A Change of Perspective: From The Other Side of the Sea

"Mommy, mommy!" Reiner tugged on his mother's armband. He was almost five years old at the time. "I'm bored. Are we almost done waiting in line?"

Karina had taken her son to enrollment in the Warrior Training Program. The local registration center was flooded with many other families with young boys and a few girls about the same age as Reiner in hopes that they too could get an honorary place in society as Marleyans. The little boy was becoming antsy because of this as the stressed secretaries were trying to make more copies of forms due to the overwhelming number of applicants.

She lifted her son to her hip. He'd probably forgotten some of their conversation from the other night. "Reiner, to be a great Warrior, you're going to have to learn to be patient. The training is going to be long and hard, and not all these other children are going to be easy to beat." She stroked him on the head. "After all, many of them have a father at home already, so they have enough food each night and enough money which we don't have, so you're going to be working extra hard for us. You want us to be a family again, don't you?" She whispered the last part.

The little boy nodded, remembering the talk from the night before. His face lit up with understanding. "Okay. Put me down, Mommy. I'll be a big boy and be patient so I can make you and Daddy proud." He squirmed out of her reach and took his place in line ahead of a family with two boys close in age, one dark haired and one red haired.

Well, she hoped patience would be good enough for her little boy in front of the instructors. He was rather skinny for a boy his age, and he still struggled with learning to read some basic children's books. But he listened to her with admiration. They had already been practicing at their apartment doing chores, pretending that he was a good Warrior who saved everybody after washing the plates, a sign of obedience which would make listening to a commanding officer easy.

He was already a far better man than Timothy ever was under her control. He was the one who approached her at the barracks in the first place, following her around like a hungry stray dog until she gave in. She was just a young woman who had never left the Internment Zone before winning a work lottery to work outside of her home. How was she supposed to react to a strange Marleyan man giving her attention? He praised her for her dutiful work, which was quite good for an Eldian like her. None of the Marleyan guards ever greeted her in the streets. None of the other Eldian women chosen to clean the soldiers' quarters cared as much as she did to atone for the sins of their ancestors. He told her all these things, and she loved him for it.

Soon their visits during breaks had to become more secretive. Gossip was widely discouraged among the Eldian women at work- a hindrance to a bunch of hardened Marleyan men-, yet their living quarters filled with it at night about what Marley's next move was or who among their neighbors at home was a devilish sympathizer to Paradis. In her defense, she always said that he was just bothering her to listen to the rules if she missed a spot while cleaning, emphasizing that the hiring committee would not bother to do anything if she reported an Marleyan harassing an Eldian, to which the other women would solemnly agree. They were getting closer and closer despite the protests of the government and the world. Strict new laws about nightly curfew in the Internment Zone were going to be implemented and affect all workers, including those who worked outside the Zone, so one night, when she had a late night shift before the curfew began, when nobody was watching, she and Timothy had a moment to themselves.

A moment that would change her life for the worse. She couldn't tell anybody the truth. She had chosen this. But she was going to get back at him with the proof of their bond that flowed in her son's blood. He was good for something after all, and all those years lost would be regained.

One of the secretaries slapped a tall pile of freshly printed applications on the desk. The line moved ahead rapidly as parents made a grab for them, several children going wild at the prospect before their eyes. Reiner's excitement grew.

"I'm going to be the best Warrior there is, Mommy," he declared with a spark of determination. "I'm going to save us from the island devils. I'm going to be the best Eldian in the world!"

Karina smiled. "Yes, you are."

…

Theo ached to lunge ahead despite the restraint of his leash before they even got out the door. The poor creature had been left alone and wandering the streets after its owners were crushed to death. It had been taken to the marketplace to be sold as meat to the Eldian refugees upon relocation, yet Gabi begged to have it spared with Falco backing her up. They were never able to keep their own pets in the Internment Zone for fear of overpopulation- and an ironic excuse to keep them from raising dogs to defend themselves. Her parents caved, just wanting her to be a little happy after what she went through and what they put her through, much to the disgruntlement of several other refugees complaining about them wasting meat, and not taking into account those medallions the unstable government got the time to craft for the Alliance.

Evidently from the other night, a pet was not able to heal all wounds. The Grice's boy was correct. Nothing probably would help the children or themselves be alright again. And how was Reiner doing? Was he consumed by melancholia on that cursed island, away from his family again? She'd tried to lovingly encourage him to do what was right following the Rumbling, but how could she do what was right? She'd been unfit to be a mother her whole life. Maybe he would really be glad to be away from her and with his old comrades instead. Klaus' daughter always set him straight according to his old Training Program records, and so did Mr. Hoover's son. The children would probably be far better people than they ever would be.

"Down, mutt!" He'd circled his way back around to Levi, who held his walking stick above his head as the dog pounced.

Karina retracted some of the leash much to the whining of Theo. Oh that dog. This habit of attempting to steal walking sticks had gotten far worse in the past few days. Gabi and Martino would have to do something about this due to the increased amount of time with some guests.

"He'll be corralling everything that looks like a damn stick in the city at this rate." Levi poked the end of his stick at Theo tauntingly. He whimpered. But a few pats on the head was a good apology.

Oh, this man. He never complained about his condition and couldn't- or wouldn't- get upset over petty things- save for tea which he never even complained about to Onyonkopon. How he kept a calm head in distress she would not understand. But he certainly was lying about his leg. Poor thing didn't want to upset anyone further. They would not walk too far from the house.

Theo was happy to finally move after being bound in a cage all afternoon, trotting with his head high at a slow pace. The remnants of the rainstorm last night had finally dried up. Gardens and trees blossomed leaves and flowers in all shades of green. Nothing like this existed in Liberio. A small patch of grass with some metal bars on it was the closest thing for an Eldian child to freely run in and play for a few minutes. Yet even a small squabble between two children could have gotten the guards angry and sternly warning the Eldian parents and children about following rules and obeying authority. At least baby Viola would be able to play outside freely one day. Gabi was too old for this and Reiner….

He never demanded to play once he started training. He asked her to get rid of his few toys he had so he could keep studying with her in the afternoons and late into the evenings. She kept them hidden away so his younger cousin Martino could play with them when he got big enough yet admired his perseverance to do anything for her. And he never cried when he tripped and skinned his knees. The Marleyan military was not easy on sensitive children, so he had to learn to hold back on crying in pain if he fell down in weapon training. He would just brush away his tears and put on a brave face. He was her warrior.

But he would never be a normal little boy again.

"What are we supposed to write?" Karina asked, wanting to clear her mind. "There's so much to tell them."

"Just keep it basic. We don't know how right we are. Just something about Ymir and the Ackermans having a part of her resistance in us that made us strong and needed to free her. The royal family probably had something to do with this when experimenting on the clan centuries ago. It's enough to give Mikasa some peace and feel-good material for their speeches."

"And for Reiner? He won't believe that I am writing to him and being honest for once."

Theo halted to relieve himself on a tree.

Levi hobbled to a stop."You think he wouldn't be able to see past any shit you put out after all this time? The brats did last night."

Why were his words so spiky? Well, he was right as usual.

"We… oh. We never did have many proper moments to discuss myself these last three years. He says he forgives me since it's all too complicated for any of us to understand with whoever sinned first. Then with the stress of relocation and the riots, his new peace ambassadorship, Viola being born… I just couldn't bring myself to talk to him. We had to move on and just… not talk about it. Maybe he was right about it being too difficult."

Those first nights in the internment camp were still spent separated from her boy who was put through too much already. Those Titans had been so close to crushing them, and then the "dark box". Then to only have him taken and poked and cut and hurt more while everything in the atmosphere around them was dull and bloodsoaked, and all she and the other survivors could do if they weren't being tested on was speculate on how many people were dead and what was still standing. Marley hid information for weeks until the official story, in collaboration with the island Eldians with Commander Arlert as leader, was released.

Eighty percent of the world population was dead. Billions of people they didn't know were gone, and billions who never knew them as people were gone. Millions upon millions of acres of land were crushed and beyond inhabitable. The outside world. Places they could never visit in the first place were no more. What did those numbers mean to them when they lived confined in a city of tens of thousands that just had a terrorist attack the month before? In the chaos, almost every one of her neighbors knew somebody who was injured or killed from their little world. Two of Gabi's Candidate friends were among them. Did anybody else care to cry for them with their distraught parents? They deserved such death to the outside world, and others from that island thought these people deserved death despite their blood relation.

Did anybody else from the outside world care to comfort her brother and sister-in-law and the Grice's as the greater evil called the island Eldians took their children to their paradise? They wouldn't have dared to have sympathy. Yet Marley called upon the Warriors to save their other two Candidates if only for the military's power structure's sake, one she contributed to. And then that day happened. If she hadn't been in the right place that day at that train station in that little world called the Internment Zone, she wouldn't have escaped with her life. All because she was an Eldian devil, and her son was a Warrior whose obedience gave her a different colored armband than her neighbors'.

Where was the care for anything but her son now when the rest of the world still owed her nothing? He was her key to survival until the present. She just had to ignore the cries of the hungry and dying and mourning on the radio and in pictures in the newspapers. She couldn't cry for all those people who died each day. She had to stop being so mad at the Nodlon locals who screamed for them to leave and go back to their flattened country or join the devils on Paradis. Only Reiner mattered now. She was the only one who owed the child of her bloodline anything from now on.

"When we were hightailing after Eren, we had to stop for the night. Everyone was talking about who stepped in whose shit first and who deserved the biggest beating. My head was messed up from the explosion and I was trying to sleep until Jean tried to turn Reiner into a pulp for killing his friend years back. Your niece dove in and took some kicks on his behalf, begging us to stop and save humanity and apologizing for her actions."

Oh dear, she knew this story.

"And Kirstein did apologize the next morning. Amazed she even forgave him after Jaeger's cronies on the ship beat the shit out of her for killing Braus and then after some of my squad tried to sacrifice Falco. It's not as if any of those brats were unaware of what a war zone was like. If we had any type of normal protocol that day, Kirstein and Springer would have faced disciplinary action from Commander Hange for torturing prisoners of war." He rubbed his forehead and looked down. "Tch, we all let our emotions gnaw at us. You forget all the rules that way."

"I suppose… they did feel better afterwards."

"They did. Can't say they've been without screaming matches on some visits, but at least that way they're not lying to themselves or each other."

How many times had they had conversations like this in the past few days? Karina had lost count. But there was something about talking to Levi that soothed her fears.

"Thank you. It's not writing about our family with the Ymir cult that troubles me anymore. Oh… you probably think I'm some ridiculous wench for this…. His father."

His facial expression remained unchanged.

"His father?"

"Reiner's father. The first and only man I loved because I was an idiotic young woman. He knows I used our son because as a daughter of Ymir, we Eldian women were just little filthy broads who spread our seeds to Marleyans to let Eldia reign forever."

"That's Marley's story, isn't it?"

"Yes. Well… the propaganda became a part of my story to Reiner, whether I knew it or not at the time. We were just "different" than what the story told. His father actually loved me, I said, but we couldn't be together because of the laws. He always believed me. It wasn't until he learned about blood tests that he asked why he was still with me since he was a Marleyan and an Eldian. He found out that Mr. Leonhardt's girl had the same bloodlines and was taken from her mother at birth." She paused.

"What did you say?"

She braced herself. "Like I said, I just had to tell him he was just that special when he was born because he was going to save us and reunite our family, that his father and I were different from the book at school but the teachers just didn't know it." She snorted. "In truth… I had been coming up for excuse after excuse even before he was born."

Theo finally stopped sniffing around and pulled forward. Poor dog wanted to continue running, but they were already two blocks from the house. She wanted to do the same to get away from home for a while. Oh well, they could take another walk later. They turned around. Was Levi grimacing? He caught notice of her concern.

"Go on."

"If we need to stop, tell me." She sighed. "When I found out I was pregnant with him, Timothy…. He told me to leave or we would both be in trouble. I agreed. It was all my fault I seduced him as a daughter of Ymir, how I just wanted to do what was done in centuries past as all the Eldians before me. How could I argue against that and what I learned in school and from my family's warnings? I was still too early along that I could hide it until I could think of an excuse. And he said he would try to figure out a cover story."

Theo sniffed at a tiny feathery carcass on the curb. A baby bird had fallen from its nest in the rainstorm last night. Flies infested it already. Karina tugged the leash. No more dead birds.

"My temporary work outside the Internment Zone would come to an end about a month later. After that, Marleyan women would come to replace us Eldian women to clean. I kept my eye on Timothy to see if he had thought of anything before I left. That's when I saw her. He was with a Marleyan woman. It was that day I realized just how much of a tool I was for him until the situation became too difficult."

"Stop," Levi spoke abruptly. He started to lower himself to the concrete curb to sit, but he fell the last bit down, grunting out several expletives that would get Tina riled up. He was sweating despite the mild spring weather. Theo trotted over to comfort him.

"Oh dear," Karina panicked. "Hold still, we're almost back. I'll go get-"

"No," he declared, inhaling sharply. "Hold a damn minute. Keep going. Talking about that piece of shit helps. I'll make it." He slowly repositioned himself using his walking stick as a grip.

She hesitated as her heart raced, then continued. "I-I was unsure how to face my family returning pregnant with a Marleyan blooded child. The punishment would be high for us all if Marley knew the truth. I was so angry and frightened but my parents were worse. My father beat me and tried to take a knife to my…." She clutched her chest. "I am thankful I never said how I was pregnant with a Marleyan man's child before saying that I was raped. My mother only despaired more."

Something changed in his face. He was ignoring his pain and became more attentive at her horrible story. His gray hooded eye softened as he took in those words.

"And we had to go over the Marleyan version of the story of Ymir seducing the Devil of All Earth to make me feel even guiltier. I'd committed a damnable sin as a woman. My father… he would have been the first to turn us in out of shame or gotten me to rid of Reiner, but even with all our beliefs stripped away, he still clung to his belief that we should never rid the world of a child. 'They're needed somehow', he would say."

Levi nodded curtly. Using his stick and Theo as support, he stood again. It was no use asking how to proceed walking. He wasn't going to break that easily in front of her or ask help.

"We decided it was best that I go into hiding to avoid any neighbors asking questions. But to do that, I had to have approval from the Eldian Work Committee to leave from the work list. They had all the records of where I was weeks prior. I had to say again that I was raped but I did not know who the man was since it was at night. It could have been an Eldian or a Marleyan man since there were some Eldian men who did scullery work there at the time. And if it was a Marleyan man, I would still get punished for it."

"Did they call you the devil?"

"Much worse. To be called a devil would be an honor looking back. Either way, I was a whore or a liar… or both at the same time. They set up an investigation at the barracks and the other women assigned to work at the time. The women corroborated my story easily about being harassed before. It was no use asking any of the men anything. They would act in disgust at the idea of an Eldian and a Marleyan having... relations. We would just have to wait for the blood test at birth."

All those months of her belly swelling, the proof of her wrongdoing. The body aches, his strong kicking from inside of her, the whispers she thought she could hear in the walls between apartments, the whispers she heard among her parents and brothers. Her emotions overwhelmed her. Her heart couldn't take the burden much longer of the man who took hold of it and crushed it and stuffed it back in her.

This thing. This child. He caused so much pain. He had to be needed somehow.

The lane to the front door welcomed them back to their- no, the snug house. It felt like they had been gone for hours instead of twenty minutes. Tina didn't need to hear this part of the story again. She didn't need her hypocritical moaning at a time like this.

"To forge a blood test… we had underground contacts in the Eldian community. But in the recent past there had been a party of Eldian restorationists exposed, I believe it was young Zeke himself who did it. Not everybody was more than willing to turn in their neighbors for a badge and reward from Marley, you see, but it was more costly and covert to get such things so nobody would be as likely to snitch. My own mother had to… get to know some men- Eldian men who worked at the hospital, mind you- to cover the cost."

Karina contemplated including the part about how the mother given the real test result from Reiner was actually the estranged wife of one of the forgers who he wanted to get back at for sleeping with another Eldian man, but Levi probably wouldn't believe her. Too many dramatics he was putting up with already.

She forgot about the labor pains within moments of cradling the little cooing bundle in her arm. She shooed the Eldian midwife out of her crepid dark apartment room to only gaze at him under the moonlight shining through the window. He was so tiny even for a newborn. He was going to survive though. He had to. He was going to save them from their status. He was going to prove to his father that he was a good Eldian. He was going to prove she was not a whorish daughter of Ymir. That is why he was born.

"And my Reiner was born and got to be my key to living a happy life with an armband and some privileges from Marley." There. It was done. She told her little story.

"Tch. Do you think your brat is going to get upset hearing that? He's not the only kid whose parent used him. I had to act as a bouncer for Kenny if he got into the wrong crowd at some bars growing up."

"Kenny?"

"That was my uncle, the serial killer in the Underground City. Closest thing I had to a parent until he left again. It was useful having an emaciated little worm around to be his backup in a fight with an old rival or to be used as a little prop to get extra food at the table. Mother was a… prostitute herself before something killed her. Maybe that's what kept me around. Didn't even know what an Ackerman was until I met Kenny again."

He wasn't even talking to her, just a blank space in front of him with a hyper dirty brown dog trotting in circles. So this was why he listened so intently to a foolish lady's story about her and her son's life.

"Point is… The Founder Ymir couldn't let go of old sick bonds to that devil Fritz herself, so you're not the first to go through with this. Maybe humans will just do this until they turn into worm shit. Reiner isn't going to try to get back at his father for being a lying manwhore now unless he wants to figure out which broken bone fragment in Liberio is his and toss it off a cliff. So there. Use Ymir's story to your advantage, both sides."

Karina felt a weight come off of her chest. Broken bone fragment. Timothy was long dead, wasn't he? He was still alive to her when she looked at Reiner's face. Maybe they were all devils after all, but it wasn't just one bloodline. It wasn't too comforting, yet it was the closest thing to the truth. They were all in this, a tangled mess of history. They just had to piece it together like a million shards of a broken fine tea set.

Her dear Reiner needed no shame. He was still needed… somehow, despite everything before and after to come.

"Thank you, Levi. You do have a way with words."

"Tch, no need for the praise. I always end up in these situations. I'll go sit my ass in the chair now so you stop worrying about me." He limped his way through the doorway.

Karina sighed softly. She thought to prepare some tea, provided it wasn't the type he complained about so much, before writing the letters. It was always the answer with him.

That was just as he let out a sudden grunt and collapsed to the floor, completely passed out.

.