Chapter Text
One horrifically pleasant spring day, his mother in bed, pained and hard of breathing, face blotchy, red and slick with sweat, sores under her clothing, and his father calls for him and tells him to fetch the mortar and pestle from the kitchen. Eren goes, because four going on five, his mother is everything in his small Shiganshina world, the one who wakes him in the mornings and watches him fondly when he helps her tend to the herbs in the small back plot behind the house, the one who hugs him and teaches him that homecooked meals are the best. His father, brow pinched, face pale, takes the heavy stone instruments from his son’s hands, and sets them on the side table.
He shifts Carla gently onto her side and she makes a pained sound that, trapped and rattling in her chest, echoes unsettlingly. Grisha tells him, in a rasp of a voice, that he needs Eren’s help to make Mommy better, and all Eren has to do is push firmly at this spot on Mommy’s nape, and these couple places on her back too. Eren does what he’s told, and Grisha takes the time to administer another shot to his mother’s arm. His father draws him close, old stethoscope digging against Eren’s chest, and tells him again, Eren, Mommy needs your help, all you have to do is go into the garden…
Eren does as he’s told.
It’s not long after that that Eren begins to go with Grisha to his appointments, learns more spots to push, some that block pain, some that inspire pain, some that stop people from moving, and the places to rub and unknot for relief. He takes special pleasure in rubbing the stress from his mother’s sickened frame when she’s well enough to get out of bed; the neighbors whisper about them behind their backs, about how Doctor Jaeger was able to fix the plague single-handedly, wasn’t that a close shave, his wife catching it as well, and lucky for him not little Eren, too. Little Eren thinks they talk too much, and when his father takes him to the back plot and into the woods to learn about different plants and what they do, he wonders if his father will also teach him how to poison annoying neighbors.
It’s how he meets Armin. They visit his grandfather, who has a bad spot of arthritis; Eren can almost hear his joints creak as they move. As the adults talk, he looks out the window and spots the bruised boy huddled in the backyard behind a thick tree trunk. He puts together a small poultice on his own for the first time, from the sap of the selfsame tree and the flowers growing on the windowsill, and Armin smiles at him when Eren holds his hand and asks him if he feels better. Then Eren asks about his book, and it’s smooth sailing from there, a world beyond the walls blossoming and opening before his eyes.
The body too, begins to open up. As he grows older his father takes him to the butcher’s shop, a rare treat, takes him to the back room and Eren watches them slaughter a pig, sticky, oozing blood slopping over the stone floor, and his father takes the heart in one gloved hand and tells him what’s inside: the heart’s a muscle Eren, and it has four parts. He sees the blood vessels, sees the layers of fat and muscle, and the smell of copper burns in his lungs. If a pig heart and a human heart are so similar, what separate the two, a human and a pig? And when he begins to sit in on small surgeries, mouth turning antiseptic sour, small hands working efficiently to press the right spots and stop the pain, he finds that there’s no real difference at all. A pig is a human is a pig. They all breathe and eat and sleep and die, and there’s something he thinks is simultaneously mundane and disgusting in it, that trapped behind walls, they all feed and shit and breed the same as pigs do in their cages. But there is his mother who reminds him that relationships give meaning, and he tries to remember her smile when he sews someone together for the first time, tears threatening to drop from his eyelids as the patient whimpers on the table, like a dog run over on the street, and when he sees her at home he rushes to the latrine and heaves.
Shiganshina is not a kind town. They’re on the very edge of the border, right on the outer fringe of the wall, and the folks inside the inner walls make fun of them, spite them, the last minute refugees from all corners of the world who tried to survive and live same as all the rest of them. The houses are small and close together, and the marketplace is always a thriving mix of languages and dialects flowing alongside the common tongue. But the merchandise is always the same, frugal and mediocre in quality, and the prices are always cheap, because Shiganshina is nothing else if not cheap. No one has any money, and if they did, they would be robbed blind, for Shiganshina does not distinguish between street business and legitimate business, and the two are often found together.
When they treat patients, medicine comes from home brews and handmade poultices, simple things from the earth, save for vaccines and pills that are made cheap and generic. Pressure points and massages dull pain because anesthetic is expensive and rare to come by, while bandages are “sterilized” rags washed and soaked in soapy hot water. And when the plague came around to strike down a third of the population, the truth is that it came through Wall Sina, and that people died because the inner wall folk refused to help the outer wall scum who probably contracted the disease living with the rats, so close to the wilder forests. No one could afford the resources needed because they weren’t for sale, not for them. Grisha Jaeger gains notoriety not because he got access to the vaccine, but because he found a way to make the cure that no one would give them. He becomes well known among Sina eccentrics for his comprehensive knowledge, the effectiveness of his complementary practices, and his aptitude for research relative to inner wall doctors, and they like to ask him for made-to-order poultices, herbal teas, acupressure and massage treatment sessions.
Eren spends his childhood this way, reading medical books, getting his hands dirty with scalpel, needle and tweezers, learning to set bones and pop back in dislocated shoulders. He watches the Scouting Legion leave, watches the heavy gate close behind them, gets beaten up by Armin’s bullies, kills two men, and gains a sister. He makes more and more hunting trips into the forest because new tariffs are creating a lack of meat at the butcher’s, and if people were more honest with themselves, meat from the forests tastes better than meat from the shop. He reads late into the night with Armin and Mikasa at his side, dreams of oceans and deserts, massages away Mikasa’s night terrors and soothes Armin’s bruises, and finds out more and more about all the ways humans break, rupture and spill in increasingly disturbing ways, and remembers the spray of arterial blood just as well as he remembers the hideous face that breaks through the wall on that day.
When they get to the other side of the wall, Eren sends his father a letter. His father never replies, never shows up, and all Eren can remember of their last encounter before newbie training is the lurch of his stomach, the expanse of missing memory in his head, and the burnished polish of the key that hangs around his neck.