Chapter Text
You don't remember being given a life, or anything before that, if there was something before that. You were just suddenly, living . You were alive. But what were you? Who were you?
You couldn’t think much of anything at that time, as your brain was apparently less capable of much intelligent thought. All you could see was dark, nothing. Black .
You were suddenly aware of a faint coolness surrounding you, and of something wet you were laying on. You heard lots of whistling around you, and felt little pecks of something pelting you from the side.
Your eyes opened for the first time, slowly trying to blink away the blurriness, and saw something above you. What was it?
Blue. Sky.
It was a blue sky.
The sky was accompanied by rolling, puffs of light grey. Clouds . You felt something farther down your face move, and curve upwards. You were smiling for the very first time.
You also saw millions of tiny… white things flying in and out of your vision. Snow .
You moved your… hands … to the wet, cool surface beneath you, and pushed yourself to sit up with a grunt, leaving huge, melted hand-shaped puddles in your wake. Finally able to look around, you slowly took in what you saw, names coming to you with some difficulty, but getting slightly faster as you went along.
… white … snow… and lots of it.
… green… dark green… trees… pine trees…
… bumps… hills… mountains!
You were in a small clearing with pines surrounding you; one lone tree stood planted a few paces away. You opened your mouth to breathe and felt a rush of cool air flow into you. It was nice.
You were aware that your surroundings were, what was it? Cold , but you didn't feel much or any of it. Instead you felt… hot ? No not hot, warm. You wondered why.
You looked down, and saw something that appeared to be connected to you. A body . Chest, stomach, legs, feet. You slowly wiggled your toes, curled and flexed your feet, and dug into the snow with your heels, giggling all the while.
Now you noticed that every few seconds, the black from before would cover your vision then disappear again. Eye lids . You tried to keep your eyes open as long as you could, because there was so much to see! But your eyes started to sting, then a clear thing moved across your eye and the stinging was gone, and you could see clearly the entire time. Your third eyelid , or nictitating membrane .
You felt something moving on the side of your head, you reached a hand you to touch it since you couldn't see it. It had a lot of weirdly intricate structures, got longer and thinner at the tips, you could control it's movement, and sounds seemed to muffle if you covered it entirely. You had two of them on either side of your head. Ears .
You could control your body just fine, so you rose one entire leg, then dropped it back down onto the ground, making the snow shake and the ground tremble. You giggled more.
Once again pushing your hands into the ground, you drew you knees closer to you and heaved yourself into a standing position, but you felt unbalanced. Your arms flailed around and you yelped and fell forward causing nearby rocks and pebbles to jump from the small shake of the land.
After listening to the echo of your yelp bounce across the sides of the snow-capped mountains and then fade out, you looked to the nearby pine tree and crawled on your hands and knees over to it to use the tree to try standing again.
Leaning a great portion of your weight against the rather large trunk of the tree, you still felt unsturdy, but decided to take a risk anyway. Moving a shaky foot forward, you took a small step, easing some strain off of the poor tree.
Feeling confident, you took another step, and another, and then after walking in a full circle around the tree, you took your hands off the large pine trunk.
You smiled again, these were your first steps!
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That was a long time ago. You didn't know how to tell time, but you knew that way too many days and nights had gone by for it to be recent. Back then, you were much younger, and smaller too. Only around one third of how tall you were now. But then again, you didn't know how to measure either, so you couldn't give any exact numbers.
You are now older and bigger, and more aware of the world around you. Your hair had gotten longer, and you had learned the hard way that long nails broke and lead to pain so you filed them against rocks whenever they got too long (which was pretty frequently).
You had come into existence in a snowy, northern land, and had lived there since then. You've learned that the snow that covered every surface you had ever seen melted under your touch. If you put a finger in a mound of the icy substance, it would just… evaporate , leaving columns of steam rising from the area of which you touched.
Although, snow usually filled your prints back up fairly quickly, since there was such a huge abundance of it. It was practically always snowing. And when it wasn’t snowing, it was hailing (which was not a fun time, let me tell you.)
You learned that pine needles are pointy, so becoming a tree hugger was something you had decided against. Pine smelled really strong though, so smelling but not touching was okay. Trees also couldn't hold your weight despite being much taller than you, so you couldn't climb any.
Brown stuff rested underneath the layers and layers of snow you lived on, but it was as hard as rock (presumably from the cold snow). You sometimes put your hand on it to warm it up, just so you could scoop handfuls of it and make mud piles to play with. That, and you also just liked the earthy smell the dirt emitted. It's aroma was stronger than the snow too, which just smelled watery.
Mountains and valleys rose and dipped with the terrain. You sometimes climbed mountains, walking uphill in between trees, climbing over boulders that were simply stepping stones to you, and bushwhacking your way to the top of the summit until you looked over the white and green wash with flat dips of frozen water, of the landscape you called home. The wind was rough and unforgiving on mountain tops, but you had grown used to it. The wind was calmer in valleys, and almost seemed to roll over you if you ducked down.
The landscape also contained various rivers, streams, and frozen lakes. If the water body wasn't fully frozen, then it at least had pancakes of ice floating on top of it. But most of the time it was frozen. You had been walking the day you discovered that not only can the ice not hold you, but it, too, melted like the snow under your feet. You had walked across with not a care in the world, up until steam started to fizzle from your steps and you fell in with a surprised cry.
Which led to your first bath.
Which lasted for hours .
Which heated the water, successfully creating a hot spring.
You liked splashing , creating different waves , and blowing bubbles . The water made your hair stick flat against your head, so you enjoyed whipping your head around to spray the water everywhere and spike your hair up. Spitting out the water was fun too, and you had discovered that you could swallow it! You didn’t know where it went, but normally after gulping down some, steam would rise up from your throat and out of your mouth, making the foggy clouds that you breathed out on a regular basis thicker. But then the water in the lake started to evaporate and your fingers got all wrinkly so you reluctantly got out. However, you tried to bathe a lot after that.
You had accidentally breathed water in one time, resulting in a suffocating feeling tightening your throat. You had panicked, frightened, scared and confused. Your chest hurt, burned, convulsed. Liquid gargled up in your mouth, and you wanted to thrash and cry out, but it hurt more to move or make noise. Wetness started streaming down your cheeks… from your eyes? Was this what happened to the water you drank? More moisture started beading up along your forehead, neck, shoulders, chest, and back. Steam flowed out of your mouth endlessly as you whimpered helplessly. The burning, acidic pain within your upper body only lasted a few moments, before it faded out to a dull throb, then was gone. You blinked rapidly as the tears and moisture along your face and upper body began disappearing in thin, misty columns. You had healed somehow. However, the experience was not an enjoyable one, so you vowed never to do that again.
You weren’t alone in your snowy wonderland either. Other creatures like you existed, but they weren't exactly the same as you. You had eagerly tried to befriend a few, but some of them ignored your existence while others attacked you. You had learned to defend yourself through this repetition of getting attacked by your own kind, and you had grown a disliking for them.
There weren't many of your kind up in this area anyway. Hardly any, actually. You’d only ever encountered the same amount of beings like you as fingers you had on both hands . You had a feeling it had to do with most of them liking warmer temperatures, which probably resigned in southern regions. But that was just a theory.
Personally, you didn’t find the cold very, well, cold . You thought this was because your body emitted heat for some strange reason, but again, that was just another theory of yours.
Strangely enough, you had made some observations about the other creatures like you. Some were taller than you and some were smaller. Some had really weird looking bodies while others had bodies that looked fairly similar to yours. However, the thing that intrigued you most was the few you had seen with hair on their face and bodies . It looked cool, and you wondered why you didn’t have it, or if you ever would have it. You sometimes checked your reflection in the running sheen of a waterfall (that was probably to strong to get frozen) to see if any hairs had sprouted along your jaw or chest. So far, none yet.
Along with the rare scattering of beings like you, you found many other, fascinating creatures that inhabited this snowy world with you. They were all much smaller than you, which was a little frustrating at times because you'd have to get close in order to see any detail from your distance in the sky, which would only scare the animal off.
Sometimes, if you stayed really still for an agonizingly long time, flying animals would circle and maybe land of your shoulders or head. Birds . Some were smaller than your pupil, and some covered the span of your thumb. Some were colorful, some were as white as the snow, and some had speckles. You liked watching flocks of them soar across the sky in coordinated patterns. You'd also panicked when you saw a bird's head turn all the way around for the first time. The bird was fine, thankfully, but you had sulked for a whole four days after trying to do it yourself but discovering you couldn’t. (You’d walked yourself in several circles in failed attempts to do the bird’s head magic trick.)
Four legged animals prowled the snowy grounds too. Some had pointy displays on their heads, some had soft fur and sharp claws, some had long tails, some had short tails, some had long ears, some had short ears, some had hooves, some had paws, some had little button noses while others had jaws full of teeth. Some fought playfully, while others fought to get bloody, and you had broken up battles many times, which resulted in the initiator of the fight biting your hand (but it tickled to you). Sometimes while you stayed still and quiet with birds resting on your head and shoulders, the four legged ones would curl up around your legs and lap to leech off heat.
You sometimes saw animals putting things in their mouths and swallowing, the way you did with water. But you only did it for fun, while the animals seemed to need to do… whatever the action was called. Some animals swallowed plants, but when you tried it, you didn’t like the bitter taste. The thing that shook you, was when some animals ate each other . The first time you saw an animal kill another animal and consume it, you didn’t react well. You had huddled yourself in a cave for a week straight, trying to convince yourself that the wetness dripping down your face was just coming from cracks and crevices in the rock ceiling. Whatever purpose animals had for putting things in their mouths, was taking another animal's life really necessary?
Maybe they were just defending themselves, the way you did when encountering similar beings like you? But you hadn’t swallowed anything after you had beaten another you-creature off! You had never stolen another living creature’s life ! You had never killed anyone! If another one like you attacked you, you only punched it around enough to daze it and make an escape!
As your thoughts ate away at your brain that week, giving you a headache to accompany the pain in your chest, you realized a weak link between the creatures like you that attacked, and the animals that attacked. The world you lived in was darker than you thought. In this world, it seemed you could either kill, or be killed.
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Your recovery from that week after eventually emerging from the cave involved a long bath (this one much, much calmer than usual) and loud chirping in your ears from the birds that found the water quiet and still enough to join you.
That was the night you began to wonder why your eyes refused to stay open when the bright, glowing orb of light that moved across the sky decided to hide behind the line of the horizon. Before that night in the bath with the birds, watching them chase each other’s feathered tails around in the water, you had never questioned why your eyes never got to see what actually happened when the light went down. Your eyes just shut the second the light went down, and opened the second it came back up. As if you didn’t have the energy to function without it.
That was how it had always been, but now, as the sky became painted in bright oranges, yellows, pinks, and purples, dusting bright outlines and shimmers through the tops and branches of snow-covered pine trees, you found yourself fighting to keep your eyes open for the first time to at least catch a glimpse of what happens .
Most of the birds had retreated back into the trees, and you slowly sat up in your bath, water hiking trails down your huge body and the tops of your knees breaking through the surface of the lake. Half of the light was visible above the line of the horizon. You turned around to look directly opposite the light’s descent. While the slowly sinking orb’s side was bright and colorful, the parallel side of the sky was a dark wash of blue, and… what was that?
While the light was setting, a white other orb that glowed faintly was rising. It was a perfect circle. Wait, it wasn’t entirely white. It had gray splotches that kind of resembled a face.
You smiled shyly and waved “hello”. Your eyes stung, and your eyelids felt heavy from staying open longer than they were used to. You turned back around in the lukewarm water, creating small waves, to see the light from the colorful side was almost entirely gone, and you felt your energy depleting as fast as the light was disappearing. It was like the light was taking your energy with it. You turned back around to look at the rising face, settling your tired head down at the edge of your natural bath. The last thing you saw before dozing off were tiny freckles of smaller white lights surrounding the bigger one with the face.
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You woke up the next day from a dreamless sleep per usual, you didn’t even know what dreams were. However, half the water from the lake you were still curled up in was gone, and you quickly crawled out before all of it went away. Closing your eyes to yawn and stretch, you wondered what you were going to do today.
You enjoyed exploring around, having a rather large play space with a less populated territory. Sometimes you’d wander too far north, and you’d have to turn back before you got really cold. This time, you thought, you would go down south to see if you could find others of your kind that might want to be your friend.
Little did you know that this would be a day that changed your life.
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As you had walked, the snow that fell constantly had gotten lighter, powderier, and softer. They were more like gentle flurries at this point, and they were new to you, but nice. You had no idea how far south you had come, but the light was still rising when you started out, and it was now well past the midpoint in the sky.
You stopped walking, groaned loudly out of boredom and looked for something to do. You sat down and checked your finger and toenails to see if they were getting long. Nope.
You picked up a pile of snow and put it on your head. It melted slowly and ran down through your hair making wet trails, tickling your scalp and nape. You giggled and wiped some water away.
You lay on your back, sprawled your legs out and started moving your limbs back and forth in the snow. After a while, you sat up, heaving hand-shaped indents in the print of your back, and stood up to look at what you had done.
A huge crater had been made in the snow, half of it resembled the outline of you with hands and feet clumsily decorating the torso, while the limbs looked like giant wings. You smiled, and continued walking.
After several good, long, and boring hours of treading through the snow, you came across a giant… rock barricade of some sort, but it wasn't like anything you had ever seen. You were surprised at this unexpected event, boredom completely replaced by curiosity. It stretched on as far as you could see on either side of you, and went up for what seemed like the height of a mountain… but flatter. Curious, you watched it from a distance for a while, before slowly approaching it and placing a gentle hand on the… smooth surface. How had you ever missed this? Well, you had never come down this far south, for one thing.
Brushing your fingertips against this strangely textured mountain made you wonder what was on the other side of it, and if there was a way for you to get to it. The snow fluttered around you and the wind ruffled your hair in spurts as you stood thinking.
Rocks usually crumbled when you threw other rocks at them, and also if you punched them. However, you tried to refrain from punching rocks since the last time you did, your knuckles bent in weird ways and nearly got ripped out in a red, gooey mess. Sure, you healed, but it stung, was gross, and you just didn't want it to happen again.
Settling on smashing what you had decided to call a wall , you set off along one side of it in search of a rock. After a few minutes of overruling different sized stones, you spotted one that was about the size of your head. Smiling in satisfaction, you gripped the rock and hauled it onto one of your shoulders with a grunt. You stepped a few paces back from the wall, took a few quick breaths in preparation, then hurled the boulder toward the wall.
The rock flew through the air, and hit the stone wall with a satisfying CRACK! As the boulder fell back down, mainly unharmed, you saw that a dent had been made where the rock had hit. Several of the bricks crumbled and cracked, but none fell out. You decided to try again.
SLAP! Still just crumbs and crumbles.
CRASH! Some more cracks and a deeper dent.
SMASH! One brick fell onto the other side, and you heard a muffled thump.
CRACK! CRUNCH! BAM! Several more bricks fell, you could see what looked like a pine tree branch on the other side.
CCSSHHH! This time, the rock smashed right through the dent, creating a hole, and landing rather loudly on the other side.
You took a few cautious steps towards the hole, for fear of something bad being on the other side. Suddenly, a voice ripped through the snowy quiet.
¨Hey!¨
Startled, you jumped back with a surprised (and embarrassingly high-pitched) cry, having not expected something - or some one - to be on the other side.
You saw the snow on the pine tree on the other side of the wall fall off as it shook. Slowly and clumsily, a little… boy crawled up the pine tree, onto the outstretched branch (that somehow survived the airborne boulder) and step into the hole you had made, right over the probably deadly high gap in between. Your eyes widened, you had never seen a creature like you this small before, he could probably fit inside your palm!
The little you-creature looked at you from the other side of the tunnel with a gloved hand gripping to a rubble-glazed brick on the inside of the wall. He had eyes that looked a little scared, slightly angry, confused, and mostly curious. Milky brown eyelids blinked over his rich brown irises. His dry looking lips were parted a little, and flecks of snow stuck to his short, curly brown hair in specks. His nose and cheeks were red, and he had a thick wrapping around his neck, along with a another thing covering his ears, and plush looking adornments surrounding his torso and legs that descended into big footwear.
You had jumped back quite a distance from the hole with your arms now up in front of you as protection, so this boy was too far away to be a threat. Not that he'd be hard to take down considering his size if he wanted to attack you like the others had.
You blinked your own (E/C) eyes back at him (the nictitating membrane, since you couldn’t afford to let a possible threat out of your sight, even for a second), waiting to see what his first move would be, that is, if he intended on making it.
He took a steady step closer, heavy… boots making a soft thump on the newly made (boulder-carved) surface.
¨You're… a… titan !¨ He whisper-yelled in amazement. He sounded like something unbelievable was occurring. His voice wasn’t squeaky, but still high-pitched.
So that's what you were: a titan! You smiled slightly at this newly-gained knowledge, and lowered your arms a little, letting your tensed muscles relax. This little titan didn’t seem like a threat, and he could communicate! You wondered what exactly it was that he was wearing, you had never seen a creature need to put extra things on them before.
¨I've… never seen one before… only drawings and- and stories.¨ He murmured in fascination, eyes brightly lit. ¨You're supposed to eat me, and crush me into a bloody pulp… or the other way around - what's different with you?¨ He asked, thinking aloud.
You understood what he had said, but not the content itself. He'd never seen one before? But wasn't he a titan too? There's tales about titans? Was eating what you called putting things in your mouth and swallowing? And why would you want to crush this little titan? He didn't seem like a threat in any way! You already knew you were slightly different from the other titans you had met, but were you that abnormal?
The boy noticed your conflicted expression, your arms now completely at your sides. He gasped in a small realization. ¨Can you… understand me?¨
You didn't exactly know how to convey the answer 'yes', but something told you to move your head. You shook it gently from side to side, hair moving with your movements and the wind, which was making a barely-audible whistling sound when it went through the hole the boy was in. Now it was the boy's turn to look confused.
¨Wait, so you can’t?¨ No, no, you could . How do you say no?
This time you nodded your head up and down, hoping for him to translate it into 'no'. Now the boy looked amused; here was a titan who could probably understand him, yet claiming that it couldn't.
¨Hold on, hold on, I think you have it mixed up.¨ He giggled and took a few more steps to the edge of the wall closest to you, and sat down with his legs crossed. You blinked in confusion, awaiting what the child would say next to explain what he meant. You had clearly said yes, then no. He was the one mixing it up.
¨Shaking your head from side to side means 'no'.¨ He told you with a grin, while demonstrating the head movements. ¨Nodding your head up and down means 'yes'.¨
Huh. You uttered out a sound that vaguely resembled an ¨oh¨. You weren't entirely sure if this information was correct, but you'd take his word for it for now.
Realizing you were still at a distance from the boy in the wall, you stepped closer slowly, as not to startle him. Your feet made gentle crunches in the snow, leaving large foot-shaped imprints.
Now practically face-to-face and head level with this boy, you smiled and he looked at you in awe, eyes sparkling.
¨A real titan... ¨ He drawled again. ¨I'm probably the only person in all the Northern Districts who's ever seen one!¨ He exclaimed, grinning widely. ¨They said titans don't really live up here, more down near the Southern Districts. I guess you're one of the rare ones, huh? An abnormal?¨
You were still confused, your unasked questions from before had yet to be answered. You understood what the boy meant by titans being more common down South, because you had predicted that yourself. The boy's statement just confirmed it. And again, you knew for a fact now that you were a deviant from the other titans.
He continued talking, no longer whispering. ¨So you can understand me… yes? Nod your head up and down for 'yes', remember, side to side means 'no'.¨
You nodded.
He smiled, and then let out a short, breathy laugh . “This is real, and so, so cool!” He finished with a shout that echoed around the tunnel and outside the wall, arms raised in the air. You smiled with him in agreement. This was cool.
Now that both of you were much more relaxed and seeing eye-to-eye, he started firing curious questions at you eagerly.
“So, which titan class are you? I can’t tell… maybe you’re 15 meters? I think so. Is it true that you’re near immortal? That the only weak point is the back of your neck? So, if I were to chop off your legs, they would just grow back? Not that I would, don’t worry. I’m not a Survey Corps guy, ha ha! You don’t have digestive systems either, have you ever eaten people? Do you blink? Do you need to breathe? Do you have a heartbeat? What color is your blood? Hey… you don’t have a peni-”
You cut off the boy’s never-ending stream with a low series of humorous growls as if to say ‘woah, woah, woah, slow down there!’
He grinned sheepishly.
“Sorry, let’s just start with the basics then? My name is Benjamin. Benjamin Titenfisch.”
Benjamin. That’s what you’ll call him.
“What is your name?”
You frowned. You understood that a name was what people called each other, but no one had ever called you anything. You shrugged to convey that you didn’t have one.
Benjamin’s lips turned down to match yours, then he squinted his eyes as if he were thinking. After a few moments, he clapped his hands.
“(Y/N)! You look like an (Y/N)! I’m going to call you (Y/N). Is it alright if I call you (Y/N)?”
Fine with you. Once again, you smiled and nodded.