main882: My author's notes from the previous chapter answer that question: "There will be three more chapters like this one before we return to when "An Eldian's Journal" left off, so hang in there! I felt it was important to establish Ymir more as the narrator before going back into Heinrich's military chase."
After this chapter, there will be two-three more with memory reviewing.
The Diary of A Young Girl
By Ymir Fritz
Entry #3
"Heinrich, you look like shit."
"Thanks, mama."
Heinrich returned home, and to greet him was his mother with a broom and dustpan. Rosa Steiner had reached the standard pudginess she would remain at for the rest of her years, and the trend of a permanently tied bun had already solidified. She closed the main door behind her as Heinrich walked into the home. I was left outside, but it did not matter. I phased through the entrance.
Heinrich dropped his backpack on the couch and reached for a cookie on the wooden kitchen counter. Rosa whacked his hand.
"No," she insisted. "You look like shit and smell like it."
"I know, mama."
"Normally I would blame your papa for that since you're half of him, but you're actually wearing shit for once." She pointed in the direction of the bathroom. "Go. We will wash it out before he comes back."
"Okay, mama."
"Okay, mama. Yes, mama. Do you have any more vocabulary?"
"No, mama."
Mother and son gathered in the bathroom. Rosa filled a bucket with water, ignoring the squealing pipes, and told Heinrich that washing excrement in a bathtub is never the optimal decision. Still, she did not want to risk doing it outside since people would see the obnoxious display, and ridicule would be inevitable.
Hair products were a luxury for average folk like the Steiners, so Rosa massaged some soap and water into Heinrich's hair and hoped for the best. She sat him down on the bathtub edge and kneaded his scalp like dough. She overdid it since she drenched her son's entire head with the bucket water and the poor lad coughed and gagged. Bucket handling seemed to be an art that did not make it through the passage of time, which felt ironic since water management was a keen focus of many to avoid extra costs.
"Mama, that hurts!"
"Too bad."
Sitting on an unoccupied stool near the sink, I listened to Rosa jabber about the drama and gossip that mothers in the area would toss to each other like entertainment. Even the light fixture above us could not bear the substance-less dialogue. Heinrich tried closing his ears at times, but Rosa would open them and keep blabbering like a sociopathic train of noise bruising people's ears.
I did not belong in this dynamic. I have felt the same way when spying on other Eldians' memories.
"Mama, your talking is making my ears bleed."
"Oh, stop being so dramatic!"
Rosa Steiner's abrasive attitude was far from amicable—luckily smoothened out by Heinrich's pre-teenage years—but I greatly envied her maternal love. I rarely received this brand of affection and could hardly provide it for my daughters Maria, Rosa, and Sina. Sometimes, when one of the three would stand by my legs and raise their arms, I would stare, puzzled about what they wanted. Then a maid would come over and carry the child in her arms.
Sometimes, my daughters just wanted to be held, but I could not even pick on the clues.
It is needless to say that titan abilities did not manifest maternal instincts in me.
Rosa Steiner washed her hands and put them on her hips, "Done." Heinrich skipped out of the bathroom to get a towel that looked more like a dog's chew toy than a cleaning cloth. He came back and dried his hair.
Rosa's abrasiveness thawed as she watched the towel practically swallow her kid's head due to its size, and the maternal love was revealed, clear as day, even in the small mole near the eyebrow. It endured and was unconditional regardless of the arsenal of masks she used for her emotions.
Rosa pinched the skin at her throat as she left the bathroom with Heinrich. "So, what did you do in class today?"
"We did a lot of things, but after lunch, I read the history textbook that papa and I looked over yesterday."
"That book is… truly a treat, isn't it?"
"My teacher made me teach the first lesson, and I told everyone how horrible Ymir Fritz was."
She fixated her gaze on a painting-less wall. "If Ymir was my daughter, I would give her a hug." She looked down at Heinrich and waved her hands, retracting her statement. She must have not wanted to confuse her son with her beliefs. "I'm just joking. She was a witch, a whore, a skank, a—"
"Mama, I'm eight years old."
A hug would be greatly appreciated, even from a "devil."
-X-X-X-X-X-
The evening lighting peppered the street in the next memory I flashed into. Men returning to their homes from whatever ludicrous jobs they had nearly knocked on their doors at the same hour.
Heinrich was sitting on the retired couch in his living room at home, slaving through some mathematics problems. I find it astounding how humans managed to make counting things more complicated than what pertained to real life. In the olden days, the fingers on our hands were sufficient when analyzing what quantity of livestock to kill for a meal. I did not need to know what fractions were.
While Heinrich was training his mind, Rosa was getting exercise by fighting a rat in the kitchen with a knife. "Come here you little shit." Those animals have persisted for centuries with their thieving ways.
Some mechanical twists and zips came from the main door. It creaked open to reveal Heinrich's father with a bag in his hand. He squawked like a bird, "Rosa!"
Rosa stabbed the rat, leaving the knife in the little corpse. "Oh great, the bigger rat came." She met her husband at the door, and Frederick Jr. appeared to be leaning in for a kiss, so Heinrich closed his eyes while saying, "Eww." Rosa snatched the bag from Frederick Jr.'s hands and left the man awkwardly standing with his eyes closed.
"Kiss that rat instead," Rosa said while looking in the bag and observing the pork chops.
"No fair. Is disrespect what I get for spending so much money on meat to cheer up Heinrich?"
After making sure no one was looking, Rosa hastily washed the rat's blood off the knife in the kitchen sink and shoved it in a drawer. She kicked the little corpse into the trash bin and wiped the faint blood trail away with a rag. "I'll deal with this later."
The next few hours passed with aromas that I could not smell floating in the air, fighting with the putrid scent of the rat corpse. Rosa put a clothespin on her nose as she cooked the pork on whatever pans she forgot to wash. Frederick helped Heinrich with his homework while making it a point to constantly adjust his hair to cover his receding temples.
When the cover of the night had arrived, Rosa arrived at the dinner table with a delicacy to cheer up Heinrich from all the bullying he had endured. She set the plates and utensils as the food's heat manifested as a visible trail that danced above the items.
Rosa asked while taking a seat next to her husband, "Why do you keep adjusting your hair like that? We know its starting to recede. Don't keep trying to hide it."
"It's not receding. My hair is just going through a phase, okay?" He pouted. "It's like the phase when teenagers get angsty and start wanting to join the military."
"That was an unnecessary comparison."
"Well, so are your comments, 'Mrs. I stabbed a rat myself since a mousetrap is too much work to set up.'"
"Okay, 'Mr. I don't want to work in a hospital because it is too much work.'"
Heinrich blasted in laughter, banging his fist near his plate. The way kids explode in joy for the most mundane of occurrences amuses me. This excitement interrupted the parents' bickering, and they all spent a moment giggling together. It was a warm giggle—I wish I could be a part of it.
Despite the family before me being idiots, it was still a family. It remained together, and they made the most of their piss-poor income and undesirable public reputation. Something held them closely beyond the paths. It was…admirable. But while they made their hearty banter, I was relegated to a corner near the dining table. The wall embraced me when I could not even embrace it.
That feeling throbbed again. Seeing all these joys that I could not directly be involved in caused me pain, and loneliness knocked on my crusade again. This solitude rang like an echo chamber that never stopped, where I was wrapped in a permanent pitch-noir twilight that felt like an eternity.
It was suffocating, unbearable, and collapsing. I was encased in my own imaginary breath like a bubble, floating in the turbulent rivers of a world that was alien—messengers that rode horses became newspaper children riding curved metal with wheels—farmland was overrun by gargantuan buildings spewing smoke instead of wheat—the times of warriors with predictable weapons grew obsolete in favor of skinnier men with monstrous weapons. I did my best to keep up with all of this. I had chosen to ride through the memories, after all.
But when I reached Heinrich, I could not bear the solitude anymore. There was absolutely nothing unique about this Eldian in his ripe years. He was equally clueless as an average child, wearing the same clothes, and combing his hair with the same parting. But he happened to be the Eldian whose memories I was scouring at the moment that I could no longer swallow the disconnectedness.
I had been alone for too long. I needed a friend. A "filthy devil" seemed to suffice, and the future I saw required me to converse with him regardless of my feelings.
I revealed myself to Heinrich, exposing my scrappy and disheveled clothing. I had worn that tattered headband and skirt for so long that they had become my new skin.
I sat on the chair next to Heinrich, doing my best not to fall through it. He was eating a pork chop, handling the bones like percussion mallets, and savoring between bites like musicians enjoying the applause after a successful concert. Who would have thought that all my problems were sparked by my decision to free a handful of swine?
Unlike a graceful percussionist, Heinrich dropped the bones onto the table, missing his plate. He released a delayed scream that threw the lack of equilibrium in the family atmosphere into even greater obscurity.
He noticed me, but his parents could not.
'I looked right to see a young blonde girl, around the same age as me, glaring at the pork in front of me. Under shock, I bit my tongue and let out a girly scream.'
I saw the young blonde boy in my peripherals, not nearly the same age as me, glaring with the incredulity I have witnessed people observe abuse and deaths.
"W-who are you?"
"I'm Ymir." I knew what Heinrich's lines were before he even said them. I knew his entire future.
"Oh, like t-the Goddess Y-ymir."
"No, I'm your imagination, so I'm basically useless…." Stop being so cynical, Ymir. You have acted like that for long enough. Practice joy, humor, and smiling, all things people have done at your expense. Do not be yourself anymore. Be a regular girl. "...But I don't mind you calling me goddess."
'As a result of getting beaten up all the time, I guess my brain created Ymir as a way to cope.'
No, Heinrich. Those points in your journal were incorrect. I was never a figment of your imagination, nor was I a method for you to cope with your bullies. It was a lie I would instill in you to protect my identity, and I served an extra entire bubbling pot of lies to make my presence seem believable to you.
That interaction was the first time I made a joke and the first time I could trick someone into believing I was something I was not. It was liberating, honestly, not having to be the slave I was known to be, but instead, something that did not follow the rules of others.
-X-X-X-X-X-
Heinrich finished his dinner by gnawing on the little bones as if he was a dog suctioning all the juices from the scraps. His teeth stamped like enamel-covered hammers. I hid again by that time, but my presence seemed to linger for the remainder of the meal since Heinrich was not entirely present while chewing: his eyes were set on a fork. He must have been calculating some numbers with the fingers of the utensil.
My interaction with Heinrich siphoned out the weight of loneliness temporarily. This seems to not make sense since I tapped into Heinrich's memories in the handful of moments leading to his doom. I should have known I would have that moment at the dinner table, but the fact is, I did know. There are some rules to this memory-scavenging journey that I have not yet discussed.
I will elaborate. The moment some Eldian gets killed in the rumbling, I would pass by them and be aware of the situations they experienced in life. So, when diving into the memories themselves, I always knew what the future would hold for the owner of the memories. But the paradox is that I would not know how those events would affect me until walking side by side with them.
In short, when I saw Heinrich get smothered, I knew I would talk to him in his younger years and be a companion, but I had no comprehension of why I engaged with him. I did not know what I was feeling or thinking in those moments of conversation either.
The Steiners cleared the table of dishes and waltzed to the kitchen in their hurried but careful ways. The trail of blood from the rat overstayed its welcome, and Rosa hopped over it like it was a little stream, or more accurately, she stepped over it. Hopping was too much activity for her.
Frederick Jr. noticed that his wife placed the "murder-weapon" back into the fresh set of dishes. He was about to complain like he usually would, starting with swooping his hair and wrinkling his nose. But instead of a complaint rushing out of his mouth came a child's statement:
"Papa, I'm going to the bedroom."
"Already? You haven't finished that math yet."
"I'm going to finish there." Heinrich grabbed his books and went to the bedroom, the only sleeping room in the house since they could not afford much else.
Heinrich pried the door open to the bedroom—the hinges were not oiled—and he set his books on his parents' bed before grabbing an item from the shelf: a baseball, the core of a baseball. The white skin of the spherical object retired over time and fell away like a shed feather.
Heinrich tossed the ball up and caught it with a singular hand, again, again, and again while fiddling with a lamp. He whispered mentally, "Useless Goddess? Imaginary Ymir? Where are you?" Heinrich went in circles like a spinning top. He was planning to spearhead me with that excuse of a sports item. "You're right there, aren't you?" His spinning paused facing the bedroom entrance, throwing the ball at the innocent door.
I was nowhere near the door. I was facing the boy's back.
"Heinrich, what are you hitting against the wall?" Rosa Steiner shouted from the living room.
"Uhh… I'm just banging my head, mama."
"This is why you keep getting bullied." She made an aside to Frederick, "Dammit, he's going to end up stupid like you."
Frederick replied, "Or ugly, like you."
Heinrich picked up the ball and set it back on the shelf. He then ripped a page from a notebook and crumpled it. "I know you're here somewhere," he said, nudging books aside.
Heinrich launched the paper ball throughout the room like he was playing a game of catch by himself, but he would reliably fail with each throw.
To cease the silly child's experiments, I revealed myself. Heinrich was in the process of leaning over to pick up the paper, and he looked upside down between his legs and shouted, "Ha! I found you!" He said it out loud instead of just in his head which would be enough for me to hear.
Rosa shouted back, "What? You found your papa's brain?"
Heinrich raised himself properly and kicked his paper ball aside. It rolled once before getting stopped by a bedpost.
I asked, "Will you stop throwing things?"
"No, I don't like you." (That was not the first time I heard that.) "You make no sense. Boys don't have imaginary friends. Only girls do."
"Too bad, I'm here anyway."
"Hmm…" Heinrich rushed to his small, disheveled bed and plopped onto the disordered sheets. He gathered his books and closed his eyes.
"I won't disappear just because you closed your eyes," I said, floating to him.
"Really? My mama told me that if I closed my eyes, the monsters would leave."
"I'm…not a monster." I forced myself to repeat it convincingly, "I'm not a monster."
"Well, the real you was. If you're better than her, I'll let you stick around." He opened his homework again. Half the sheet was missing answers. "If you're going to be annoying, can you at least do my math homework?"
Heinrich looked in my direction; those pale blue irises abducted me. The alluring temptation of childish innocence materialized, and I had no option but to help him as I fell into a spell—his memory of this moment required my involvement anyway. The boy's innocence was like an effervescence, exuberant in its glow and nearly criminal in its power to a passing stranger. To a passing diety, such as myself, the guilt was too cruel when knowing this child would be trampled among the most menacing heard of cattle hell could conjure.
What are you thinking, Ymir? Every one of these humans deserved to perish.
Regardless of my involvement, Heinrich's innocence would be like a stone weathering down with time until it would be pulled out like a rug from under him. I could tell him that the math homework would be the least of his worries during his days in a military camp and beyond, but an eight-year-old would not be able to comprehend why. I wish I could have also told him about his future, but that would be too gracious of me; this boy needed to struggle as I did.
Again, Ymir, every one of these humans deserved to perish.
"Hey!" Heinrich tried to pull back my attention.
"Huh?" I looked at the legion of characters on the homework page. "I can try to help, but since I'm imaginary, I only know as much as you do."
He pointed to the third row of problems. "I can't do this one. 25 times 5." Partially erased pencil marks were stains under the questions.
The foreign symbols would have made no sense in the olden times, but I was well equipped to solve this problem because of my walkthroughs beside Eldians with math teaching as a profession. "Multiply the fives first and you get 25. Keep the five below the line and add 2 to whatever 5 times 2 is. You get 125."
Heinrich winced at me and twidled his pencil, "Yeah, I knew that one. I was just testing you." He marked the correct answer and flipped through some pages as eraser dust littered the bed. "Do this one. 144 divided by 6."
"Well, 144 divided by 12 equals 12, so if you multiply that answer by 2 you get 24. That's the correct answer."
Heinrich looked at me cautiously, "Why would you divide by 12 instead of 6? I wasn't taught to do problems that way. How would you know that?"
He was catching on rather inquisitively. Kids can be intelligent… occasionally.
"You're just so intelligent that you didn't know it off the top of your head," I replied.
"You're right. I'm so intelligent that I don't know things sometimes." Heinrich looked back to the page and began doing problems independently, making deliberate marks with his pencil like he was drawing. "I think I can do these myself now. It's obvious you know the answers, so that means I know them too."
Heinrich got out of his sitting position and went into a "Z" shape, tucking his knees into his abdomen and hunching over his homework. He chewed on his pencil eraser when mentally carrying over numbers like it stimulated brain flow.
I slipped back into the shadows while watching the pencil walk on the page, strutting inelegantly, much like its owner. I yearned to know what was flowing through young Heinrich's mind. Not the math knowledge, but what he thought of the world and his place in it. His journal seldom discussed his mindset in his single-digit years, and as I have established, I could not read his mind. Only the things he intended to say were clear to me.
When I was a child, people were ignorant of the ways of the world. Information and news flowed like murky water; the nobles or people of high status could shift the river flow one way, and we dirt-scrapers had no option but to suckle at its trough, well aware there were no other rivers we could get our information from. One would think the modern time's broadcast capabilities would mitigate these issues, but it is because of the widespread "education" that lies can be dispelled much easier. In modern times, the world is much grander in individuals' minds, but it is still not the actual world.
No one has a grasp of the real world in their heads. As long as there is a middle-man to get information across, people's minds will always lug around falsehoods and fallacies...
A glazing light took over, and this homework memory sharply cut out to make way for another. I went to the next scene to find Heinrich shoving books off his bed like they were grimy socks. It must have been the same day as the previous memory since Heinrich wore the same clothing.
He was too active to go to sleep. He shimmied himself into his sodden bedsheets, littered with stains from eating food on the bed and dotted with eraser dust. His eyelids clapped together repeatedly, almost hard enough to catch a speck of dust with its membraned hands.
Rosa Steiner yelled from the living room. "Heinrich! You better not be sleeping yet! You need to finish that math before your teacher comes here and give us all a whipping."
Rosa's barking fished a temporary fear out of her son, and the lad opened his eyes like the blinds of a window before sharply shutting them closed. He hastily adjusted to lay on his stomach, and I could hear his breathing dampening—a ploy to fake unconsciousness. I will admit; I attempted that a fair number of times.
"Hey!" Rosa bellowed at the doorframe.
"Shh, you cow," Frederick Jr. whispered. "He's asleep."
He was not. The memory would end if he went to sleep.
Rosa rolled up her sleeves and thundered through the room like a grumpy crab with claws. She slapped Heinrich in the ass, and the boy shot out of the bedsheets faster than a child could fling excrement on your head.
"Oww!"
Rosa pulled out Heinrich's workbooks, and they all sat on the crusted floor together. She ordered, "Every time you get something wrong, I'm going to slap your papa once, okay?"
"Hey!"
"Okay, mama."
The Steiners were a lively bunch, not necessarily a more exciting group than any other family, but I somehow got to insert myself in it. One may deem that pathetic of me, but everything is miserable one way or another.
I flashed out of the memory and moved to the next one. It was at twelve years of age that Heinrich's life took a turn.