Grisha lost control. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that he never had it.
The memories that haunted him went from an occasional horrifying revelation to a deluge. The horror of what he had facilitated, the monstrosity… it shocked him. Left him insensate. Left him open to the manipulations of a teenager whose power was nearly that of a god's.
When the Founding fell, Yeager killed most of the Reiss family. Most, not all. He left one to be injected, one to fulfill the requirements of the Founding power.
Garrison men panicked as the walls they stood on crumpled under their feet, desperately attempting to maneuver down as the only thing protecting them from the Titans disappeared in dust clouds. And then the panic really started.
The men who controlled the Church of the Walls watched as their secret became impossible to hide. Some of them were hopeful that they might just be killed by rioters before the Titans got them.
And the Titans marched. Marched to the sea and into it, swimming through the waters to a world that had done nothing to prepare. There was no defensive fleet to sunder, just cities filled with screaming people whose long-dreaded nightmare was fulfilled.
If Grisha was in control of his senses, he might have wept, but the Rumbling kept moving forward. No planes or flying Titans to impede the march, the biggest stumbling blocks being literal mountains; even then, doom still came, tumbling down mountainsides and turning green vales into a charred ruin.
They marched until the end of the world, killing most sailors unfortunate enough to be out with waves of cleansing steam. They marched to lands that seemed like something out of myth, where mountains spewed flame and great sheets of ice stood taller and prouder than the Walls back home. What few people scraped out a living there were trampled underfoot as well, as the greatest of those Titans marched to a volcano.
Fire water. Lava. Yeager remembered reading about such a thing, remembered hearing about its incredible destructive capacity, the heat tremendous enough to turn stone to liquid. Perhaps… it could kill a pesky bug.
He mentally apologized. He stepped off the rim…
And Titans stopped existing. All across Paradis, great bursts of steam revealed disoriented people. Reiner, Annie, and Bertholdt lost their powers, and the newborns who had unknowingly inherited the other Titans lost theirs as well.
The residents of Wall Maria didn't stop their flight. The walls they were running to no longer existed– hell, they had seen those very walls walk right by them– but they thought the regular variety of Titan was behind them, and some sort of safety might be in front. They hit the cities of Rose like a flood, begging to be let into castles or other seemingly secure structures, and the Garrison struggled to rein them in.
Rumors of a Titan or two destroying the walls at Shiganshina quickly vanished, subsumed into the larger murmurings about whatever the hell had happened to all the walls. Was it even worth sending messages to the more rural villages about the fall if they had no inner walls to flee to?
Humanity waited, waited for the inevitable death blow. But there was nothing. Riders reached the other cities that sat on the periphery of Wall Rose and found them… fine, barring a few rabble-rousing strangers who had staggered in from outside of the walls. Well, outside of where the walls once were. Most of them were locked up because they ranted like madmen, speaking of islands, devils, and paradise.
Garrison men desperately fought to keep order, to prevent furious mobs from storming churches, while trying to hide their own unrest. The walls they had spent so long maintaining were Titans? What was the story behind that? Who were they really protecting?
At the very least, it seemed like the scouts wouldn't be lacking for work anytime soon. They rode further and explored faster than ever before, without Titans to worry about, and their scouting seemed to confirm that not one existed anywhere.
Humanity might have breathed a sigh of relief if they weren't teetering on the edge of a violent revolution. If their infighting was bad when they had an external threat to worry about…
Erwin Smith sat across from an attractive blond woman, but this was no date. Beside him, one of his aides sat with a notepad, ready to note every last thing the woman said. Most of the outsiders, the ones from beyond the Walls, were fairly easy to catch. They were insensate and laughably lacking in obvious knowledge about life. With people being so paranoid, so scared… many had been turned over to the military if they didn't meet messy ends first.
The scouts had a private theory about these people, fielded by a certain Hange. What if they were a sort of Titan-folk? A people somehow spawned from the death of the Titans, or perhaps liberated from inside them. There were several strange links between humans and Titans, and while they hadn't confirmed the idea, it was something to consider.
(Whatever their origin, they were from someplace else. They spoke the same language and used the same calendar, but they had strange cultural assumptions. Not always shared, but inarguably foreign. They identified with strange places named Marley or Eldia…)
Getting his hands on one and setting up a system for interviewing them had proven difficult, especially with the panic in the government.
"Your name?"
"Dina Yeager." The woman answered. Erwin's aide seemed a bit surprised by that, and Erwin made a mental note to ask them about it later.
"Place of birth?"
"Liberio Ghetto, Marley." Another strange commonality: many people mentioned this Liberio place, consistently referring to it as some city within Marley. A consistent story…
"As far as you know, where are we now?"
"Paradis."
"An island?"
"Yes. Separated from Marley proper by the Steaming Channel."
A new place name. Erwin's aide scribbled. "An interesting name."
"Yes. The name comes from Titans wading or swimming across, leaving tremendous clouds. And the fear was always that the channel would steam again."
"Because of the Titans?"
"Yes. The Titans inside the Walls would wake and march for the rest of the world, crushing it all underfoot."
Erwin felt the strangest urge to laugh. The people outside the Walls seemed like proof for his father's theory, and the more he investigated, the more certain he grew. And what of it? Beyond the foreigners who ended up on Paradis, they were all dead.
His question had been answered, but a whole slew of new ones came flooding in behind. Who were these people? What were they like? What lives had they led? Erwin would get no answer, outside of a few fragmentary accounts. He would keep on chasing answers until he was cold in the ground, it seemed.
"Why did you cross the Steaming Channel?" Erwin asked.
"We were brought here by Marley." She said, before realizing her vagueness. "'We' being an anti-government group. A sentence to Paradis is a typical punishment for criminal Eldians such as ourselves."
"Eldians."
"An ethnic group. Our ethnic group. Ones who can be transformed into Titans. That was the sentence. The misery of being a Titan."
Erwin understood why the government was holding onto these people so tightly. That sort of news… it was incredibly inflammatory. That they all had the capacity to be Titans, that the plague they had faced for decades was inflicted onto them by an outside power. They probably couldn't get revenge, considering the Titans in the Walls had already walked, but it was clear the government had peddled a lie of massive proportions.
"Could you give us any information on fellow members of your group? Did you see any of them?"
"I didn't see any, no, but they should be here. Many of them have practical skills. My husband Grisha was a doctor…"
"Doctor Grisha? Grisha Yeager?"
"Yes! Do you know him?"
"He saved Shiganshina from a plague a while back." Dina smiled at that, but it wouldn't last for long. "He got married again. Had a kid."
"I'd… like to see him, at least." She sighed.
"Don't know how possible that is, ma'am. You were found in Shiganshina. You saw how bad it was."
"Please. I'll tell you everything I know if you help me find him."
(Once that round of interrogation was finished, she wept. For her marriage, for her homeland. For her son. Zeke!)
One of the last things the royal government did before dissolving into chaos was mandating the resettlement of Shiganshina. As unpleasant as the cleanup was, there were surviving buildings and resources to be salvaged. Masonry, lumber for fires…
Without the walls, some of the braver citizens could even try their hand at farming. Beyond the Walls, there was virgin forest and pristine wilderness, untapped mines and grass for pasture.
Eren, Mikasa, Armin, and Armin's grandfather all limped back into Shiganshina under the watchful eyes of Hannes. (Who had already directed people to clear out any bodies near the Yeager household.)
For a few moments, they simply stared at the collapsed ruins, but Eren took a step forward. And then another. He knelt in front of the pile of masonry and started digging, tossing and pushing the broken pieces of old life aside. His approach was anything but cautious.
"Careful, Eren! You'll hurt yourself." Mikasa warned.
"The basement," Eren responded. "Need to see it."
Armin and Mikasa shared a look before getting down and helping him out. Armin's grandfather watched them from a distance and frowned. The tragic image wasn't helped by their circumstances: the elder Arlert was discussing how the people of Shiganshina might make a living for themselves, and prospects were bleak.
In theory, the government was providing a dole to help Shiganshina recover, but he knew them too well to think they'd fulfill their end of the bargain for long. Thankfully, the farms inside Wall Maria were mostly untouched, but they still needed money to buy…
Mr. Yeager seemed like the sort of man who would stash money away for emergencies. Hopefully, such a fund existed. Even more hopefully, maybe it was recoverable without moving aside a ton of masonry.
(Were there any families they knew to be gone for certain? As grim as the thought was, if they weren't using it…)
Thankfully, some part of an answer to their economic worries came floating down the river about a while later. A motley mix of anyone interested in the land outside the Walls– including a gang of scouts with their horses– had stopped in ruined Shiganshina. Some wanted to stay, some wanted to move on, but while they were here they needed things.
Some of those things were brought with them: food and tools, most obviously, but they wanted other things. Warm beds, company, drink. The first could be rented, the second could be found, and the third was dug up from cellars.
A sufficiently well-to-do-looking person couldn't take a few steps without a Shiganshina urchin offering to shine their shoes. Better than pickpocketing attempts, which were slightly less common due to the Scouts walking around.
Eren, of course, refused to stoop down and slave away like that when there was an unexcavated basement beneath his feet. He worked his hands raw and encountered quite a few splinters, but he kept on going. The boy wasn't lacking in determination…
Sometimes, Armin's grandfather was grateful for the basement. It kept the boy rooted, and not running off into the wild. Eren would probably do something foolhardy like that, but there might just be a career in it. Who knew how the future would pan out?
Speaking of….
"Excuse me, sir, do you happen to know where the Yeager household is? I've been told it's near here." A blonde woman he had never seen before walked straight up and asked him. Forgive him for cynicism, but he smelt a scheme of some kind here.
"Why are you looking for the Yeagers?" He asked.
"I was an… acquaintance of Grisha's."
Well, wasn't that a fine excuse, considering that the man couldn't corroborate? Or perhaps it was a perfectly reasonable explanation, considering how much he traveled. However, a possible logical solution wasn't certain, as completely and totally certain as the responsibility he had to Grisha's children.
"You were? I assume he met you on one of his trips?"
"Not quite. I knew him before he arrived in Shiganshina."
That was an exceedingly bold claim, especially considering the rumors about where Grisha came from. Again, another convenient answer. Who could contradict her claims?
"You did? Nobody knew where he came from." There were hypotheses, and for the longest while he had liked to believe that it was outside the Walls. It made his son and daughter-in-law's deaths feel a little less vain. Their hopes of something out there had been proved true by the folk outside the walls, at least.
"Yes. It was quite a journey…"
"And you chased after him all this time?"
"I only had the means to find him recently."
"After he died."
The woman flinched, the sadness on her face looking incredibly genuine. She was either a remarkable actor, or she cared for Grisha very much. "I didn't… I had hoped." She sighed. "Did you know him well?"
He saw too much of his daughter-in-law in this woman, even if he still suspected a lie. "His children and my grandson played together."
"His children… played?" She asked. "They didn't…?"
"They're still alive." He sighed.
"Thank goodness."
"And why are they your concern, ma'am? I don't even know your name, much less why I should allow you near them."
"My name is Dina. Dina Yeager née Fritz."
"What, are you saying you're his wife? How long were you married? Am I supposed to believe Grisha Yeager, the man who saved my family from a plague ran off from his young wife?"
Dina gulped, but before she could begin forming a response, they both heard a cry: "Mr. Arlert, we found something!"
A group of children burst from a pile of rubble Dina had completely ignored. A brunette boy waving around a book, a vaguely Asiatic-looking girl carrying a few more, and a blonde boy carrying a stubby little candle. All three were terribly messy, but they were grinning broadly. (Oh, the brown-haired boy! That grin was Grisha's, that grin was Zeke's, those rare occasions when she got him to smile.)
"Are they medical texts?" Mr. Arlert asked. Unconventional technique could explain some of Grisha's success, but he didn't seem the sort of man to hide helpful information.
"No, it's…" The boy stopped talking as soon as he saw Dina. He clutched the book close to his chest.
"Eren!" The girl whispered, rather aggressively, into the brunette's ear. Eren, huh? "Doesn't she look like…"
The boy flipped the book open and lifted up a little piece of paper, about the size of a photograph… which these people shouldn't have, she thought. Eren looked at her, looked at the photograph, and then back at her.
The blond boy did the same and gasped. Mr. Arlert seemed about ready to launch into a lecture about being rude… but Dina took a few steps forward and caught a glimpse of the photo.
… She could have cried, knowing some image of Zeke and Grisha survived. Correction: she actually did cry.
The picture served as proof, although it raised some awkward questions about her remarkably graceful aging. She gave an abridged explanation to Mr. Arlert, and then settled down nearby. She didn't have anywhere else to go, did she?
Still, she was determined to prove her value and then some. She and Grisha had failed Zeke, but she'd care for Eren as best she could. It was unfortunate, having to learn the old-fashioned way to do some particular domestic chores, but she tried to 'innovate' where she could.
That had led to a very strongly worded conversation with Mr. Arlert. She had created a clumsy, stumpy spinning jenny in her spare time, and Mr. Arlert acted as if she had planted a bomb in their basement. Because invention and innovation were practically a crime on Paradis. His son…
That was an entirely different sort of pain from her own. To see your child grow into a man, to see a grandchild, and then having the son snatched away by the government? It was a spectacular cruelty, one that left Mr. Arlert to raise his grandson alone.
("The last thing these children need is more instability in their lives!")
Yet the military police never came. The capital bubbled with discontent, and rumors spoke of a grand march on Mitras…
So Dina had her yarn and cloth, while the children's livelihoods were funded by scouts and migrants and whoever came by. It wasn't exactly the life a royal scion should have been doing, haggling for wool and working callouses into her hands, but she was alive, and she was helping Grisha's children.
Perhaps someone else would have found it pathetic, living for a man who married someone else. If she had anyone else in the world, perhaps she would have been above it, but her only concrete connection to anyone was a vague relation to Eren and Mikasa.
She still felt like she sat in Carla Yeager's shadow, though. Dina would accompany the children as they went and visited a pair of cairns devoted to Carla and Grisha, and despite her previous Titanic form, she felt so small before that little pile of stones. Carla had been the womanly influence in Eren's life. Mikasa had lost a second mother…
It was as if she had inherited some half-formed project, a pot of clay that needed a few touches… but she had no clue what the grand design had been, what Carla Yeager and Mikasa's mother would have wanted for the children. Hell, Armin needed a good maternal figure as well.
If she found the Warriors who did this… urgh. And the orphans! So many orphans. Once, Eren was roughhousing with a boy, and Dina went to chastise them both. Not even thinking, she knelt down and asked the blond boy where his mother was, and he immediately burst into tears.
Although she supposed the Warriors had been repaid for their crimes and then some. Strangers in a foreign country, burdened with the thought that their actions had doomed their homes.
(They probably had nightmares. Dina certainly did. She dreamt of a kind woman with Eren's face and soft eyes, she dreamt of bones crunching between teeth.)
There was one minor problem with their little life in Shiganshina: if Carla Yeager herself couldn't stop Eren from joining the scouts, there was no way in hell Dina Yeager was going to do the job, and if Eren was going, Mikasa and Armin were following.
For a while, she had hoped the unrest in the government might have crippled the scout's ability to explore, but the provisional military government obviously thought exploring their vast new domain was important. A new base camp was established at the mouth of the southern river, the one that passed straight through Shiganshina. It was good business, but it meant that Eren would have precisely no issue finding a scout to help him enlist.
Well, maybe a parent could have stopped their child from enlisting, but their family situation was so strange…
Dina wasn't sure she could have brought herself to do it, even if the thought of Eren on a military expedition made her stomach churn. It was both too close and too far from Zeke. Oh, Dina and Grisha would have loved it if their boy had been nearly as zealous about the Warrior program as Eren was about the Scouts… but that whole experience had taught her the importance of a child's opinion, and Eren's opinion was that he wanted to scout.
There would be chances to visit, thankfully, but the thought of them going away… it was a familiar pain for both her and Mr. Arlert.
"It's the worst feeling in the world, watching them go away." She sighed.
"You just have to hope they do their best." Mr. Arlert sighed. "Raise them well, and hope they can bear the world."
Military education had changed a lot recently. ODM gear was increasingly defunct, except in certain urban patrol contexts, and considering Eren's interest in the scouts, he found himself in a very different curriculum.
Squinting at the wood, Eren could see a clear gap between two planks, wide enough for water to get through. "We need some caulk over here!"
Connie snickered. "In need of a good caulking, Yeager?"
"Shut up, Connie!"
Maintaining ships was hard work. Hot, gross work with pine sap and tar, nothing like the horsemanship and maneuver gear he had imagined. However, that was the reality of modern scouting. There were a few established scout units still mapping the remainder of Paradis, but there was no point in training up new scouts in the same style. Sure, horsemanship and setting up camps would be critical if they found land beyond the sea, but they needed to cross the sea first.
The sea! What a wonder it was. Even their officers seemed a little amazed, giving them some time to simply marvel at the great expanse of water. Oh, you'd get told off if you went staring at the sea now, but there was like a good day when they'd smile at your antics and chuckle instead of shouting.
Before they could sail, they needed a watertight ship. Eren had already memorized all the knots, and he watched the older cadets as they reefed and shook out and did all the things that let a ship sail. These were the best option: compressed gas shipping didn't scale well, and there were no stops for resupply out there. Sailing worked everywhere there was wind.
Armin's book about the outside world was no longer verboten: in fact, the stories and lands contained within did a lot to impress their fellow cadets. There was a certain giddy excitement in the air. The Titans were gone, the world was their oyster.
(Less happy rumors circulated about what that world beyond the Walls was like, who had been there before…)
After their work, they settled in for seafood. Seafood day in and day out, courtesy of the massive schools of fish just offshore. Older cadets would set out to sea and come back with sagging nets, unbelievably heavy with fish. Sure, a lot of it was salted and smoked before being sent inland to cover their costs, but they could eat fish every single day.
It made Eren wonder what marvels waited for them over the sea. He had heard tales of fish as big as boats, like Titans of the sea… but they were gentle. Strange-colored stone bloomed off the coast, fish flitting between the structures. Even the creepy, almost bug-like creatures they pulled from the sea proved themselves to be delicious.
(There were times when Eren would have traded the whole ocean, every last drop, for life with his Mom and Dad.)
They had finished off some thick cuts of fish when Shadis started shouting: "Get up, cadets! We just got a sail in!" There was some groaning, considering they couldn't go straight to bed afterward, but they did need to help store the sail…
They all limped off to see a cart with massive bolts of cloth sitting in the back, but the sheer quantity of fabric wasn't what surprised Eren. It was the driver. "Eren!" She cried, dismounting and grabbing him for a hug.
"Oi, get off! You're embarrassing me! Hug Mikasa or Armin!"
Connie was slack-jawed. "That's your mom?" He breathed.