Chapter Text
01: Unsre grüne Au
Es blüht ein schönes Blümchen
Auf unsrer grünen Au.
Sein Aug' ist wie der Himmel,
So heiter und so blau. [1]— August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben: Forget-Me-Not
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Emil Gruender has always been a quiet child.
Not the ordinary quiet that comes from shyness or fear, but a stillness that seems to exist even when the world around him refuses to be still. In the narrow streets of Shiganshina, boys your age shout and shove and compete endlessly—who can run the fastest, shout the loudest, throw the hardest punch. Noise is their language; chaos their pride.
Emil never joins them. He is reserved, clam. Most people think he’s shy. They say it fondly, with smiles softened by the sight of him—the charming boy from Her Inflorescence, the flower shop with its ivy-wrapped windows and scent of crushed petals drifting into the street. Emil is always running errands for his mother: delivering bouquets tied with twine, counting coins with careful fingers, offering polite bows that look almost too formal for a child.
The other boys from your neighbourhood try to rile him up, to get him angry. They circle him sometimes like restless crows, trying to draw something out of him—anger, embarrassment, anything at all. They mock the flowers he carries; mock the careful way he speaks. They mock the way adults praise him although he isn’t doing anything extraordinary.
But that is the thing about Emil: he doesn’t try to be extraordinary; doesn’t try to stick out. He keeps his opinions to himself, guarded like secrets he’s unwilling to share, he doesn’t go into a conversation hungering for conflict.
When they swarm him—boys taller, boys smaller, boys loud with the careless cruelty children often possess—Emil simply watches them with an expression so composed it almost seems absent.
It occurs to you it is a miracle he hasn’t been punched yet.
Though perhaps the miracle is that none of them quite dared to do it.
Mature. No, that isn’t the word. Sublime. That’s the word coming to your mind whenever you watch him standing quietly in the afternoon light, hands folded behind his back as if he belongs somewhere more solemn that a dusty street.
Like a saint. Not the bright, heroic saints from your mother’s fairy tales, the ones who healed wounds with glowing hands and chased away monsters with righteous fury. No, Emil reminds you of the saints in the chapel of Shiganshina. Those stone figures with smooth, distant faces who keep silent vigil over the people below. Watching, waiting. Untouched by the noise of ordinary life.
Emil doesn’t care much about the other children.
But he cares about you.
It comes with the benefit of having a mother for a bookseller with a hunger for stories, and a father for a cartographer with a steady hand that never wavers. At least that’s what Marianne tells you, and she knows a lot. Her parents are teachers, after all. She once told you, very matter-of-factly, that half the children in the neighbourhood would never speak to you if your parents didn’t have respectable and important jobs.
You aren’t sure if that is true.
But perhaps it explains why they dislike Emil even more. His parents sell flowers and everyone says flowers are useless. Pretty gifts, meant to be admired for a moment before they wilt.
It certainly never bothered you, nor your mother whenever your father brings her flowers after returning from long days hunched over maps. She would always smile then, that brilliant, impossible smile that seems to contain a thousand sunrises that would make your father suck in a breath as if he’s taken a blow to the gut.
You try doing the same thing to Emil. Whenever he tucks a red moss rose into your hair or slips little dried, purple phlox between the pages of the books you carry around like treasures, you would beam at him with what you hope is the same radiant smile.
Emil would wrinkle his nose a little. “You’re making that funny face again,” he’d say, sounding faintly concerned.
You’d immediately abandon the attempt and change the subject. “So, what does this one mean?” you’d ask instead.
Because Emil has taught something extraordinary: flowers have meanings. Secret ones. Entire languages made of petals and colour and scent.
“You can read,” he would answer every time, already turning away. His ears would turn faintly pink. “Look it up yourself.” Ah, his favourite lesson. You have to put in effort for everything. Strife for knowledge, fight with purpose. Anything gained by doing nothing doesn’t mean anything.
Somehow you never manage to find the right books covering the topics he wants you to look into. Lessons on how it would be possible to fly using hot air, descriptions of the strangest animals roaming the world with their unfathomably long necks so they can reach the sweetest leaves high up on trees—sometimes his ideas are stranger than the fairy tales lining your mother’s bookshelves. You know he’s teasing you, but it’s fine. You really like that he’s treating you differently from anyone else.
“That’s because you like him,” your mother says one day, summoning your father to her side like an autumn storm sweeping through the streets.
“That boy from the flower shop?” Ink smudges still wet on his cheeks, your father adjusts the reading glasses on his slightly crooked nose. “I mean, there are certainly worse choices to fancy—“
Your mother elbows his him sharply in the ribs to silence him. “And something tells me that he likes you just as much,” she continues, smiling in that mysterious way adults do when they believe they understand secrets you don’t yet.
Like. You know what that means. Your mother likes your father, your father likes your mother. Michael, the butcher’s son, likes Lisa with her golden hair and eyes green like spring meadows even though she’s cruel and throws stones at the blind veteran living in the old shack on the other side of town close to the Wall. Princesses like princes in your mother’s stories, especially after they save them from evil wizards or fire spitting dragons.
And you like Emil Gruender, because he’s Emil. Quiet, unshakable Emil with a knack for speaking to flowers and braiding them into radiant, colourful crowns for you to wear.
You’re ten years old when you acknowledge this feeling for the first time, this complex, disastrously beautiful thing called love.
Two years later, on the day your world is torn asunder, Emil ask you to meet him down at the meadow near the canal where he usually sits amidst the wildflowers that grow rampant. Somehow it’s only this one spot where they bloom. A strange little stretch of earth where they grow in reckless abundance, their colours bright against the pale grass. The sun barely climbs high enough over the Wall to warm the ground most days, but Emil told you that’s exactly what makes them special: they grow under adversity and persevere, and that makes them so damn beautiful.
Like humans, he’d say, crouching among the flowers like a priest among relics.
You spot him immediately. His pale blond mop of unruly hair stands out against the vibrant flowers. He’s sitting cross-legged, head bowed in fierce concentration over something lying in his lap. Another crown, you notice once you’re close enough. This one a necklace of daisies and forget-me-not. A smile breaks free across your face, stretches up to your cheeks.
“You should sell them,” you say in lieu of hello, dropping down beside him in the grass. Emil doesn’t even flinch, nothing breaks his focus. Sometimes you think a Titan could emerge from the canal and he would merely blink at it before returning to whatever task holds his attention. “When we go over to Shiganshina tomorrow, you’d earn a fortune.”
“I don’t make them for just anyone,” Emil says, his blue eyes darting over to you. A warm feeling blooms in your chest. It makes you want to lie down and roll around in the flowerbed and squeal like a little mouse granted a delicious slice of cheese. Instead, you sit quietly beside him and watch. The sun barely peeks over the Wall, warming the back of your neck. Emil’s face, cast in half-shadow, is relaxed and soft. His lashes, long pale crescents, flutter when he blinks. You lean in, trying to count them one by one.
“You asked me once what I wanted to do when I grow up,” Emil says after a moment. His eyes rise to yours and then quickly disappear again behind the thick fringe of his lashes as he lowers his gaze. “I know now.”
You wait for him to continue. The day is warm. Somewhere further on the main road, where houses nestle close against the Wall outside of Shikanshina District, you can hear children laugh. It’s a beautiful day.
“You know I want to see the world outside the Walls.” Emil halts his work. He smiles at you, that smile that’s like a light suddenly being turned on in every dark room of a house. “That’s why I am going to join the Survey Corps.”
You inhale sharply. Lean back. The light blinds you. Emil watches you drag your knees up to your chest as your eyes take in the insurmountable Wall rising endlessly—an unbroken cliff of stone that surrounds your world on every side.
Your voice comes out very small. “Mom and Dad said the Scouts came back from an expedition today. A lot of people died or got hurt.”
Emil hums softly. His fingers move again, weaving stems together in quick, practiced motions—a quick dance only he knows by heart. “We all die one day,” he says in the calm tone adults use when they are explaining something simple to children. Usually, it makes you angry. With Emil, it never does. “But I don’t want to die in here,” he continues quietly. “Caged like a bird that doesn’t know what it is like to fly.”
Stretching your legs out again, you take care not to crush any flowers and crane your neck back to look up at the vibrant blue sky. Single clouds, soft like sheep, drift lazily over your head. “You really think we’ll be free from the Walls one day?“
“I don’t think so.” Emil gently prods the petals of a white, star-shaped flower. The soft breeze makes its head bow as if it nods in agreement. “I know it.”
“But outside are Titans,” you state the obvious. It doesn’t sound right. It’s more like you actually want to say But I won’t be outside.
“Titans, yes.“ Emil shrugs lightly. “But also a whole wide world to see and explore.” He hesitates then, drawing in a slow breath. When he lifts his eyes, there is something new in his expression—something steadier, braver. “There’s going to be so much I want to see and tell you about.”
To hear you are in this future he is imagining for himself is wind in your sails, propelling you forward and lifting your courage. It makes you bold. It gives you hope. Your lips curl; another smile breaks across your face.
Crossing your arms, you cock your head towards him. “Bold of you to assume I'll still be here waiting for you.”
Emil snorts but he looks almost pleased. The crown is nearly done. “You will be. And I’ll come back to you.” He glances up. His voice softens. “I will always come back to you.”
Your smile begins to ache. But there’s another pain—much subtler, humming in a low throb—sitting deep inside your chest like a hook under your skin.
“You don’t know that.” The teasing is gone now. You hold his gaze without looking away, even though the intensity of his blue eyes usually makes your face heat. “You don’t know what happens outside the Walls. What’s out there. Everyone says the Survey Corps is a lost cause. There is no hope for us.” You have seen them before. The Survey Corps passing your suburb on their way to their headquarters. Men and women beaten too many times to stand up again, their uniforms torn and stained bloody, their faces carved hollow by the unspeakable things outside. Shadows of their former selves now marked by their wounds and defeat. You don’t want to see Emil end up like them. Like a broken vessel of someone you love.
Emil’s arms brush your shoulders as he places the crown upon your head. He’s so close you see your own reflection in his blue, blue eyes.
Blue like the infinite sky. Blue like forget-me-not. Such a beautiful, beautiful blue.
He studies the crown with quiet satisfaction, clearly content with his work. Then he begins digging through the pockets of his jacket, and produces a silver ring with a tiny, scarlet glass orb in its middle. His face is ablaze, an angry red flush that creeps from his neck up to his face.
Your heart stops as he holds the ring under your nose.
“If you can’t believe in the Survey Corps, believe in me,” Emil says. He holds your gaze, and you don’t look away as he goes on. “You gave me a promise. Now I give you something in return.”
He takes your hand carefully, so warm around yours, and places the ring in your open palm. The metal is cool against your skin. “This is how you know I will always come back. Because when we grow up … we’re going to get married.”
You stare at him as though you’ve seen a god and that god shares Emil’s name. The sun slowly dips behind the wall, but you don’t feel cold. You have never felt this warm, this safe before. Your gaze flickers from Emil to the ring and back again as you struggle to find the right words.
“You didn’t steal it, did you?”
Emil blinks. Then he bursts out laughing—sudden and jarring like a thunderclap. “Who do you take me for?”
“I didn’t know you owned something like this,” you reply, voice only a whisper in awe. It is beautiful. The ruby catches the sunlight when you tilt it, glowing as if liquid fire is trapped inside.
Emil takes the ring gently from you with a patient smile and holds your hand. “It is very, very important to me.” His fingers curl around yours. “And you are very, very important to me.” He slides the ring onto your finger, and you both start laughing as it wobbles loosely in place. It’s far too big. But it’s fine, you’ll grow into it. You’ve read so many times about this in books. The answer is always yes. Your answer will always be yes with Emil.
“This is my promise,” he whispers. “I will always come back.”
Together forever. Neither of you says it, but it’s hanging in the air, sweet as the blooming wildflowers around you. You take a deep breath.
In this moment, you are invincible.
“Okay,” you breathe, unable to properly convey the weight of this feeling you want to share with him.
“Okay.” Emil smiles.
“Okay,” you repeat, holding up your pinky finger.
Emil’s eyes immediately soften. He grins, and locks his with yours. “Okay.”
Bell chimes rise from the nearby watchtower. Your heads swivel around, pinkies still locked together. Along the main road, Garrison soldiers are rushing towards the open gate, pulling and pushing cannons to the other side of the Wall.
Fear rattles inside you like a marble in a jar. Emil scrambles to his feet, his eyes wide in absolute terror. He’s gone a sickly grey colour, like the ashes of a dead fire. Before he can say it, someone is screaming it.
Titans.
Emil is dragging you up the meadow towards the road before you fully understand what is happening.
Your hand is caught in his grip, fingers crushed tight enough to bruise, and you stumble after him through the tall grass as if the earth itself has begun to tilt. Flowers bend beneath your feet, their bright petals torn and trampled as people rush past you in desperate waves. Behind the Wall, something terrible roars to life, and now you can hear it clearly, screams spilling from the other side of Wall Maria.
Shiganshina is overrun by Titans. The words ripple through the fleeing crowd, passed from mouth to mouth.
Emil keeps pulling you forward. His shoulders tense, his head turning sharply left and right as people surge past in both directions. Somewhere during the frantic climb up the hill, your flower crown has slipped from your head and vanished into the grass.
Garrison soldiers barrel past you toward the gate, their tall forms cutting through the crowd like blades. Steel flashes in their hands—long swords drawn, faces set in grim determination. They are supposed to be the protectors of the Wall, the shield between humanity and the nightmare beyond it. But each and every passing face draws a different picture of horror and fear. Disbelief even.
For a hundred years the Walls have stood untouched. A hundred years of safety, of ordinary days, of children playing in the streets and merchants shouting their wares across the marketplace. Now that century has vanished in fire and smoke.
Canon blasts crack through the air so violently it makes your ears ring, the sound blending into the rising chaos of the crowd. People are screaming, tripping over one another as they run, clutching children, dragging carts, dropping everything they cannot carry. They flee in terror at the rumbling of the footsteps that herald the monsters’ arrival.
This must be it; this is what the end of the world sounds like.
Emil keeps pushing forward, forcing his way against the rushing tide of refugees pouring through the gates. Bodies slam into you from every direction, shoving you sideways, pulling you apart inch by inch until suddenly his hand slips from yours and your fear unfolds into a living thing. The loss is instant and terrifying, like a rope snapping while you hang over a cliff.
“Emil!” you scream.
A tall man barrels past, nearly knocking you flat with his long stride. He glances down briefly, irritation flashing across his face as if you’re a cockroach beneath his boots, clearly in his way. You recognise him instantly: the fruit vendor with the ridiculous curled moustache who always sneaks you strawberries or peaches for free when you visit him. He doesn’t even slow down now, instantly swallowed by the tide of fleeing people.
By the time you find your balance again, Emil is gone. The crowd surges forward toward the evacuation ships waiting beyond the gate, a river of panicked bodies that swallow him completely. You spin in circles, trying to see through the forest of moving legs and flailing arms. But then, somehow, his voice carries across the chaos, over the sound of crying children, screaming women—you would always recognise his voice everywhere, anytime.
“[Name]! Go find your parents!” he calls. “Come to our shop—we’ll leave together!”
“I’ll find you later, Emil!” you shout back, cupping your hands around your mouth, hoping he can hear you. “I will find you!”
“I know!” For a split second you think you see him, just a flash of pale hair between taller bodies. “I know you will!”
There is more, there is so much more you want, need to say. But someone slams into you from behind, and suddenly the ground rushes up to meet you., Dust fills your moth as you fall hard, the air knocked from your longs. Dirt grinds between your teeth as you gasp for breath.
“Move!” people scream.
“Faster!” they urge.
“Help!” they beg.
And finally, “They’re closing the gate!!”
Tears sting your eyes. You have to find Mom and Dad and meet up with Emil and then you all will move to the evacuation vessels and flee behind Wall Rose where it’s safe, where the Titans can’t reach you.
But first, you have to get up. You have to get up even though your knees hurt and your palms are scraped bloody from your fall and you just want to get back to Emil and talk more about your future. You want him to keep holding your hand.
Get up. Dad has always told you that during a crisis finding a safe place is the most important thing. They must be waiting for you at home, inside the secure construction of familiarity. Home. You have to get home.
Someone’s boot slams down inches from your outstretched hand. You scramble upright just in time for another body to shove you forward, sending you crashing face-first into the ground again. Pain explodes across your mouth, you taste blood immediately.
“Stupid bitch, get out of the way!” someone barks as they step over you. The words burn deeper than the searing pain throbbing through your body like the fast, stumbling rhythm of a song—but there’s no time to grasp your surroundings.
Strong hands suddenly hook under your arms and haul you up on your feet with surprising force. The sudden repositioning gives you vertigo, your mind can’t keep up with everything that’s happening—and then your mother’s face appears before you, stricken with fear and worry.
“Oh thank God, you’re safe.” She almost chokes on her words, pulling you into a strong embrace. She smells of sandalwood and chicken soup. In a different world, you would be sitting down for lunch now.
“Come on, come on.” You father’s voice booms, urgent and commanding, but when his hand settles on top of your head it is gentle as always. Safe. Relief washes over you, so strong and sudden your knees nearly buckle. You cling to your mother as she pulls you along with the fleeing crowd.
Everything will be fine.
Now you only have to find Emil and everything will be alright. It’s no problem. You have always found Emil.
A crack, loud like thunder. Like the earth is splitting in two, dying. Your head whips around in time to see the giant Titan break through the wall, sending large boulders flying through the air in all directions. They sail in magnificent arcs, soar with an ease through the sky that birds would envy. You watch in awe as one of them soars towards you, growing larger and larger—and you realise there is no way you can get out of its destructive path in time.
Of all the thoughts flashing through your mind in that moment—you still need to help Dad sort through some of his old, unused tools; your friend Dominique hasn’t returned your copy of Tales of a Songstress; Mom wants to try a new pastry recipe and you promised to help—only one strikes roots deep into your heart to bruise your entire existence: I still haven’t told Emil how I feel.[2]
There’s still so much you need to tell him. You haven’t properly conveyed all that he needs to know.
Regret. What an awful, ugly feeling eating you from inside before you even had a chance at life.
Your mother stops suddenly. You crash into her legs, grabbing for her coat. At least you’d find your end in this world the same way that it had begun: in your mother’s warm and safe embrace. But she doesn’t hold you. She shoves you, hard, away from her. The force sends you stumbling backward, out of the shadow of the falling boulder just as it crashes down.
It’s funny how you’ve seen insects squash beneath your mother’s slipper or your father’s hand and never really thought about the split second between life and death—consciousness and the absence of everything: feeling, thought, awareness. Pain. Insects die within a blink—snap. Just like that.
Humans die messy. Bones crack, blood splashes, shit sprays. The boulder squashes your parents into a bloody pulp with a sickening crack of bone and spray of blood, burying them alive beneath cold, hard stone. There and gone within a blink—splat. Just like that.
It takes one, two, three seconds until your brain catches up with what just happened. Three seconds of blissful shock and blessed emptiness where nothing exists—no thought, no feeling, no comprehension. And then the truth crashes down on you, everything caves in and you feel everything at once.
Dead.
They’re dead.
Mom and Dad are dead.
This isn’t real. This can’t be real. Maybe … maybe you can save your father. His feet, bloody and twisted at impossible angles, stick out from under the bolder. Maybe he’s fine and you can pull free—
You never get the chance. A Garrison soldier snatches you off the ground and up into his strong arms, his black curls plastered onto his sweaty forehead as he’s running towards the evacuation boats. He screams but you don’t hear him—no, it’s you who is screaming, wailing for your mom and dad until your throat feels like it’s tearing apart, hot tears burning on their way down your face.
He throws you over his shoulder like a sack of grain, smelling of sweat and something else; something bitter, something primal and raw—fear?—as he carries you away from the huge hole in Wall Maria. Away from the Titan that broke through it. It’s different. This one doesn’t look like the Titans from your mother’s picture books. Steam curls around his slightly opened mouth, its eyes gleam like sharpened gold. Plates of armoured skin cover its body like a knight’s armour, thick and impenetrable, and maybe that’s why none of the soldiers are trying to kill it. No one is even trying to take it down even though it did not hesitate tearing down Wall Maria. Your home. Your parents. Your life.
Carried away, unable to do anything; powerless to do anything, you witness the pitiful spectacle of humanity’s impotence. A reminder of the terror of being dominated by them and the shame of being held captive in a cage like cattle.
Freedom has never tasted so foreign, so unreachable.
Freedom.
You choke on your sobs, sight coming into focus so suddenly it gives you whiplash. Emil. There’s still hope once you find Emil.
“Let go.” Twisting in the soldier’s grip, your eyes dart wildly around as you try to figure out how far off the main road you are. A squeaky shop sign catches your attention, reading Schmidt’s Bakery. The side road leading to Emil’s house isn’t too far. Now you begin to struggle with more vigour. “I have to—find Emil.”
“Stop moving, we’re almost at the evacuation side,” the soldier barks.
But you won’t leave without Emil, this certainty is engraved into your heart like the never changing law that when the sun sets it also rises and day becomes night becomes day again and continues forever. You and Emil are forever.
“Let me—” You grunt, and without thinking bite into the soldier’s ear. “GO.”
Blood explodes in your mouth, its taste a punch to your senses. Do Titans taste like humans taste? Do they relish in the coppery smell, the warmth? Nausea overwhelms you, disarms you until you find yourself back on the ground, your back taking the worst of the impact.
“What the fuck?” the Garrison soldier shrieks. You don’t look back, already bolting past the bakery towards the side road enclosed by tall buildings. Emil. Only Emil is important right now.
The path is burnt into your memory. You could walk it blindfolded in the middle of the night, for your heart knows to lead you where you belong. Down to the end of the path, a sharp right and up the stairs separating the higher and lower parts of the suburb. Past Fiona’s house—
—graceful Fiona who’s the best at hopscotch and there she is lying, the pink inside of her head spilled before the entrance like mashed fruit and her parents are crying, cowering in front of her, but why is her father pointing the rifle at himself; BANG—
You’re too scared to turn around at the gunshot cracking behind you. Fiona’s mother screams but it grows distant as you follow the cobblestone path to where Dad always visits his favourite barber—used to visit his favourite barber—where it always smells of fresh laundry, hanging out in the sun to dry as women flock together to share news, gossip, trade little secrets to season, sweeten, spice up meals. Never again.
You race between court yards, climb over debris—how has destruction caught up so fast—past a fruit stand and an alehouse. Smashed peaches, oranges, apples drape the ground like intestines turned inside out, squashing under your feet. The sound makes you sick.
Close. You’re so close. Almost there. You lurch around the last corner—
Nothing.
There is nothing.
You heart pounds like thunder. Where once Her Inflorescence stood, a neat two store building with a peaked crimson roof and a wide door painted brightly in yellow, the front wall covered in ivy, only the ghost of a house remains. It’s collapsed like a little toy thing, as if a child threw a temper tantrum and decided it’s grown tired of it.
But worse is the smell. Sweetness. Floral sweetness from countless trampled, squashed, ripped out flowers mixing with the smoke from rising fires. Someone must be burning down houses in hopes of hurting or at least slowing the Titans.
Fear jams up your throat. It leaves a hole in your chest, a gaping wound you know won’t heal. You know this as bones know their breaking stress. You heart hammers, as though you’re in free fall, as though the ground is slowly disappearing beneath you.
“Emil?” It’s barely a whisper, but you repeat his name over and over again. Your prayer. When silence is your only answer, you stumble closer to the wreck. “Emil, where are you?”
If he’s been waiting inside his house for you, if he’s still under all the stone and wood and everything—
You couldn’t save your parents, but you have to save him.
Stone cuts into your palms. Splinters wedge into your skin. Blisters grow and break. Your little arms shake from overexertion, your muscles burn but you don’t stop. You can’t stop. There’s a future waiting for you both, a promise to protect and a life you want to share with him only.
Why is everything so heavy? Why are you so weak? Why can’t you do anything?
Your throat is raw from screaming, your red-rimmed eyes hurt from crying, and still you lift and lift, find his mother’s favourite, elegant dark-wood cupboard in broken pieces; his father’s guitar, all strings snapped; broken flower pots and buckets; the painting Emil’s grandfather created of this beautiful, imagined pink-petalled tree overlooking a steep cliff. Where are they? Where is he?
Voices. Too focused on unearthing what remains of the house, you only notice the approaching refugees when they’re already too close.
“Kid, we gotta get outta here!” Strong arms haul you up—why keeps everyone just picking you up like a weightless sack of trash, why don’t they just leave you be—but you cling to the debris, leaving bloody hand prints.
“No!” You try to kick at the man but exhaustion renders you weak. “No, I have to find Emil! I have to keep my promise!” Someone is screaming—Titans, Titans are coming!—you want them to shut up and help searching. You’d be so much faster if someone helped. “We can’t be together if I don’t find him!”
“Just leave her!” a woman’s voice shrieks, and suddenly someone’s tearing your clothes in the opposite direction.
More voices. They’re so loud, you can’t hear your own thoughts.
Shut up, shut up. “Shut up, shut up!” you scream, but they don’t stop arguing.
“I’ll be damned if I allow those fuckers to eat another one of us,” the man rasps. He dodges your arm swinging but your elbow grazes his temple and his head whips around and he gives you a wild, dark look, one that chills you to the bone and locks your limbs up in fear. His hands around your arms hurt, he starts shaking you so hard something pops in your neck. “It’s always the same with you, can’t you fucking behave for once, Anna? This is serious!”
The woman tries to jump between you, her crimson hair unravelling under her headscarf like tendrils of fire. “She’s not our daughter, Anna is dead,” she cries. “Leave heeeeeeeeer!” The rest of her sentence turns into a high-pitched scream as fingers, thick as tree trunks, curl around her body and lift her from the ground right into the gaping mouth of a black haired, wide eyed Titan that’s crouching behind a house. Her scream cuts off abruptly when its teeth snap off her head from her neck, painting its own chin crimson as blood spurts from the grizzly stump.
Dead. Just like that.
The man looks up at the Titan eating his wife with a mute expression of horror before he turns and without another word, you still tugged under his arm, bolts. You’re powerless, tired, scared. Every rasping sob feels like sawblades in your chest, cutting you open from the inside. When your sight finally comes back into focus—how much can a single person cry until all tears have dried up?—you’re down by the river, standing before the mass of people trying to get onto the vessels. Some have already started leaving the docks.
“Children and mothers first, children and mothers, then the elderly, now pick up the pace, people! Come on!”
The tension is palpable enough to cut with a knife. Who knew how much longer the frail order could be maintained by the Garrison soldiers, how much longer people would hold onto their senses before overthrowing moral, allowing their primal fear to rule them.
The man simply allows the soldiers to carry you to the very front, he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at you. Two parts of him have died today and now nothing is left. His eyes. His eyes are dead, and you wonder if they’re a mirror of your own.
But when your feet are back on solid ground after you’ve boarded the ship, you scramble away from the soldiers and up at the railing to look over what’s left of the town. Titans are swarming the entrance, catching those who aren’t fast enough. Eating them. Breaking their bones, snapping their necks. All with glassy eyes, crooked smiles. The devils are upon you, bringing forth the end of mankind.
As your eyes roam over the crowd, over so many still waiting to get on board of a vessel, still hoping for safety beyond Wall Rose, you hope to find one person only.
“Emil,” you whisper, eyes scanning the crowd, hoping to spot a flash of silver hair, the colour of stardust. Babies and children are crying. Families, torn apart, try to convey their last hopes and wishes.
“Emil,” you say, leaning so far over the railing you could fall over any second. Soldiers scream for order, but scared people are hard to control for their fear is turning into a living thing.
“Emil!” you shout. If he’s here somewhere, he’ll hear you. He’ll come to you. Desperate men and women try to jump onto the ship. One man manages to grab onto the edge, but no one helps him up. On the other end, a women loses balances and falls off. When she hits the ground, her head splits open like a watermelon.
“EMIL!” you scream, no wail, the sound more like a wounded animal than human.
A sharp slap. Suddenly, your world turns quiet. Searing pain slashes across your cheek as you tumble off the railing, whimpering. Above you towers a Garrison soldier, and after he’s kicked the man who just managed to climb onto the vessel off it, he turns to you and spits, “Shut the fuck up you stupid brat before the Titans come after us!”
“Back off, man!” A young man shoves the soldier away. He’s hunched over slightly, a make-shift bandage across his head made out of tattered fabric covers a wound. “What the fuck is wrong with you, hitting a child?!”
The Garrison soldier points at you with a dirty finger. “That fucking kid might get us all killed!”
“You don’t just fucking hurt a child!”
You don’t want to be here. Crawling away from their shouting, between broken men and defeated women, sobbing children, you make your way to the bow. It’s quieter here, a little less crowded. No one wants to be here and look back at what they’re leaving behind—what they have to surrender to the Titans. You manage to drag your small, beaten body, refusing anything more than slow, careful movements, against the railing, eyes fixed on your hometown slowly disappearing as you head into the uncertain future.
There’s the meadow, growing smaller and smaller. You can barely spot the flowers. Not too long ago, you and Emil sat there and promised each other to be together. Now, it feels like a dream. A beautiful dream that ended, throwing you into the reality of this cruel world.
Something presses into your hand painfully. When you open your palm, Emil’s ring sits in the imprint it has left in your skin—you’ve been clutching it inside your fist the whole time.
The ring.
The only thing left of him. Of your promise.
You tuck it back into your palm, away from the world, save from its cruelty, and cry.
One, two long minutes pass as the world turns quiet. When you close your eyes, images flash in the dark, vibrant and forever-lasting in your mind: Emil’s smile, Mom allowing you to taste what would become your favourite stew, Dad instructing you how to change his ink cartridge without spilling anything. The glowering, bright eyes of the enormous Titan breaking through the wall, Dad’s feet sticking out from under the stone. The very last time Mom looked at you. The painting of the tree in Emil’s house usually hanging by the entrance. Emil’s smile.
In the darkness, a voice reaches you. “I’ll exterminate them … I’ll clean out this world.”
You open your eyes. Against the railing, a boy stands, gripping it hard enough his knuckles turn white. His eyes—furious, vibrant viridian—are fixed on a future only he can see as he declares to the world, “I’ll kill them! Every single fucking one of them that’s on this earth!”
You curl into yourself, in this small space only belonging to you, and look down at the ring again. This time, you promise something yourself: You vow to get stronger. Once you’re stronger, no one will be able to take away what’s important to you. Once you’re stronger, you’ll never have to break a promise again.
Once you’re stronger, you will kill the armoured Titan.
