STOHESS BERG NEWSPAPER

ISSUE OF JUNE 21, YEAR 850

"RIPPED FROM THE HANDS OF JUSTICE" – KENNY ACKERMAN PARDONED BY ROYAL DECREE - by Peaure Faerber

Unprecedented actions abound in the capital today, true believers; just this Tuesday, fresh off of the military-backed coup that dethroned Mitras' corrupt nobility and the battle against the monstrous Mangled Titan in Orvud District, Queen Historia extended forgiveness to one Kenny Ackerman, colloquially (and fearfully) referred to as Kenny the Ripper. Such an act has perplexed many among the public, press, and even the military's higher echelons, for not all were included in the joint chiefs' session that decided the Ripper's fate. The Scout Regiment will be taking Ackerman as their ward, with Eren Yeager himself assigned to rein him in should his entrenched proclivities rear their heads. Once inducted into Levi Squad, Ackerman will be under the command of Captain Levi and, ostensibly, will become another of the Scout Regiment's greatest weapons in their continued plight beyond the Walls. Some would say affording such a position to him flies in the face of reason and decency itself; Ackerman's crimes are well-known and increasingly numerous as the secrets of the old guard are revealed. On his hands is the blood of countless Military Police, Scouts, and ordinary civilians, which some whisper includes the Queen's own mother, all of which he cut down with efficiency enough to make a Titan blush. And yet, there are others who believe that the upcoming mission of the Scout Regiment, reclaiming Wall Maria and all of the lands therein, will require the sweat and blood of every fighting man that can ride a horse. With rumors of Mr. Ackerman holding his own against Captain Levi himself, and further insinuations by sources reputable and disreputable that Mr. Ackerman is descended from a nigh-superhuman line of warriors that protected the King of the Walls in antiquity, the argument is brewing that Mr. Ackerman's forced enlistment in the Scouts may be the difference between victory and defeat in the battles to come.

But will such a change of heart come to pass? Or will it be shown that the blackest hearts among us can never lose their filth? No one can say for sure, dear readers, but from all of us here at the Berg, we look forward to finding the truth as much as all of you. May we do it together!

Addendum : Let it be known that the opinions disclosed herein do not reflect those of the Stohess Berg Newspaper, its employees, or its official corporate stance on any issues described above. We stand, as we always have, with the facts as they unfold. - Roy Schmidt

"They didn't," Flegel Reeves breathes, dumfounded, as he reads the article in Trost District.

"They didn't," says Magda Kirschtein, ten miles down the road from him.

"They didn't!" shouts Lord Valt on his pristine plot of Sina land.

"They didn't," Mr. Ral whispers, fresh from a visit to his daughter's headstone.

"They didn't," rasps Artur Braus, when his wife reads him the news on their Wall Rose acreage.

"They didn't," growls Floch Forster, in the crowded Garrison Regiment barracks on Ehrmich District's west edge. Twenty other Garrison soldiers mill around him, all newly-returned from their battle at Orvud District. Each of them jostles with another trying to get a look at the paper even though he's just read it out loud.

They all start to argue at once. You can hear it outside, too, on the street.

"What, they're saying recruitment's a fifth of what we were hoping?" Connie says, leaning against a worn wooden fencepost at Armin's right. The meadow Historia's farm had been built inside of spreads out before them under a cloud-belted sunset; tall grasses and pastel flowers crop up around patches of bare dirt where the horses here often tread. The rest of Squad Levi's scattered across the plot; Eren, Mikasa and Jean work away on dinner in the rough-hewn, squat farmhouse, Sasha pouts outside where she was no doubt exiled for snatching bits of beef for the stew when Jean wasn't looking, and Historia, the Queen of the Walls herself, stomps through the shrubs and dirties her dress playing with a few rogue children. The picture the world's painting for Armin is one he wishes he could hang in his head for a long time. It's quiet, and wonderful, but the last four months have trained him to be cautious of those two things put together. There's another storm coming, with the Wall Maria operation on the way. You can see it in the sun; a gleaming disk of glory, steadily retreating.

"That's what Commander Erwin tells me we're working with," he replies. "But don't quote me on that. He hasn't written an official report, and even if he had, he's stuck politicking with the other joint chiefs and the press and others right now. Hange off to question the Commandant, Levi still in the capital . . . I'd be lying if I said these weren't some difficult straits we've found ourselves in." He itches at his scalp, the sun falling right into his face and pressing beads of sweat from the skin. Connie raises a slender eyebrow.

"Well, you're the big-brain," says the other boy. "Do you think he's right? Erwin, I mean."

"About Kenny or about our recruits?"

"Fuck, both." Connie's face twitches at that, his brow hooding his eyes in triangles of shadow. Of the seven of them (six, he has to remind himself (no, wait, it is technically seven, now that they have a demented serial killer on their Squad)), Connie's easily the most candid with his disdain for Kenny. They haven't been introduced to their new teammate, as Erwin had thought it best they be sequestered here until the media spectacle around this died down ("we respect all of your feelings regarding the Queen's choice, soldiers, but we cannot let those feelings reach the public and taint the narrative the Scouts are currently creating"), but it would've been naive to expect them not to speak about it amongst themselves. Eren's bewildered, Mikasa's introspective, Sasha's fearful, Jean's ambivalent, Connie's angry . . . Armin's something. The situation keeps rolling over in his head like a dragon, its belly crusted with new aspects, new factors, new outcomes that make coming to a single decision complicated.

"Really, I don't know." He tells Connie as much, showing him the palm of his hand before he sticks it back into the pocket of his pants. "The issue with recruitment is a foregone conclusion. There are too many people who lost family to Kenny, too many soldiers in whose eyes we've just thrown our reputation on the fire. Add to that that he worked for the Reiss family, the same family we just helped oust and who the public know tampered with their memories . . . he's a symbol for everything they hate. Whether or not Kenny should've been executed like we all thought he would be? That's . . . not for me to decide, I suppose. If he can help us take back Wall Maria, I'm willing to suspend my own thoughts on human decency." Golden eyes slit, and there's a hard knotting that forms at the hinges of Connie's jawbone.

"Sure, Arm, but this guy . . ." he mutters, gaze fixed upon the sunset. "This guy murdered our friends. Nifa and Keiji and Dimo Reeves, the rest of the Scouts that died in Trost . . . he's an animal. We kill Titans without a second thought, but at least they can't help it. He likes it. He's the same kind of bully as those kids that used to beat you up when you were little. And you're telling me you're solid, that this shit doesn't bother you?"

It's hard to answer him, chiefly because Armin can't answer that for himself either. Can't reconcile. When he'd heard Kenny was to have a trial, when he'd heard he survived at all, there were hateful jabs that formed on his tongue. Skewering insults for a man who deserved them in his throat. But they stayed where they were, because as much as he'd wanted to shout Murderer right along with Connie, all he could do is picture a cart rumbling under his feet, the shattering of everything he thought he knew as warm blood splashed Armin's face and did not evaporate.

"Of course it bothers me."

"Hey, man, I didn't mean to shake you up. Sorry."

"Don't worry about it."

"I'm just mad we don't have Ymir here, y'know? Girl might've talked some sense into Her Highness before it was too late."

"Connie, you hated Ymir."

"She saved my ass at Utgard. Think I can demote her to mild annoyance . . . I wonder where she is right now."

"Me too."

He's about to respond when the bell over the front deck of Historia's cabin rings, a brassy, tinny sound over the dim buzz of crickets from the bushes. Even from this distance, they can both see Sasha's head whip around with a canine alertness as she stalks back towards the house. Historia, too, turns from her spot in the field and shouts something at them, too far away to make out. Connie just sighs and grins into that stark swirl of light in the clouds. "Well, let's hope Eren and Jean could stop fighting long enough to help out," Armin says as they walk into the grass.

Connie's laugh echoes over the blue-green glade and into the coming dusk.

" . . . Yeah, Vice Captain Moblit's been writing to me," Eren says after dinner. Water rushes between his fingers as noise does into his ears. The stream cuts through the forest like a vein through meat, giving life to all of the generic matter around it. Its surface shimmers in the torchlight, and he imagines if that light were snuffed, the entire crust of the water would glow for the stars over their heads. Whether or not the beauty of it is lost on Historia isn't for him to say; her face is impassive, the corner of her mouth quirked up in thought. "Apparently they just started putting those Titan-smashing techs I helped make to use. Supposedly, they kick ass, but I'd have to see it myself to be sure. The Section Commander's working on a name for them. I dunno if the brass will go for 'Executioner From Hell' but . . ." Historia scratches at one of the clay bowls with her thumbnail and dips it back into the water, peeling away the last of the grime on that one and setting it down gently in the cloth sack they've brought with them.

"That's good," she says quietly. "You're able to use your hardening, then. To seal the hole in Shiganshina."

"In theory, at least," Eren replies. "There're still a lot of tests that Hange wants out of me. With everything going on in the capital, it might be a while before we get around to them. I feel confident about it, though; I was able to control it in the cavern enough to protect everyone, how much harder can it be to do that one more time?"

"You assume that you won't have anything in your way. That this is going to be an outright slam-dunk for the Scouts. Nobody knows what you're going to find out there, Eren. Or who." He polishes off a couple of plates with the tough ends of his knuckles, wiping away the excess water on his shirt. It's cold out tonight, and the wind would pick up when they went back to the cabin and stepped back onto that flat, flowered plain.

"I'm not going to slip up this time," he bites out, the words acidic. "If they're there . . . I'll put them down. For good this time. And besides, I have an Ackerman I'll be babysitting, anyway. Or, I guess he'll be babysitting me." Her face is swallowed by darkness as she turns her gaze from him, hiding in the shadows and her own honeyed bangs. The tiniest part of Eren wants to do that, too, wants to renege on the bloody promise he'd made Reiner and Bertolt even as he knows in his heart that there is no way forward but the one torn through them. But it's swallowed. Any mercy in his heart is devoured out of necessity. Maybe destiny hadn't chosen him for greatness and maybe he is just another person, but duty sits heavy in his lap all the same. Hatred for his enemies is just part of the job description. One more tool he has to carry to see this through to the end.

"I didn't make the right call, did I?" The trees reverberate Historia's words, carrying them high into their canopies and out beyond the darkened stands of pines. "Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm pretty sure my first official act as Queen was to shoot the Scout Regiment in the foot."

"What makes you say that?" Eren asks.

"Armin says we barely have twenty percent of the manpower we need. Nobody from the MPs joined up except that guy Marlowe. We have fifty from the Garrison. Another twenty-five from the public and maybe twenty from the 105th Cadets. It's not going to be enough."

"We've got three Ackermans, me, a dozen Scout veterans, Erwin and Armin on the tactical side of things–" She sighs, and scoffs, putting the last of the ugly iron forks back into her bag and standing.

"And what if you lose, huh? One transformation and Bertolt can obliterate every new recruit we've got. What about this Beast Titan? We had no idea what Annie could do until she was ripping Squad Levi apart. Who the hell knows what's in the Beast's arsenal? What it would take for us to have a defense against it? How many would have to die that we don't have?" She pinches her nose, and Eren notices the new exhaustion on her face for the first time. She looks like someone else, like an older, more bitter woman he'd seen in memories that might've been hers. "I can't . . . I can't have that on my shoulders. I wouldn't be able to handle all of you dying because of me."

"Well, fuck, Historia," he shoots back, suddenly annoyed. "Why the hell did you bother with Kenny, then, instead of just putting him under a guillotine and moving on?" The last few plates are scraped clean in short order, stacked securely within the roughspun cloth and hoisted over Eren's shoulder as they leave the slender river behind. Torchlight plays over the fronds of the trees, casting lurid, weird shadows over them like malignant spirits.

"Because I think Captain Levi is right," she says, breaking the spell of nothing but the crackling of fire and sticks snapping beneath their feet. "He has nothing left to live for, but that means we can make him live for anything. Eren, I've been him. People have spat on me my entire life. Since the day I was born, the world has been screaming at me that it'd be a happier one if I was dead. I've seen Kenny's life, when we . . . when we touched in the cavern. The Founder let me see it, just for a split second, through his eyes and through my uncle Uri's. The things that man's been through in the Underground, the– the abuse and the shit and the assaults on his soul . . . Even with everything that happened to me, I still got to feel the sun and the wind on my face." The trees begin to wear away, exposing the jagged edge of the field and Eren and Historia to the bite of the wind. It's a short walk back to the cabin, glowing orange through the windows from its hearth, but it's a cold one, too. Rustling in the air, the grasses chatter and add a kind of airy, ethereal feel to the world, like Eren could float away into the night, high above the Walls and disappear. "I told you before. If I see someone crying because nobody wants them, I can't ignore it. I thought I'd be helping him. Giving him purpose, and us a leg up on whatever we find in Shiganshina. But I've . . . I've fucked us, haven't I? And for something so silly." He shakes his head. The wind buffets Eren's bangs against his eyes.

"That's not something I can answer for you, Historia," he admits. "To be honest, I don't think that's the part that matters. Whyever you broke the dam, it's broken now. All we can do is ride the flood as best we can. Keep moving forward."

Jean can't sleep. He's dreaming of his mother stumbling blind on top of Wall Maria, wandering until the ivy that's surely crawling up the bricks even now covers the stone. In the guest bedroom of the cabin, sandwiched across Connie and halfway draped over Sasha, he wakes up, troubled. He dreams about his mother often, mostly in nightmares; they'd started in with a fury after the battle in Trost, strange otherworlds where the fight was lost, the Titans trampled gleefully over the place he'd been born, and they took what they wanted. That was the thing about having parents that're still above ground; he'd never say this out loud for fear of forever alienating Eren, Armin and Mikasa, but there's a certain power in having no living family. You're certainly freed from a lot of worry; what more can you lose if you've already been robbed of everything? And it's fairly likely that the three of them didn't have repetitive bad dreams anymore. No, that's an honor raised for him, and one with its own strength of spirit to invoke. At the end of the day, at least, when all of this shit's over, there'll be someone for him to go back to.

He pulls lanky limbs out from his more stunted comrades' and pads across the floor, careful not to step too quickly so as to avoid any alarming creaks in the wood. Historia snores on the couch loudly, almost as loud as Eren does from his spot in the main bedroom with Armin spreadeagled next to him. That puts him a bit more at ease, and with a few more swift dashes, he exits the house, takes one of the grizzled old chairs on the front deck for himself.

The world seems strange out here, swallowed by an all-encompassing quiet that only the flow of the breeze and the crickets and the occasional wicker from the stables breaks up. Nights in Trost used to feel like this sometimes, in the winters where the air bit with refreshing teeth. Jean used to stay up all night when he was little, watching the torches on Wall Rose flicker against the black pit of the sky, with much the same feeling in his heart that he has now.

It takes him a few moments to notice Mikasa out there with him, sitting on the steps, eyes drawn inexorably to some blue distance out by the mountains.

"Hey, Mikasa," says Jean. "What're you doing up?" Onyx flecks sparkle as she looks back at him, and entirely without his consent, his stomach starts to smolder with a nervous heat, excited particles banging against the inside of his skin. She usually has this affect on Jean, unless they're coordinating a strike on a Titan or actively being shot at. He's proud of himself for getting this far, in any event; he used to be so starstruck by Mikasa that one glance his way would make him flush and stutter and generally look like a throbbing tool. Mind you, he still is starstruck, and debatable a throbbing tool, but there's something to be said for not being obnoxious about it when she could probably pick up double his body weight.

"Couldn't sleep," she says shortly. "You either?" Jean rubs the back of his head where the brown stubble is most bristly. He crosses the deck in a moment and sits down next to Mikasa, though she barely looks up in favor of staring down a starless section of sky. At the edge of the field, the forest drinks up the darkness and melts in and out of the horizon's black cut. The shapes of them shift out there. Molded by the breeze.

"Just some bad dreams again," Jean admits. "I haven't gotten very good sleep in a while, and that was before this shit with Kenny and the fight with the MPs and . . . when I killed that person." Mikasa just sighs, flicks the flat of her palm his way.

"It gets easier," she murmurs.

"Isn't that . . ." Jean's tongue meanders, mozying through fields of prospective words. "Well, that's part of the problem, isn't it? How did it get so easy for you? I know Eren's always acted like a murder-machine, but you . . ." Mikasa looks at him for the first time since they started speaking, and abruptly all Jean's pride in resisting her charm takes flight from his head because even tired and war-weary, she looks so goddamn gorgeous that he can't hold her gaze. Or maybe that's his shame at implying she has some proclivity for killing. Curse his damn gut for burning like it does. His cheeks follow suit and he looks at the ground. "Sorry, that was low. I didn't mean it like that."

"As long as I can remember, it's never bothered me. Not since I was a little girl. Whenever we go into battle, I'm not really . . . surprised, if that makes sense. Everything that happens feels like something I've seen before. Captain Levi told me we would have to start cutting down people and I thought nothing of it. But apparently that's just coded into my blood."

"What," says Jean. "You mean because you're an Ackerman?" She nods, looking away from him again. There's a slight twitchiness to her movements, a series of tics in her eyes and her face that look strange for someone normally so in control of her body. Mikasa's gaze shifts again and again as nervous energy forces her to change her target.

"I thought my family was dead. Now I find out I'm related to a murderer. He's not that different from the men who killed my parents. To tell the truth, I don't give a damn about him, I know I spoke up for him at the trial but . . . he could know everything about where I come from. About why I'm like this." She flexes a bare arm his way, the bicep a boulder under her skin as it seizes and relaxes. "He could tell me . . . if all Ackermans end up like him." The light twitches ghost over her skin so lightly and so fast it's like they're not even there, or some kind of optical illusion, but on Mikasa's face, when she isn't talking to Eren or Armin, she might as well be weeping. "Maybe killing is all we're destined for."

Jean likes to think he's cautious. One of the things about himself he's most grateful to have is his respect for danger; it's kept him alive for the last four months, and that's more than could be said for hundreds of other people who didn't make it. There are people he can name that are considerably less observant when incredibly peril closes in (one in particular), and his whole life he's looked down on them. Thought they were suicidal or insane or both.

He starts to kick himself for his hypocrisy the moment his hand touches Mikasa's. He never would've imagined her instinctual tug away from him would be as half-hearted as this. Jean's heart starts to race.

"You are so much more than that, Mikasa," he says. "If it was some kind of genetic destiny for you to turn into a psycho, why wouldn't it have happened already? Wouldn't you have just taken me out the first time Eren and I ever got into a fight? You're so strong and all I've ever seen you do with it is protect people. When Reiner and Bertolt revealed themselves, you were the only one strong enough to go straight for the kill right there. Not because you enjoyed it, because Eren was standing right there and he needed help." For some stupid reason, Jean's brain betrays him, conjures the image of that day and the speed and fury with which Mikasa had come for the traitor's heads, how thoughtlessly she'd put herself between them and Eren. How she would never do that if it were him. "You're our flagship, Mikasa. Marco might've given me the credit for leading everyone to the armory in Trost, but I– we remember who it was that got our asses moving in the first place. You don't have all these complexes and guilt like the rest of us, you . . . just do things because they're right. Does that sound like Kenny the Ripper to you?"

The adrenaline is replaced by anxiety before long, a return to the burning in his stomach, and he lets go of Mikasa's hand with a blush that must've glowed. He must look like a fool–

"You really see me that way?"

Jean blinks, right into her genuinely-inquisitive face. The chapped fray on her lips. The black scar under her eye.

"How could I not?"

In the interest of not exploding from the explosives lit behind his ribcage from the way she looks at him, Jean hurries back inside and forces himself back to sleep as soon as he can. From behind the wall of strange dreams, he doesn't know when Mikasa retires to bed; all he's sure of is her gentle smile when Connie and Sasha's surprise breakfast for everyone fails due to an earsplitting argument over how much egg the recipe calls for, and the way the fatigue seems to have melted from her face.