Chapter Text
Reiner spends a lot of his time being vaguely confused by everything that goes on around him. When he moved up to the crimped northern town with his uncle, leaving behind a warm city with fruit trees on street corners that he can struggle to remember, his memory was full of holes. He knows he lived in a big, empty house but it’s hard to know who else lived there. He knows that his uncle walked him through a sweet twilight to a train station and they spent three days distancing themselves from something. He knows that he got off the train and there were no fruit trees or street corners, there was a road full of thick gray mud that stuck to his shoes like cement and everything else was a silvered field of grass, hedged in by the north’s characteristic black pines. And he knows that he spent eight days walking through the country to the port, eight days where his uncle silently dared him to complain, of sleeping on dripping moss beds, of rationing and bleeding feet and a permanent cold. There was one night, fireless because everything was damp in mist, that they slept under a fallen tree. Lichen dropped in their hair.
“Now Reiner,” his uncle said, “I know this seems bad now. But life will be better for you once we get there.”
“It’s so cold here though.”
“There’s worse things to be than cold, Reiner.”
Even then, Reiner can’t remember what they would need to be safe from.
He doesn’t pay too much attention to his memory, or lack thereof, until he hears his fellow students mentioning things that had happened to them one, two, three years ago. For the first time he draws a blank because for all he knows nothing happened to him before the last few months. A lot of time is spent trying to remember. He tells his uncle that he wants to know what happened.
His uncle, leaned over the pocked kitchen table, looks at him. They superficially resemble each other, but the longer you look the easier it is to realize they aren’t truly alike. “No, you don’t. That’s why we’re here.”
Reiner meets the ocean with a lot of questions and nobody to get answers from. He tries to keep quiet about things, but eventually ends up telling Annie anyways. Most lies come easily to him but Annie has a distinct way of making truths happen.
They walk through the edge of the forest, crossing the road that Reiner came into town on, and this afternoon it’s just the two of them. Bertholdt usually accompanies but his parents warned him to be home directly after school. Over the years, the Hoovers have become slowly more suspicious of the cunning blond children their son keeps company with. A lot of excuses and sudden appointments have started arising whenever Bertholdt wants to stay out for an hour after school.
So that day it’s just the two of them. Reiner is feeling a little funny; his uncle’s been weird, been disappearing from the house he normally never leaves, been tensed with nerves born of…something. That’s when he loses steam. Whatever is worrying his uncle must be something from down south, and thus something he can’t remember.
For a moment he goes quiet because this forgetfulness is fearful. Then he asks Annie, “Why can’t I remember anything?”
She’s thoughtful for a moment, parsing her options. They’re sat on a log and she’s unable to touch her feet to the ground so starts bouncing her legs.
“I don’t know…but my dad knows a lot about how people work. He’s told me stuff about it. That when something bad happens, that your brain wipes it away because remembering would be too much for it to handle,” she clears her throat as a way to waste time but it’s still obvious what she’s about to say. “So I guess something bad must have happened to you.”
Reiner looks down at the loamy earth under his feet. “I think I knew that part already.” And he guesses that he did, he always knew that even if he didn’t know anything else, knew it in the way his uncle didn’t talk and the way his chest gets too tight sometimes when he first wakes up from a black sleep. There isn’t much to say after that so he takes Annie’s hand in silence, pressing it down into the spongy log beneath them. She stretches her neck long against his arm so that her chin hinges around his shoulder.
“It’s okay. Sometimes I get the same way.”
He’s surprised. It had always seemed like if any of them had their act together, it would have been her. “Really?”
“It’s my mother. I can’t remember my mother.” Her words press into his arm straight from the warm run of her throat. From Annie, that’s a confession.
“Oh.”
“So I’m not exactly like you. But a little close. I guess.”
A little close is one word for it, but Reiner doesn’t put too much thought into that. He closes his eyes, feeling her against his arm and the moss under one hand, her hand under the other. He wonders when she stopped being so bitter and started getting…mournful isn’t quite the right word, but it’s the best thing he can come up with. Maybe it’s part of getting older; being sad when they were kids was tough, but then living through years and learning that things don’t go away on their own, that they’d never just wake up one morning with their brains sorted out, Reiner feels like that did something a little bit wicked to each of them. Annie just kept herself quiet about it.
When she has to leave back to her island after their hour spent ‘working on a class presentation’ as she will tell her father, Reiner remains in the forest. He finds a new log to sit on after walking Annie down to the dock, this one newer and still sappy. The air is cold, the ocean colder, the forest thick like his uncles swallows over dinner and expansive, the forest cages his town to the ocean and he stares at the ground.
He wants to go back down south.
For a week, Reiner thinks about actually leaving, actually putting everything he can carry into a bag, actually walking back down the muddy road to the train station, actually leaving his uncle. Not only his uncle though, but the town that he’s spent the last eight years of his life in, all the teachers he’s sweet-talked and students he’s studied with and the old woman who runs the grocery that he playfully flirts with every time he goes shopping. The longer he thinks about leaving, the more okay he becomes with the idea. But there are some things he refuses to leave behind. Something tells him that Annie and Bertholdt are just as ready to get out as he is, though.
After a week of reflection, Reiner tells Bertholdt his plan.
“You mean, like, moving? Out of town?” Bertholdt looks a little confused, and it would be tempting to say that it’s because he never considered leaving. Of course Reiner knows that isn’t true; every day as they walk to school, he sees the look Bertholdt gets when they take a turn off the main street to the schoolhouse. If they’d kept going straight they would have left town long ago. The confusion is because he never considered leaving to be an actual possibility.
“Yeah. You and me and Annie. We could go south and find work or something. Just get out of here.”
Bertholdt looks down at his hands. Over the years his scratching has taken its toll; his coppered skin fades to a dark clay hue in thick scars down the backs of his hands, overlaying his bones perfectly because he is succinct. His fingers slot together like sardines in a can. “I…”
“Just think about it. We’ve got time.” Reiner taps his forehead against Bertholdt’s shoulder. Bertholdt reaches up and keeps his head there with a hand on the side of his neck. They don’t look at each other because that would be some sort of admittance.
“I will.”
The thing is, of course, is that Bertholdt is awful with change. But change can be necessary, is necessary as told by the scars on his hands, and Reiner gets the feeling that the southern sun could help bring the blood back to his face.
Next he tells his uncle. It’s late at night, and Reiner stands in the doorway of his uncle’s study. The entire house is incredibly dark but the study is by far the worst offender. Three windows all with carpet-thick drapes over them, the floor polished shadowy, the walls thick with dust because nobody ever cleans them. His uncle sits at his desk, hands pushed into his graying hair worn long to give a more classical look.
They know how to exist together but have never quite figured out how to converse. So Reiner remains quiet in the doorway until it becomes clear that if he wants to talk, he’s going to have to be the instigator.
“Once I graduate, I’m moving out.”
“Mhm.”
“Out of town. I want to go south again.”
His uncle looks so old so suddenly. Small strands of hair fall over his face, the stubble around his mouth mostly covering the wrinkles there, and he’s gone wildly dark under his eyes. For many moments he stays still over his desk. Choosing words and making bets. Trying to figure out how to diffuse a strong-willed young man who is going to do what he wants regardless of anything, really.
“Reiner, do not do that,” he speaks lowly and without looking up, though his eyes have gone wide.
“You can’t keep me here–”
His uncle looks up then. “You don’t know what’s waiting for you down there.”
“Then tell me.” Reiner shoulders himself out of the doorway and into the study proper. The stifled room manages to make him less imposing than he normally is, the darkness weighting him down like an extra layer of gravity.
“No.”
Even though his uncle looks almost afraid, there is nothing more to say.
And that leaves one more person to tell.
Reiner does not want to have this conversation with Annie. Because he knows that she’ll go with them but he’s asking much more of her than he is asking of Bertholdt or his uncle. Bertholdt needs to get out of this town, needs to escape from his parents and the people he grew up with, needs a breath of fresh air in the same way as a drowning man. His uncle will be losing something, but it was inevitable really; Reiner wanting to leave is no surprise. But it’s different for Annie. She’s never talked about leaving, and the whole town knows of her devotion to her father. He can’t understand how she’s so loyal to this paranoid, most likely broken man, but she is and asking her to leave that island is going to be a battle with multiple theatres.
When he asks her, they’re alone at the dock. The backdrop of the ocean is making her look even smaller.
“What makes you think I’m willing to leave.”
Suddenly, the ocean backdrop puts her power in perspective.
“What makes you think I’m unhappy, or want a change. What makes you think that I hold my father in so little regard that I’d just leave him.”
“I’m just putting it out there,” he raises his hands defensively. “I’ve already talked to Bert about it.”
“What makes you think you matter so much to me that I’d follow you away to some place I don’t even know?”
Most people assume that Annie is always angry because they see her stony mouth and harshly-lidded eyes and they never hear her speak in anything but clipped little sentence fragments. That isn’t anger; that’s boredom. Anger is when her shoulders roll forward and her jaw sets heavy and there’s something in her voice that is surprisingly warm, but warm in the way lightning is warm. Warm like electrocution. Her anger is low and intense, and generally is used to frighten people off before they can think of what they did to find such a flaw in her armor. Reiner, of course, isn’t easily frightened, especially by somebody he could win a fight against by sitting on, but he knows when he’s said enough. Hearing her resort to shock value to try and get him to back off makes him take a step back.
He can’t understand, could never really understand, how much the idea of leaving her father scares her. Because when somebody is told their entire life that the world is full of monsters chomping at the bit to devour you, that they will hurt you and use you and spend you, and you can’t even fight them because they’ll all have human faces; when there is a three year old girl sitting on her father’s shoulders at the very top of the lighthouse watching a storm roll in, and her father tells her that the world will hurt her, so she must make it her enemy, and that he will teach her how; and when the girl grows up as an entire town blames her silently for her father, when her mother is a void in her memory, when all of this convenes it makes Annie Leonhardt, the girl that is brave only because she never had any other choice.
Because when he thinks about her father, he imagines a man who cannot comprehend tenderness. Not the father who watches his sick daughter in her red eyes and blue veins, who lets her hair down because by that point her arms are too weak for her to do anything herself. Not the father who had to teach them both how to survive her nightmares and how to pretend they never happened come morning because even if she can’t have sleep she can at least keep her pride. Not the father that only told her that friends are poison because he never had any evidence to the contrary and thought that even if he made his daughter’s life sterile, it would be better than what he’d had to fight through.
There’s this great disconnect between them, because to Reiner family means nothing while to Annie it’s nearly everything she’s ever had.
He leaves her at the dock after that, and later that day talks to Bertholdt about it. Bertholdt doesn’t say much, mostly nods along, while Reiner riles himself up, half from the sting of her words, half from the fear that she really would refuse to go with them.
“I’ll talk to her about it later,” Bertholdt promises.
Apparently he does, though Reiner isn’t sure when or how, because one night in late June there is a knock on his front door. He opens it to a thick night that still has the cool sea breeze in it and in the center of it all is Annie. She has a large backpack with her and her hair tied tight behind her head and she’s been crying.
(They’ve never seen Annie cry. Reiner will cry, usually out of frustration, and he’s loud and angry about it, usually shouts and shakes until he’s too tired for more. And Bertholdt will cry and hates himself for it and rubs at his eyes so much to try to keep his tears in that they turn red and puffy. But Annie does not cry).
“Don’t touch me, don’t fucking touch me,” she hisses and shoulders into his house.
It doesn’t feel right to stay there with her so he grabs his toothbrush and goes next door. Bertholdt’s mother is not particularly enthused to find him on her porch at nine in the evening, smiling gallantly and asking to speak to her son. She lets him in regardless, mostly because Bertholdt appears at the top of the stairs and gives her a pleading look. By this point she knows that her son is leaving, and she also knows who it is that is taking him away from her.
In Bertholdt’s room, Reiner outlines what happened.
“Shit, and she was crying too.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah.”
Bertholdt looks horrified, and a little like he wants to sprint next door to find Annie himself. But they both agree that they need to give her until morning at least to sort out whatever happened.
They spend their night laid out in bed with their sides touching. It’s a little uncomfortable in the stagnant night but Reiner is too distracted to notice and Bertholdt is too polite to say anything. The air sits heavy on them in lieu of a blanket and it makes them both drowsy, just a little bit.
“I guess we’ll really have to leave soon, then. If Annie came out here…I don’t think she’s going back…” Reiner says, but Bertholdt is already asleep. He traces the shadows on the ceiling with his eyes while thinking about what Annie might be doing, not even thirty feet away probably, tries to convince himself that he didn’t abandon her, remembers that his uncle is there with her and groans loudly. Why didn’t he think of his uncle earlier?
“Shh. ’S okay.” Bertholdt, still asleep, reaches up to pat him on the head but misses and hits him in the nose.
It is not a restful night by any means and they are forced to wake up early when the rising sun hits the window, turning the room quickly into a sauna. They migrate to the bathroom but Bertholdt nudges him in the hallway. “Go check in on her.”
Reiner does. He sees his uncle in the kitchen, strangely enough. His uncle does not look very pleased, but nods to the stairs.
He finds Annie sitting in the bathtub full of cold water, her hair slicked to the back of her neck and her eyes no longer rimmed in red. Through the refraction of the water he thinks he sees thick knots of scars across her ribs, silvered with age, but he can’t find voice enough to ask, instead looking at the linoleum floor. She must know what he can see but doesn’t pay him any attention.
She eventually asks when they will leave. He says as soon as possible.
“Good.”
She beckons him over to the side of the bathtub and leans out a little bit. Wildly guessing at what he’s supposed to do, Reiner sits down so they’re at eye level with each other. From how she has lifted herself out of the water he can see for sure that those are scars on her sides, not a trick of the light, and he spends too long looking – his uncle has some just like them. She snatches at the side of his head and even her short little nails are sharp at his scalp.
“Don’t.” Then she lowers her head and says quite softly, “you have no idea what I’m leaving behind.”
There’s no way to apologize to that, really.
That night, back in his own bed with Annie pressed into a ball against him, he imagines leaving. This time around, the moss beds will be dry and springy, not damp as they were with his arrival, and he thinks of them all sleeping together on the forest floor, spending their earliest mornings picking pine needles out of each others hair (he doesn’t imagine how, no matter how hot the day is, that night is cooler and cooler still when there are no house walls to trap the heat inside, doesn’t imagine the sounds of forest creatures that will walk just an arm’s length from their heads, cannot imagine that on the first morning Annie will wake them both up with an unsure kiss and that he will smile so hard that she’ll blush and punch him in the jaw). And the fields he saw when he first got off the train, now they will be gold and green and there will be wildflowers to pick, for Bertholdt to press into one of his books, for him to try and braid into Annie’s hair as they wait a lazy hour for the train. And all the mud of the road will have dried, replaced with a gray dust that weaves itself into their clothes and clots the saliva in their mouths and creases in the folds under their eyes, mixing with sweat and leaving discolored streaks across their skin.
He imagines the train, can’t quite remember what it looks like or what it sounds like, but that it will probably be a welcomed reprieve after their week-long hike. He imagines the country flashing by so fast beyond their windows. And his imagination stops at getting out at the train station, the one his uncle stole him away to eight years ago, at the fruit trees on the street corners and the fact that they’ll all have northern accents that sound awkward in the warm southern air and all the ways that a big agricultural city is so different than a tiny ocean town.
There is so much to imagine. For now he has his muggy little room, with Annie still angry but at his side anyways, and Bertholdt probably asleep next door – or, knowing him, wide awake and scurrying around his room, checking and double-checking that he’s packed everything that he needs.
Again, there is much to imagine. But he will leave the doing for tomorrow morning.