streets. Dodging the outstretched fingers of mindless titans. Running past grieving families and wide-eyed soldiers readying cannons. The sounds—screaming, crying, yelled orders, the panicked yells of those searching for loved ones. Packed evacuation boats where the two of them had sat shoulder to shoulder with their weeping, fearful victims. A nightmare, but the setting had been the same as the one she found herself in now—the streets of Shiganshima and Karanes had been built from the same cobbles, bordered by the same timber homes and low stone walls, marked by the same hand-painted shop signs…

The familiar agony of her guilt redoubled, subjecting her heart to a fresh spasm. Yet it was just a ghost of the remorse Annie had felt on that first day of the Trost clean-up operation, when she'd stood over a small, unrecognizable corpse and struggled to hold back a flood of tears.

A weeklong leave upon graduation was a privilege unique to the new recruits of the Military Police. This period of leave afforded to its new members was truly a cunning political move on the part of the police brigade, not to mention a luxury that most soldiers could only dream of. Trainees that joined the Garrison were not given the opportunity to return home before they were dispatched to their new station, while those that joined the Scouting Legion were sent immediately to that branch's headquarters for intensive additional training. Thus, only the freshly-minted soldiers of the Military Police, splendid in their uniform emblazoned with the legendary unicorn, ever returned home after graduation to spend time with their families. There, they attracted admiration and envy throughout the streets of their home villages everywhere they walked. Combined with the prestige of graduating at the top of their trainee class, it was only natural that the common people—at least those that didn't know any better—viewed the Military Police Brigade with such respect.

After all, unlike the other branches, the easygoing police could very much afford to spare its new recruits for a week. In contrast, the day they had left at age twelve to become trainees was often the last that many families ever saw of sons and daughters that joined the Scouting Legion. Small wonder that the cloak bearing the wings of freedom was so associated with controversy.

Annie, however, was met with kind, respectful stares as she crossed streets and walked along rows of shops and houses. Eyes would flick to the unicorn patches on her shoulders and breast, and people would smile, wondering which lucky family of the city could boast of such an accomplished daughter. Children stopped playing to watch this soldier pass by, their round faces frozen in awestruck expressions. A girl sawing at a stubborn cut of meat in a butcher's shop looked up at her briefly with a gaze marked by envy before turning back to her bloody hands and knife. Boys around her age glanced up and down her figure, some appreciative, others dismissive.

She found all of the attention extremely uncomfortable, yet she felt more uncomfortable still whenever she stopped to ask for directions.

"Pardon me, do you know where I can find the Carolinas' home?"

That was when the smiles died, the same flicker of understanding passing across each pair of eyes whenever Annie asked that question. A total of just under eight hundred soldiers had died during both battles for Trost, including many trainees and soldiers of the Garrison from Karanes, and most people of the city knew of somebody who had lost a loved one. So this girl from the Military Police, it seemed, was just someone else trying to find the family of a friend, a comrade, perhaps a lover now dead.

Over and over again, the workers, the tradesmen, the shopkeepers that Annie asked solemnly informed her that sadly, they did not know where the Carolinas lived. She was given a promising lead by a priest of the wall cult, only to find herself at the wrong home—a happy, bustling household where a family with six children called the Carolines lived.

As she turned away from the family's chatty grandmother, Annie wondered yet again why she had come.

She had no home to return to.

Still, she could have spent her week of freedom in Hermiha, or even traveled to Stohess early. She could have walked the boulevards, ornate bridges, and plazas of the rich Wall Sina cities, perhaps spending some of her military pay on a hearty meal or two. She could alternatively have spent her time productively, using her free time and new privileges of military access to further her information-collecting mission. Yet, she had chosen instead to pay for the ride by mail caravan to Wall Rose's easternmost settlement, a city with little recreational appeal, to which she had no connection…

Here she was, wandering the streets of Karanes in the late afternoon sun with only a family name for guidance. For the first time in years, she had no orders to follow, no training regimen or curfew to adhere by. If anything, she desperately missed the structure, the constant demands of some task that she could occupy her mind with. She could only look on as she passed masses of people doing things that she had never experienced—children clustered around a corner candy booth licking sweets, a girl sitting on the steps of her home squinting at a lesson book, a father and son playing some game with wooden pieces. The smells changed from block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood—cured meat, tanned leather, livestock, the smoke of wood stoves and hearths.

She still couldn't shake the image of Shiganshima from her head.

Her legs had begun to tire from all the walking when she finally found the help she was looking for at a cobbler's shop along the central road of the city. An older man, with graying hair and a face set with the sort of kind wrinkles that only a lifetime of smiling could bring about, stood from his workbench, stepped into the street, and pointed her towards the right section of the city. Of all the people she had met so far, his expression had been the only one that had not darkened upon hearing her question. Rather, he had nodded understandingly, his eyes warm and twinkling. Before she had left his storefront, he had explained that he had a daughter in the Scouting Legion.

The sun had fallen behind the level of the inner gate by the time Annie arrived at the two-story house with the green door that the cobbler had described. The road in this neighborhood was not even paved—soft dirt yielded slightly beneath her boots as she rounded the corner. The houses were draped in the shadow of the inner wall, and the street seemed subdued despite the small but loud crowd at the draper's shop midway down the block.

That was where Annie froze.

What was she thinking? Why had she come here, of all places? What did she want? Why was she here, in front of the house where Mina Carolina had grown up? How had she gotten here without thinking? Was it a need to honor the memory of a girl who had died too young, too early? Was it her own guilt, her ever-living horror at what she was helping others to do?

Annie was afraid—no, terrified—of herself, of whatever had possessed her to make this journey. She became aware of the strong, growing urge telling her to turn and walk away from this foolishness. Inexplicably, she remained there, rooted to the corner, eyes fixed on the squat house with the green door with the drying clothes strung across the street from an upper window. It was a summer afternoon, but Annie felt profoundly cold.

Had she lost her senses completely? It had been beyond stupidity to come here—what a tremendous waste of the caravan fees and of her own time. How had she ever let her emotions get the better of her like this?

Outwardly, she'd always been the most distant of them all. Had her father been watching them this entire time, she would have seemed like the best of the young warriors—completely detached from their enemies, emotionless and ruthless, utterly dedicated to their mission. In reality, however, it was Bertholt that had always felt the greatest sense of resolve. He'd been the one strong enough to laugh and joke with the others while planning with Annie and Reiner how they would breach the gates of Wall Rose at Trost. Annie, however, had done her best to avoid others primarily out of fear, not just out of cold necessity. Despite her father's constant mantra to shun all attachments to those within the walls, she'd found it just as difficult as Reiner had to maintain the mask. She'd been the one that had accidentally revealed something about their past, when she'd mentioned her martial arts training in passing. She'd gone out of her way to offer to train Eren in her fighting techniques. She'd even sought to convince the other trainees not to join the Scouting Legion—out of a genuine concern for their lives, and partly out of her horror at the prospect of having to face them in battle.

"Those of you who choose to join the Legion will participate in a scouting expedition outside the walls one month from now," she remembered the Scouting Legion's commander declaring. He'd already looked like a ghost in the glittering torchlight.

Armin, Jean, Connie … she kept telling herself that she could bring herself to kill them all if it came to that. After all, all of them without exception would die anyway when the walls inevitably fell. Three weeks from today, though, would she really feel nothing when the time came to erase Christa beneath her heel, or when she was forced to snatch Sasha from the air as the mountain girl swung in to attack the nape of her titan? Almost every night since she'd been informed of the expedition, and ever since she'd learned that twenty of her classmates had joined the Scouting Legion, she'd lain awake trying her best not to think about who she'd have to kill or how they would have to die. They were doomed, she reminded herself. They were all dead already. The walls had to fall.

Yet look where she was now…

The crowd outside the draper's had noticed her presence, and Annie saw the shoppers glancing at her furtively with mixed expressions. Their stares were just enough to return the feeling to Annie's legs, and she willed herself to step away. There was nothing she could gain from staying here, much less from walking up to knock on this door that she'd traveled hundreds of miles to reach. Instead of taking a few steps back, however, Annie's feet carried her forwards involuntarily. She wondered vaguely if she were dreaming.

Suddenly, a voice came from the porch of the house on Annie's side of the street, "Are you looking for someone, dear?"

Annie spun to see Mina's mother standing up from where she'd been sitting with two other women on the deck, cups of tea before them on a small table.

Annie had recognized her instantly. Mina's mother had Mina's black hair and the same grey eyes, though they were shaped differently. She was also short—just a little over Annie's height. Mina must have been taller than her. A dirty apron was tied around her neck.

Annie became aware that her own eyes were wide, and that the feeling had vanished from her fingers and toes.

She could have escaped easily with a polite but evasive answer, stepped away never to return. Instead, Annie swallowed, her mouth dry, and asked quietly,

"Are you Mina Carolina's mother?"

The woman froze, then nodded stiffly. Her face was turning white as she put a hand to her heart and said in a subdued voice, "I am, yes. May I suggest… that we talk at my house…?"

Annie nodded, her heart pounding, then followed as Mina's mother walked down the steps to lead the young soldier across the street to the building with the green door.

Mina's house was crowded but comfortable. Recalling what Mina had told her about her family, Annie remembered that Mina's father was long dead, a victim of the great epidemic. Her mother made a small living as a washerwoman. Indeed, almost every square foot of space not occupied by furniture was crowded with bags and baskets of dirty and clean clothes, stacked in organized piles along the sides of the rooms, and more bags hung from the ceiling and walls. Judging by the quantity of dirty clothing filling the house, she had fallen far behind on the washing in the last weeks. A clear area had been left around the dining room's hearth, table, and stove.

The room was extremely warm, and Annie removed her leather uniform jacket before sitting down in the chair that she'd been offered. Mina's mother had pulled another chair back from the table, yet she remained standing, her face and posture uneasy and marked by her recent grief.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs leading to the second floor. Annie turned to see a young girl, perhaps eight or nine, peer timidly into the dining room before vanishing back upstairs. She was a shade lighter-haired than Mina had been, but the resemblance was unmistakable.

"Mina's sister Susanne," Mina's mother said softly.

She looked back at her young visitor, her grey eyes studying Annie with a wary gaze. She wiped her hands nervously on her apron, even though her palms were already dry and very clean. Mrs. Carolina took several steps towards the stove. "You must be hungry. Can I offer you anything to eat?"

"No thank you, I've already eaten," Annie lied.

Mina's mother nevertheless rummaged about the counter, collecting several containers. She opened the oven door, removing a roll of bread from several loaves stored inside. Walking around the table to Annie's side, she placed the plate in front of the girl, adding a small helping of precious butter from a jar.

Annie felt overwhelmed at the gesture. That spoonful of butter was worth more than what Mina's mother had likely earned all day. She looked up at the older woman and murmured what must have been an unintelligible thank-you. Suddenly embarrassed, Annie hoped dearly that her expression had conveyed at least some of the gratitude that she felt.

Mrs. Carolina seemed to acknowledge Annie's bungled thanks, yet her eyes, while very kind, were clouded with indecipherable emotion as they looked down at her. That was when Annie suddenly remembered that Mina had sat in this very chair countless times, eating from this same table. She had likely helped her mother with the cooking, tended the hearth and the stove in winter, worked side-by-side with her family to organize, stack, and hang the washing…

Was Annie causing Mina's family pain with her visit? Had she inadvertently reopened the still-fresh wounds of recent grief by reminding Mina's mother of her lost daughter?

"You must be one of Mina's friends?" Mrs. Carolina chose that moment to ask.

Annie nodded up at her. Inside, she flinched at the question. Mina had been beyond a doubt a friend to her… but had she ever truly been a friend to Mina?

When Annie replied, she was surprised at how strange her own voice sounded. "I knew Mina since our first day of training."

Mina's mother let out a small sigh, and her eyes glazed over for a moment. Suddenly, Annie had a strong feeling that the older woman was lost in the memory of the day Mina had left for the trainee corps—the last day she had ever seen her daughter. A long moment passed.

"What's your name, dear?"

Annie swallowed. "Annie Leonhart."

"Annie…" Mrs. Carolina repeated. She placed a hand on the tabletop as though to steady herself. Her gray eyes stared once more into Annie's.

"I can't thank you enough for coming here, Annie…" she began, "I thought that I would never find out… the families of the dead almost never hear anything, and the military only cares enough to post the lists of names…" Her voice broke.

Struck, Annie tried to imagine what it might have been like to stare up at the bulletin of names, hoping desperately that the name of your oldest daughter would be nowhere to be found. Few things could possibly be as cruel as believing that your child was alive and happy, only to learn that all your worst fears had come to pass and that your beloved baby was gone forever, never to return. Upon seeing that name written among the lists of the dead, you were forced in a single instant to relinquish irrevocably the whole set of dreams and hopes you had ever imagined. Mrs. Carolina would never open the door to greet her daughter, now grown, standing on the doorstep proudly in uniform. She would never watch as Mina earned a promotion before an applauding audience of fellow soldiers. She would never see Mina marry a husband on a bright summer's day, nor would she live to see Mina care for her tenderly and lovingly in her old age.

Looking up at the older woman, Annie could see the toll of these realizations written clearly across her features. Mrs. Carolina was still young, no more than forty, yet her eyes could have belonged to someone far older. Her face, pale and ghostlike, made her look as though a part of the mother had died with the daughter.

Annie reflected numbly that if she herself were to die behind these walls, her own father might well never learn of her fate. He would go on waiting until the end of his days, ever consumed with guilt, hoping for a reunion and for words of forgiveness that would never come…

Had Mina's mother begged Mina too to promise that she would return home?

Mina's mother had recollected herself, her eyes shining. She gestured to the plate sitting in front of Annie, urging her, "Please, have some bread. There's no need to be polite."

At her insistence, Annie broke off the end of her loaf of bread, spread a small amount of butter on it with her fingertip, and took a bite. The black rye bread was warm, rich, and flavorful, hearty yet not too coarse. For a girl who had lived almost her entire life on military and refugee rations, this was far and beyond the best bread she had ever tasted.

Annie turned to Mrs. Carolina. "Thank you… it's excellent."

A small smile briefly rested on the young mother's face before numb sadness overcame it once more.

As Annie ate another piece of bread in silence, she became acutely aware of the nature of the conversation that was about to happen. There were questions that Mina's mother was waiting anxiously to ask, things that she wanted to hear. At this moment, however, Annie could barely piece together how she had ended up here in this house, much less what she planned to say to Mina's parent. Suddenly, Annie felt profoundly guilty that she was here, sitting in Mina's place, eating her mother's food, while Mina was nothing but a few handfuls of ash and bone indistinguishable from the remains of her comrades, buried deep in the pit they'd dug in the land behind Wall Maria. For a horrifying moment, she had a waking dream that the bread was made of ashes, that she was chewing on the charred remnants of fallen soldiers. The rye bread instantly lost all flavor in Annie's mouth, and she struggled with a powerful urge to spit it out and run madly from this house of grief.

Feeling Mrs. Carolina's eyes on her, however, Annie managed to conjure up enough of her trained stoicism and resolve to hide the signs of her discomfort. Fighting against the tight lump in her throat, Annie swallowed the mouthful of bread with a shudder.

Bent over the table, Annie breathed with difficulty, her chest tight and her stomach churning with nausea. Her face felt totally numb, a prickling sensation spreading painfully across her cheeks and around her eyes.

She remembered. She remembered walking past Nack Tius's mangled body, across pavestones stained brown with blood. Her boot and brushed the broken blade of a 3DMG sword, pushing it slightly across the ground with a metallic clink. Broken windows. A collapsed wall where a titan had fallen and evaporated. That was when she'd seen it—the same pigtails, the same slim figure, the same collared shirt—but a gaping hole in place of the pretty, kind face she'd known in life… Annie had wanted to scream, to look away, but she had stood there motionless, letting the sight burn itself forever into her memory…

Annie didn't look at Mina's mother. She stared straight across the table at the lit hearth and murmured the same words she'd gasped out that day, then later that night as a pyre had reached towards the stars:

"I'm sorry… I'm so sorry…"

She heard Mrs. Carolina sniff, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw the woman waver, clutching the side of the table tightly.

"I don't know what to say…" Annie began, only to hear her voice trail off into silence. For a moment, all she could hear was the crackling of the fireplace and the soft rustle as Mrs. Carolina raised a handkerchief to her face.

Finally, Annie said softly, "I was the one that found her afterwards."

A hand still clutching the square of cloth suddenly clutched Annie's shoulder, its grip gentle yet somehow desperate.

"How did she die?" Mina's mother asked. "Please… I beg you not to lie to me about Mina… tell me the truth about what happened…"

Annie stared at her, her eyes wide. How could she tell her the truth? Why had she begun by choosing to talk about this, of all things?

"I wasn't in Mina's platoon that day," Annie answered slowly, "but I heard the story from her squadmate…"

She looked away from Mina's mother. There was no way that she could bear looking into her eyes any longer, not when she, Annie, had coldly agreed to the plan that Reiner had put forth on the night before the graduation ceremony. She, Annie, had distracted the sentries while Bertholt had crossed the wall to break the gate, letting in the titans that had killed Thomas, Mina, Marco, Nack, Franz, and so many others...

"…her squad was maneuvering near a group of titans in the city," Annie continued. She was staring determinedly at a stool in the corner, intently avoiding Mrs. Carolina's gaze. "A titan caught her wire, and she lost control and hit a wall. Then…"

Mina's mother gasped and put the handkerchief to her mouth, as though she were witnessing the events firsthand. Involuntarily, Annie looked up to see her face turning white, her shoulders trembling.

"…then the same titan grabbed her around the chest, and—" Annie had to avert her eyes once more as she finished, "—it bit her through the head. She died immediately." Or at least Annie hoped she had. It had been a double mercy. Not only had Mina died quickly, without excessive suffering, but it had been impossible for Annie to tell what her last expression of terror and despair might have been. Yet that gaping wound had been even worse in many ways…

One night during training, Mina, sitting in her usual spot at supper across from Annie, had noticed that the other trainee was being particularly unresponsive that evening, and she'd begun asking Annie questions, wondering if something was wrong. Irritated, Annie hadn't answered, and Mina had switched tacks to trying to elicit any kind of response from her. Determinedly, she'd begun making progressively sillier faces across the table, doing her very best to provoke laughter or even a smile from the other girl. The entire cafeteria had eventually caught on—an amused Ymir had moved to their table to watch, smirking. Annie remembered Reiner whispering something to Armin, who had shaken his head wryly in reply. Finally, an especially distorted expression by Mina had broken Annie's composure, and she'd let out a single chuckle, upon which the room had burst into cheers and applause.

Annie came to her senses and noticed that Mina's mother had turned to the window. She seemed to be focused on the darkening street outside, but her eyes indicated that her mind was somewhere far away. Tears glistened on her face.

"She was well loved by everyone," Annie offered hesitantly, "and very brave—"

Mina's mother cut her off. "Her last letter said… she really was going to join the Scouting Legion, wasn't she?" Her voice shook.

Annie did not reply. After a few moments, Mrs. Carolina turned to her and asked quietly, "Was she happy in training, especially in those last weeks?"

Annie nodded, folding her arms on the table. "Everyone was. Everyone was excited to finally graduate…"

She raised her head. "Mina was usually cheerful. She was always encouraging and friendly to others, and she worked very hard to do her best."

Mina had never been near the top of their class. Her 3D maneuver gear skills and academic testing had been average, though her level of physical fitness had been high. Her hand-to-hand scores in particular were quite poor, and she'd never been much of a leader. Nevertheless, she would have made an excellent soldier—cool-headed, resourceful, committed, and quite brave. She'd always confronted each training exercise, no matter how dangerous or intimidating, with the same expression of grim resolution and determination.

As Annie continued speaking, her mind wandered ever further back through their years of training together. Three years—the time seemed to have passed by so fast, yet simultaneously, it felt as though the first day of service had taken place an age ago…

"She made many friends—I think she was very happy in the trainee corps," Annie recalled. "She almost never complained about anything. Except for the food, which we all hated…" She felt something like a smile on her lips for an instant.

She remembered a night when she'd lain awake in her bunk, listening to the other girls gossiping away. When Hannah had attacked Annie's training attitudes and icy personality, Mina had risen to defend her, asserting against general disbelief that Annie was actually a warmer person than she seemed, and that she could even be funny from time to time. Annie hadn't been hurt in the slightest by hearing what others thought of her, but she had been touched somewhat by Mina's insistent loyalty. What had she, Annie, ever done to earn such esteem in Mina's eyes?

Another memory swam to the surface of Annie's mind, and she added, "Mina talked about home and her family a lot to the rest of us. She was hoping that she'd be stationed in Karanes, so that she could help look after things."

Mina's mother had placed a hand over her heart again. "Bless her…" Visibly swaying where she stood, she exclaimed softly, "she was always such a responsible child… especially after Otto died…" Mrs. Carolina closed her eyes, sending a pair of droplets down her cheeks.

Annie's conversations with Mina, if you could call them that, had always been so one-sided. Perhaps rightly confident that Annie would never reveal a secret, Mina had sat alongside her on many a night confiding her dreams and fears to her fellow trainee. Her hidden crush on Jean Kirschstein, her distant hope of joining Annie among the top 10 of the class, her worry that she would fail a crucial exercise and be sent home… Annie had sat and listened, never sharing in kind.

…And then there had been the constant compliments. Mina had raved constantly about Annie's hair, her hand-to-hand skills, her blade technique, even praising Annie's no-nonsense attitude as refreshing and honest.

Yet through it all, Mina had always respected Annie's solitary nature. It had seemed as though the girl possessed some sixth sense that prompted her to leave Annie alone most of the time, only to swoop in and keep her company the moment she detected that Annie wouldn't mind.

Suddenly, Mina's mother straightened, frowning slightly as though something had occurred to her. "Is your family from around Karanes too, Annie? Is that how the two of you became friends?"

Caught by surprise, Annie couldn't reply for an instant. Thoughts of her father and of the simple log home in which she'd grown up raced momentarily through her mind. Then her honed mental defense returned, and she clung tightly once more to the familiar lies that had long protected her.

Looking down at the rough wooden floorboards, Annie shook her head. "I grew up outside Wall Rose. My family is dead."

Mina's mother looked away as well. "I'm so sorry to hear that…"

Then, realization lit her eyes, and she turned to stare directly at Annie, shocked. "So you used your enlistment leave… and you came all this way—just to find our family…?"

It was true. It was undeniably true. In the time that she'd been sitting at the table, Annie had finally figured out why a part of her had felt such a strong need to come here, against all logic and against her own better judgment.

"I never had the chance to thank her," Annie said simply, "for everything. For being a friend to me."

Were those tears, suddenly threatening to flood her eyes? Her heart felt as though an invisible hand had wrenched it into a quarter turn.

No. Annie couldn't show tears. She couldn't afford to show weakness. It wasn't a matter of her composure, but rather her fear of what would happen if she couldn't maintain it. If Annie started crying here, or showed the slightest outward sign of anything more than the most distant grief or sadness, the kind-looking woman standing in the room with her might be moved to place a hand on her back to comfort her, or even to envelop her in a hug. Resolutely, Annie stared with even greater intensity at the crooked wooden planks, hiding her face from view as she fought to regain control of herself. She hoped desperately that Mina's mother would choose that moment to turn her back, so that she could mop at her eyes with her sweatshirt's sleeve.

Annie had done her duty to Mina. She could dash for the door now without any serious regrets. In a day, she could be hundreds of miles from here, well on her way towards resuming her grim mission without further doubts or distractions. Deep inside, Annie felt now that coming here had been right, yet enough was enough. Far more blood would be spilled by her hands in the weeks and months and years to come, and if she failed to learn to come to terms with that reality soon…

But by Maria, what had they done? Mina was dead and gone, irrevocably gone. All three of them had always known that there were many within the walls that deserved far better than death and suffering… Mina most of all! Was their secret agenda, their enmity with the high powers within the walls, really worth such a cost? Too young to die… too good to die… too loved by friends and family… They had not only robbed Mina of her future, but also subjected her to the most terrible death that this harsh world had to offer. She had died still almost a child, remembered only by those close to her, never to see the tiled roofs of her hometown again.

How many innocent lives like hers was their mission worth?

She felt as though the surface of her entire body was painfully numb. She couldn't feel her fingers, even as she clenched them into fists. Her lungs felt like they were in spasms, and her breath came in forced shivers.

There had been no use resisting at all. In defiance of her best efforts, a few solitary tears fell from Annie's eyes onto the wood floor, shattering like glass as they reached the ground.

Footsteps echoed through the room, and a pair of warm arms wrapped themselves around Annie's shoulders. Her face, pressed against that worn apron, was immediately assaulted by the smell of smoke, freshly baked bread, a hint of mint tea…

Almost as immediately, Annie felt a wave of emotion rise up inside her. This well-meaning physical contact hurt more than anything Annie had ever experienced. A raging guilt was bursting into flame within her chest, scorching and consuming her gut with a sharp, piercing pain. Guilt beyond description. She was numb with guilt, her limbs sluggish and unresponsive, barely able to feel the arms holding her. It dawned on Annie that not only had she been an accomplice to Mina's death, but she was now accepting this embrace from her mother as a salve for her own selfish regret. Her remorse grew once more, churning and bubbling, and Annie struggled desperately to contain its outward signs, disguising her self-horror as mere grief.

She was a terrible person. Even the world's coldest murderers and criminals shrank from the thought of facing their victims' families, yet she, Annie, had come here to be held by the same arms that had gently rocked an infant Mina Carolina.

One day, they would all find out what she had done, what she was, and when that day came... Even this kind woman would recoil in loathing at the memory that she had once welcomed a monster into her home.

Knowing what she did, how could she keep sitting there, mute, passively accepting Mrs. Carolina's best efforts to comfort her?

The worst part of it was, a lonely part of Annie was fervently wishing that this moment would never end. She no longer had any memory of what her own mother's embrace had felt like. The last time that anybody had ever held her like this, her father had been clutching her on the night of her departure, as though he could keep her with him by the sheer force of his love and worry. The warm arms wrapped around her neck allowed her to imagine that, for an instant in time, someone inside the walls cared for her, understood her.

She could even almost begin to pretend that she was being forgiven.

At the same time, another part of her reeled, revolted at the depths of her pathetic delusion. Nobody had ever understood who Annie really was—not any of the other trainees, not Reiner, not Bertholt, not even her own father. She was utterly alone, just like she'd always been. Lost, struggling to survive, and wondering if there was even a shred of meaning to this existence.

Rye flour, laundered clothes, a mother's arms—Annie, trapped in Mrs. Carolina's arms, inhaled the scents of a world she'd never known. A world that she'd shattered forever with grief and loss. Together, the smells hinted at the true extent, the vast, incomprehensible sheer magnitude of the countless life experiences that she and her fellow titan-shifters had torn apart, destroying the innumerable, infinite loves, dreams, and memories of thousands upon thousands.

Where would it end?

OOOOO

Annie left the house early the next morning, before the sun had risen. In the waning hours of the moonless night, the streets of Karanes were cold and lifeless. Every window was dark, and it felt to her as though the whole city was holding its breath, frozen in time apart from the single living girl crossing the street, a knapsack slung across her back by one shoulder.

The crisp click of her boots on the pavestones echoed down the road. Once again, Annie was alone, returned to the familiar half-comfort of her usual solitude. On a sudden whim, she turned her head to look at the eastern boundary wall. It rose, blacker than the night, drawing the line of its ramparts against the dark blue of the sky. Annie knew that, if she wished, she could scale Wall Rose in less than a minute in her titan form. In six hours, she could be at Wall Maria's southern gate. She could be back on her father's doorstep in less than a day. Home. No more mission, no more deception, no more death.

But that was a total fantasy.

Annie stared up at the stars for a long moment. Beyond the wall, the names of the constellations were different, and she remembered listening with amusement to Armin as he'd pointed them out to them all one night, calling them by unfamiliar names, recounting their odd stories.

That one had been a dog, which had waited for its lost master night after night, until angels and spirits had lifted it into the sky out of pity.

The group of stars below it had been a queen that had leapt from the wall after the death of her son—the dull cluster of lights surrounding her represented her tears, suspended alongside her in her eternal fall.

Annie knew the Queen instead as the Martyr—a young hero who had fallen long ago in the first war against the titans. She lay in the heavens surrounded by her shimmering blood, refusing to die until she saw some small hope that mankind would one day overcome its foe. On that day, it was said, the fourteen stars in that part of the sky would fall, and fourteen heroes would be born on earth to reconquer the world.

Those stars had not moved in two hundred years.

Annie, you're actually a kind person, aren't you?

At the corner, Annie looked back briefly at the house where Mina Carolina had grown up. Annie had left a note on the table, together with the small collection of Mina's things that she'd brought to Karanes—a brush, a battered pen, some blue hair ribbons, a folding knife, an embroidered coin purse. She hoped that the objects would bring whatever hoped-for closure that her own words had not succeeded in providing. That box of belongings had followed Mina from home three years ago. Annie was sure that Mina would have liked knowing that it had been returned.

In the end, however, Annie had left one object to herself as a keepsake. The graduation badge that Mina would have received sat, cold and angular in Annie's uniform pocket.