Chapter Text
The lemon haired girl can't remember anything. Not even her name, at least.
Her awakening is not something she remembers, not even the flash of some kind of light or destruction of the crystal. She isn't even awake when it shatters anyway. Her eyes are still closed, and it feels like they've been like that for a while. Unconscious, she's deaf to astounded scientists yelling hasty orders to get the strange girl to a room. She doesn't wake even when they're half-carrying, half- dragging her through the immaculate hallways of the facility with careful hands. Like they're worried she'll disintegrate if jostled the wrong way.
She is placed on a single cot in a window-less white room where those same hands now strip her of her clothing. They are quick, yet methodical while doing so, considerate with the fact that her body must be extremely weak after crystal stasis. Her jacket is pulled gently over her head, her pants removed, maneuver gear (what's left of it) unbuckled, and her boots, slipped out.
And lastly, any personal possessions- her ring.
They give her new clothing; a crisp, long white dress shirt reserved for hospital patients, matched with undergarments. They hook her to an IV, and she now has tubes and wires decorating her body to see her progress; One for her blood, another for nerves, and another to measure her heart beat. In short, she is given the same treatment a coma patient would receive.
It is about a week of this before they see a muscle twitch in her body.
***
"So the patient is awake."
Dr. Hunter, a reputable man in his early thirties with brown hair and side burns, is currently in discussion with a fellow colleague in the privacy of his office. His colleague is a woman with considerable standing in his division. She has short, stark platinum blonde hair nearly white in color, despite being no older than thirty. Everything about her looks pastel; pale pink lips, pale eyebrows, and a pale visage. Her piercing light blue eyes are intense, like they've always been watchful even from a young age, giving off the overall impression of a serious woman not to be trifled with.
Dr. Hunter winces, "Awake is quite a stretch, Lilia. The girl is still completely out of it, and I don't know for how long. She still can't open her eyes."
"That's true," replies the woman, Lilia. "I hope it won't be too long before she's able to use them. But rest assured, the nurse in charge said her vitals look fine and she's breathing normally. She's even showing signs of her eyes moving, and believe me, that's good. It'd be a shame if she had blepharospasm*."
Dr. Hunter sank into his chair, tossing aside advertisements from his mailbox to open his file cabinet. "I really can't believe it shattered just like that." he confessed. "I knew the lesions were developing more and more, but still...to have them rupture like that, and at such an unexpected time...!"
"We're lucky we were just leaving the site when it happened. I have to remember to mention a pay rise for the janitor to the boss."
There is a silence in the room as he shuffles and rifles through his cabinet, which contains papers sticking out in all directions. He is not exactly a tidy person; there are papers, both important and unimportant and have been accumulated over the years of his research. Customs, attire, military, government...all of it concerning the wall dwellers who'd lived hundreds of years prior. He tries to be as quickly about it as possible while Lilia is in the room. He hates the idea of her disapproving face looking down at his mess, so he shifts around, trying to block it from view.
But she isn't looking at him at all. Instead, her eyes are fixed on a model of a nineteenth century hand gun perched on a wooden stand in the far corner of his desk. It is a strange thing to have on display even for a desk as disorganized as his, and she wonders how she hadn't seen it before. Curious, she reaches out to take it.
Upon closer inspection, she finds it diminutive in size. It has a short body, the closest thing it resembles, is a pepper-box* with its hook lever and trigger intact. It is unusual, even among other vintage hand guns. Its muzzle is far too wide to have accommodated any bullets and there is the lack of back strap or grip panel which would be in most pistols.
"Didn't know you kept something like this here." she remarks, turning it over carefully and bringing it up to eye level. Though she is limited with firearms, she gathers that through the size of the muzzle and body, its use must not have been for aiming bullets.
He looks up briefly to see her immersed with the gun, glad that her attention is elsewhere instead of his mess. "It's a signal flare gun. It was used by the city dwellers to alert others miles away when titans were near. Their military used them while riding horseback through the plains."
"I've only ever heard something like this, but I haven't actually seen it with my own eyes. Does it work?"
"Dunno. A friend of mine in the archaeology field long ago uncovered that from under the soil. He said it's crazy the amount of stuff they find out there. Ammo shells, dislocated gear, horse shoe remains...no titans though."
"Obviously." she agreed, "Given their nature in evaporating."
"Well, anyway, after he got back from the trip, he gave that to me as a sort of gift, saying "Derreck, you wouldn't imagine how many of those blasted things we've found. It's enough to fill up a whole goddamn museum!" He's rambling now, half on the subject of the fascination with the past, and half with the task of finding the correct papers. "Those flare guns turn up occasionally in one of the archaeological digs, but not nearly as enough as the "3DMG" . I used to have the three pre-loaded barrels with me on the desk with that gun. You know... green equals safe route...red equals titan...black equals aberrant...but it was getting in the way so I left them at my house."
There is a pause as he finally spots the folder hidden in between a thick stack of papers all detailing their military agenda. He retrieves the thin folder from its confines at the same time Lilia replaces the gun on its stand. "So where does she fit into all of this?"
By "she" he knew she meant the strange girl in the crystal. Wordlessly, he fishes out two stapled papers from the manila folder to pass it over before sitting down as well. She takes it and her eyes scan the page as she reads:
The subject in question, is a small girl estimated about eighteen years of age with blonde hair tied back. She is wearing a white hoodie underneath the standard military garment worn from of that time period, suitable for the wall dwellers. She is immobile while inside the crystalline structure which, aside from a few cracks, doesn't appear to be breakable. The crystal structure is very hard, and upon further examination, was found to bear nearly the same skin properties as that of the hardened skin of titan shifter, Eren Jaeger found in woodland caverns in the Wall Rose domain. Using all manner of hard weapons (i.e jackhammer, knife, bullets, and even bombs and grenades) for extracting parts of Eren Jaeger's titan skin have proven unsuccessful. However, scientists are still on the subject of researching more about its placement and properties even when other attempts have been futile.
The rest of the paper shows scientific data and records of examination which are dated five years back, but she doesn't deign to worry about that. Instead, all she can do, is look at him genuinely surprised. "So the crystal properties are the same as that of Eren- as in, the Eren Jaeger? But then..."
"That's not even the most of it all." replied Dr. Hunter. "You asked before, why I called you here to talk, and my answer comes from that second sheet of paper. You see, it's not the crystal itself that is the problem or the fact that there's someone in it. The conflict...lies on who the girl actually is."
Lilia looks again at the paper, flipping the page. This paragraph is considerably larger than the first page, but unlike the statistics and observations she's usually seen on a regular one, this one is entirely on the girl herself. Her backstory. It takes several minutes for her to finish, and when she does, she sees her expression mirrored on her colleague's grave face.
"Her name is Annie. Annie Leonhart." he emphasizes.
She doesn't bother to ask if she's that Annie who's been rumored among scientists as being the one who'd once wrecked a portion of the Stohess district in the year 850, around five hundred years ago. She was someone who hadn't been born inside the walls, having come somewhere else for the sole purpose to spy on the wall inhabitants.
And now, it's a strange thing, that the very thing that their ancestors had fought against, deemed as a monster, born from somewhere else entirely, is laying in a cot somewhere upstairs.
Lilia closes her eyes, then opens them again. "So...what you mean to tell me, Dr. Hunter, is this: an alleged murderer who might possibly still be a titan shifter after all this time, and which is said to be highly intelligent...is sleeping, unsupervised, as we speak?"
"I know what you're thinking, but it's not as bad as you think." He says, reading the paper again. "I managed to contact Dr. Arvell, and he filled me in on the rest. He told me he won't be able to return for a few weeks because of other research, but he's dying see her. He's accompanying his young son Elias on one of his projects."
"Good for him. But that still doesn't answer the question why she's left unattended."
There is a pause in which Dr. Hunter is looking down at the desk, and she notices he's not looking at the paper, but rather the hand gun she had picked up before. A relic from the past. The hazel eyes on his young face suddenly seem troubled. Like he's contemplating what to say.
He doesn't look up, addressing the artifact instead. "That's because...and Dr. Arvell told me- we won't be interrogating her about her past."
She nearly does a double take on this unexpected piece of news. "What?"
"What I meant was...when she wakes up, we wont tell her who she is, or what time period she's from. Least of all, the fact that she's a titan shifter."
She looks scandalized now. "What?!"
"Look, Lilia, it wasn't my idea, but Dr. Arvell's! The lab-our lab- did brain scans and experiments on her yesterday and came to realize that five hundred years in a dormant state has rendered her to cognitive brain disorder but which wouldn't interfere with her other normal body functions. In short- she has something like amnesia. Cognitive Impairment, according to them."
"So what you're saying is, we'll have to feed her some cock-and-bull made up story and never mention the fact that she's a five-hundred year old ancestor brought back to the living? Derreck, do you have any idea what you're saying? For years, no...centuries, the crystal hasn't shown any indication of breaking in the past, and now you're going to keep the truth from everyone by keeping her ignorant? This girl could be the key to understanding our past, to understanding our prejudices-"
"You think I'd rather keep all of this from going public? Like you, I want more than anything to know more about her! But, we have to wait until Dr. Arvell gets back from his trip. In the mean time, he's told us to keep all things from the public away from her. This means she's going to have to stay here in one of the rooms."
Lilia didn't like this one bit. The prospect of keeping all this information was just pure and utter injustice. Just seventy hours ago she'd been working on something else, oblivious that the girl hundreds of years old would be putting them on the brink of what they were sure, the biggest most inconceivable occurrence in the field of archaeology and genetics.
She got up to leave, realizing break time was over after all. "Fine, we'll agree to make no mention of her past while she's here. That good enough?"
"We're also not allowed to give her or show her any of the possessions she had in her previous life." He concludes with a shake of his head. "We can't give her back what she was wearing before- or even jewelry," he added, thinking of the ring she had.
"So you're just going to burn her belongings?" she asked, shocked.
"The biopsy department's examining it for other DNA. We'll give her new clothes and a new identity. She will no longer be known as 'Annie'. We'll name her Seras. Other than that, she'll be like just an ordinary girl who's suffered from a severe case of amnesia."
"And what if she wakes?"
"If she wakes, we are to tell her a fake story: Her parents died when they were young, and she'd been staying at the Silistine orphanage since birth. We are keeping her here because she'd been in a car accident and now has a rare disease which requires her to stay indoors. That is our story- and hers. It was Dr. Arvell who came up with this."
Lilia sighs, looking out the hallway where a picture of a mountainous range is framed on the wall. When she looks back at him, it is resigned but with a hint of worry. "Derreck, tell me...what's going to come if she happens to remember?"
He couldn't give an answer.
*blepharospasm- condition in which there is involuntary tight closure of the eyes.
*Pepper-box- an old multi-shot firearm dating to its uses from between 1790-1850s.