Work Text:
you make me want to live.
not survive; not exist. live.
The light dances in streaks on her face as she rocks softly in her chair, wood creaking against wood. The sunset colors her passivity a deep golden hue. Her distant eyes look on and on at the sky, hands instinctively folded on the swell of her belly. There is quiet, for once.
The walls must be abuzz with chaos and celebration both. She doesn’t know for sure, but she can almost hear the far distant cries of joy of the townspeople and the hurried, frantic whispers of military personnel. At a time like this, no one remembers the pregnant queen with little use for the world sitting in her rocking chair at a desolate farm. The MPs left for an ‘emergency’ hours ago. There is quiet.
She’s glad for it.
The price of peace, however, is her peace of mind. News doesn’t travel fast here. What she knows, she gleans from the hushed conversations of the MPs, from Captain Levi, from the helpers, from that man. Anxiety forms into a bigger bile in her throat every second that passes.
Once again, there is nothing she can do but stare at the sky and wait while the world moves forward.
The door creaks open and the midwife stands next to her. Nana has served the nobility for decades now but she has aged quite well. Her posture is tall and proud, aristocratic, her manners refined and her apron as dainty as always. She’s to take care of the queen until after she gives birth.
“Your Majesty,” she says in that formal, but firm and motherly way. “It’s cold out here. Please come back inside.”
Oh, she’s heard this exact same line from someone else so many times she could recite it in her sleep. Come in, Historia. You need to take better care of your body. It’s part of her daily routine, as is sitting on this porch every afternoon. Even the change in the way she’s addressed excites her now.
The woman doesn’t look very pleased. “He will come back soon. Don’t worry about him. Worry about yourself… and the baby. You know how much that young man fusses when you so much as cough or sneeze.”
A beat passes.
“Do you think…” Historia starts, then pauses. Her eyes don’t leave the horizon. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
A voice in the back of her mind that suspiciously sounds like her mother tells her, and what do you know about doing the right thing? You have never done one right thing in your life.
She banishes the thought and cups her belly protectively.
“I don’t agree with it,” the woman says beside her. Historia finally breaks her skyward gaze to discern the woman’s expression. She seems far away, disconnected. The older reminds her of herself so often.
“I did wonder why someone with such strong principles would partake in this.”
The woman meets her eyes. “And why would you? Why would anyone? We’re devils caged in these walls, are we not? The most we can do is protect our own. I have a granddaughter in Trost, a tad younger than you are, she recently got engaged. She’s a good kid — a saint by this world’s standards. I bet those from the outside wouldn’t hesitate to cut her breath short at all. They’d likely think it a mercy to free her from the curse of her despicable blood. I refuse to jeopardize her future and watch her die for the happiness of the world, that’s all.”
Historia, despite herself, smiles a mean and bitter smile.
—
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, doesn’t remember what went through her mind, when she spots a small cluster in the distance. They’re mere silhouettes against the amber of the hills, the three of them. Still her heart leaps out of her chest at the sight.
A familiar man in a beret crosses the fence and jogs up to her. Historia inhales sharply, as if it is the first time she’s doing so, as if she’s gasping for breath after she’s been drowning. She gets up to meet him halfway.
“I’m sorry I’m late, Your Majesty,” the man says. He sounds so different when he doesn’t refer to her by name, she noticed. “MPs crawlin’ everywhere. I had to lead those two through the safest path.”
Ah, that’s right. She really shouldn’t hold it against him. He’s stuck his neck out for so long just to deliver news and letters for her. Who else is more fitting to play the doting, loving father of her child? “Don’t worry about it,” she tells him. “Go help Nana out with dinner. I’ll deal with things here.”
He turns, sends a not-so-subtle look at Floch who rolls his eyes in response. The two walk past her and into the house, Floch acknowledging her presence with a mere cursory glance and a tip of his chin.
Typical.
They may both be on the same side now but she reckons old grievances never truly die, and although she wasn’t present at Shiganshina when he battled her friends for the previous Commander Erwin’s life, she is also on the receiving end of his coldness by association.
To be fair, Floch lived through a nightmare. Four years ago, younger recruits looked up to him as the lone survivor of a massacre. She’d heard secondhand tales of—his luck—how he bravely faced certain impending death and crawled out of Hell’s door unscathed, physically. But she thinks she sees no god or hero when she looks at him, just a kid who was rattled and changed beyond the point of no return.
He walks straight and proper, poster child of a hardened Survey Corps soldier, alongside the farmer without so much as a backwards glance.
—
Once they’re gone, Historia sidles up to the man waiting by the fence. Her pace is unhurried—it’s ironic, really. She spent what felt like years rocking in that stupid chair, heartbeat hammering in her ears, waiting for this moment. Worrying it might never come. And yet.
They stand there side by side, a tangible silence in the air. It is not awkward though. It never is, with him.
She casts a sideways glance at him. His hair is longer than the last time she’d seen him. Back then he often appeared sleep-deprived and frazzled, and it bothered her. She can’t count how many times she’d had to keep herself from brushing away the fringe from his eyes. It’s tied up into a neat little bun now, but it still bothers her. It probably always will. He looks way older than he should be.
“News doesn’t travel fast here,” she starts, just to have something to say. As if the man beside her, out of everyone, wouldn’t already know that. “The military says you’ve escaped and...” Her gaze hones in on the grass beneath her feet.
She doesn’t ask him what he did, what he’ll do next. She already knows.
Of course she knows the walls would fall into strife after this. Perhaps it already has. She heard the Military Police mutter the term "Jaegerists" before they departed. It's them against the military. People like her caretakers here against people like her friends from the 104th. She knows all too well.
Eren doesn’t even seem to hear her. “I can’t stay long. The military will be back soon. They’ll think I’m going to use you as a replacement for Zeke.”
“I know.” Historia knows it was a big gamble, him coming here.
“He’s as dead set on euthanizing all Eldians as ever,” he continues through gritted teeth. She can hear the barely contained rage and disgust in the low rumble of his voice. “He still wants to use the Founder to get rid of people’s ability to reproduce. I’ve never heard a more ridiculous plan.”
Her hands instinctively fold on her belly.
“I have to get to him soon.”
She chews on her bottom lip. “And? What comes after that?”
“...I’m going to do something I won’t be able to reverse,” he confesses. “I have to.”
“What about the others? Mikasa, Armin?”
He pauses. “They... will never understand.”
”Have you talked to them?”
”It’s better to part ways now.” His gaze hardens, then, “They’ll do everything they can to stop me, no matter what I tell them.”
“Still... you have to tell them something.”
“They’ll try to talk me out of it. I’m sick of talking. It’s all everyone ever seems to plan on doing around here.”
Historia flinches at the venom laced in his words.
There’s a palpable tension that lingers in the air between them, that which only two people who share a grave secret can have. It should be suffocating and yet it’s the closest thing to a refuge they can ever have now.
The weight of their sins presses heavily against their souls. She sees a mountain of corpses, sees red everywhere. Feels tremors beneath her feet. The voices in her head grapple with her sanity every day and when she looks at him she remembers he’s fighting the same battle, too.
What is left to say, before the storm? They should revel in the calm.
And yet the sense of foreboding hangs over them like liquid sunset envelops the farm and green grass sprawls over the land.
He feels it most out of everyone.
Historia thinks Eren is not so dense anymore. Hasn’t been for four years now. Melancholy pulls his body taut; sometimes it seems to be the only thing holding him together. His face is wiped clean of emotions save for storm-cloud gray eyes that look like they’ve seen several lifetimes and held all the secrets in the world.
She tucks a stray hair behind her ear, tries to veer off course. “So, did Floch forget to hand you a shirt to brave the cold or something?” The lilt in her tone is almost teasing.
“He didn’t have the time.”
“Well... I do. There’s that shirt you left. I think it’s your favorite. I have it in my drawer. Change into that before you go... it can’t be very comfortable without one.”
Eren frowns into the distance. “You should have burned that old thing. It’s dangerous to keep it lying around.”
“It makes me feel more useful if I can do at least this one thing.”
He finally looks at her, then. Brows creased disapprovingly like hers when she catches the kids at the orphanage with their hands in the cookie jar.
“Is this what this is about? You don’t need to be of use to anyone or anything. You need to take care of yourself…”
“I know.” She sounds too amused. “But it’s just a shirt, Eren. You don’t need to fuss so much. You’re even worse than my husband.”
He ignores the last word. If possible, his frown only deepens. “It’s not his child at stake.”
Historia ducks her head.
“Hey, I know you can’t stay long but… walk with me to the house? I’ll give you your shirt inside. It’ll be quick, I promise.”
Eren doesn’t respond, just shoves his hands into the pockets of his cloak and matches her steps.
—
There’s chatter from the kitchen. The three don’t seem to have noticed their entrance, so Historia leads Eren to a room to the right. She closes the door, slowly, as if any sudden movement or creak would dispel this dream state and disrupt their peace.
Eren sits on the bed as she rummages through her drawer. Historia can almost see his mind wander somewhere else again, his eyes glazed.
She pulls up the false bottom of the drawer and fishes out an old sepia shirt. It’s well worn and smells of wood and dust.
She walks over to him as he puts on the shirt and angles his back towards her. "Your bun is loose," she says by way of explanation. Eren is quiet as she unties his hair and combs through it with her fingers. She finds amusement in how he'd grown his hair out while hers had been trimmed recently.
“It must be difficult,” she says, more idle talk than anything. “to maintain your hair like this. I’ll cut it for you.”
Then, unhesitant, offhanded— “When I come back.”
Time stops right there. Historia still hears light chatter somewhere in the house, but she can’t even hear her own breathing in this room. It’s as if the air has been sucked into the creases of the floorboard. Everything is so, so still.
Sunset seeps into the window and bathes the world in a blood orange haze.
When I come back.
She is brought back to a time, almost a year ago now, when this very same boy looked at her with something urgent, something pleading, almost desperate in him. He had told her to run. To fight. Anything, anything but sacrifice herself for Paradis’ gratification.
A voice kept telling her: I want you to live a life you're proud of.
He told that voice: You’re the girl who saved me that day. You’re the worst girl in the world.
She recalled, bitterly, how Ymir had turned her back and left forever after making sure Historia was safe. When Eren turned to leave then, she knew.
She read the same hunch of loss in his shoulders. The telltale signs of submission written plainly across his back. In horror she watched her mother, her father, Frieda, and Ymir walking away as he did.
Time moves for Historia again and she lets go of him, brushes dust off her dress as if nothing happened.
When Eren speaks again, his voice is quieter. “There’s a restaurant Yelena oversaw the construction of. We’re going there next.” A pause. “They’re going there, too.”
She already knows who they are.
“You’re right,” he adds. “I have to talk to them. But if I do... all I’m going to do is hurt them.”
Historia cups his face in her hands, and for the first time today truly sees how different he looks. The lines of his face are sharper, brows permanently furrowed. As she runs her thumbs across his cheeks, she wonders how someone can be so familiar and yet not at all.
“Sasha died because of me,” he says suddenly, and Historia’s fingers freeze in place. “And I have children’s blood on my hands. There will be more. There’s a kid I met, his name is Ramzi. I... saved him. Even though I knew I’d cause his death one day, I saved him.”
His voice is deeper, almost self deprecating.
“I almost killed Hange-san. I really would’ve killed them right there. They tried to use you against me.”
“Eren...”
“They all know nothing. Absolutely nothing. They’re all so ignorant, it kills me. But Hange-san still knew enough to provoke a reaction. If they find out... they’re going to use you in any way to bargain with me. Those shitty pigs in the top brass wouldn’t hesitate.”
White-hot anger is written all over his face but she sees through it—sees the despair behind his dead eyes. Historia recognizes the haunted look on his face very well. It’s the same one that stares back at her in the morning every day when she wakes up.
She tries to convey all the feelings she can’t verbalize in the press of her lips against his.
He winds his hand around her nape and pulls her closer, kisses back with equal ferocity. An equal urgency.
For now, it has to be enough.
—
Floch approaches them once they step out into the living room. “Eren, we have to go.” He holds her gaze. “Historia.”
The man beside him reddens, his pupils comically blown wide. “You can’t just address Her Majesty like that!”
Floch shrugs. “What’s the big deal? I’ve known her since we were cadets.”
Yes, he has. Floch was different then: loud and callous, obnoxious and naive the way they all were before their first true brush with a Titan. He regarded her the same way everyone regarded Krista, but now, especially that she’s Queen, he bestows her a grudging respect. It’s the same one he bestows Eren, though he follows him... worships him, almost. He is after all responsible for rallying the masses to their side, playing Eren’s name up wall by wall, city by city, to every living form he could find. He must’ve truly believed his own speeches, to be so convincing like that. “Only a devil with everything to lose can save Eldia,” he once told her.
Underneath his reserved exterior lies a cruelty that threatens to crack into the surface.
The stories going around about him prove to be wrong: he was not valiant and fearless in the face of death. Only a man who’s felt the pinpricks of fear in every pore of his body and tasted the rust of blood and death in his mouth could ever segue into the reckless ball of crazed anxiety that he is now.
“Besides,” Floch continues. Historia’s attention snaps back to the conversation at hand. “We got more things to worry about than some fancy title. Once the plan is in motion,” he looks at Eren again then, “there’s no going back. We really shouldn’t be making dangerous detours like this anymore. The MPs are stupid, if they left Historia without a guard here. But you know the Scouts are a bitch to deal with.”
Eren is unperturbed, stares at the other as though he can see through his soul.
Floch withers slightly under his gaze. His eyes shift to Historia, then to Eren, and then back again. He scoffs and drops the issue.
"Your Majesty," the farmer coughs awkwardly after a long silence. "Are you still craving apples now? The person you left in charge of the orphanage sent a fresh basket this morning. I'll make a pie out of it, if you want."
She smiles, albeit thinly, at him. "Thank you. I know I bother you a lot with my nightly cravings."
"It's nothing," he says, flushed. Still as starry-eyed as the time she roped him into this.
An unfathomable emotion briefly crosses Eren's face. He stands just a little bit closer to her, and her shoulder is warm where it meets his. Eren is never jealous. She's only seen him once with an emotion akin to that, once when he had first left her in the care of another man. Even then, it wasn't really jealousy. It was grief, it was longing, and it was all the more painful for her because of that.
Historia catches Nana casting a measured glance at him when she thinks no one’s paying attention.
She wonders what the woman really thinks of him. The people in the walls appraise Eren as their hero, their savior, and in a way, he is. Nana has never voiced any type of distaste for him, but she looks like she doesn’t know what to make of the young man. Devil or hero? How does one ever become both?
The elder tears her gaze away from him and silently trudges back to the kitchen, lips pursed, as if she still can’t come to a conclusion.
—
Historia offers to walk Floch and Eren out. Floch jogs ahead of them. He must’ve sensed her distress and allowed her more time, or maybe he’s just impatient. Nevertheless, she feels a swell of gratitude for the action.
Eren gears to fasten his stride and catch up to him, and in mere split seconds an image of Frieda’s back replaces his, and another second it’s Ymir’s flashing in front of her very eyes. Historia’s heart climbs into her throat and she tries to swallow it down with one painful gulp.
Two voices echo in her mind: Live your life with pride. You’re the girl who saved me that day. Ymir definitely wouldn’t choose herself over millions of lives. Hell, she wouldn’t choose herself over two lives. She was a stupid, stupid girl. She loved to pretend she was selfish and mean and unfeeling, but she might have been the most selfless person Historia has ever known. She wonders how a good, beautiful girl like that managed to love a girl as despicable as her.
In a perfect world, there is no Eren Jaeger and Historia Reiss. There would only be one normal boy and one normal girl who lived normal lives and found a normal kind of love. Maybe that girl would’ve married Ymir, after all, and tended to the garden in their backyard until they died of old age in their bed, holding hands, like normal lovers would. Maybe that boy would’ve found someone else too, or perhaps he would be too dense or engrossed in his goals to bother. They would never cross paths, never know each other at all. There would be no reason for them to. They would be completely fine living perfectly normal lives without each other.
But this is not a perfect world. Eren and Historia do exist, their paths do intertwine—much more than people think. And maybe that’s why the world will fall into ruin by his hands, and she will let it.
Thousands of broken screams and disembodied whispers warn her, as they had ten months ago by the fence at dusk when she, nearly coy, had asked him “What would you think...about me having a child?” and the clashing emotions on Eren’s face had only been decipherable by the warm glow of his lamp, that there is no punishment in Hell that would ever be enough to pay the price of her absolution. Nor his.
But, she thinks, what worse punishment is there? She’s looked out into the horizon, the sky, the walls, so many times before. Time and time again she has waited and longed for people to come back and did anyone ever?
Historia grabs his wrist, because she’s selfish, and he turns to face her, because he’s selfish too.
The sunset melts gold on her features but he is void, fending off light. There was once a time when this boy shone brighter than the sun. It had blinded everyone, then. He dazzled like diamonds and his conviction was built just as strong.
His eyes used to unnerve Historia. They were kaleidoscopic in the light, she’d noticed, and she didn’t understand how anyone could have that much fire in them.
Now death hides, dark and cold, behind his pupils like contained chaos. She studies the hint of guilt—not regret, never that—in the set of his jaw and sees nothing of the devil they whisper about in the streets, in the meeting rooms of the military.
Her heart bleeds for him.
“When it’s all over with,” she says, the corner of her eyes prickling with unshed tears. They almost sparkle in the sun. “the ghosts of our comrades will glare and spit and curse at us. But I’m your ally, Eren. So you have to make sure to return to me, okay? Come back.”
He ever-so-slowly drags his gaze to the swell of her stomach and it’s as if he’d been jarred out of a dream; he looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time.
He’s a husk of his old self, but she knows him. In any shape or form he takes, in any facade he chooses to wear. She sees Eren, would know him from the accent of his shadow, from calloused but gentle hands, from the indignant set of his mouth when he said, rid of hesitation, They want you to give birth to a child whose only purpose in life is to become a sacrifice for this island. They want to keep forcing parent and child to eat one another. I won’t let them.
His gaze remains on her bump, and she sees it lancing through him again—the ache, the longing.
“I’m stronger than I look, Eren.”
”You are,” he agrees. “You’re stronger than me... you always have been.”
Historia looks up at him from under her lashes with glassy eyes. “So come back. Be the devil they say you are, and come back to me. After all, we’re... enemies of humanity. Aren’t we?”
Eren holds her gaze, quiet understanding dawning on his features. A little resolve, too.
He presses a gentle kiss at the top of her forehead, like a promise.
She watches him go and slip out of her grasp again. Floch waits for him with arms crossed beyond the fence. The sun sinks into the jagged, rocky hills and gobbles them up bit by bit until they’re completely out of sight.
—
"I think I've figured it out," Nana says beside her, on the porch again. "what it is I think of that Jaeger boy."
The chair creaks as Historia rocks in it, back and forth, back and forth.
"I think, I may have judged him too harshly," the woman admits. "There is something at stake for him, here. I saw the way he looked at you, and I recognize the resolve that drove him to commit these atrocities. In the past I thought... what an awful thing it is. For the world to go to hell because of young love. But then again, I'm here, am I not? I am just as complicit in all this. I realized I may have judged you as well, Your Majesty."
The rocking stops.
Nana pauses to look at her. "Nobody fights because they want to," she elaborates when Historia says nothing. "Not even that troublesome child, Floch. We were all driven to this point by some kind of force. Freedom, family, loyalty. We have something to protect inside these walls. Perhaps the members of the military could so confidently betray their people because there's really nothing for them here, nothing left to lose. Perhaps they cling to ideals, dreams they can't let go of, a refusal to be disillusioned by the world.
I think... in the end, we all have to choose what's more important to us. And we have to live with that choice."
—
The world crumbles around her. She hears the wails of millions of people across the ocean—the innocent, the guilty. Comrades, strangers, children. Thunderous footsteps mercilessly crush countless lives and memories and homes, but time freezes in this room. Two soldiers stand guard by the window outside like motionless statues. The man in the beret has his hands clasped together in prayer. Even now, she muses, he still plays the role of the ever-loving husband perfectly.
Nana’s eyes are wide with concern. She stands beside the Queen’s bed, her lips parted in an attempt to convey words of encouragement but no sound makes it out. Historia grasps the pull on either side, knuckles white, and her pain is captured frozen in her furrowed brows and clenched teeth.
It is a scene out of a portrait, a strange haven in the midst of all the bloodshed and chaos.
Her wails slash through the silence and time moves again. Nana’s chants of push, push, push collide with her pained screams and her faux lover's mutterings and prayers.
She recalls memories in flashes. A vast otherworld of sand and blue-violet lights across the sky. Everyone of Eldian blood gathered together. Eren’s voice in their heads.
Frieda’s smile in the daylight. Ymir’s back as she walks away.
A soft press on her forehead, a look of reassurance.
A promise.
Tears stream down her face.
—
Right before dawn breaks, the entire world goes mum, and only the sound of a baby’s first cry echoes in the quiet.