Chapter Text
“Come on Ymir! One more round of sprints and you can go home.”
“You’re about to get one more round of my foot up your ass.” The brunette muttered under her breath. She could hear Mina snicker from not far behind.
Honestly, why had she even thought that playing high school basketball was anywhere close to a good idea? Lying around doing nothing and smoking weed had served her well in her middle school years, what physically fit demon thought it was necessary for her to try out and actually make the team.
“You got it! Just remember, those scouts are going to be here at next month’s game! If they like you, you’ll be guaranteed a full scholarship in two years!”
Oh yeah, that. Ymir had never thought about college before high school. She thought she would be stuck in this podunk, bum fuck nowhere town forever.
Until someone mentioned athletics for sports scholarships and suddenly, a new life had been laid before her in the form of the team captain ogling at her height.
Ymir groaned and pushed through the last of her round and collapsed on the bleachers closest to her. Annie was already sitting drinking her water bottle and looking nothing less than unfazed. How the hell she did it, Ymir could never figure out.
“Fantastic! I’ll see you girls tomorrow night at practice, get some rest and I hope you all enjoy your first day of school tomorrow!!” Coach Pixis calls while grabbing his things.
“Bye coach!” Sasha yells. She was a hyper active little shit, but she never did anyone wrong. She was pretty cool in that way…but hell she could be loud as fuck.
“You guys ready for school tomorrow??” Sasha asked while bouncing over to her gym bag.
Where the extra energy she had after absolutely grueling practices came from, Ymir couldn't figure. However, she believed witchcraft and the selling of Sasha’s soul and/or firstborn child probably had something to do with it. Sasha seemed too nice sometimes to not be secretly hiding a demon or spell book somewhere.
“School? Are we ever actually ready for school, Sasha? It kind of just happens.” Rico responds not even sparing the her a look.
"I wonder if the stick up her ass 'just kind of happened," Ymir mutters.
Ymir pretty much hated Rico. Sometimes, Ymir would joke about hating Annie, but that was all it was, a joke. Rico was a pretentious senior who had felt she was above and beyond all of her peers since the day Ymir had met the brat her freshman year of high school. The day Ymir finally decided that Rico should be decked in the face was the day she called Sasha “a waste of space that should stick to sitting in trees in the woods, not on a basketball court.” Of course, Ymir couldn’t actually punch Rico in the face, she would be kicked off the team. Mysteriously, about five months ago a stray softball made a beeline for Rico’s thigh during gym class. No one ever really saw where the ball came from, but some sources say that Ymir was in the outfield practicing her fast pitch at the time.
Ymir never claimed to be nice, but her friends were the people she would ride onto a battlefield for. Maybe not led by them, because let’s be honest, Sasha might lead them straight into a ditch, but she would fight for them.
“Honestly, I’m just ready for this year to be over already. Two more first days of school and I’m college bound.” Annie replies, hiding her smirk.
Ymir nods, it was her junior year of high school as well. She couldn’t wait for it to already fucking end.
“Oh you guys are such party poopers!! Get jazzed! Think of all the new shit that could happen!! Maybe we’ll make new friends and go to parties and…”
“…and fly away in a magical car, singing songs everyone magically knows choreography for.” Ymir finishes sarcastically.
Everyone knew Sasha’s weakness for “Grease.” She had watched it nearly twenty five times since Ymir had met the girl.
“Don’t be a jerk, Ymir,” Mina says with a playful sternness, “For one Sasha, I’m actually excited about this school year. I got chosen to be in yearbook as a sophomore, so remember, if you see me with a camera, you have to smile. No exceptions.” She finishes. Mina makes sure to sweep her eyes across the team with a threatening finger jab to match.
“Whatever, Mina. We all know you’ll only get the worst pictures of us because they’re funnier and that’s what high school students love.” Ymir calls out smugly.
Mina smirks and shrugs her shoulders on her way out of the gym doors.
“Later dweebs.” Ymir yells to everyone as they leave to the locker room and gracefully kicks the door in front of her open.
Typically, this would not have been a problem, however, the universe loves to throw Ymir curveballs.
It was still summer vacation, technically. Even though the women’s basketball team had mandatory practice, school for non-athletes didn't begin until tomorrow.
So, when a short blonde happened to be walking by the gym at just the right time to be hit directly in the face with the door Ymir had just kicked open at full force, Ymir considered it the worst luck in the history of time itself for both of them.
“OH MY GOD.” Ymir yells. The blonde girl just stayed on the ground, disoriented. Maybe dead.
‘She seems to be conscious.’ Ymir thought, but she was basing this on the fact that this girl’s eyes were still open, but maybe she slept that way. How could Ymir even know?
“Shit, are you ok?” Ymir asks while bending down to look at the fresh goose egg forming on the girl’s forehead.
The girl sat up and took in everything around her, was she on the ground? She looked up to find and very tall, and very pretty, girl standing over her.
“Oh god, fuck. Did I give you a concussion? Shit, hell, I’m really sorry. Do you want me to call an ambulance or something?”
“Um, no. Ow, that really hurts. Thank you for offering though, I probably shouldn’t have been walking so close to those doors. I’m sorry! It’s fine, really!”
Was this girl seriously apologizing for being smacked in the face with a large, wooden door?
“Don’t apologize, I shouldn’t be kicking doors. Let me help you up.” Ymir held her hand to the, now that she was looking at her, very short girl. She couldn’t be more than five feet.
“I’m Ymir. I’m the asshole who just chronically kicks doors at Rose High School. It’s actually an epidemic. They’ve been trying to peg me for years, but I disappear into the throng of moving teenagers before they can catch me. Astounding really, being that I’m nearly six feet tall, but hey, that’s public school for you.” Ymir could feel herself rambling, it happened occasionally if she was nervous about something. Kicking a door into someones face gives you a right to be nervous.
The timid girl below her seemed to be caught between laughing and trying to figure if what Ymir was saying was true or not.
“I’m going to assume that you’re new? I mean, I've never seen you before.” Ymir finished. Rose High School was incredibly small with a student body of just over three hundred. If you didn't know someone, they were new.
Ymir was finally able to extract a nod from the shy, yet utterly adorable, being in front of her.
“My name is Krista, It's my first year in public school, and high school in general, and it looks like no one is here and school doesn’t actually start until tomorrow.” Her name had sounded like ‘Kritha,’ because after Ymir had helped her stand, her nose began to bleed and she tried to hold it closed.
“Oh…wow. Here, there’s a bathroom right here, lets try to get your nose to stop bleeding.” Ymir led Krista, who was now walking with her head held up, to a nearby bathroom and had her lean over a sink.
“So, how long have you been wandering around campus exactly?” Ymir asks while grabbing some paper towels.
“Twho houers” Krista’s speech was still a little slurred from the attempt of trying to staunch the blood gushing from her nose.
The taller of the two stopped momentarily to look back at the sink with a raised brow and a frown. Krista was bent over the sink with running water at this point and hadn’t seen the face Ymir had made.
“…how long were you planning on walking around until you realized school’s not actually open today?”
She imagined Krista would roll her eyes, instead the girl just smiled.
“I realized after my classroom door was locked and no one had come, I just wanted to get a good tour of my other classes before mobs of people pushed me around while I stumbled through the school lost. I was here anyway.”
Ymir had only heard parts of whatever Krista had just said because it wasn’t until that moment that she realized the bloodied girl had an accent of some kind. She couldn’t quite place it though.
“Where are you from?”
Krista had been in the midst of another sentence and Ymir felt bad for not listening, but Krista smiled again anyway and said,
“I’m from Alto, Georgia. I lived there my entire life until I moved here a couple months ago.“
‘That’s it, Georgia peach.’ Ymir thought as she handed the towels to Krista, about time. The poor girl had been bleeding profusely into a sink for about five minutes. Ymir was beginning to think the amount of blood being lost was worthy of calling an ambulance and Ymir prayed to every god she could think of that this poor girl was not on her period too.
“Georgia? Bit of a drive. Any particular reason you came up to live in North Carolina?” Ymir asked as she threw the bloody towels into the trashcan, probably breaking fourteen different health code regulations.
“Yeah, my mother didn’t want to live there anymore and my she found a better paying job up here.”
Ymir nodded and looked back at the blonde. She visibly winced.
“What?” Krista asked slightly worried.
“You kind of have blood stains…everywhere. They’re all over your face…and everywhere. It's kind of on your necklace too.”
Krista immediately wrapped her hand around the cross that hung low on her chest and thrust it into the water, scrubbing viciously. She looked like she was about to throw up.
“Woah, hey…” Ymir starts. Krista was either ignoring her or completely hadn’t her.
“Blondie, hey stop, if you keep scrubbing that hard you’ll end up taking some skin with it.” Ymir states.
Krista was shaking and her breathing had picked up, but she had finally calmed down enough to stop scrubbing. She was still holding it dangerously tight.
“I have some jewelry cleaner in my practice bag, I left it near the gym door. I’ll be right back, ok?” Ymir says calmly. Ymir, being on the basketball team, was no stranger to bleeding profusely from random injuries. She typically wore earrings and it comes in handy to get the blood off.
When Ymir returns, she finds Krista scrubbing lightly at a small stain that had dripped on to her shirt. At least it wasn’t white; that would have really sucked.
She hands the bottle to Krista and her shoulders release an enormous amount of tension.
“Thank you so much.” The poor girl sounded close to tears.
“I’m really sorry.” Ymir says, she had never been great with apologies and she knows its sounds stiff and awkward.
“It’s alright, at least you didn’t leave me to bleed out in the middle of the floor. You let me use this,” she shakes the bottle of cleaner in her hand, “I mean, you’re worried about me. So, thank you! I forgive you for hitting me with a door on accident.” Ymir can hear the slight sarcasm in last sentence.
“You know, sometimes we haze freshmen. I think you’ve paid your dues though.”
Krista looked terrified for a millisecond and Ymir couldn’t help but laugh.
“I’m joking. It’s against school policy, plus I don’t have time to terrify kids who are already terrified enough.”
Krista laughed and smiled.
“You said your name was Yahmeer, right?”
She snorts, “Ymir. I know it’s kind of difficult to pronounce. Almost as hard as my last name, Upphaf. Substitute teachers gave up years ago. I’m either ‘tall brunette’ or ‘Stop disrupting class, young lady!”
Krista giggled and tried the words again. “Ymir Upphaf. Very unique. My full name is Krista Lenz.”
“Sorry the first friend you meet at a brand new school violently hit you with a door before school even started.”
“It’s alright, really. Do you have a cell phone I could borrow, please? I need to call my mother and I don’t really know where any of the school phones are.”
“Sure, I didn’t break yours or anything did I?” That would have put a fucking cherry on the asshole cake.
“No! I didn’t have one to begin with.” She says as she begins dialing the numbers on Ymir’s Iphone.
“Ok, I’m going to go grab my bag real quick.” Ymir states. Krista smiles in response.
‘Damn, she’s cute.’ Ymir had a knack for always fucking up first impressions with people she finds attractive. There was the cupcake incident of 2010 that Annie had never, truly let her live down and this was, by far, probably 100x worse.
Ymir, now that she was alone, could feel her face heating up and turning her dark skin an interesting shade. She groaned audibly and connected the heel of her palm to her forehead.
‘The universe has it out for me this year, I can feel it.’
A pair of her shorts and some kneepads had been strewn about in a need for speed when she was looking for the jewelry cleaner. She stuffs everything back in the bag haphazardly and slings it on her shoulder and walks casually back to the bathroom in hopes of easing the red in her cheeks.
As she enters the doorway she hears Krista talking in a hushed tone.
“Yes, Ma’am. Of course. I am very sorry, it will never happen again. Ye…Alright. Yes, Ma’am,” Ymir hears the sound of her phone being set on the bathroom sink.
“Everything alright?” Krista looks up and smiles, as brightly as she had all day, and hands Ymir her phone back.
“Yep! My mother will be here soon, thank you for helping me with everything.”
“It was kind of all my fault…well the door part.Not helping would've been like, the biggest dick move in history.”
“Still, thank you," She hesitates and asks, "Do you mind doing something with me?”
“Uhm, sure?”
“Ok!” Krista grabs Ymir’s hands and bows her head. Ymir starts to ask what she’s doing but Krista speaks first,
“Dear God, thank you for letting Ymir accidentally hit me with that door. Had she not, I probably would have had to walk home because I never would have had a phone. Please lord, let Ymir’s first day of school tomorrow be joyful and fulfilling. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.”
“Amen.” Ymir says a little quietly. She had not expected that. She had not expected that, at all. The way Krista had nearly had a heart-attack about her cross, it made sense. Ymir couldn’t even remember the last time she had prayed. It might have been when she still believed that monsters lived in her closet and under he bed, or maybe at Mass when her mother commanded that she go. She didn’t really even think of herself as a Christian, not anymore. Not when she realized the real monsters had lurked elsewhere in her life, God was nowhere to be found then.
But she wasn’t going to tell Krista that. This was a sweet gesture and Ymir recognized that fact.
“Thank you, Krista. If you want, you could call your mom back and I could drop you off, if that might help?”
Krista paled slightly but waved her hands, “No, no! It’s all right! What’s done is done. I’ll see you tomorrow though, right?”
“Right. I’m sure we’ll see each other.” Ymir says blushing slightly.
“Great! God bless!” Krista says smiling and turning towards the hallway that leads to the front entrance of the school.
“Yeah…you too.” Ymir mutters.
“Hey, behemoth.” Ymir rolls her eyes.
“Ah, my favorite stone cold bitch. What’s up, Annie?” Annie typically had a knack for holding her face in a permanent look of disinterest. Most of the time, it was just her resting face, but she smirked at Ymir. Ymir pretty much thought of Annie as one of her closest friends, Annie never said it, and maybe she never would, but she agreed. It might have something to do with the fact that they were both out, there was a sense of security there. They also decided to make-out once for “science” and it had been so awkward that they both laughed for nearly fifteen minutes and decided it was a terrible idea and they agreed to never try again.
“Mina, Sasha and I were wondering if you wanted to come get some food with us and watch a couple movies before the beginning of the most miserable part of our existence begins again.”
Ymir snorts. “Yeah, that sounds like exactly how I want to spend my Sunday evening. Hanging with a bunch of losers.”
“You could go home and be a loser by yourself, but in my opinion, that’s even more pathetic.”
“No one asked for your opinion, Leonhart.”
“Typically, no one does, but it’s always greatly needed. My opinions could raise empires.” Annie says deadpan.
“Someone’s ego is in tip top shape today, where are we meeting?”
“Mina’s. She has the space and a fantastic Netflix queue.”
“Touché” Ymir says as she starts for towards the parking lot.
“Who was that girl, by the way? She was already half way down the hallway before I got to you. I didn’t recognize her.”
“The blonde? Said her name is Krista, cute as hell. She doesn’t pay a lot of attention though.” Annie nods and heads to her own car.
Ymir rides with the windows down on the way to Mina’s with her music as loud as her speakers would allow, ‘Maybe the universe is letting me have this one and not try to fuck me over.’
That night the girls enjoyed their last late night as "free" women as they would be slaves to there schoolwork by the morning.