Chapter Text
Sometimes I just get feelings about things, you know?
I can’t explain it, and I don’t know when they’re coming. I don’t even like it when it happens, not usually; the feelings, the urges, can be damn near overpowering, and it’s like a switch gets turned in my head. I’ve had fewer as I’ve gotten older, thank god for small favors, but they’ve gotten more powerful with age too.
I don’t remember the first time it happened, but it became a family legend that’s been told my entire life. When I was a really little guy, not even out of diapers yet and hardly walking, my grandma bought my dad a new set of scrubs—the poor guy had been running himself ragged on his internship, and had to keep rotating the same two tired, worn out sets of scrubs every other day. He was going in for a night shift, and changed into his scrubs before he came downstairs to say goodnight to me.
I took one look at him and burst into tears.
That in and of itself wasn’t so unusual; I love my dad, as much now as I did then, although I like to think I’ve gotten a lot better with the separation anxiety. What was unusual was the force of the crying, and how I wouldn’t—how I couldn’t—stop. I think I remember that, a little, crying so hard it felt like I would die before I’d be able to stop, filled with a grief I didn’t have the words to describe.
My dad and my oma didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t my typical crying jag whenever I was separated from my dad for too long (even then, I knew what a gift it was to have someone love me as fiercely and blindly as my father does). This was something completely new, and nothing would soothe me. My dad was ready to call into work and take me to the hospital, thinking I’d burst my appendix or ruptured an organ or was somehow dying horribly in his arms, and he wrapped me in my green blankie to rush me to help.
As soon as the blanket fell across his chest and covered his new scrubs, I stopped crying, suddenly a cooing, cheerful baby again. I’m told that it was like I just turned off the sadness, and that was that, it was over.
Until the blanket slipped off my father’s shoulder, and then I was inconsolable again, weeping so hard I gave myself a nosebleed.
My oma, veteran of raising two young boys herself, figured out what was going on before my dad did. She took me back, cradling my head against her chest so I could weep out my agony there, and told my dad to go change his shirt. He did—even now, he knows better than to cross her when she gets a certain tone in her voice—and when he came back, wearing his tired old scrub shirt, I held out my arms for him to pick me up and was all smiles and cheeriness again.
“What was that about?” he asked her, and my oma shrugged, knowing what had just happened but unable to explain it.
“I guess little Reiner doesn’t like red.”
I still don’t like seeing my father in red, but I don’t cry about it anymore.
So yeah, I get these feelings, and I never know when they’re going to happen or what they’re going to be about. Once my mom got rear-ended while I was riding with her, and the guy who did it was being really shitty to her, really aggressive and angry. There was something about his mouth I didn’t like, something about his teeth that set me on edge, and when he got too close to her, that was it. I came slamming out of the car and put myself between them, a misshapen thirteen year old who bore a closer resemblance to a pimply, ambulatory potato than anything human, and got a fully grown adult man to back down. They exchanged insurance info and drove away, and it wasn’t until later that my mom told me she thought I was going to tear the guy apart if he’d pushed the issue.
I would have, too. No one threatens my mom with teeth like that, not while I’m here to have anything to say about it.
But here I am telling you about all the bad times, the ones where the feelings were negative or confusing or almost got me into fights. There’ve been a lot of good ones too, ones that made my life brighter and more beautiful, even if they didn’t make sense at the time. I could tell you about the kid I met in kindergarten who I knew was going to be a good friend to me, and who was and is, or the sergeant in the military who I knew would keep me safe. But if I’m going to tell you about my feelings, my little hunches that I’ve learned to listen to, I need to tell you about the two that matter, the two that changed everything around, the two that made me who I am today and opened up my entire world.
I need to tell you about meeting Annie and Bertolt.