Chapter Text
"I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars" -T. E. Lawrence
The Story So Far
Chapter One
Disclaimer (applies for all chapters): I do not own any of these characters nor Attack On Titan. The books mentioned below are not owned by me, but are favorites of mine.
"From now on you can call this place your home," the realtor says in a kind voice that matches the warm gaze of her brown eyes partially hidden behind matching goggles. "Thank you, Hanji," replies the young woman whom just decided to move into Hanji's home-turned-apartment-complex. "It made not be as big as some modern style apartments, but I like to believe the coziness of this place charms my tenants into renting them," Hanji continues in a voice that rises as her level of excitement expands. Arms raising and palms open as she goes over the details of the small one-bedroom space Petra has decided to rent. "The sink is made out of small river stones the old house owner picked out himself!" Hanji exclaims happily, turning to face Petra while simultaneously walking backwards on the wooden floor to the corner where the kitchen is placed.
Petra follows her at a slower pace that does nothing to hide the bewilderment that clearly shows on her heart-shaped face. Amber eyes wide and teeth biting her lower lip as she sets sight of the place she would now call home. The small, open window above said river stone sink sets a atmosphere of warmth and calmness that immediately soothes away Petra's frown. The cool summer breeze -what she assumes to be summer's parting wave as autumn is close on it's heels- embraces the slender woman with an air of firmness about it. Almost commanding in the way it made her long-sleeve button up cling to her arms and sides, but swaying her floral long skirt around her bare legs in what she read as summer's attempt at asking her to loosen up. Abandoning the small town she had grown up in, and abandoning the person responsible for many of her accomplishments had taken a heavier toll than she had first expected. The carefree sprint she had carried in her feet throughout her younger years seems to have left the moment she had stepped into that lonely bus station in the dead of night. Asking, searching, for refuge from a place that was no longer her home.
"Ms. Ral?" Hanji asks with slight frown perching between her brows the same way small birds would sometimes perch on the electricity cables hanging around the world. Coming our of her daze, Petra's eyes focus once more on the woman to whom she would be paying rent to from now on.
"Yes, Hanji?" Petra says apologetically. A corner of her lips curling upwards as the brunette woman commences her spoken words again.
"As I was saying," she begins with her eyes jumping from object to object as she points out the 'enchanting kitchen items that would undoubtedly become her dearest beloved'. And while Petra could definitely proclaim she might come to love all the little quirks of her new place; she is hesitant to say she would ever come to love an old pair of kitchen mittens Hanji pulls out of the stove and are marked with years of used and spotted with grease.
"You will love them, I assure you," claims Hanji with flushed cheeks and unfocused eyes, "love them and treat them kindly for their magic is one that will only be revealed with love."
After spending two nights at a nearby hotel and traveling almost twenty-six hours in a sometimes-empty, sometimes-too-full bus. Petra has come to appreciate what ever form of kindness was bestowed on her, as well as accept with a grateful smile the eccentric qualities of the various personalities she has come to meet.
"Yes," she says now with a kind smile and relaxed tone, "I will come to love them."
And even though the old pair of mittens are obviously worn out from years of use and marked with the passing of grease and time, she could almost be certain that she would come to be fond of them.
"Imagine the way you want your apartment to be and go from there," Hanji says as she places the old kitchen mittens back inside the oven before clapping her hands excitedly and showing her more of her new home.
"The refrigerator may not be the newest model, but it works perfectly fine and will give you no troubles at all." Petra supposes Hanji is right. Except for the upper metallic compartment where she assumes will be where cereals and other items of the like are to be placed, and which is adorned by metallic forest green leaves that wind around real ones of a shade lighter. Petra figures the herbs have sprouted from the nearby potted plants on the windowsill residing directly on the left of said refrigerator.
"I managed to convince a friend of mine to renovate the wooden floor on this part of the apartment and changing it into a tile floor instead," continues Hanji. Stepping loudly on the tile floor with her knee-high brown boots to emphasize her words. This was also something Petra has already notice, but still turns her gaze downwards at the apple-colored square tiles that seem to draw in the bone paint of the walls, the light shade of brown of the wooden cabinets, and the forest green of the plants to a cozy painting of colors.
"It's lovely," she mentions.
Hanji's smile grows larger alongside the happy spark in her eyes, "yes yes, it is." "Over here," Hanji exclaims, right forefinger pointed at the red bricked gas stove, "is the old styled stove you already had the pleasure of seeing and which by miracle alone, works!"
"That's reassuring," Petra mumbles to deaf ears for Hanji has excitedly already moved onto the next object she wants to broadcast.
"The same friend who changed the floor also managed to adjust an updated microwave into the space old cabinets used to be," she says while opening the steel microwave's door to show Petra the clean interior and the way it worked.
"The plants on the windowsill were my idea, and also the bead curtain that leads from the kitchen to the side living room," she plows on, changing directions mid-stride to pass through said bead curtain, and thus breaking the woven blood-red and clay colored pattern that had stayed motionless until then. Petra walks through next. Palms open and fingers touching the cool beads with the faintest of whispers as they hang from just above the threshold, and her feet step onto the wooden floor once more.
"The living room is small, but I hope that's not a problem," Hanji says taking a seat on one of the two small couches supported by wood and fitted with cream-colored cushion while orange and teal filled cushions lay spread out on them. They are surrounding a small, matching wooden coffee table, and flanked by two smaller tables on each side. Both wooden surfaces holding a white colored lamp on them.
"Of course not," Petra assures the woman, before taking a seat on the other couch across from her's. Noting -with a strange sense of conformity- that the fireplace she had noticed before, but merely spare a glance at, is now occupied with cut pieces of logs that sets the idea of chasing away the crisp air of a cold November night with a warm fire that would cast the soundtrack of cracking wood and embers, into her mind.
"Excellent," Hanji says before getting up and motioning with wide arms at the wide sliding doors behind her that opened to a small balcony, "this here will give you a perfect view of the setting sun behind those mountains over there, and also of the sun's first rays washing over the tree tops in the early morning."
Petra has already paid the first two months in advance, but Hanji seems determined to make sure to show her renting the apartment has been one of the best decision she has ever made.
"Over there is where you will spent most of your time eating at," she says while pointing to the kitchen's side where a white wooden table stands housing four similar chairs under it, and which holds a crystal vase filled with sunflowers placed on a brown cloth that has been patched around the edges with red string.
"The Red String of Fate," she mumbles to herself. Not noticing the slight widening on Hanji's eyes as Petra's soft words are overheard.
"This will be where you can watch anything you want," Hanji continues on, despite the sudden spark of curiosity that has catch on fire with Petra's voiced thoughts, "from cooking shows to the news."
Petra's wondering eyes turn to look at a tv that is big enough for her not to miss any details from where she'd be eating dinner, yet small enough for it to not damage her eyes at close range. It is placed on a long black-wood table that runs from half the stretch of the brick wall, behind which her bedroom is.
"I took a leaf out of Japanese home decoration by placing a heated table and a set of seating cushions on the empty space before it, where you can watch the TV comfortably from." Petra nods gratefully before Hanji turns towards the wall running from one hallway to another where various paintings of landscapes and town alleys were depicted.
"As you already know," Hanji said walking past the tv but stopping close by, "passing this other bead curtain is where your bedroom is, and the door besides it leads to your restroom."
Petra nods again for she has already set foot pass the beaded curtain that mirrors that from the kitchen, and has seen what her bedroom would be like.
"And while I offer my tenants free laundry service, I have to ask for the drying to be done on the two linen lines hanging across the two poles on the ends of the balcony so that the clothes can be sun dried," explains Hanji. Crossing the apartment once more to the sitting area where the fireplace is at, and to the set of transparent sliding doors that open to the said balcony.
"While this is better for the electricity bill, it does cause some issues," Hanji continues with an apologetically tone as Petra steps through the sliding doors to join her. "The weather, for example, is unpredictable and clothes would have to be dried in one of the many laundry places around the area."
"It's alright," Petra reassures her with a smile, for the calming breeze and the stunning view of the mountain valley made the small sacrifice of drying clothes outdoors or spending spare change in laundry spaces worth it. Hanji nods. Content with her newest tenant's quick acceptance to the small inconvenience.
"You can officially move in whenever you would like," Hanji says while taking the apartment's key out of a pocket in her pants and disposing the small metal object on Petra's open palm. "This night should be fine," Petra says in return. Pocketing the key inside one of the breast pockets of her button up shirt.
"Good," affirms Hanji with a quick nod of her head, before announcing she has to leave to help a friend of her's clean some things up.
Leaving her alone with a click of the front door to her own thoughts, and to quiet the pounding memories that plead to surface with the movements of her hands. She moves furniture, arranges tables differently, and leaves her new apartment to start bringing her spare belongings in. And after folding the few clean clothes she had packed and washed. After placing her toothpaste and toothbrush on her restroom's counter, and turning the tv on to a cooking channel she sets out again. Buying groceries from the super market down the street: vegetables, fruits, bread and butter. Cooking utensils from a store right beside it: spoons, plates, bowls and pans. And new bed sheets from the a department store across a small cafe advertising 'Now Hiring' signs. Petra arrives back to her apartment with loaded arms and sets out to work once more. Arranging pans and pots into cabinets, and plates and glasses onto shelves.
Fruits and vegetables on the table surrounding the sunflowers. Placing the cheese and milk inside the refrigerator, and the wine and bread placed close together above the fridge in the metallic green compartment. She sits idly for a few minutes after surfing through channels between escapes to the kitchen to arrange more utensils and food, before deciding to leave her apartment once more.
Coming back mere moments later with a paper application clutched tightly inside her right hand.
After spending hours making her apartment her own and unpacking the few possessions she had hastily packed the night she had left her old town, she gazes outside balcony doors and notices the lilac tree partially hidden from view behind the windowsill. Takes in how the blazing light of the setting sun changes the leave's colors from their vibrant shade of green to resemble that of autumn's reddish locks.
For Petra, the world begins and ends with her mother's old quilt. A parchment of thick cloth patched countless of times to depict the rise and fall of her mother's moods. There are dark blue pieces of cut cloth were thousands of tiny crosses made of yellow string shine through. Each dot marking the space of a star she had once upon a time gazed at as she'd laid on the soft grass behind her house. There are faded orange patches that had once held the brilliance of a ripe pumpkin, and stand for the time in her mother's life when she had read a book and discovered through it that orange was the color of extraordinary. These colors: matching and crossing forest greens, lighter hues of blue and red, deep violets, and small corners of black; each match a mood, and each patch is attached to a memory.
The crossfire red marking the year Petra's mother had married her father. The lightest hue of blue marking the time she had gone to the beach, not for the first time, but her first as a married woman. The deep violet for her favorite flowers. And the black patches that had been added 14 years after her death by the small hands of a young girl. Marking the tragedy of the daughter that had been born as her mother's last breath had left her body. Petra's first touch of warmth had been when her father had enveloped her within her mother's quilt. The smell of her in it soothing the cries Petra had been crying since her father had taken her home. She had grown accustomed to a forgetful father who lived for her and survived on empty air and sorrowful apologies, and to spending weekends watching movies alongside her father with her mother's quilt tucked around her. Petra had learned from a young age to rely on what was available, and to be compassionate by placing her father's needs before her own.
Cooking dinner and staying in while her classmates went out together. Washing clothes and reminding her father to eat while her classmates' mothers scowled them for not completing a school assignment. Petra never resented her father for the things she had missed out on doing, for he had given her far better things: a painting of a woman facing away with auburn locks and slender figure that her mother had titled 'self-portrait', and a old book list her mother had made when she had been in her early twenties. Searching within herself and between ink marked pages the meaning behind the word 'myself'. For her tenth birthday he had given Petra a crystal flower vase and seeds to all of her mother's favorite flowers, vegetables, and fruits.
She remembers the eagerness with which she had torn away at the paper packages, and how bright-eyed she must have seen as she'd looked up and asked her father if they could go out and plant now. That had been the birthday when trees had grown from the random spots she had dig and planted a seed on. Hopping from one spot to the next with no sense of order or organization. The year when tendrils had taken over the right side of the one-story brick house she had grown up in, while the other side remain hopelessly bare with mere wildflowers ebbing towards it with the passing breeze. Every day she would go out and water each earthy bump where a seed had been laid in. And after spring had lifted it's cloak to pass its turn to summer; the flowers and trees had began to sprout and bear the promises of fruit and open petals.
Petra's tenth birthday had been when her love for flowers had been born, and when she had began to bring in a few flowers every few days to be put in the crystal vase she had set on her bedroom's windowsill. For her eleventh birthday her father had given her a box filled with all the books her mother had read as a young girl, an adolescent, and as a grown woman. Never expecting for his daughter to devour the printed words with the eagerness of a small lioness, and never dreaming of his child's reading level to match that of an eighteen-year-old. That had been the year English teachers had begged for her to accept taking advance classes, and the year she had bluntly said no. The year when nights where spent thinking of the lonely, blond homeless boy the narrator of On the Road had encounter in the back of a pick-up truck in the middle of Mississippi on his trip across the country in search for an old friend. The year she had begged and bribed with her father to change the paint on her walls from their placid earthly cane color to that of the pumpkin-orange color of extraordinary after ready The Sky Is Everywhere.
Petra's eleventh birthday had been the start of her reading habits, and the year she had experienced her first heartache by reading all the books her own mother had read, but not being able to talk to her about them or laugh with her, or cry at the character's pain she had felt as her own. For her twelve birthday, Petra's father had placed on her lap a faded plastic box, and encouraged her to open it with motioning hands and a kind smile that had formed wrinkles around his eyes. Inside laid small string cylinders and carelessly thrown long tendrils of different-colored strings, and in the middle of all the color chaos was placed a steel needle. She knew without having to ask her father to whom the box had belonged to.
That was the year fresh flowers were placed on a white windowsill that set off the pumpkin orange of her room, and small mountains of books stood precariously besides her bed and desk. While she sat cross-legged on the floor brow furrowed with a 'How To Knit/Sew' magazine between her hands. That was the year Petra had learned how sharp the pain of a needle pinch could be, and the year when she realized her father's cough had lasted more than two months. For her thirteen birthday, her father had given her the most valuable of all of her presents combined. With weak and trembling hands he had pulled out her mother's thick quilt from inside a simple large birthday bag, and two pieces of paper she would later open to reveal his handwriting and her mother's final letter to her.
That had been the year when the flowers and trees around her house had been neglected, but had grown despite her lack of presence under the rays of the sun and the continuously rain that fell the summer following her thirteen birthday. It had been during that year where she had allowed herself, for the first time, to shed tears in front of people. For as they lowered her father's simple brown casket into the deep wet soil to lay timelessly besides that of her mother's, she had screamed at the men to stop. Begged for them not to leave him alone in that dark hole; not to seal him away from the sunshine he had so dearly loved. 'I'm sorry.'
Was what her father had written at the end of his parting letter for her. The words resounding within her skull as she remembered the man he'd turned into after her mother's death. 'It is my wish to be with her.' Was his form of explanation for giving up, but not one she could fault him for. After her father's death she had been asked to packed their belongings and store the pieces of furniture alongside the suitcases of memories inside a storage house. And after that she had been whisked away for four long years to be looked after by grown-ups who were kind, but were not her father or mother.
For Petra's fourteenth birthday, she had locked herself inside the room belonging to her, and patched the black pieces of cloth she had previously cut out from an old curtain onto her mother's quilt. That had been the year when she had swallowed her tears in order to work through her pain and accomplish the dreams her parents would have wanted her to follow. It was the year when she had once again renounced her teachers' suggestions at taking higher level classes to continue alongside people her own age. That was the year when her nightmares threaten to grow fingers to tear through her, but ones she managed to quench under vigorous studies and sleepless nights. Petra's fourteen birthday was the beginning of her lonely years where she learned how to thread alone in the sea of people around her, and the year that was marked by sharp pains inside her chest at every memory of what she had lost.
The following birthdays leading up to her eighteen one were spent laying on different patches of grass and allowing silent tears to cruise freely down her cheeks until her chest heaved at the emptiness of it all. For her eighteen birthday, her father left her his house and the land around it. For her eighteen birthday, her mother had left her a note with the code of a bank savings account she had set up for Petra to access when she reached adulthood. Painting through ink her secret thoughts of having her daughter graduate from college.
A painter, a cook, anything she wanted to be, her mother wrote, she could be. She had set up an account where she had deposit all of her own savings on in order to give her daughter the choice she had not been given, and her father had transfer all of his own funds to the same account when he had felt the coldness of death caressing his toes. Petra had gone through ten years of college, and received her diploma in medicine by the time she was 28. Working ahead, and studying through summers while working part-time at the college's coffee shop. A task that nearly brought her to her knees. She remembers how after the graduation ceremony she had taken off her ridiculously expensive cap and gown to toss them carelessly inside the trunk of her old pick-up truck.
The auburn locks she had painstakingly straighten waving behind her head with a wild applause of their own as the truck picked up speed down the road, and the air blowing in through her open windows roar in. Petra had driven four hours with no sound but that of the wind, before turning into an empty pavement road announcing the upcoming Shiganshina's promise land of cold bones and cement blocks.
"I finished school mom and dad," she had spoken to them while around her the newborn green leaves of spring swayed to a dance of their own. "I'm a psychiatrist now," she continued on with a proud smile on her face, "sorry I couldn't be a painter like you wanted mom, but I'm decent at cooking at least." She had meant that as a joke, but her eyes pricked with tears.
"I learned to play guitar and the ukulele from a classmate," she had said through tears and broken sobs, "I learned how to make different kind of coffees and which kind of tea calms the nerves.
"I love you," the sound of her heaving cries broke the calm tranquility that engulfed the cemetery, but she still continued on, "I love you, both so much. I- I wished you were here. With- with me." Petra's knees had given under her after that. Her forehead pressing against the cool grass that covered their tombs as she cried broken sobs for the years her parents had missed of her growing up, and the years she had missed of their life lessons and love.