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Annie and Eren sat next to each other on the cliff overlooking the lake near the training grounds, where Bert and Reiner had taken the naïve green-eyed boy once. The two of them sat and talked quietly about their childhoods, relieved that nobody else was around to listen.
“My mom was an amazing cook, Annie,” he told her, gazing up at the star-filled sky wistfully. “The sweet bread she made always had me and Mikasa drooling!”
“I believe it,” she replied, watching the lake and the twinkling dots reflected on its surface.
Despite her desire since the fall of Wall Maria to be nothing but apathetic towards the people she would have to train with until she was able to infiltrate Mitras, the capital of the Walls, Annie had found that somehow, Eren Jaeger had managed to captivate her from their first day as trainees. His unending sincere passion for eliminating the titans, and giving true peace to humanity, while an utterly ridiculous dream, nonetheless had reeled her in.
It couldn’t be helped that his admiration of her fighting skills, as shown when he had employed her infamous kicking maneuver against Kirstein, had piqued her interest in him.
Eren sighed deeply, his face falling and he whispered to Annie “I miss her, so much. I think about her every day, every night, and how powerless I felt, watching that damned titan eat her. Annie, I…I feel so weak, y’know?”
She nodded, and muttered “I know, Eren. The feeling of being weak in a world where the weak ones are destroyed by the strong is a huge burden.”
“On that note, Annie, what was your mom like?”
Annie flinched, and Eren immediately grimaced, realizing too late that he had struck a chord unintentionally. She bit her lip hard enough to almost draw blood, and a dark shadow fell on her face.
“My mother…when I was barely a child, she was murdered.”
Her father, Ernest Leonhart, had told her the story of her mother’s death as a constant reminder of the power that Marley had over the prisoners in the Liberio Internment Zone, where the Eldians who had failed to escape to Paradis were doomed to reside under the iron rule of their malicious captors.
Rebecca Leonhart had always been a woman filled with cold, seething fury towards the Marleyans, for she knew that despite their outward appearances as the saviors of mankind, the officers were known for slaughtering Eldian children for the minutest offenses. When Rebecca had learned that one such Eldian child, an adventurous girl who had managed to sneak out past the gate of Liberio, had been torn to pieces by stray dogs, she had instantly told her husband that it was not an accident.
“Those bastards stood there and watched an innocent child be mauled to death!” she had screamed in Ernest’s face, enraged and unable to stop herself from picturing her beloved Annie from becoming a similar victim.
“What can we do?” Ernest had meekly replied, terrified of the life and death power that Marley had over them. “What can we do but stay silent, so that we aren’t murdered next?”
Rebecca’s fury had boiled over one fateful night, when Annie was only 6 years old, and a group of Marleyan officers were out harassing two Eldian boys in the streets of Liberio. The boys’ names were Reiner and Bertolt, both aged 7 and at that time unknowing of the Marleyan’s horrific capacity for sadism.
It wasn’t even the curfew hour when the officers had cornered the two boys against the wall of one of the Liberio houses, screaming insults in their faces while the children could only weep in terror. Rebecca had heard the commotion, and didn’t hesitate to bolt from her house to confront the vile men.
“Back the fuck away from them, you monsters!” Rebecca had screamed, terrifying the other Eldians who were watching, too scared of Marley to intervene for even the sake of defenseless children.
Annie and Ernest had watched from the door of their house as, without a moment’s hesitation, the officers had whirled around and gunned Rebecca down, the shots echoing throughout the area as she crumbled to the ground, bleeding out from more than 7 gunshots to her torso.
Rebecca’s last words to the boys, both of them watching her with agape looks of alarm, were “Run, and don’t look back!”
With that, Reiner and Bert had fled before the officers had a chance to stop them, to the safety of their own mothers who gladly clutched them in iron embraces, weeping in relief.
That night, Annie and Ernest had no choice but to bury Rebecca Leonhart within the unmarked mass graveyard within Liberio, a pitifully small plot of land set aside by the Marleyan government so that the “demons” under their rule were reminded of their sheer worthlessness.
Ever since the horror of that day, Ernest Leonhart had begged his daughter to hide her emotions away from the world, so that she wouldn’t be punished like her mother had been.
“The men who ripped my mother away from me and my father were hypocrites who acted like they were the heroes of mankind, all while going around destroying lives like hunting animals for sport,” Annie whispered, barely avoiding mentioning the name of Marley to Eren as she summarized her mother’s death.
He looked at her with tears streaming down his tanned face, as he told her “I-I’m so, so sorry Annie!”
“We both lost our mothers to the monsters of this world, but one day, Eren, we’ll both have the power to avenge them.”
“Yes!” he snarled, his mouth pulled back into an animalistic expression. “I’ll annihilate all of the titans for what they did, and I won’t rest until they’re completely wiped from the face of the Earth!”
“And one day soon, when I finally find the Founding Titan and claim The Coordinate, I’ll gladly use its power to unleash Hell upon Marley, and ensure that those pigs die screaming!” Annie thought, her face contorting into a vicious leer.
“Mother, I won’t let your death be in vain, I swear it!”