Work Text:
The Visitor
Note: This was a strange little idea that hit me about halfway through one of my other stories, and it wouldn't leave me alone until I got it out. Make of it what you will. Time-wise I would put it at roughly thirty years before the events of Attack on Titan proper.
…..
The wormhole experiment was privately funded by an old military Emerald that had experienced some sort of phenomenon in space and just couldn't let it go. She brought together a scrappy team of research Kunzites, engineering Sodalites and a few Peridots to do the basic science. The installation was set in an old refinery that had been abandoned since the end of the war.
When it did manage to somewhat successfully create a static wormhole, anything they threw into it could not be retrieved. A Kunzite theorized that since they were inanimate objects, of course they wouldn't come back because they would need to interact with the wormhole itself. They'd have to send something with at least some degree of sentience.
One trip to the nearest black market auction later, they had a pearl in decent enough condition not to break up upon re-entry, and gave it strict orders to return as soon as it could. Then it was tossed into the wormhole, and they waited.
Unfortunately, three cycles worth of waiting later they discovered that some gem had tipped off Homeworld authorities about the project. The experiment was shut down, the machine destroyed and every gem involved got to spend a long time in isopod.
The pearl was never recovered.
…..
Among the trainees, it was said to be good luck if your class had at least one crazy person. Like that one guy who said anything that grew in the dirt was poisoned and ate nothing but bread, but refused to believe that the wheat for the bread was grown in dirt. Or that one girl who kept muttering under her breath about the titans stealing her thoughts.
Pearl was definitely one of those.
Although if you'd asked the other members of her class, they'd make a face and insist she wasn't crazy, just different. She was pretty enough to get a lot of male admirers, and the girls liked her because she wasn't a gossip or petty. Despite being rail-thin, she never seemed to need the food she was given and gladly gave her rations to anyone that wanted them (and in lean times this was a precious gift indeed) and she never got herself or anyone else in trouble. She was very well-liked.
Indeed, most people just shrugged off her eccentricities as a result of whatever nasty accident she'd had that left that really strange birthmark on her forehead, the one that looked almost like exposed bone or some sort of embedded rock.
(Johanna from the third bunk down once plucked up the courage to ask about it, but only got a slow blink and 'I don't understand the question' in return.)
Or perhaps she was odd because of where she had come from. According to the old lady who had taken her in, she had been wandering around the forest, dressed in some sort of gauzy white stuff and claimed to have been 'pushed through a machine' and ended up there. None of what she said made any sense. When asked for her name, she said she was called Pearl. No second name, no family to speak of, just Pearl.
When a neighbour told her she should consider joining the military (joking, he said) she went for it with no explanation other than 'he said I should.' The lack of family name, birth records and place of origin raised some eyebrows, but they couldn't afford to be picky.
As it turned out, she was the kind of cadet every drill sergeant dreamed of. She did exactly as she was told, all the time, never talked back, pulled her own weight and the weight of other less viable cadets along with her.
“Why are you here?” the drill sergeant bellowed in her face on the first day of training.
“Because you told me to be here,” she answered pleasantly.
He nearly cried.
She was naturally good with the 3D Maneuver Gear, showing exceptional balance and instinctual reflexes. She was slightly less sure with the blades than some of her other classmates, and she kept looking at them as though she expected someone to take them away. Once she got used to them, she was a natural at slicing up the targets too.
She never had a single illness during all the time she trained, despite being so pale she was practically blue and so thin a stiff breeze could knock her over. The strange growth, birthmark, whatever it was didn't seem to impede her in any way and she even managed to avoid the typical broken ankles, lacerations and trench foot that almost every cadet got.
Her one fault, if it could be called that, was that her willingness to do just about anything she was told to do made her vulnerable. It took two different guys getting caught coaxing her into dark corners for the rest of her classmates to start keeping a protective eye on her. She was childlike in many ways, and the more sentimental types among the cadets theorized that she had never had anyone to look after her before, so it was their duty to.
Due to her immense skill with the 3DMG (and her incredible talent for following orders) she was among the ten chosen in her graduating year to join the Military Police, but she chose instead to join the Survey Corps. Some of her classmates were horrified that she would give up such prestige to get eaten beyond the wall, but she didn't seem concerned about that.
Later, a theory would make the rounds that a commander in the Corps had paid her a visit the night before graduation and told her to join the Survey Corps, and in her usual fashion she obeyed without question.
…..
Pearl returned from many missions beyond the wall unscathed, but a curious set of rumours started circling around her. They seemed to originate from mission survivors, who were often maimed, in shock or dosed up on medicines that slowed their wits so they couldn't exactly be relied on for accuracy. Even so, it was strange that even when every other member of her team died beyond the wall, Pearl always returned unharmed.
She was exceptionally good at killing titans, anyone that had ever seen her in the field could agree. She had to be ordered to attack them in the first place, but once she was given her orders she took them down with a cold efficiency that was almost frightening. She didn't seem to fear them, and she always hit her targets.
Then a returning lieutenant that didn't know her (and had been on a different squad before they regrouped) claimed that a titan ran right past her in order to eat someone else in the formation. It seemed like nonsense, but then some others who had been on missions with her also mentioned that titans often managed to overlook her. One incident could be good luck, two very good luck, but more than that seemed like a pattern.
And then the rumours got weird.
One person claimed to see Pearl have her leg from the knee down bitten off while the titan was aiming for the girl beside her, but by nightfall her leg seemed to have grown back. Another said she saw Pearl take a blade in the stomach courtesy of a clumsy new recruit and disappear into a cloud of smoke, but she later turned up unharmed on someone else's horse, apologizing for missing the rendezvous point.
The disappearing happened a lot. She fell out of the giant trees more than once, sometimes into a crowd of flapping titan mouths and limbs, but always reappeared a few hours later. Someone reported seeing Pearl and her horse kicked by a titan over the horizon, and while they caught up with the horse's carcass Pearl's wasn't there. Despite being deep in a black zone, she managed to make her way back to the gate before the rest of the Corps. Apparently, she walked back.
Anyone inside the walls that knew her laughed off these rumours, the idea that their nice-as-pie-but-hopelessly-naive comrade was some sort of immortal titan-repellent machine was just too ridiculous to take seriously.
Eventually, she went on a mission and didn't return. The entire Corps was decimated down to just a handful of severely injured people, and they barely made it back at all. None of them could say what happened to Pearl beyond her losing her horse, they sort of lost sight of her after that.
In the years that passed, every now and then a Corps soldier would claim they saw a young girl wandering around in titan territory, ignored by the titans and offering an airy wave to those she saw passing by. It made for a very popular ghost story, and indeed the wandering girl seemed ghostly enough, pale as snow and smiling faintly.
Perhaps, if they had known she required new orders to return to the walled cities, they could have brought her back. Because they didn't, she never did.