Work Text:
present day
Historia didn’t know how many months it’d been since the initial outbreak, but life was flourishing in whatever cracks it could find through the proverbial concrete. She still went to class, still shopped (stole, but whatever) for groceries, still fed the stray cat she’d adopted, and still had her cooking and cleaning duties as one fifth of her apartment’s residents.
All things considered, it was quite weird to have two of your top worries for the day being to “wash all the dishes in the sink and—oh, yeah also don’t get eaten by zombies, haha,” but such was the life they led now. There was little to do about it but to move forward.
And move forward they did.
Her night lecture left her feeling brainless and beyond exhausted. The walk from the International Relations Hall to their apartment was relatively a quick and uneventful one—a straight path directly through the center of campus—on most normal evenings, but Historia didn’t have half the mind to spend on checking if her surroundings were clear. Because, you know, who really even gives a fuck anymore—she just had to spend the previous three hours of her life listening to some dude-bro who had both the audacity and unfortunate skill to survive an entire zombie apocalypse still refuse to recognize critical race theory.
Fuck, she was exhausted. She ran a hand down her face and stretched her bottom eyelids as low as they would go in the process, welcoming the cool air of the evening drying out her eye, the sharp crimson of her inner eyelid contrasting sharply from the natural paleness of her skin. She sighed loudly, pace quick to begin with and quicker once her anxiety fully set in. And to think she still had an entire Senior Honors Thesis to create a draft for by the end of the week.
Suddenly, getting killed didn’t sound too bad.
The shuffling music in her ear blasted the next song concerningly loud directly into the depths of her brain and really, this should’ve been the first indicator that something was about to go terribly wrong. Not necessarily because of the particular song at hand—she loved that song, really—but because she lost all sense of her surroundings from the sheer loudness of it all. She winced, dug into her pocket to lower the volume for the sake of not damaging her hearing from self-inflicted overuse at the age of twenty-two, and then was promptly tackled to the floor by a large body.
Figures.
It’d been fourteen months since the outbreak, Historia suddenly remembered with crystal clarity. Fourteen months of this never-ending bullshit, and every time she found herself in this situation, the urge to give up overpowered her senses and frightened her in its intensity. Tonight was no different; it was truly a God-given failsafe that her body automatically chose to fight by default (even despite her shorter stature), because otherwise, Historia’s sure that she would’ve already died ten times over in the past year and a half. Especially now. Especially tonight.
Her gun was in her backpack somewhere, if she could just reach behind her. What her hand landed on instead of the zipper to her bag was a brick, but honestly, that was good enough.
It took one, two, four, eight hits—echoing loud and wet as it gathered blood and brain and bone alike on its ridges—to the neck for the body above hers to go limp.
Historia grimaced. She hated to kill, even after all these months, but there was a certain rush that accompanied bashing in the skull of the zombie that had just previously been pushing her into the concrete. Adrenaline, pure and pulsing wildly in her veins, felt uncomfortably addicting. But that was a dark thought she wouldn’t expand on—instead, she pushed the cadaver roughly to the side before it could collapse on her, and then finally paused the music on her phone.
The ringing in her ears alone would take hours to fade away, no doubt.
She kept walking until she got to her apartment, ears ringing the entire way there and then some. She jumped over the fence around the complex easily, greeted their dogs with scratches under their chins, punched in the entry code to the building, walked up the barbed guarded staircase, and then finally, finally, unlocked the front door to their unit.
Ymir was on cooking duty tonight.
She had on her favorite apron (it was actually the only apron that belonged to someone other than Sasha, a long, black thing that stated Good Cooks Deserve Good Pussy in big, obnoxious letters) over her biker shorts and oversized band t-shirt. The countless freckles kissing up her thighs were on full display. She hummed gently—albeit a little out-of-tune—to herself as she kneaded the fresh, homemade dough in her hands, and Historia felt the magnetic urge to pause in the doorway and appreciate the way her biceps bulged as she pushed the dough flat onto the kitchen counter.
It took a second for her to notice her in the room.
“Hey Histor—whoa, what the fuck happened to you?”
Historia sighed and placed her backpack by the door. Thankfully, it wasn’t completely doused in blood, meaning that she wouldn’t need to spend hours washing it. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said about Historia. She wiped at her face and rolled her eyes at the darkened blood, already steaming from where it pooled in her palm.
“Surprise attack. Give me a once-over, real quick?”
Ymir apologetically raised her flour-dusted hands. “Sorry. Mikasa’s home, though. Go get clean and then come give me a kiss.”
“You sure you don’t want a kiss right now? We can definitely arrange that.”
“Come anywhere near my pizza with your blood-soaked face and you’ll be sleeping on the living room couch for a month. I labored over this dough for hours.”
Historia snorted, raised her hands in surrender and acquiesced. She appreciated the way Ymir joked now, even though she was likely lit aflame with anxiety, simply because she knew Historia hated being fussed over.
“Fine, fine.”
Mikasa, indeed, was home.
Historia knocked gently on the door to her room, seeing the other woman reading one of her textbooks at her crowded desk. Once, Historia used to find it astounding to see her continue to be such a dedicated student despite the circumstances, but then she realized that this was the one sliver of normalcy that Mikasa could hold on to. Something, anything, to keep her going. Well, that and Annie, but that was hardly the point.
“Hey,” Historia spoke clearly and without hesitation, loud enough to break Mikasa out of her zone without frightening her. The latter looked up, removing the singular headphone she had in her ear with gentle grace.
One look at Historia said enough. Mikasa stood up, delicately placing an old receipt on the page she’d just been reading and followed Historia to the shower quietly.
“What happened?” She finally asked when Historia was completely stripped down and standing under the running water. The showerhead felt cool in Mikasa’s hands when she unhooked it from the wall, the soap warm when she lathered it with her fingers.
Historia shrugged, moving pliantly as Mikasa directed her body, looking for any indication of the virus. Thankfully, it was relatively obvious to find the bloodied entry scars even in the earliest stages of being infected, and even more thankfully, none of that was evident on Historia’s body. There was also the distinct lack of swelling at her nape, which occured within minutes of infection.
Mikasa let out the breath she’d been holding—Historia was clean. She was uninfected.
“I was walking back from Erwin’s lecture when one jumped me. It was my fault—my music was too loud and I didn’t hear it approach.”
Mikasa’s hands were steady. Correction: Mikasa’s hands are always steady. This was a fact as indisputable as that of the sun’s existence—the sun rose every morning from the east, set every night in the west, and Mikasa’s hands never, ever shook.
“You’re too reckless,” She admonished, massaging the soap between Historia’s shoulder blades and the small, blonde wisps of hair on her nape. There was a sadness in her voice there, somewhere, but Mikasa knew that she couldn’t change Historia even if she tried.
Historia pointedly ignored her concern. She was tired. She didn’t need pity.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Be better.”
A pause.
“I’ll try.”
fourteen months ago
day one of the outbreak
Historia was completely, irrevocably, head-over-heels in love with the tall brunette that sat in the back of her Social Research and Data Collection lecture. Her name was Ymir, and she was not only tall, but intimidatingly attractive to boot. They’d spoken a few times in passing—which was how she knew her name—and if Historia didn’t have to sit at the front to accompany Sasha, she would’ve spent the entire hour and some change observing her.
But today was the day she would do it. She would ask the brunette out to coffee, and the very thought made Historia buzz with anxiety and excitement. And if Sasha’s frantic encouragement was anything to go by, then her roommate was equally excited for the prospect of her getting a date.
The professor let them go with some final words of encouragement to help prepare for the impending doom of finals, and then the class was set ablaze with chatter and the sound of books slamming shut, of arm-tables swinging downward.
“Hey,” Historia greeted. Ymir smiled from where she was putting her books into her backpack.
Historia had first approached Ymir when she noticed the latter staring at the PowerPoint presentation on the board with an expression that kept evolving from confusion to anger and then falling back into confusion. At first, she’d dismissed it as simply being unacquainted with the topic—data science is difficult, after all (that is to say, Historia doesn’t get a single thing, like, at all)—but a flash of black caught her eye.
An external transmitter; a cochlear implant.
Ymir understood the topic more than well, Historia would later learn. In fact, Ymir’s entire degree was based on scientific data collection in biology.
She just couldn’t hear the professor well.
Historia’s sister, Frieda, had suffered profound hearing loss from an accident that’d occurred when she was a child. And being the forgetful child she was, she’d often neglect to replace the batteries to her external transmitters. Meaning that she’d often just sign instead, which Historia knew very, very well.
The lecture hall was big enough for Historia to slip towards the back relatively unnoticed. She sat in front of Ymir and signed; do you need help with the notes?
Ymir blinked a few times, astonished. Evidently, nobody had approached her so casually with ASL before.
“The battery died,” she signed back. Historia was transfixed by her elegant hands, fingers long and slender, adorned with silver rings. Then she watched as Ymir placed a bent V behind her right ear, by where her external transmitter was attached magnetically to the implant under her skin. Historia knew that it was the sign for cochlear implant. Then, she pointed to her left ear and signed again. “And I forgot my hearing aid.”
“I see,” Historia smiled. “This is going to sound weird, but do you want batteries? I have some. My sister has bilateral implants. Always forgets to recharge her processors.”
Ymir gave her a perplexed look but nodded anyway. She was smiling—this was good. This was great. Historia was blown away by how beautiful she was.
“Thank you,” she signed.
Historia shrugged with a big grin and handed over the unopened pack of coin batteries. “No worries.”
Changing the battery was relatively simple once you actually had the battery, Historia knew. And once everything was in order, Ymir put her hand out for Historia to shake.
“Thanks again,” she whispered, her voice rich and deep and honey-like. “You’re amazing. I’m Ymir.”
“Historia,” she supplied. “And no problem. Like I said, my sister forgets all the time, so I carry around extras just in case. It’s cool.”
Now, she waited for Ymir to finish packing her class materials away before she asked her out to coffee. It was relatively risk free, asking for a coffee date. In the case that she was already dating someone or wasn’t looking for a romantic partner, Historia could just pass it off as the simple desire to get to know her more, no strings attached. In the case that she was straight—well, fuck Historia then, she supposed. Though the likelihood of that was hopefully (fingers tightly crossed) low, if her gaydar was anything to go by.
“What’s up?”
Historia cleared her throat. Shit, shit, shit, this was a lot harder to do when Ymir was actually in front of her and she wasn’t speaking to her reflection in the mirror.
“What in the fuck is your face doing, right now? You look like you’re about to shit yourself.”
Historia scoffed, pretending to be offended. Ymir chuckled, knowing her theatrics are for show by now, but her brutal comment was simply a thin veil to cover her concern. At the blonde’s silence, Ymir cleared her own throat too, a little more nervous. “Seriously, though, are you okay?”
Now or never, Historia thought.
“Would you like to go get coffee together, later? If—if you would like to, of course…”
The brunette paused; her backpack halfway slung over her shoulder, she stood up.
Fuck, she was so tall.
“Like, as a date?”
Historia leveled her with a slightly nervous, slightly determined look. “If you want it to be.” Then, far more quietly, “please, want it to be.”
Ymir grinned, something devilish, something teasing. “Of course, pipsqueak. I thought that was a given, to be honest. How does Levi’s sound?”
Historia was about to answer. Really, she was. But when she opened her mouth, only a piercing shriek echoed through the room.
Historia blinked profusely—she hadn’t been the one to scream. In fact, she hadn’t said anything at all.
“Someone just screamed, right?” Ymir asked, looking around at the other students.
Historia nodded, her eyebrows knit together in concentration and concern. Normally, hearing a scream wasn’t so disconcerting; shrieking was an altogether commonplace occurrence on campus (this was a college campus, after all) whether it was from excitement or frustration or surprise. It wasn’t the occurrence of the scream that put Historia incredibly on edge—no, it was the cadence of it. It didn’t feel normal. It didn’t feel funny.
That was unmistakably a scream of fear, and by how everyone paused in their positions in the large lecture hall, they’d noticed too.
Historia’s first thought was a school shooter.
By how what little of the students remained rushed to barricade all the doors in a quiet and efficient manner, she could tell that it was the unanimous conclusion reached by the remaining students in the room. The only issue was that the lecture room only had seats drilled into the varying, staggered levels of the hall, and there was little (read here: nothing) to hold the doors closed with besides brute, human power.
And of course, Ymir volunteered. Of fucking course. Along with her, another student about her height and build and a shorter blonde closer to Historia’s stature both walked up, bracing their hands against the door and pushing.
Historia knew she couldn’t help much with the doors and so she ran down to Sasha instead, who was talking to a boy named Connie by the front of the hall about something he’d seen on Twitter. Word of mouth and tweets made little sense in terms of creating context, but the general gist was that there was some sort of confirmed issue of safety on campus. That was honestly enough to hear.
“We should run and get somewhere safer—there’s no point in staying here while it’s still relatively quiet. If we don’t move now, we’ll miss our chance to leave,” the blonde next to Ymir whispered.
The girl next to her shook her head no. “We don’t know what’s happening outside, Annie. Our best bet is to sit still and figure that out first.”
“Do you want to fucking get shot?” The girl named Annie asked, gesticulating with one of her hands.
“That’s the thing: I haven’t heard any gunshots,” the other girl fired back. “And until I understand the gravity of the issue, I won’t blindly run out into the open. It could be a shooter, or it could be worse than a shooter. We don’t know.”
“But if we don’t take a risk, we won’t even know what the issue is to begin with,” Annie countered.
Ymir chuckled quietly, somewhere between nervous and aggravated. “Girls, girls, you’re both pretty. Can we stop arguing now and just hold the fucking door shut? With both hands, preferably?”
Both of them completely ignored her, but Annie placed her other hand back on the oak of the door.
Meanwhile, Historia sat by the front, dialing every friend saved into her contacts list. A concerning number of calls were falling through, unanswered, as Connie and Sasha argued about, well, something, but it was mostly undecipherable to Historia.
“There’s no fucking way,” Sasha was saying. “No way. That can’t be real.”
Connie hissed, shoving the phone into her face. “Do you really wanna test that theory? Jean, show them again.”
“It could be doctored,” she argued, staring at the video image, but Sasha’s resolve was quickly dissolving into nothing.
“I’m on FaceTime, Sash! How the fuck could it be doctored? This is live footage!”
Jean’s muffled voice spoke from the phone in Connie’s hand, hurried and panicked. “I don’t know which room you guys are in, but you need to get the fuck out right now. Get to a car, a bus, something. Just get out of the Data Sciences building. They’re all coming out of there.”
Annie gawked from where she held the door shut. “I fucking told you!” She hissed. But before she could let go of the door in triumph, the handles rattled, and she stilled in terror.
Now, Ymir would generally argue that she’s tougher than a bag of bricks. She’d argue that having grown up in the neighborhood that she did, she was prepared to do anything and everything flawlessly and efficiently. She was tough, she could fight, and she had more than enough anger built into her veins to do so.
But when the doors shook with the sheer force of what felt to be a fucking bulldozer behind it, all of her cocky confidence bled out of her like the color on her face. She pushed back with her entire body weight, but her limbs shook and trembled. Her teeth chattered. Her breath caught in her throat.
And worst of all, she couldn’t imagine a single thing that could possibly have this much raw power. The doors barely hung onto the hinges—this was most definitely not a shooter. No, this was something much, much more terrifying.
“Which room are they in?” A gruff voice asked from the other end of the line. He sounded considerably less panicked compared to Jean—more determined, if anything.
“Which room are you in?” Jean repeated, louder.
“Smith Hall 10, on the first floor,” Connie answered. Ymir and the other two girls strained from the exertion of keeping the trembling entrance doors shut. Annie stood steadfast, hands splayed shoulder-width and pushing hard. There was sweat dripping on her brow. Ymir wasn’t fairing much better. The girl next to her was also pushing hard, though she seemed a little less winded than the other two. “We’re six people!”
“Let’s go to them. We have an entire cargo van, we’ll be fine. Bert, the Data Science halls are to the west—just drive that way until you see a big red building. Everyone! Exit out of emergency doors at the bottom of the hall when I tell you to!”
“We don’t have much of a choice other than the emergency exit anyway!” Annie shouted. Then, she turned to the girl beside her. “If we’d just fucking left when I told you to—”
The phone in Connie’s hand chimed with the strength of the voices on the other hand, a chorus of adrenaline and panic. “Now!”
The three of the girls locked eyes, and on the count of three they all let go.
Ymir never ran so fast in her entire goddamn life.
present day
“Surprisingly, you live up to your apron,” Historia chuckled, biting into her third slice of pizza. The green pesto sauce dribbled tantalizingly down the corner of her mouth, inviting, and Ymir wiggled her eyes in triumph much to the dismay of everyone else at the dinner table. A year and a half ago they would’ve crinkled their noses at the pesto sauce, but now they could stomach nothing that gleamed red. No tomato paste. No barbeque sauce. It reminded them too much of other things that were mushy and red and dark, nightmares of blood on hands and entrails on car windshields—oh, there went what little remained of Ymir’s appetite.
“Yeah, this pizza fucks, ‘Mir. Thanks for dinner,” Sasha hummed. Then, she signed thank you and it’s very good, both of which made something in Ymir go warm and fuzzy and happy.
“No problem,” she signed back.
Sasha swallowed quickly. “Wait,” she asked, clearing her throat. “Could you do that again? I didn’t get the second word. Was it ‘problem?’”
Ymir nodded. “Nice,” she praised verbally. “I said ‘no problem.’ It’s just the sign for ‘no’ and ‘problem’ consecutively. That’s what I was taught when I was learning ASL. I’ve also seen people do ‘none’ and ‘problem’ too, like this,” she demonstrated accordingly.
Sasha mimicked her hands with impenetrable concentration, and then promptly picked up her pizza again and bit into it. “Nice,” she whispered, though it was mostly to herself.
Ymir shook her head fondly.
“So, how’s lab going?” Mikasa asked. Her intention, Ymir knew, was to simply ask about the progresses they’d made so far at the vaccine laboratory run by Doctor Hange Zoë on campus, but the sheer nature of working in that lab made both Annie and Ymir groan simultaneously at the inquiry. Doctor Hange’s lab was…an adventure, to say the least.
“Oh, I didn’t expect it to be that bad—I’m sorry for bringing it up,” turning red, Mikasa rubbed the back of her neck, a nervous habit.
“Hange’s got two locked up at the lab for our ongoing Phase II clinical trial,” Annie said, rolling her eyes. “I’m half tempted to let them out because it’s freaking me the fuck out. They’re so…calm. Too calm for the experiments Hange puts them through. At least the animals reacted more to the vaccine.”
“Well, they haven’t outright died yet,” Ymir said between half-hearted bites of her food. “They’re actually the first two to survive her trials and show signs of improvement.” She looked up from her plate to her roommates. “They don’t have that deathlike pallor anymore, and they no longer hemorrhage randomly.”
“I guess.”
“That’s promising! If they’re getting better, maybe a cure is on the horizon. And all things considered, that’s pretty insane.” Historia countered. By now the pizza was finished and her hands dusted off, wiped elegantly with a napkin. Ymir thought she looked wonderfully regal with the way she sat, leaning back. “So capturing them is a necessary evil and all that.”
At that, the freckled girl shrugged loosely. “Yeah, something like that. It is freaky, though. Doc calls ‘em Sawney and Beane since they didn’t have any ID when Levi and Moblit wrangled them into the lab. I give Moblit one more week tops before he snaps and lets them go himself.”
(“I still can’t believe lil’ ole teahouse Levi ended up being such a violent agent of justice,” Sasha murmured, though no one paid her mind.)
Annie snorted, throwing the tissue in her hand onto her plate. “Three days, max,” she countered Ymir’s estimate. “You should’ve seen him when we were going over the results from last week. He’s already at the end of his line.”
“I still say a week. Wanna bet? Loser cooks for a week.”
“You’re fucking on.”
fourteen months ago
day one of outbreak
Ymir unhooked her sound processor and transmitter when the arguing became insufferable. She could still partially hear them from her left ear, but with losing her hearing aid in the process of running to the van, it was muted. And with the sheer speed at which everyone in the van exchanged their heated words, it was all mostly undecipherable anyway.
Her skin was tinged with sweat, her short, wet hair pressed against the coolness of the glass by her head. It sent violent shivers down her spine, made her bones rattle and buckle, but she refused to lift her feverish head from the rumbling window. Anxious thoughts overwhelmed her every sense, bit into her skin like rabid piranhas.
It felt silly to call them “zombies,” really. She didn’t like it, that word. “Zombie” felt childish. “Zombie” felt like a stupid gimmick in a ill-plotted movie with mindless action sequences and not a real-life catastrophe that she’d just barely escaped. “Zombie” felt wrong.
“Undead” or the “living-undead” didn’t feel any better on her trembling tongue, but it was still something. “Flesh-eaters” sounded fucking horrifying, but honestly, it was the only word that captured the horror of what they’d witnessed on that short sprint to Reiner’s massive (and gutted—who the fuck gutted the seats from a beautiful van like this?) Ford Transit Wagon.
“We need to fight!” The boy named Eren was yelling. From what Ymir could hear in addition to read from his lips, he was yelling quite a loud proclamation of war. His face looked angry. His ears were red.
God, she groaned. He’s way too fucking intense.
“Let’s go out, bash some heads in, look for survivors, something! We can’t just drive away!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jean mumbled, though Ymir could only catch it by the way his lips moved.
The boy with the buzz-cut that’d helped orchestrate their escape hit him upside in the head. “Like hell we’re fighting! Our best bet is to find a safe place to hunker down, fortify it, and then we can go searching for survivors.”
The black-haired girl that’d helped hold the door sighed heavily. Ymir watched as she slumped in her seat, running her hands over her eyes. “Eren,” she said. Just from the cadence of her voice, Ymir could tell that her tone was even. Untainted by panic. Strained, maybe, but otherwise untouched. “We can’t fight them unarmed.”
“Then let’s fucking get armed, Mikasa.”
The blonde boy—Armin, Ymir distantly remembered Mikasa saying—ran a hand through his nape-length hair. “Connie’s right, Eren. We’re not fighting. Not yet at least—there’s barely enough room in this van for the eleven of us.”
Eren slumped in his seat, quiet.
Ymir didn’t realize Historia had called her name until she gently laid a hand on her knee. Ymir jerked, frightened for a moment, before settling back into her seat on the soft floor and rubbing her forehead with her fingers.
“Are you okay?” The blonde signed. Her fingers trembled profusely and Ymir could only stare.
She simply shrugged as an answer. No, of course she wasn’t fine. But she was alive, and that was more than could be said about virtually anyone else on campus.
“Do you need anything?”
Ymir tapped her straightened thumb, pointer finger, and middle finger together twice, shaking her head: “No.”
“Do you want to sleep?” Historia asked, patting her shoulder. From the way her eyes shone, Ymir could tell the action was done in an effort to feel useful, to feel not so much like an empty shell watching the world become one, singular cemetery. To have a reason to keep fighting, even though the fight had just begun. But to seek comfort in her would mean that Ymir owed her comfort in return, and no matter how endearing Historia was, that was not something she could afford right now. Not now.
Ymir shook her head again, instead turning to look at the landscape of blood and death and red outside—a Pollock painting of guts and disease. She swallowed down the bile that threatened to release from her throat; this was not the time or place to throw-up what little breakfast she held in her stomach.
Achingly, Ymir pressed her forehead to the cool glass again.
No, she wouldn’t be able to sleep for a long, long time.
present day
It brought Ymir great comfort to know that even if her life had gone completely according to plan and the outbreak hadn’t occurred, she still would’ve found herself stuck in a lab half-past eleven that night. The only difference was that, sans the presence of the literal undead, her usual labs involved protein function analysis and not pre-clinical vaccine research to reverse the rather adverse effects of, well, dying. Decaying. The whole shebang.
A potentially unsolvable issue, really, but Ymir refused to dwell on that.
She swiveled around on the barstool chair at her table and huffed, swinging her legs here and there. With the way Hange was working the team like horses, it was becoming more and more clear that they wouldn’t be going home that night. It simply wouldn’t be safe—and while Ymir certainly would’ve said that a year and a half ago too, tonight it was for a completely different reason.
She should call and tell Historia not to wait up for her.
Thankfully, Hange wasn’t a cruel person—they had an entire floor of the sterilized research building refurbished to accommodate late-night situations like this, complete with beds and food and water and securely distant from the lab materials. If Ymir didn’t already know that the eccentric scientist lived with Professor Erwin and teashop owner Levi (thinking about that particular combo hurt her brain) she would’ve thought Hange lived at the Zoë Research Center. She still thought that they lived at the Zoë Research Center.
(Yes, the building was already named after Hange’s renowned research pre-outbreak, but Ymir wouldn’t put it past them to rename the building after themselves even if that weren’t the case. Literally who the fuck could’ve stopped them? The world’s already gone to shit.)
“Oi!” Annie shouted, hitting the back of her head with a thick wad of rolled up spreadsheets. Ymir swiveled around to face her and scowled deep.
“The fuck was that for?”
“Hange’s waiting for us in the conference room.”
“You could’ve just said that,” Ymir complained, rubbing her nape. “That hurt.”
Annie sighed, rolling her eyes. “Das weichei.”
“Well, fuck you too Leonhardt.”
At Ymir’s insistence on not moving, Annie pushed her off the barstool without giving her a chance to adjust her balance. Ymir yelped as she fell, the large pocket of her white lab-coat tangling on the back of the chair. “Just get to the fucking conference room. I still have to collect Armin.”
But Ymir wasn’t listening.
No, she was too busy looking at the face of Sawney—short and blonde haired and absolutely covered in peeling skin as he was—limping over to Annie’s turned back, very much not in his sterilized isolation quarters.
At her silence, Annie looked up from where she’d been reading the spreadsheets in her hand. She knew Annie well enough to see the concern in her eyes as she did so, but Ymir still couldn’t speak—the words clogged her throat, and her eyes could only jump between Sawney and Annie and then back to Sawney again, calculating.
Later, she’d blame her delayed reaction time to having too little sleep and too much coffee. Right now, all she could do was motion for Annie to come closer to her, which the blonde wholly ignored.
“Hey asshole,” she signed, putting extra emphasis on the ‘asshole’ (very lovingly and affectionately). “Did the battery die again?”
Ymir opened her mouth to answer “no” and to say “fuck you” and to tell her to “get the hell away from Sawney”—preferably in that order—when said dead-but-not-really man made his move.
“Get down!”
Annie ducked instinctively, no questions asked. Ymir loved her for it. She swung the barstool right over her lowered body and aimed square at Sawney who, somehow, expertly dodged it by leaning towards the right. He cushioned his fall to the ground by falling on top of Ymir, who couldn’t move out of the way in time and fell hard onto her back for the second time that night. This time, however, the sheer force with which her head hit the tiled floor knocked her hearing aid out of her left ear, the small device skittering across the room.
She didn’t like the way her shoulder blades bit painfully into the floor, but what she didn’t like even more than that was how Sawney had already grabbed onto her raised arm with bared, clenched teeth, mouth squeezing ever so tightly. She watched in horror as Annie wacked at his head from above the two of them, hacking away and yelling for Hange, Moblit, Armin, anyone, as she did so.
But no dice—the conference room wasn’t even on this floor.
See, the issue lay in the fact that they couldn’t just kill Sawney; he was an indisputably important part of their vaccine research for surviving all of Hange’s doses and trials, and to kill him would be to take the entirety of humanity one step back in finding a cure. Ymir normally wouldn’t give a shit about humanity and all that, but she didn’t want to live like this forever.
Plus, she owed Hange for giving her a reason to keep herself busy during the epidemic, a reason to keep holding on and a reason to have hope.
So, she kept her bitten arm still and locked her other arm as it held Sawney’s shoulders back. They were at an impasse—Sawney couldn’t bite down further because of the arm holding him up, but Ymir couldn’t yank herself free without risking breaking skin and becoming infected. She had to thank the stars that Sawney was so weakened from their constant drugging of him with morphine, so much so that he physically couldn’t bite down hard enough to bleed anyway.
She just had to pray that she didn’t have any pre-existing cuts on her arm—that certainly wouldn’t be very fortunate.
“Ju—just go get Hange,” she spit through grinding teeth. Her cochlear transmitter was still in place, but she didn’t need to hear her own voice to know that she’d yelled loud enough for Annie to hear—she could feel the vibrations rumble in her chest, powerful and commanding. “Go!”
Annie hesitated for only a single second before taking off upstairs.
“Awe, come on Sawney!” She laughed maniacally. If he wanted crazy, she could definitely provide that. “I thought we were friends!”
Sawney moaned, pushing further into her straightened arm. Ymir was strong, sure, but the exertion of keeping her body locked was beginning to wear her out. She hoped—desperately, too—that Annie would run back soon with everyone else.
“He-lp m-me…”
Ymir stilled.
“W—what?”
It could’ve been her mishearing it; after all, with how loud her blood was rushing in her veins and the lack of her hearing aid amplifying sound, she could very well have mistaken what she heard. Worst case, it could’ve been a malfunction of the sound processor on her other ear.
“Help m-me!” Sawney moaned again, loud, tearful, agonized, but before Ymir could freak out about him speaking, he bit down. Hard.
Ymir grit her jaw down hard enough to nearly shatter her teeth, her head snapping backwards in agony. Even if that bite hadn’t broken skin, it sure as hell hurt like a bitch, and her eyes started swimming—frighteningly not dissimilar from Sawney’s—with tears.
“Fuck!”
“Help me, help me…”
In all honesty, Ymir didn’t really remember what happened next, but all first-hand accounts relayed most of the same story; that she’d apparently started crying as soon as Hange and Moblit pried Sawney’s mouth open with fortified gloves, Nifa shackling his hands clumsily behind his back as they did so, and immediately requested to be quarantined.
Which is where she was now—in one of Hange’s spare quarantine quarters, stripping off her lab coat and shirt to see if her nape would grow red and inflamed. Her arm seemed fine other than the prominent imprint of teeth (the lack of skin breaking was courtesy of Hange’s fucking indestructible lab-coats) but Ymir’s blood still buzzed with adrenaline and anxiety and terror as she turned around.
That was the closest call she’d had in months.
Annie stood on the other side of glass, anxiously waiting for her nape to come into view.
It was not swollen.
“Gott sei Dank—” Annie sagged against the barrier in relief, her forehead on the cool glass. “Literally fuck you, Ymir.”
Ymir snorted, though she found it more than slightly disconcerting that Annie was showing so much emotion in the span of one night. She tapped the glass twice to get Annie’s attention before signing. Without her hearing aid and having turned off her implant’s sound processor, Annie’s voice was almost imperceptible.
“I almost died and your reaction is to curse me out?”
Annie signed back quickly and fluently. “I’m leaving.”
“No!” Ymir backpedaled, palms against the glass for a moment. “Don’t leave. Please? I’ll get bored here alone.”
Annie rolled her eyes. “You asked to be quarantined,” she signed with emphasis. “That’s not my fault—you know quarantine lasts three hours. I’ll come by to check on you when I’m sure you’re not braindead and rotting from the inside out.”
“Ouch.”
“Yep.”
“Please? I love you very much, and also need you to call Historia to tell her we’re staying here tonight. Else, she’ll stay up all night.”
“You say that like I didn’t already call the apartment hours ago. And I don’t love you back, sadly.”
“I know that’s not true. And you did?”
“I called ahead at ten o’clock. Honestly, Ymir—if updates on our location relied on you, the girls would’ve thought we died months ago.”
Ymir scoffed and crossed her arms, huffing loudly. Annie mirrored her on the other side of the glass, all bark and no bite, but both noted how she didn’t leave.
thirteen months ago
month two of outbreak
Ultimately, Historia was the one who chose the apartment they’d be staying in.
It was a pretty sweet deal; a spacious four-bedroom apartment on the second floor of an especially difficult building to break into, with ample space around it to fortify. And since the landlord was dead anyway, the worry for rent was practically nonexistent, meaning that they could focus on more important things like helping the community and gathering the will to keep surviving.
They split from the boys when it became apparent that, sans Armin, the rest of them had a death wish wrapped in the guise of “restoring humanity.” It was an easy enough decision—the girls collectively thought that the smartest course of action was to sit, isolate, and wait. Once they could fend for themselves, then they’d figure everyone else out, too. They—and by “they” it was largely implied that it was “Historia”—sought out the apartment building, saved several units for the boys and whomever else they could find alive, and they spent the rest of their time focused on torrenting as many films as possible on Ymir’s surprisingly intact laptop before the internet ultimately cut out.
So far, they had everything from the Kung Fu Panda trilogy to the Titanic—the classics had to be saved, after all.
“Maybe we should download World War Z or something, too,” Ymir mused, tapping a finger to her chin. Mikasa turned to her from where she sat unpacking their latest looting session, incredulous.
“You…want to watch more zombie-related content? Willingly?”
Ymir shrugged, and by her quickly deepening blush, Historia could tell that she was growing embarrassed. Sasha snorted from where she sat folding sweaters. Annie simply ignored them all.
“Well, I don’t fucking know!” Ymir exclaimed, pointing out the window. “Maybe it’ll give us some insight on how to on how to deal with that outside! I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t have prior experience dealing with the literal undead and would appreciate some help with brainstorming.”
Mikasa blinked once, twice, thrice before shrugging.
“Fair enough.”
There was a slight, pregnant pause, a beat where nobody said anything. The exhausted laptop huffed loudly as it torrented. Sasha’s clothes rustled gently as they were folded. Mikasa and Annie had an entire conversation in the silence just going off of face mimics and what appeared to be telepathy alone.
Historia watched the way Ymir’s red-dusted cheeks faded away.
“You okay?” Historia signed once she caught her eyes.
Ymir waited a moment before answering. “Yes,” she signed back, and then far too quickly to be genuine, broke out into a giant, wobbly grin.
Historia kissed her cheek. She didn’t comment on the tear that trekked down it.
If for nobody else, if for nothing else, seeing Ymir’s smile was a good enough reason to keep going, tainted in anxiety as it was. If she held on, if Historia just held on tight, she could potentially see that smile without the context of zombies, without the context of simply trying to survive.
Yes, that was enough reason to keep going.
Historia repeated it over and over again in her mind.
This is enough. She is enough.
“Let’s watch a movie,” Annie said. She shattered the tension with a full-fletched sledgehammer, loud and aggressive. “Shrek 2, anyone?”
present day
Like the traitors they were, they kept Ymir in quarantine for an hour longer than necessary. From the way Annie smirked behind Moblit and Hange, Ymir could easily argue that it was probably that blonde asshole’s doing that she was fated for not three, but four entire hours of pure, unfiltered boredom.
“Just to be sure,” Hange had said, but Ymir saw the way their eyes lit up, examining her as though she were zombie-carcass already.
“Hey!” She yelled, snapping her fingers to get her boss’ attention. Once Hange finally looked over at her face and not her nape, she signed: “Where is my hearing aid?”
Hange easily signed back, fingers quick and nimble.
“Armin’s repairing it.”
“It’s broken?”
“Not badly.”
Ymir sighed, loud, and then tapped on the glass again to get their attention. “Can I come out now?”
She watched as the quarantine doors slide open without hearing the full bellowing sound of its hissing. She stepped out, careful of where she stepped, her converse finally meeting the tiled floor of their lab and not the weird marble-like stone of the quarantine zone.
“Sawney talked to me,” she sighed. “I forgot to tell you.”
Hange blinked, confused.
“What?”
Ymir paused for a moment as she pulled on a sweater over her band t-shirt before layering it with a clean lab-coat, both of which Moblit had kindly found for her as she waited in isolation.
“Sawney talked to me.”
Hange’s eyes widened. “Spoke words? He spoke words? Real, human words?”
Ymir raised an eyebrow, nodding. “No shit,” she signed. “Of course, he spoke real, human words. He’s not an alien. He’s just not alive.”
Ymir watched as her boss’ mouth formed an “O,” jaw slack, eyes wide.
“What?”
Their signing was shaky this time. It was clear that they put extra thought into the words, to the point where Annie asked if they wanted her to translate, even though Ymir still had some semblance of hearing and Hange’s signing wasn’t bad at all. Hange shook their head no, turning with an unreadable expression back to Ymir.
“It worked,” is what they settled on, simple and short. It was too bad that Ymir still didn’t understand, not without the context.
“What worked?”
“Revision three. It worked.”
Annie stiffened in understanding.
Ymir still didn’t get it.
“The vaccine. Revision three’s working.”
Oh.
Now, Ymir understood. And alongside understanding, a hysterical thought formed in the depths of her anxiety-addled brain. She should probably call Historia and tell her the news. She should shout it from the rooftops until her throat got torn apart by her own doing. She should throw all of her research papers and Excel spreadsheets and all that nonsensical paperwork out the window and into the streets.
But her first though, since she was the one who made the discovery of the vaccine’s efficacy, after all, was:
“Can you name the vaccine after me?”