Chapter Text
How you love to make your little entrances. The dawning light must illuminate your figure, catching the edges of your coat and thinning out at where your boots are caked in dust from the long walk. You know the Instructor isn’t impressed by your bad posture, because he makes a point to poke you in the chest and demands, “Name? Hometown?”
You respond briskly with your first name.
“I said,” he barks once more, “name and hometown.”
“I’m from Krolva District.”
“Did you not hear me? I asked for your full name!”
You give him a confused look. “I have no other.”
“Hmmph,” the man says. He does not look completely satisfied.
You smile back like you’ve never lied in your life. Eventually, he nods and pushes you toward a group of other recruits. The first day is okay. You don’t exert yourself and it’s passable, with how out of shape the others are. As you chow down on your evening meal, you decide that you really do like this place. You’ve made it. You’ll train, blend in, figure things out. Everyone is just a blank slate, meant to be shaped into a good soldier. Everyone, which includes you. Now that your bowl is empty, you set it aside and straighten your back, ready to head outside. You push the door open—
“HEY! MOUSE, WAIT UP!”
If not for the annoyingly familiar voice, the nickname gives away the speaker’s identity at once.
You freeze. God is cruel. Hange Zoë is there to greet you with a wild smile. Your sibling is the completely opposite of you, you think, in every aspect possible. Whereas your jacket is bound tight, their lab coat flaps behind them, a pair of wings struggling to fly.
You bolt.
“Move it! Sorry! Just—move, please!” You turn around, shove past a stunned cadet, and slam some door behind you. The outside is dark, but not dark enough that you can’t see anything. You leap over a supply crate and keep running. Behind you, a four-eyed someone yells your name again, but you don’t stop.
You duck behind some building lungs. Your hands are shaking.
Why are they here?
You told the officers no family. You wrote the forms yourself. You didn’t use the Hange name. You dyed your hair, changed your eyes, for fuck ’s sake.
Why are they still following you?
You pull a small mirror from your coat. Your eyes catch in the light, deep green with a hint of gold. The contacts hold, just barely. You pop one out to check the pupil.
Still slitted.
You mutter, “perfect,” and jam it back in.
Some people cried themselves to sleep, but the sniffles are a lot quieter now. There’s the occasional rustle of someone turning to the other side of their bed and this incessant snoring, which you manage to tune out. You lie on your back, hands folded behind your head. You try not to think, which means you do nothing but that.
Hange.
Their voice. Their face. That look they gave you today, when you ran like hell from them across the training yard. Your sibling is stupid. You rarely see them afraid, because anything new or unfamiliar or dangerous is immediately something interesting . Hange’s mouth falls open as they blink, forming that dumb, familiar expression of too much thought and too much love.
You turn onto your side and squeeze your eyes shut.
You were small, in your memories, maybe nine. Maybe younger. You had curled in a ball, shivering in the bathtub because your skin had peeled off again and the cold hurt less than the bandages. Your mother thought it was some kind of skin condition, but the expensive medicines remedied nothing at all. Eventually, she stopped going back for more. She’d given up.
But Hange didn’t. Hange’s voice chattered like a nervous bird, trying to distract you as they cleaned the blood off your back.
“You know, Mouse, I read about this sea creature—it’s called a slug—that sheds its entire skin every month. Just peels right out of it like it’s a coat. Isn’t that neat?”
Hange never cried in front of you. Never, not even when they held your limbs down as you thrashed, not when you kicked them in the face and screamed that it hurt. They just hummed and talked about natural theory, waving their hands so fast you almost missed the fact that they were constantly trembling.
You hated them for it sometimes. For pretending it was normal. For pretending you were normal.
They always called you that—Mouse—because you were small and twitchy and you liked to hide under tables, because you used to hold onto their lab coat like a tail. You were forever in their shadow.
“Mouse,” they whispered, sitting with you in the bathtub hours later. “It’s okay, Mouse. You’ll be okay.”
You continued to cry. You were trying your best to believe them.
You stopped crying a while ago, once the pain had become so regular that…it was no longer pain. It was just there. That version of you, curled up in their arms, is long gone. And yet the name lingers, follows you all the way to what should be a new life.
Mouse , Hange had shouted.
You hate how badly part of you still wants to hear it.
It makes you feel warm; warmth turns into a false sense of security. No, you can’t have that. So you don’t sleep the whole night, because what’s to say that these barracks are safe? Insomnia is an old friend that keeps you company and has the grace to slip away for a few moments, long enough that you pull yourself out of bed. The shouting also helps.
Someone yells for everyone to fall in line. You throw on your uniform fast, tuck your sleeves down tight past your wrists, and tie your scarf at your throat so no one sees the edge of your bruising.
Hand-to-hand training comes first. The boy paired with you clearly thinks he’s about to win, and that’s pretty reasonable. He’s a respectable six-foot-something with big feet and bulky shoulders. You wonder how long it’ll take before he realizes that strength means nothing if you don’t know how to read a body.
One of Hange’s worst traits is their lack of humanity at times. You have that too, as a part of you is itching for the chance to humiliate this boy.
As he charges, you duck under his arm and twist it with little effort, using his own weight against him. You let go as soon as he begins to flail, standing with disinterest, waiting for him to steady himself.
When he comes back, more desperate, you don’t resist. Instead, you bend. There’s no hope fighting brute strength with brute strength, so you dodge it. Your body doesn't fight the pressure, it slips past it like you’re boneless. You know of this game people play, called limbo. You’d probably be good at it. The boy’s momentum betrays him and sends him crashing to the ground. You raise a hand to signal the end of the exercise. The Instructor nods approvingly, though his gaze lingers on you for a moment longer, and diverts his attention to the stragglers. The boy is cursing at you through a mouth of dirt.
You just want one interesting person to fight. This one girl has a great arm—a singular arm, far more muscular than the other—that she uses almost like a bat. There’s some potential. Nope, not that one. Oh, her hair is going to get ripped off. And—
Oh.
You see grey eyes watching you, reminiscent of a hawk. Next to them, set a little higher, are light, doting brown ones. The owner of the first pair scoffs at you, then leans toward your blasted sibling and mutters something you can’t hear. Hange stiffens before elbowing the tiny, scowling man in the ribs. You don’t know what he said.
Judging by the way Hange’s face tightens and flushes with something between irritation and guilt, it wasn’t kind.