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Within Her Walls [Chapter Two]: Oaths In The Storm

The girl has been running since noon. Krista watches as her thin legs tremble on her twentieth round of the training camp, as her feet nearly trip on every pebble and crevice. Sasha Braus, she’s called, from a mountain settlement of hunters called Dauper Village. She ate the potato, stole food that wasn’t hers, and now she is being punished. It’s the cruel order of this world.

At least Krista can ease Sasha’s suffering. That is her duty, the minimum she must do.

Krista thinks of Sasha as she fills her bowl with thin gruel. She makes her way to one of the few empty seats, at a corner table where none of the others will see her. Seated across the table, a freckled girl glances at Krista, but she doesn’t look back and the girl turns away.

Staying invisible is easier than usual. Her fellow recruits are all huddling at a table on the opposite side of the room, around a scrawny boy narrating a story. Eren Yeager, of Shiganshina District, where Wall Maria had fallen to the Titans. Her eyes flit across the half-circle of heads: Marco, Connie, Mina, Sam, Thomas, Daz. She remembers their names since the moment they recited them to the Instructor or mentioned them between bites of food, a habit picked up from two years of watching rooms for unspoken orders. A lanky boy—Jean, he’s called—smiles and Eren moves toward him. Krista doesn’t like Jean. He reminds her of that harsh man from another life, with a blade as crooked as his leer.

Eren and Jean glare at each other, and the room swivels to them. She takes the chance to slip a loaf of bread from the basket into her bag.

Gradually, night falls like a veil. Krista slides her plate into a soapy washbasin and slips outside. The cadets disperse back to their barracks. She sees Eren waving his arms at a black-haired girl Krista doesn't know, and a small blond boy called Armin.

Sasha keeps running.

Krista stops at the entrance of her own quarters. Picks up her waterskin, wipes off the throat and fills it from the barrel of drinking water outside the door. A sentry passes by, lighting the braziers for the night. She melts into their shadows.

Finally, Sasha collapses. The hunter girl moans, the sound inhuman and delirious. Krista moves forward in a practiced movement, clutching the bread in one hand and the waterskin with the other.

She doesn’t expect Sasha to lunge at her like a beast.

Krista falls down with a dull thud. She can only gape as Sasha freezes, then pushes herself onto her knees and grabs the bread from her mouth, acting human again.

"It’s—bread?"

Krista puts on her best caring smile.

"That’s all I could get. I saved it for you." She lifts her waterskin. "But you should drink some water first."

She watches as Sasha turns, eyes wide and swirling. Disappointment? Reproach? Krista winces, prepares to receive her verbal lashing—

Sasha grabs her shoulders and shakes her.

"Goddess? Are you a goddess?"

Her face glitters with wonder.

Sasha shakes her again, and she curls. Krista cares for others: others aren’t supposed to care for her, or bad things would happen, like what happened to Mother. She wants to stand, to give Sasha the waterskin then run, hide in her barracks, the training grounds, the woods, anywhere but here, but she can’t extricate her shoulders from those hands, not without making Sasha feel hurt, and she’s small and weak—

"Hey. What are the two of you doing?"

It’s the freckled girl from the mess hall. Both Krista and Sasha turn, and Sasha releases her and starts gulping down the bread.

"She spent the whole day running," Krista explains.

The girl towering over them frowns. "So you’re trying to do a good deed?"

To read more, head to https://archiveofourown.org/works/56866096/chapters/144969484.

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Within Her Walls [Chapter One]: AoT From Historia's POV

When she turns ten, Historia finds a dollhouse in the attic of her grandparents’ barn. The house is brand new, the wood smooth and painted with bright, pretty colours.

Historia knows, right away, that the house is a gift from her angel.

Grandmother and Grandfather tell her angels don’t exist, that they’re children’s tales. That Historia has to grow up and “learn to face the real world”.

But Historia believes in angels. She’s read about them from the books her angel’s brought her, hidden under her bed: about little winged people who bring presents and good luck to well-behaved children. She knows she has an angel, because sometimes she’d be watching over the horses in the branches of a tree, and when she was feeling hungry and climbed down she’d find a basket of ripe, juicy peaches. She’d wake up in the grass after a long midday nap and feel a ribbon, long and shiny, laced through her hair. 

And books. Books, all of the books she wants for herself in the quiet moments during chores, would appear on her bed when she returned to her room. Her grandparents taught her how to read and write simple things, but never more, the same way they trained horses to pull carriages and dogs to guard the land. Historia learns from the angel’s books the beauty hidden in words. How to string them together to make pretty-sounding sentences. She practices every night, with a pen and a little jar of ink the angel gave her, in the empty margins of pages. She’s holding that pen, now, clasped tightly in one hand, her book held in the other.

Maybe Grandmother and Grandfather don’t believe in angels. Maybe they don’t like the angel, so the angel never shows itself to them. Once, she showed them one of her books, and Grandfather snatched the book from her hands and Historia never saw it again.

After that day, she stops telling them about the angel.

The dolls are simple, two little balls with scrawled faces and ducktails of cloth spread out like skirts. They’re seated in what has to be the living room of the house, and the larger doll is glued to the smaller one in a position Historia recognizes as a hug.

She thinks the larger doll must be a mother, and the smaller doll must be a daughter. From her books, Historia knows how normal mothers and children talk and laugh, fight and cry. They have a bond her books call love, an invisible string between their hearts, and mothers would do anything for their children because of love.

Two springs ago, she tried to hug Mother while she was sitting under a tree and Historia saw her reading a book. Historia thought that Mother was reading the same books as her, that she was learning how to be a better mother. Mother always went on trips, after all, and Grandmother had told her how Mother knew Rod Reiss, a kind father and Lord of their land, and maybe Mother was learning from him how to love Historia.

But Mother grabbed her by the face and threw her away. Mother was muttering, about birth and death and regrets, strange words that Historia didn’t understand. 

Still, Historia was happy, even though her nose was bleeding. Mother knew her daughter loved her, because she left the next day, moved to a place called Orvud, where Historia thinks Mother is going to school like all the other children are, so she can learn how to be a better mother.

She puts her pen and her book down, and picks up the little dolls. The daughter has blond hair, just like her, but the mother has black hair, and Mother is blond like Historia. Historia frowns. Does the angel think she has a different mother? No, that doesn’t make sense: otherwise, she couldn’t love Mother, and she loves Mother very, very much. 

Maybe that’s why Mother needs to learn how to love her? Because she doesn’t think Historia’s her daughter?

Her stomach twists. It’s too much, too confusing. She puts down the dolls: she doesn’t like the gift anymore. Next time, she’ll ask the angel for a new book. Books are familiar, comforting. She likes the rustle of flipping pages, the smoothness of paper on her fingers. The angel will understand, it always does [...]

Historia Reiss' journey to find love and acceptance. A character-centric retelling of Attack on Titan from Historia's POV, from her childhood to the post-Rumbling years.

New chapter drops every Sunday.

To continue reading this work, head to https://archiveofourown.org/works/56866096/chapters/144589648.